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Updated: May 22, 2025
The child of the woman was given a name two months later, Lakin Kudyang. For two years the mother suckled the two, and then they were old enough to play behind the houses of the kampong. They saw many birds about, and they asked their father to give each of them a sumpitan. When they went out hunting the human boy got one bird, but the other boy got two.
Sumpitan, or Simpote, a tube seven or eight feet in length, through which the Borneons blow small sharp-pointed arrows. Tanjong, a point of land. Turaj, or Tarajahs, natives of Celebes. Tatows, wild tribes in the interior of Borneo. Tuan, sir, an exclamation of assent to an approved speaker, instead of "hear, hear," or "yes." Tuan Besar, sir, great, great chief, higher applause and deference.
She said to her husband, whose name was Batangnorang, "Go to the limit of the sky and bring the instrument that plays by itself." Putting on tiger skin, and carrying his parang and sumpitan, Batangnorang went into a small prahu which was able to fly, and it flew one month, to the end of the sky. He landed in a durian tree, near a small house covered with the tail feathers of the hornbill.
The sumpitan is a kind of blow-gun, like the "bean-blower" formerly used by American boys, which was a tin pipe, or the "pea-shooter," an English plaything. It was used, it is said, by the Dyaks in former times; but recent travellers do not mention it as used by them.
The box or jar is then deposited in a subterranean chamber made of iron-wood, called kobur by both Malays and Murungs, where in addition are left the personal effects of the deceased, clothing, beads, and other ornaments, and, if a man, also his sumpitan, parang, axe, etc.
With the possible exception of curare, this is the deadliest poison known, the slightest scratch from a dart thus poisoned paralyzing the respiratory center and causing almost instant death. The dart is expelled from the sumpitan by a quick, sharp exhalation of the breath.
In fact, M. de Haan told me that among certain of the Dyak tribes virtually all of the men suffer from rupture as a result of the constant use of the blow-gun. Though I have heard those who have never seen the sumpitan in use sneer at it as a toy, it is, at short distances, one of the most accurate weapons in existence and, when its darts are poisoned, one of the deadliest.
On leaving the house we noticed several blow-pipes, a hollow tube eight feet long called by the Poonans "sumpitan," the chief weapon of this tribe, and in the manufacture of which they greatly excel. The darts used are about five inches long, and are dipped in upas juice.
In order to show me what could be done with the sumpitan, the Regent stuck in the earth a bamboo no larger than a woman's little finger, and a Dyak, taking up his position at a distance of thirty paces which I stepped off myself, hit the almost indistinguishable mark with his darts twelve times running. That, as the late Colonel Cody would have put it, "is some shooting."
Noticing that I was interested in the equipment of the Dyaks, the Regent of Koetei called up their chief and, without so much as a by-your-leave, presented me with his sumpitan and the quiver of poisoned darts, his wooden shield a long, narrow buckler of some light wood, tastily trimmed with seventy-two tufts of human hair, mementoes of that number of enemies slain on head-hunting expeditions a peculiar coat of mail, composed of overlapping pieces of bark, capable of turning an arrow, and his imposing head-dress, which consisted of a cap formed from a leopard's head, with a sort of visor made from the beak of a hornbill, the whole surmounted by a bunch of yard-long tail-feathers from some bright-plumaged bird.
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