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Of these we distinguish six principal groups: Sea Dayaks or Ibans, the Kayans, Kenyahs, Klemantans, Muruts, Punans. A census of the population has been made in most of the principal districts of Sarawak and of Dutch Borneo; but as no census of the whole country has hitherto been made, it is impossible to state with any pretence to accuracy the number of the inhabitants of the island.
On their return trip the Dayaks bring salt from the government's monopoly, gaudy cloths for the women, beads, ivory rings for bracelets and armlets, and also rice for the journey. Should the supply of rice become exhausted they eat native herbs. At Long Pangian we were able to develop plates effectively by hauling clear and comparatively cool water from a spring fifteen or twenty minutes away.
Subsisting chiefly upon meat, their favourite food is wild pig. At the birth of a child all the men leave the premises, including the husband. The dead are buried in the ground a metre deep, head toward the rising sun. The Punans climb trees in the same manner as the Kayans and other Dayaks I have seen, i.e., by tying their feet together and moving up one side of the tree in jumps.
It must be remembered that, owing to the frequency of divorce and remarriage among the Sea Dayaks, a youth may find himself in the position of step-son to half a dozen or more divorced step-mothers, some of them perhaps of his own age, and that each of them may have several sisters, all of whom are reckoned as his aunts; therefore he must walk warily in his amorous adventures.
The oldest, whose branches have many traits in accord with the Dayaks of Borneo, especially the practice of head-hunting; a second, which also took place before the arrival of the Spaniards, to which the Tagals, Bisayas, Bicols, Ilocanos, and other tribes belong; the third, Islamitic, which emigrated from Borneo and might have been interrupted by the arrival of the Spaniards, and with which a contemporaneous immigration from the Moluccas went on.
It must be remembered that the Dayaks themselves have no idea that there is anything wrong in taking heads, and the government very wisely does not impose the death penalty, but the transgressor is taken to Soerabaia, on Java, to undergo some years of hard labour from four to six, I understand.
Neither of them can tie knots that are at once firm and readily undone, nor are they able to drive a nail properly, put in screws, or rope a box, although no doubt in time they could learn; but the Dayaks are uniformly handy at such work.
Such parties of Sea Dayaks have been known to accept the hospitality of unsuspecting and inoffensive Klemantans, and to outrage every law of decency by taking the heads of old men, women, and children during the absence of their natural defenders. Valuable varieties of gutta-percha are obtained from trees of more than a score of species.
There is a considerable body of evidence to show that the Sea Dayaks have borrowed much in their arts and crafts from tribes who have been longer established in Borneo; but it must be confessed that in their decorative art they have often improved upon their models; their bamboo carvings and their woven cloth are indeed "things of beauty."
The Klemantans put selected pieces of the property of the deceased within the tomb, but do not generally hang them on it externally as the Kayans and Kenyahs do. The Sea Dayaks bury their dead in the earth, generally in a village graveyard on the river banks not far from the house. The body, together with personal property, is merely wrapped in mats and laid in a grave some three feet in depth.
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