Note 132 — V. HERE FOLLOWETH CONCERNING INDIA THE GREATER.

In Sumatra, we read, “Man’s flesh, if it be fat, is eaten as ordinarily there as beefe in our country. Marchants comming vnto this region for traffique do vsually bring to them fat men, selling them vnto the inhabitants as we sel hogs, who immediately kil and eate them.” (Odoricus, in Hakluyt, vol. ii.)

“In one part of the island, called Batech, the inhabitants eat human flesh,” etc. (Conti in India in the Fifteenth Century, p. 9.) The cannibalism of certain tribes in Sumatra is noticed with more or less exaggeration by several other old travellers, and has been confirmed in the present century. The tribe is that of the Battas or Battaks, as correctly named by Conti, a race presenting the singular anomaly of Anthropophagi with a literature. Some have supposed that they may be the cannibal Paddaei of Herodotus (iii. 99). It is not impossible, for the more we learn the further goes back the history of Eastern navigation.