Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/472

414 where a man has been buried. Thus their burying-grounds in the neighbourhood of Batavia cover many hundred acres, on which account the Dutch, grudging the quantity of ground laid waste by this method, will only sell them land for it at enormous prices; notwithstanding which they will always raise money to purchase grounds, whenever they can find the Dutch in a humour to sell them; and actually had while we were there a great deal of land intended for that purpose, but not yet begun upon. Their funerals are attended with much purchased and some real lamentations; the relations of the deceased attending as well as women hired to weep. The corpse is nailed up in a large thick wooden coffin, not made of planks, but hollowed out of a trunk of a tree. This is let down into the grave and then surrounded with eight or ten inches of their mortar or chinam as it is called, which in a short time becomes as hard as a stone, so that the bones of the meanest among them are more carefully preserved from injury than those of our greatest and most respected people.

Of the Government here I can say but very little, only that a great subordination is kept up; every man who is able to keep house having a certain rank acquired by the length of his services to the Company, which ranks are distinguished by the ornaments of the coaches and dresses of the coachman; for instance, one must ride in a plain coach, another paints his coach with figures and gives his driver a laced hat, another gilds his coach, etc.

The Governor-General who resides here is superior over all the Dutch Governors and other officers in the East Indies, who, to a man, are obliged to come to him at Batavia to have their accounts passed. If they are found to have been at all negligent or faulty, it is a common practice to delay them here one, two or three years, according to the pleasure of the Governor; for no one can leave the place without his consent. Next to the Governor-General are the Raaden van Indie, or members of the Council, called here Edele Heeren, and by the corruption of the English Idoleers, in respect to whom every one who meets them in a carriage