EXTRAORDINARY CUSTOM.

The most extraordinary of the Batta customs, though certainly not peculiar to these people, remains now to be described.  Many of the old travellers had furnished the world with accounts of anthropophagi or maneaters, whom they met with in all parts of the old and new world, and their relations, true or false, were in those days, when people were addicted to the marvellous, universally credited.  In the succeeding ages, when a more skeptical and scrutinizing spirit prevailed, several of these asserted facts were found upon examination to be false; and men, from a bias inherent in our nature, ran into the opposite extreme.  It then became established as a philosophical truth, capable almost of demonstration, that no such race of people ever did or could exist.  But the varieties, inconsistencies, and contradictions of human manners are so numerous and glaring that it is scarcely possible to fix any general principle that will apply to all the incongruous races of mankind, or even to conceive an irregularity to which some or other of them have not been accustomed.

EAT HUMAN FLESH.

The voyages of our late famous circumnavigators, the veracity of whose assertions is unimpeachable, have already proved to the world that human flesh is eaten by the savages of New Zealand; and I can with equal confidence, from conviction of the truth, though not with equal weight of authority, assert that it is also, in these days, eaten in the island of Sumatra by the Batta people, and by them only.  Whether or not the horrible custom prevailed more extensively in ancient times I cannot take upon me to ascertain, but the same historians who mention it as practised in this island, and whose accounts were undeservedly looked upon as fabulous, relate it also of many others of the eastern people, and those of the island of Java in particular, who since that period may have become more humanized.*

(Footnote.  Mention is made of the Battas and their peculiar customs by the following early writers:  NICOLO DI CONTI, 1449.  “In a certain part of this island (Sumatra) called Batech, the people eat human flesh.  They are continually at war with their neighbours, preserve the skulls of their enemies as treasure, dispose of them as money, and he is accounted the richest man who has most of them in his house.”  ODOARDUS BARBOSA, 1516.  “There is another kingdom to the southward, which is the principal source of gold; and another inland, called Aaru (contiguous to the Batta country) where the inhabitants are pagans, who eat human flesh, and chiefly of those they have slain in war.”  DE BARROS, 1563.  “The natives of that part of the island which is opposite to Malacca, who are called Batas, eat human flesh, and are the most savage and warlike of all the land.”  BEAULIEU, 1622.  “The inland people are independent, and speak a language different from the Malayan.  Are idolaters, and eat human flesh; never ransom prisoners, but eat them with pepper and salt.  Have no religion, but some polity.”  LUDOVICO BARTHEMA, in 1505, asserts that the people of Java were cannibals previously to their traffic with the Chinese.)