338 Batchian. 



type. They are an industrious agricultural people, and supply 

 the town with vegetables. They make a good deal of bark 

 cloth, similar to the tapa of the Polynesians, by cutting down 

 the proper trees and taking off large cylinders of bark, which 

 is beaten with mallets till it separates from the wood. It is 

 then soaked, and so continuously and regularly beaten out 

 that it becomes as thin and as tough as parchment. In this 

 form it is much used for wrappers for clothes ; and they also 

 make jackets of it, sewn neatly together and stained with the 

 juice of another kind of bark, which gives it a dark red color, 

 and renders it nearly water-proof. 



Here are four very distinct kinds of people, who may all 

 be seen any day in and about the town of Batchian. Now if 

 we suppose a traveller ignorant of Malay picking up a word 

 or two here and there of the " Batchian language," and noting 

 down the " physical and moral peculiarities, manners, and cus- 

 toms of the Batchian people " — (for there are travellers who 

 do all this in four-and-twenty hours) — what an accurate and 

 instructive chapter we should have ! what transitions would 

 be pointed out, what theories of the origin of races would be 

 develoj^ed ! while the next traveller might flatly contradict 

 every statement and arrive at exactly opposite conclusions. 



Soon after I arrived here the Dutch Government introduced 

 a new copper coinage of cents instead of doits (the 100th in- 

 stead of the 120th part of a guilder), and all the old coins 

 were ordered to be sent to Ternate to be changed. I sent a 

 bag containing 6000 doits, and duly received the new money 

 by return of the boat. When Ali went to bring it, however, 

 the captain required a written order ; so I waited to send 

 again the next day, and it was lucky I did so, for that night 

 my house was entered, all my boxes carried out and ransacked, 

 and the various articles left on the road about twenty yards 

 off, where we foimd them at five in the morning, when, on get- 

 ting up and finding the house empty, we rushed out to dis- 

 cover tracks of the thieves. Not being able to find the cop- 

 per money which they thought I had just received, they de- 

 camped, taking nothing but a few yards of cotton cloth and a 

 black coat and trowsers, which latter were picked up a few 

 days afterward hidden in the grass. There was no doubt 

 whatever who were the thieves. Convicts are employed to 



