Miscellanies (3); Stories and Essays

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ...of the native tribes. The Bagos possess plenty of palm wine, and, as early matrimonial engagements are made amongst them, the betrothed parties are brought up together in the same house, from seven or eight years of age, and the male is enjoined to bring each day to the relations of his intended partner two calabashes of palm wine, one in the morning, another in the evening. His parents supply him with this until he is himself capable of making the wine. A tribe, called the Timannus, in the vicinity of Sierra Leone, not only employ palm wine in this manner, but use it as offerings to the dead. They deposit quantities of this liquor, as well as of solid food, in the charnel-houses, under the impression that they are necessary for the deceased in supporting their spiritual existence. Punch might be considered the peculiar triumph of drinking civilization, did we not find its first principles familiar to the rude inhabitants of the Friendly, Society, Feejee, Sandwich, and Navigators' Islands. Here the cam plant--a species of pepper, cultivated solely for convivial purposes--is carefully dug up, scraped clean with mussel shells, split into small pieces, distributed to the company who chew them into a paste, and collected again into a wooden bowl to have all the virtue squeezed into a certain quantity of water. This fluid is drank in silence out of banana-leaf cups, and a fair amount of stupefication is procured from the smallest quantity of drink. Batavia, but for several drawbacks, would certainly be the drunkard's paradise. Here a man can get thoroughly intoxicated upon arrack for the small charge of a halfpenny; but the capital is so intersected with foetid canals, and surrounded by stagnant marshes, that a night or two spent in the city often...