hatteth wide.
When her eldrynges beth elde,
And ne mowen hemselven welde
Hy hem sleeth, and bidelve
And," etc., etc.
--Weber, I. p. 206.

Benedetto Bordone, in his _Isolario_ (1521 and 1547), makes the same
charge against the _Irish_, but I am glad to say that this seems only
copied fiom Strabo. Such stories are still rife in the East, like those of
men with tails. I have myself heard the tale told, nearly as Raffles tells
it of the Battas, of some of the wild tribes adjoining Arakan. (_Balbi_,
f. 130; _Raffles_, Mem. p. 427; _Wallace, Malay Archip._ 281; _Bickmore's
Travels_, p. III; _Cathay_, pp. 25, 100).

The latest and most authentic statement of the kind refers to a small
tribe called _Birhors_, existing in the wildest parts of Chota Nagpur and
Jashpur, west of Bengal, and is given by an accomplished Indian
ethnologist, Colonel Dalton. "They were wretched-looking objects ...
assuring me that they had themselves given up the practice, they admitted
that their fathers were in the habit of disposing of their dead in the
manner indicated, viz., by feasting on the bodies; but they declared that
they never shortened life to provide such feast, and shrunk with horror at
the idea of any bodies but those of their own blood relations being served
up at them!" (_J.A.S.B._ XXXIV. Pt. II. 18.) The same practice has been
attributed recently, but only on hearsay, to a tribe of N. Guinea called
_Tarungares_.

The Battas now bury their dead, after keeping the body a considerable
time. But the people of Nias and the Batu Islands, whom Junghuhn considers
to be of common origin with the Battas, do not bury, but expose the bodies
in coffins upon rocks by the sea. And the small and very peculiar people
of the Paggi Islands expose their dead on bamboo platforms in the forest.
It is quite probable that such customs existed in the north of Sumatra
also; indeed they may still exist, for the interior seems unknown. We do
hear of pagan hill-people inland from Pedir who make descents upon the
coast, (_Junghuhn_ II. 140; _Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal_, etc. 2nd
year, No. 4; _Nouv. Ann. des. V._ XVIII.)

[1] _Marsden_, 1st ed. p. 291.

[2] _Veth's Atchin_, 1873, p. 37.

[3] It might be supposed that Varthema had stolen from Serano; but the
book of the former was _published_ in 1510.

[4] Castanheda speaks of Pacem as the best port of the land: "standing on
the bank of a river on marshy ground about a league