A CURIOUS TRIBE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXVII, Issue 7, 9 January 1886, Page 5

A CURIOUS TRIBE.

The Habits of the Sakeis of the Malay Peninsula. The report of the Resident in the State of Selangore, in the Malay peninsula, for the last year, contains sjme curious information with regard to the "aboriginal tribes" called the Sakeis, who number between 700 and 800. They are in nine divisions, under head-men called Batins, and they live mainly by collecting gutta, rattana,and other jungle produce. As far as is known, they have no form of religious worship, but they are very superstitious, believing in good and bad omens, the sacred character of certain birds and desert a village as unlucky on the death of any member of the tribe. They tattoo figures on their arms, but do not use any specially significant figures, peculiar to each tribe, analogous to the totems of the North American Indians. They consider no kind of edible food unclean, butoafcoven monkeys snakes, and ecorpiuns, which they kill by means of a blow-pipe, throwing a dart poisoned with the juice of the ipohor upas tree. For large game they use a kind of cross-bow, consisting of a sharpened bamboo spear placed horizontally on a grooved log, and a bent sapling fastened back by a rattan cord, This cord is stretched across a darth in the jungle, and on being touched releases the sapling with sufficient force to drive it completely through a deer's body. The Sakeis live in small huts built of bamboo and thatched with leaves of Bertam palm, raised eight feet or more above the ground. They are shy and easily frightened, but are quite harmless, and are gradually becoming accustomed to Europeans, by whom they are employed to track game and to cut paths through the jungle. They are small in stature, but are otherwise very similar in appearance to the Maloys, from whom they differ, however, in usually having wavy instead of straight-growing hair. A few Malays are attached to every Sakei community, to act as go-betweens in the sale of their produce, and the officials have received special instructions to protect these aboriginal tribes —" Nature."