Assei gold-traders, on the contrary, who are an active, laborious class of men but yet indulge as freely in opium as any others whatever, are notwithstanding the most healthy and vigorous people to be met with on the island.  It has been usual also to attribute to the practice destructive consequences of another nature from the frenzy it has been supposed to excite in those who take it in quantities.  But this should probably rank with the many errors that mankind have been led into by travellers addicted to the marvellous; and there is every reason to believe that the furious quarrels, desperate assassinations, and sanguinary attacks, which the use of opium is said to give birth to, are idle notions, originally adopted through ignorance and since maintained from the mere want of investigation, without having any solid foundation.  It is not to be controverted, that those desperate acts of indiscriminate murder, called by us mucks, and by the natives mengamok, do actually take place, and frequently too in some parts of the East (in Java in particular) but it is not equally evident that they proceed from any intoxication except that of their unruly passions.  Too often they are occasioned by excess of cruelty and injustice in their oppressors.  On the west coast of Sumatra about twenty thousand pounds weight of this drug are consumed annually, yet instances of this crime do not happen (at least within the scope of our knowledge) above once in two or three years.  During my residence there I had an opportunity of being an eyewitness but to one muck.  The slave of a Portuguese woman, a man of the island of Nias, who in all probability had never handled an opium pipe in his life, being treated by his mistress with extreme severity for a trifling offence, vowed he would have revenge if she attempted to strike him again, and ran down the steps of the house with a knife in each hand, as it is said.  She cried out, mengamok!  The civil guard was called, who, having the power in these cases of exercising summary justice, fired half a dozen rounds into an outhouse where the unfortunate wretch had sheltered himself on their approach, and from whence he was at length dragged, covered with wounds.  Many other mucks might perhaps be found, upon scrutiny, of the nature of the foregoing, where a man of strong feelings was driven by excess of injury to domestic rebellion.

It is true that the Malays, when in a state of war they are bent on any daring enterprise, fortify themselves with a few whiffs of opium to render them insensible to danger, as the people of another nation are said to take a dram for the same purpose; but it must be observed that the resolution for the act precedes, and is not the effect of, the intoxication.  They take the same precaution previous to being led to public execution; but on these occasions show greater signs of stupidity than frenzy.  Upon the whole it may be reasonably concluded that the sanguinary achievements, for which the Malays have been famous,