It is truly an extraordinary sight to witness a whole tree-trunk,
perhaps twenty feet long and four or five in circumference,
converted into food with so little labour and preparation. A
good-sized tree will produce thirty tomans or bundles of thirty
pounds each, and each toman will make sixty cakes of three to the
pound. Two of these cakes are as much as a man can eat at one
meal, and five are considered a full day's allowance; so that,
reckoning a tree to produce 1,800 cakes, weighing 600 pounds, it
will supply a man with food for a whole year. The labour to
produce this is very moderate. Two men will finish a tree in five
days, and two women will bake the whole into cakes in five days
more; but the raw sago will keep very well, and can be baked as
wanted, so that we may estimate that in ten days a man may
produce food for the whole year. This is on the supposition that
he possesses sago trees of his own, for they are now all private
property. If he does not, he has to pay about seven and sixpence
for one; and as labour here is five pence a day, the total cost
of a year's food for one man is about twelve shillings. The
effect of this cheapness of food is decidedly prejudicial, for
the inhabitants of the sago countries are never so well off as
those where rice is cultivated. Many of the people here have
neither vegetables nor fruit, but live almost entirely on sago
and a little fish. Having few occupations at home, they wander
about on petty trading or fishing expeditions to the neighbouring
islands; and as far as the comforts of life are concerned, are
much inferior to the wild hill-Dyaks of Borneo, or to many of the
more barbarous tribes of the Archipelago.

The country round Warus-warus is low and swampy, and owing to the