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Updated: August 2, 2024
As we sailed down the great Barito River on a dark and cloudy evening, from the deck, which was scarcely a metre above the muddy water, one might observe now and then floating clumps of the plants that thrive so well there. On approaching the mouth of the river the water, with the outgoing tide, became more shallow.
Usually the head-hunting raids were, and are still to a limited extent, carried far away into distant regions and may occupy several months. The Saputans, who were devotees to the custom, would go as far as the river Melawi in the southwest to Sarawak in the north, as well as to the Murung or Upper Barito River in the east.
Banjermassin, of which something was said as we passed the mouth of the Barito River, on which it is located, contains 30,000 inhabitants, and is the most important in the island. Borneo proper is in the north-west, and is under the government of the Sultan of Bruneï.
In this sense, for the sake of convenience, I shall myself use the word, but to apply it indiscriminately to anthropological matters is as unsatisfactory as if one should describe a certain tribe in the new world merely as American Indian. Fifty miles from land the sea assumes a different aspect through the fresh water of the great Barito flowing on the surface.
In the upper Teweh river, an upper tributary of the Barito the men are tatued a good deal, especially on parts of the face, such as the forehead, the cheeks, the upper lip.
Coal, which is often found on the upper part of the Barito River, may be observed in the bank of the river in a layer two metres thick. It is of good quality, but at present cannot be utilised on account of the formidable obstacle to transportation presented by the kiham below. Our Malays soon began to talk of returning, fifteen of the twenty-four men wanting to go home.
The government has exerted itself to keep the Malays from coming, but no doubt in the end this will prove as unavailing as it did on the Upper Barito.
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.
At Poru we tried in vain to secure a kind of gibbon that we heard almost daily on the other side of the river, emitting a loud cry but different from that of the ordinary wah-wah. Rajimin described it as being white about the head and having a pronounced kind of topknot. As far as we had advanced up the Barito River, Malay influence was found to be supreme.
It was comparatively a small affair. About a month later, when I stopped at Buntok, on the Barito, the controleur of the district told me that an unusually great tiwah feast had just been concluded in the neighbourhood. He had spent ten days there, the Dayaks having erected a house for him to stay in. More than two hundred pigs and nineteen water-buffaloes had been killed.
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