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Updated: May 4, 2025
Thus in some districts of Borneo, when a Dyak is out head-hunting, his wife or, if he is unmarried, his sister must wear a sword day and night in order that he may always be thinking of his weapons; and she may not sleep during the day nor go to bed before two in the morning, lest her husband or brother should thereby be surprised in his sleep by an enemy.
When they are not off on head-hunting expeditions, the Dyaks are very industrious farmers. They are fond of ornaments. The men of some of the tribes wear richly embroidered jackets; the women may wear waists made of fine rattan strung with metal beads and ornaments.
In my later wanderings in Borneo the quarrel between my two servants, Dayak and Chinaman, grew to such an extent that I feared it would end in murder. The foregoing account, short as it is, will, I trust, give some idea of what my long stay among head-hunting Dayaks was like.
"I suppose that is what the Dyaks used when they went head-hunting," said Felix. "No head-hunting now; used to use it, the Hill Dyaks. Used in battle too; split head open with it, or cut head off." "What other weapons did the fighting men use?" asked Louis. "They carried a shield, and used a spear with the parong latok; no other weapons. Two kinds of Dyaks, the Sea and the Hill."
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.
But the Ifugaos, thanks to Gallman, as already said, have abandoned head-hunting, and the skulls in hand, if kept at all, are now hidden inside their owner's houses, their places being taken by carabao heads and horns.
To rob the native of a neighbouring town of his cranium, was regarded in much the same light as the capture of a scalp would be amongst North American savages. Brooke saw at once that no improvement could arise whilst murder was regarded not only as a pleasant amusement, but to some extent as a religious duty. He declared head-hunting a crime punishable by death to the offender.
For he wisely held that in order to suppress fighting and head-hunting, hitherto the natural avenues to fame for restless tribes and ambitious young men, it is necessary to replace them by some other form of violent competition that may in some degree serve as a vent for high spirits and superfluous energy; and he hoped to establish an annual gathering for boat racing and other sports, in which all the tribes should take part, a gathering on the lines of the Olympic games in fact.
Their warlike ambition is easily satisfied by the taking of a single head, or even by a mere hostile demonstration against the enemy's house. Nevertheless, like all the other tribes, except the Punans, the Klemantans need a human head to terminate a period of mourning. We venture to append to this chapter a few speculations on the origin and history of head-hunting.
In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was made by the household with continual unction and exposure to the sun; in the Carolines, upon the farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the family hearth. Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in Samoa.
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