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Updated: June 3, 2025
Tribes calling themselves Bahau now live along the Mahakam above Mujub and include one Kayan group; on the upper Rejang are Bahau tribes under the name of Kayan, and a small section has advanced into the Kapuas area and settled on the Mendalam which again includes Kayans and kindred tribes.
"More dreaded," says a traveller in Central Borneo, "than the evil spirits of the neighbourhood are the evil spirits from a distance which accompany travellers. When a company from the middle Mahakam River visited me among the Blu-u Kayans in the year 1897, no woman showed herself outside her house without a burning bundle of plehiding bark, the stinking smoke of which drives away evil spirits."
The reddish-brown waters of the Mahakam, nearly always at flood, flowed swiftly between the walls of dark jungle on either side and shone in the early afternoon sun, under a pale-blue sky, with beautiful, small, distant white clouds. Three mourners remained behind, one man standing, gazing after the craft.
We could look forward with confidence to the remainder of the journey, mainly down the great Mahakam River, toward distant Samarinda, because the Dayaks along the route were very numerous and had plenty of prahus.
Briefly, my plans were to start from Bandjermasin in the south, ascend the Barito River, and, branching hence into its northern tributary, the Busang, to cross the watershed to the Mahakam or Kutei River. Following the latter to its mouth I should reach the east coast near Samarinda. This journey, I found, would take me through a country where were some tribes never before studied.
Should the mother die, no other woman willingly suckles the child unless the father has a daughter who can do it. However, by paying from one to three gongs a woman may be induced to undertake the duty. Bahau is the name of a river in Apo Kayan, where the tribes of the Mahakam River lived before they migrated to their present habitations, a hundred and fifty to two hundred years ago.
This belief appears to be universal amongst the Kenyah-Klemantan of the Upper Mahakam and Batang Kayan. On Pl. 86 of Nieuwenhuis' book is figured the thigh tatu of a Long Glat woman; the front of the thigh is occupied with two rows of the hornbill MOTIF to which reference has already been made.
He distinguishes two main races, a dolichocephalic and a brachycephalic, terming the former Indonesian, the latter Proto-Malay. Doctor A.W. Nieuwenhuis, who about the end of the last century made important researches in the upper parts of the Kapuas and Mahakam Rivers and at Apo Kayan, found the Ot-Danum, Bahau-Kenyah, and Punan to be three distinct groups of that region.
For a generation they have been gathering rubber, taking it far down the Mahakam to be sold. Of late years rubber has nearly disappeared in these parts, so they have turned their attention to rattan. One day a man was seen running with a sumpitan after a dog that had hydrophobia, and which repeatedly passed my tent. The apparent attempt to kill the animal was not genuine.
The rivers and the surrounding sea swarm with fish of many kinds, furnishing an abundance of food, although generally not very palatable. The djelavat, in flavour not unlike salmon, and the salap, both of which I met in the upper courses of the rivers Samba, Barito, and Mahakam, are notable exceptions.
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