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Updated: May 3, 2025
During the English occupation, it was casually discovered that a buffalo's skull was constantly carried backwards and forwards from one end of the island to the other. The Javans had got a notion that a frightful curse had been pronounced upon the man who should allow it to remain stationary.
Marsden remarked this same peculiarity in the Sumatra Malays, and Humboldt in the Chaymas Indians. The latter people, however, do not know how to count beyond five or six, which is not the case with the Javans.
A curse was to fall upon all who did not work at a road for his descent into the plain. Such boundless credulity as this, is of course easily turned to account by mischievous persons, and has often been worked upon to incite the Javans to revolt.
Not long before, Clod had made known to his servant, that the town of Malacca was besieged by sea and land; and that the king of Jentana, a Saracen, was personally before it, with an army of twelve thousand men: That neither the conduct of the governor, Don Pedro de Silva, nor the succours of Don Fernandez Carvalio, had been able to defend it against the attempts of the barbarians; that the Javans, a fierce and warlike people, had mastered that place; that of three hundred Portuguese, who were within it, above an hundred had been put to the sword, and the rest of them had only escaped by retiring into the fortress.
They wear no covering except ornaments of flowers, which on particular occasions are the work of much labour and ingenuity. The head-dresses of the dancing girls by profession, who are usually Javans, are very artificially wrought, and as high as any modern English lady's cap, yielding only to the feathered plumes of the year 1777.
This assertion is confirmed by many examples. Dr. Selberg conjectures various reasons for this eccentricity or epicurism, whichever it may be termed, on the part of the tiger, and amongst other hypotheses, suggests that the animal may be partial to the hogoo of the Javans, who anoint their yellow carcases with cocoa-nut oil.
Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs men and women and children clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries beyond their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners men and women and children drifting, eddying each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God and devil in embrace the seal of the Shining One the dead-alive; the lost ones!
But the poor tiger has no chance allowed him; for if he does, through pluck and luck, prove the better beast, the Javans, who evidently have not the slightest notion of fair play, or any sympathy with bravery, subject him to an unpleasant operation called the rampoh. They make a ring round him, and torment him till he hazards a desperate spring, and finds his death upon their lance points.
Every evening, during the fine season, the large square in the Chinese quarter composed of massive comfortable buildings, contrasting favourably with the fragile huts of the Javans is converted into a kind of fair, where the whole city assembles. "The place is illumined with a thousand torches, which increase, to a stranger's eyes, the curious exotic character of the scene.
Within the present century prayers were read for the Governor-general's safety when he went on a journey, and thanksgivings offered up on his return; now the whole island may be travelled over almost as safely as any part of Europe. The Javans are neither quarrelsome nor covetous, and even when they turn robbers they seldom kill or ill-treat those they plunder.
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