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Updated: May 4, 2025
Another time upon arriving at a village where a child had been born a few hours before, I was flatly refused hospitality, some Sakais preferring to accompany me a long way off and there erect a hut for my use on the formal understanding that I should not for any motive whatever attempt to approach the settlement. Had I not kept to this condition I should probably have been killed.
Penang is populated chiefly by Malays but numerous other races are represented there, especially Chinese and Indians. Without much trouble I succeeded in engaging the services of five porters: a Malay, an Indian, a Chinese, a Siamese and a Sam-Sam, quite a lad. Together they formed a little Babel which I congratulated myself would prove of great help in making overtures with the Sakais.
My chief reason for illustrating the virtues and defects of the little-known Sakais is to present them more closely to the attention of England, that, by delivering them from the contempt and able trickery of other races, might easily lead them to civilization and at the same time form important and lucrative centres of agricultural product in the interior of the Peninsula.
The fact was so uncommon and extraordinary considering the good nature of the people, that it was quite worth the while of an investigation. Two Bretak Sakais descended from the heights which bound Perak and Pahang, and found hospitality in a family of those Sakais who are in constant contact with strangers.
And I could not blame them for this. The Sakai woman Conjugal fidelity A life of labour Betrothals and nuptials Love among the Sakais Divorcement No kissing Chastity Bigamy Maternity and its excesses Aged before the time Fashion and coquetry.
First attempts at industry The story of a hat Multiplicity Primitive arts Sakai music Songs Instruments Dances Ball dresses Serpentine gracefulness An unpublished Sakai song. Primitive, like their language and their agriculture, are also Art and Industry among the Sakais.
The Sakais would find but a scanty result from their hunting and shooting-, and their own lives would not be sufficiently protected if the forest did not provide them with an inexhaustible and infallible means of dealing death with their blowpipes and darts.
And less still can serpents' teeth or crushed wasps have any influence in increasing the power of this poison, which is in itself intense. Evidently the Sakais, well aware of the lethal effect of a bite from a serpent, think that by introducing into the wound, by means of their dart, a tiny portion of the organ which determines this effect, an equal result will follow.
The desire expressed by Henry IV that each one of his subjects might boil his own fowl in his own pot is more than realized amongst the Sakais. They do not cook their fowls because they are only reared as a means of barter, but it seldom happens that they cannot enjoy a choice bit of monkey, snake, deer or wild boar, which they like much better.
The Sakais like music but nearly always the notes are accompanied by a dancing movement, sometimes lightly as if to mark the time, but at others they kick their legs about so furiously, at the same time twisting and writhing their bodies in such a strange series of contortions that an uninitiated looker-on would surely receive the impression that they were suffering from spasmodic pains in the stomach, whereas in reality they are only imitating the wriggling of a serpent.
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