Sago Bread. 385 



flour cakes, but have a slight characteristic flavor which is 

 lost in the refined sago we use in this country.' When not 

 wanted for immediate lise, they 

 are dried for several days in the 

 sun, and tied up in bundles of 

 twenty. They will then keep 

 for years; they are very hard, 

 and very rough and dry ; but the 

 people are used to them from 

 infancy, and little children may 

 be seen gnawing at them as con- sago oven. 



tentedly as ours with their bread 



and butter. If dipped in water and then toasted, they be- 

 come almost as good as when fresh baked ; and thus treated, 

 they were my daily substitute for bread with my coffee. 

 Soaked and boiled, they make a very good pudding or vege- 

 table, and served well to economize our rice, which is some- 

 times difficult to get so far east. 



It is truly an extraordinary sight to witness a whole tree- 

 trunk, perhaps twenty feet long and four or five in cii-cumfer- 

 ence, converted into food with so little labor and preparation. 

 A good-sized tree will produce thirty tomans or bundles of 

 thirty pounds each, and each toman will make sixty cakes of 

 three to the pound. Two of these cakes are as much as a 

 man can eat at one meal, and five are considered a full day's 

 allowance; so that reckoning a tree to produce 1800 cakes, 

 weighing 600 pounds, it will supply a man with food for a 

 whole year. The labor to produce this is very moderate. 

 Two men will finish a tree in five days, and two women 

 will bake the whole into cakes in five days more ; but the 

 raw sago will keep very well, and can be baked as wanted, so 

 that we may estimate that in ten days a man may produce 

 food for the whole year. This is on the supposition that he 

 possesses sago trees of his own, for they are now all private 

 property. If he does not he has to pay about seven-and-six- 

 pence for one ; and as labor here is fivepence a day, the total 

 cost of a year's food for one man is about twelve shillings. 

 The effect of this cheapness of food is decidedly prejudicial, 

 for the inhabitants of the sago country are never so Avell oft" 

 as those where rice is cultivated. Many of the people here 



Bb 



