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.  Junghuhn, with some enlargement of the time, is disposed to accept their story of the practice being comparatively modern.  This cannot be, for their hideous custom is alluded to by a long chain of early authorities.  Ptolemy’s anthropophagi may perhaps be referred to the smaller islands.  But the Arab Relations of the 9th century speak of man-eaters in Al-Ramni, undoubtedly Sumatra.  Then comes our traveller, followed by Odoric, and in the early part of the 15th century by Conti, who names the Batech cannibals.  Barbosa describes them without naming them; Galvano (p. 108) speaks of them by name; as does De Barros. (Dec.  III. liv. viii. cap.  I.)

The practice of worshipping the first thing seen in the morning is related of a variety of nations.  Pigafetta tells it of the people of Gilolo, and Varthema in his account of Java (which I fear is fiction) ascribes it to some people of that island.  Richard Eden tells it of the Laplanders. (Notes on Russia, Hak.  Soc.  II. 224.)

NOTE 4.—­Basma, as Valentyn indicated, seems to be the PASEI of the Malays, which the Arabs probably called Basam or the like, for the Portuguese wrote it PACEM. [Mr. J.T.  Thomson writes (Proc.R.G.S. XX. p. 221) that of its actual position there can be no doubt, it being the Passier of modern charts.—­H.C.] Pasei is mentioned in the Malay Chronicle as founded by Malik-al-Salih, the first Mussulman sovereign of Samudra, the next of Marco’s kingdoms.  He assigned one of these states to each of his two sons, Malik al-Dhahir and Malik al-Mansur; the former of whom was reigning at Samudra, and apparently over the whole coast, when Ibn Batuta was there (about 1346-47).  There is also a Malay History of the Kings of Pasei to which reference has already been made.

Somewhat later Pasei was a great and famous city.  Majapahit, Malacca, and Pasei being reckoned the three great cities of the Archipelago.  The stimulus of conversion to Islam had not taken effect on those Sumatran states at the time of Polo’s voyage, but it did so soon afterwards, and, low as they have now fallen, their power at one time was no delusion.  Achin, which rose to be the chief of them, in 1615 could send against Portuguese Malacca an expedition of more than 500 sail, 100 of which were galleys larger than any then constructed in Europe, and carried from 600 to 800 men each.