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Updated: June 13, 2025
Down near the water the branches by which we pushed ourselves along were those of the undergrowth, with many rattans and other creepers varying from the thickness of one's thumb to that of one's wrist, and these would take a great deal of chopping before one of their war boats could be pushed through, but higher up they would probably have much thicker branches to contend with.
From our first arrival at Kuching my husband had taken every opportunity of visiting the Dyak tribes, and sometimes a chief would come to the town with a number of his people, to pay their rice tax, or purchase clothes, tobacco, gongs, gunpowder, whatever the bazaar possessed which they valued. They brought with them beeswax, damar, honey, or rattans to exchange for those things.
Of the purely uncultivated jungle products that figure in the exports the principal are gutta-percha, India rubber, and rattans. Only one deposit of cinnabar has so far been discovered, that was in 1867. Antimony was first discovered in Sarawak in 1824, and-for a long time it was from this source that the principal supplies for Europe and America were obtained.
A few of the able-bodied men employ themselves in or about the house, making boats, forging swords, spear-heads, iron hoes, and axes, repairing weapons or implements. Others go in small parties to the jungle to hunt deer and pig, or to gather jungle produce fruits, rubber, rattans, or bamboos or spend the day in fishing in the river.
The principal ports are Kuran and Sibuku; they produce a large quantity of very fine white birds'-nests, a quantity of black ditto, much dammer, sago, tripan, wax, rattans, camphor, honey, Buru mats, gold, &c. The people of Tapeandurian are represented as very ferocious, and the sea-coast hereabout requires surveying.
Kenyahs and Klemantans sometimes catch deer by driving them into a JARING. This consists of a strong rope of plaited rattans stretched in a straight line across the jungle, from tree to tree, some five feet above the ground. It is generally laid so as to complete the enclosure of an area that is almost surrounded by the river.
Rattans from Borneo, sandal-wood and bees'-was from Flores and Timor, tripang from the Gulf of Carpentaria, cajputi-oil from Bouru, wild nutmegs and mussoi-bark from New Guinea, are all to be found in the stores of the Chinese and Bugis merchants of Macassar, along with the rice and coffee which are the chief products of the surrounding country.
Bees-wax is another article to be procured here at present to the amount of thirty or forty peculs per year from Sibnow, Malacca canes a small ship-load, rattans in abundance, and any quantity of Garu wood.
He trades with the Dyaks of the forest, who are no better than monkeys. He buys from them guttah and rattans while we starve. Only two days ago I went to him and said, 'Tuan Almayer' even so; we must speak politely to that friend of Satan 'Tuan Almayer, I have such and such goods to sell.
"Go, Betsy Jane, and fetch the camphire, quick!" But Madam Conway did not need the camphor, and so she said, adding that Mike was better where he was. Mike thought so too, and refused to come, whereupon the woman insisted that he must. "There was room enough," she said, "and no kind of sense in Betsy Jane's taking up the hull side of the table with them rattans.
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