AMONG THE HEADHUNTERS

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 223, 20 June 1925, Page 20

AMONG THE HEADHUNTERS

There arc few more dangerous occupations than collecting camphor. Formosa, which practically produces the world's supply of camphoi, is inhabited by a race of head-hunters whose intractable savagery is without equal to-day. Thousands of camphor gather ers, chiefly imported Chinese, have paid toll with their heads. Scattered through the island, for the purpose of distilling the drug from logs, are approximately 8000 stills, run bv small communities of workers and protected by Japanese troops. This measure of protection is not always enough to awe the head-hunters, who, without warning, sweep out of the forests and fall upon the villages on their errand of destruction. Formosa is the only country in the world where large forests of camphor trees still remain. An idea of the Tremendous wealth contained in these forests may be gained from the fact that from one tree alone, with a girth at the foot of 12 feet, camphor to the value of .■£1990 has been distilled.

The Japanese Government has.no intention of allowin' he aborigines’ taste ill skulls to con Jf' to interfere with one of its most valuable monopolies. In addition to the subsidy of £1,090.000 which it has voted towards the industry’s more rapid development, it is adding everv year more troops to the large number resident in the island. Unless the head-hunters accept civilised conditions in the near future, thev face invasion and summary defeat, if not extermination,—J J. Qnin in the "Dailv MaH.*'