Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/456

398 markets is to a European very entertaining. The immense quantities of fruit exposed is almost beyond belief: forty or fifty cart-loads of pine-apples, packed as carelessly as we do turnips in England, is nothing extraordinary; and everything else is in the same profusion. The time of holding these markets, however, is so ill-contrived, that, as all the fruit for the ensuing week, both for retailers and housekeepers, must be bought on Saturday and Monday, there is afterwards no good fruit in the hands of any but the Chinese in Passar Pisang.

Thus much for meat: in the article of drink, nature has not been quite so bounteous to the inhabitants of this island as she has to some of us, sons of the less abundant North. They are not, however, to-day devoid of strong liquors, though their religion, Mahometanism, forbids them the use of such; by this means driving them from liquid to solid intoxicants, as opium, tobacco, etc. etc.

Besides their arrack, which is too well known in Europe to need any description, they have palm wine, made from a species of palm. This liquor is extracted from the branches which should have borne flowers, but are cut by people who make it their business. Joints of bamboo cane are hung under them, into which liquor imtended by nature for the nourishment of both flowers and fruit, distils in tolerable abundance; and so true is nature to her paths, that so long as the fruit of that branch would have remained unripe, so long, but no longer, does she supply the liquor or sap. This liquor is sold in three states, the first almost as it comes from the tree, only slightly prepared by some method unknown to me, which causes it to keep thirty-six or forty-eight hours instead of only twelve: in this state it is sweet and pleasant, tasting a little of smoke, which, though at first disagreeable, becomes agreeable by use and not at all intoxicating. It is called tuackmanise, or sweet palm-wine. The other two, one of which is called tuack oras, and the other tuack cuning, are prepared by placing certain roots in them, and then fermenting; so that their taste is altered from a sweet to a rather astringent and disagreeable taste, and