Page:First Voyage Round the World.djvu/228

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148
DESCRIPTION OF ISLANDS.

Titameti, Bachian, Latalata, Jabobi, Mata, and Batutiga. They told us that in the island of Cafi the people were small and dwarfed like the Pigmies; they have been subjected by force by the King of Tadore. We passed outside of Batutiga to the west, and we steered between west and south-west, and we discovered some islets to the south, on which account the pilots of Maluco said it would be better to cast anchor so as not to drift at night among many islets and shoals. We, therefore, altered our course to south-east, and went to an island situated in 2 deg. S. latitude, and fifty-three leagues from Maluco.

This island is named Sulach;[1] its inhabitants are Gentiles, and have not got a king. They eat human flesh; both men and women go naked, except a piece of the bark of a tree of two fingers' breath before their natural parts. There are many other islands around here inhabited by anthropophagi. These are the names of some of them:—Silan, Noselao, Biga, Atulabaon, Leitimor, Tenetum, Gonda, Kailaruru, Mandan and Benaia.[2] We left to the east the islands named Lamatola and Tenetum.

Having run ten leagues from Sulach in the same direction, we went to a rather large island named Buru, in which we found plenty of victuals, such as pigs, goats, fowls, sugar-canes, cocoa-nuts, sagu, a certain food of theirs made of bananas called kanali,and chiacare, which here they call Nanga.[3]The chiacare are fruit like water-melons, but knotty on

  1. "Xulla" of Robert's Atlas, and "Xoula" of the Dutch. Note, Milan edition.
  2. Comparing this with what the author writes a little further on, there is another proof that he took down the names of the islands, and laid down their positions, as he thought he understood the pilots who spoke a language which he little understood. He here notes ten islands, and he has drawn six without names to the North of Sulach, where other geographers also lay down a few islets; but of these ten, Tenetum Kalairuru, Mandan, and Benaia, are again named and drawn further on; and Leytimor is a peninsula attached to Amboina. Note, Milan edition.
  3. The jack fruit, called Nangka throughout the Malay seas.