The history of Sumatra : $b Containing an account of the government, laws, customs and manners of the native inhabitantsMarsden, William
History
The history of Sumatra : $b Containing an account of the government, laws, customs and manners of the native inhabitants
Marsden, William
Natural history -- Indonesia -- Sumatra; Sumatra (Indonesia)
The sugar-cane (tubbu) is very generally cultivated, but not in large
quantities, and more frequently for the sake of chewing the juicy reed,
which they consider as a delicacy, than for the manufacture of sugar. Yet
this is not unattended to for home consumption, especially in the
northern districts. By the Europeans and Chinese large plantations have
been set on foot near Bencoolen, and worked from time to time with more
or less effect; but in no degree to rival those of the Dutch at Batavia,
from whence in time of peace the exportation of sugar (gula), sugar-candy
(gula batu) and arrack is very considerable. In the southern parts of the
island, and particularly in the district of Manna, every village is
provided with two or three machines of a peculiar construction for
squeezing the cane; but the inhabitants are content with boiling the
juice to a kind of syrup. In the Lampong country they manufacture from
the liquor yielded by a species of palm-tree a moist, clammy, imperfect
kind of sugar, called jaggri in most parts of India.*
(*Footnote. This word is evidently the shakar of the Persians, the Latin
saccharum, and our sugar.)
JAGGRI.
This palm, named in Sumatra anau, and by the eastern Malays gomuto, is
the Borassus gomutus of Loureiro, the Saguerus pinnatus of the Batavian
Transactions, and the cleophora of Gaertner. Its leaves are long and
narrow and, though naturally tending to a point, are scarcely ever found
perfect, but always jagged at the end. The fruit grows in bunches of
thirty or forty together, on strings three or four feet long, several of
which hang from one shoot. In order to procure the nira or toddy (held in
higher estimation than that from the coconut-tree), one of these shoots
for fructification is cut off a few inches from the stem, the remaining
part is tied up and beaten, and an incision is then made, from which the
liquor distils into a vessel or bamboo closely fastened beneath. This is
replaced every twenty-four hours. The anau palm produces also (beside a
little sago) the remarkable substance called iju and gomuto, exactly
resembling coarse black horse-hair, and used for making cordage of a very
excellent kind, as well as for many other purposes, being nearly
incorruptible. It encompasses the stem of the tree, and is seemingly
bound to it by thicker fibres or twigs, of which the natives made pens
for writing. Toddy is likewise procured from the lontar or Borassus
flabellifer, the tala of the Hindus.
SAGO.
The rambiya, puhn sagu, or proper sago tree, is also of the palm kind.
Its trunk contains a farinaceous and glutinous pith that, being soaked,
dried, and granulated, becomes the sago of our shops, and has been too
frequently and accurately described (by Rumphius in particular, Volume 1
chapters 17 and 18, and by M. Poivre) to need a repetition here.
NIBONG.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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