It Is Doubtful, Indeed, Whether There Were Kings Of
Achin In 1205, Or For Centuries After (Unless Indeed Lambri Is To Be
Regarded As Achin), But The Introduction Of Islam May Be Confidently
Assigned To That Age.
The notice of the Hill-people, who lived like beasts and ate human flesh,
presumably attaches to the Battas or Bataks, occupying high table-lands in
the interior of Sumatra.
They do not now extend north beyond lat. 3 deg.
The interior of Northern Sumatra seems to remain a terra incognita, and
even with the coast we are far less familiar than our ancestors were 250
years ago. The Battas are remarkable among cannibal nations as having
attained or retained some degree of civilisation, and as being possessed of
an alphabet and documents. Their anthropophagy is now professedly practised
according to precise laws, and only in prescribed cases. Thus: (i) A
commoner seducing a Raja's wife must be eaten; (2) Enemies taken in battle
outside their village must be eaten alive; those taken in storming a
village may be spared; (3) Traitors and spies have the same doom, but may
ransom themselves for 60 dollars a-head. There is nothing more horrible or
extraordinary in all the stories of mediaeval travellers than the facts
of this institution. (See Junghuhn, Die Battalander, II. 158.) And it
is evident that human flesh is also at times kept in the houses for food.
Junghuhn, who could not abide Englishmen but was a great admirer of the
Battas, tells how after a perilous and hungry flight he arrived in a
friendly village, and the food that was offered by his hosts was the flesh
of two prisoners who had been slaughtered the day before (I. 249).
Anderson was also told of one of the most powerful Batta chiefs who would
eat only such food, and took care to be supplied with it (225).
The story of the Battas is that in old times their communities lived in
peace and knew no such custom; but a Devil, Nanalain, came bringing
strife, and introduced this man-eating, at a period which they spoke of
(in 1840) as "three men's lives ago," or about 210 years previous to that
date.
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