These superstitions are unfavourable to every improvement. It is among the priests that civilization must always begin, unless it be superinduced by conquerors or missionaries; so long therefore as the priests are mere knaves and jugglers, so long must the people continue savages. One writer says of these islanders, that they have no notion of a God, but that they believe firmly in the devil, and worship him from fear. They believe in a superior being for whom they have no name, simply using the word Knallen, which signifies above, or on high; they believe that this being is good and will not hurt them, but wherein his goodness consists, says Mr. Haensel, they neither have, nor seem to wish to have, any understanding, nor ever trouble themselves about him. When the Missionaries endeavoured to convince them of their sinfulness and the necessity of redemption, they were opposed by a singular opinion; the islanders insisted that they were good by nature, and never did any thing wrong: and for the truth of this latter assertion they appealed confidently to the missionaries themselves. It was founded upon a notion which reconciled this complacent belief in their own original goodness with any crimes they might think proper to commit. The world, they affirm, was not made by him who is above, but by the Eewee, whom the missionaries readily identify with Satan; and whenever any thing wrong is committed by them, they charged it upon the Eewee, and acquit themselves as being mere, and therefore irresponsible, agents.

All diseases which baffle their modes of cure are accounted for by possession. Exorcism of course becomes the remedy,-and instead of laying the devil in the Red Sea, they put him afloat upon a little raft decorated for that purpose, tow him out to sea and turn him adrift, in the belief that if he be not driven on shore within three days, he must die,but as it is perfectly well understood that wherever he lands he will continue his practices, the inhabitants of that part of the coast where the raft happens to be stranded, resent the unwelcome importation by sending a challenge to the village from whence the devil was shipped off. A day of battle is appointed, and by a whimsical arrangement, this battle serves to compound all private quarrels, and terminates litigation. more effectually than a court of law. Champions are chosen on both sides to belabour each other upon the affair of the devil, and notice is given that all who wish to have their disputes settled, may take this opportunity. The causes usually to be decided are cases of theft, crim. con. and such other offences as occur among a rude, but not a ferocious people. The business is conducted with due solemnity; the captains or foremen of all the neighbouring villages are present, and inspect the long sticks, which are the only weapons used in their judicial combats. One combat

at a time is decided; the two champions if it be the devil's affair, or the plaintiff and defendant in a private plea, enter the lists, and lay on upon each other's back and head, till one of them crieshold, enough !'-in this manner all parties get well thrashed, he who gives in is cast in his suit, and Mr. Haensel assures us that peace is restored, all being perfectly satisfied with the justice of the decision. Satisfied they may be that it is without appeal, but the injured man who is beaten, and believes the decision to be judicial, must in strict reasoning ascribe it to the Eewee; and the worst effect which results from this cudgel-work is, that it must confirm the opinion that the affairs of this world are governed by a capricious or evil being.

Of their other superstitions little is known. Mr. Fontana observed that at the change of the moon they decorate their hats with palm branches and festoons made of slips of plantain leaves; their persons are ornamented in the same manner, and the day is spent in singing, dancing, and drunkenness. This indicates a kind of lunar worship, which indeed the old Jesuit missionaries expressly impute to them. During an eclipse, they beat all their gongs with the utmost violence, and hurl their spears into the air, to frighten away the demon who is devouring the celestial body: no superstitious notion seems to be so widely prevalent as this; it is found among the savages of America and Africa, as well as in Asia, and wherever it exists, the same practice accompanies it.

The most hideous of their ceremonies is an annual feast of the dead. They dig the skulls out of all the graves, a stake being planted in each exactly over the head of the corpse, to show where it lies; this office is performed by the women who are nearest of kin to the deceased; they serape off the flesh if it be not consumed, wash the bones with the milk of fresh cocoa nuts, and rub them with saffron ; they then wrap the skull in new cloth, replace it in the grave, and replant the stake, which is hung with trappings in honour of the dead. The whole night is spent in these horrid rites; in the morning they sacrifice hogs, and smear themselves with the blood, and some among them eat the flesh raw. A more loathsome feast of the dead is celebrated among some of the North American tribes, and a more dreadful ceremony of watering the graves' among the atrocious barbarians of western Africa. Their jugglers are called paters, an appellation manifestly borrowed from the Portugueze missionaries. They are knaves, who, being as expert in slight-of-hand as the performers in India, make a more profitable exhibition by acting as physicians, and professing that their art is miraculous. This kind of roguery leads to the deepest guilt, when their common mummery fails, which necessarily happens whenever the disease is too vio

lent to be cured by imagination, the juggler, to save his own cre dit, protests that some person has by witchcraft sucked all the power of healing out of the patient's body. His next business is to discover the culprit, and woe be to those who have offended him, for the wretch upon whom he thinks proper to fix, is without farther inquiry put to death!

This is the only case in which the Nicobarmen discover any trace of ferocity. It is not indeed without some share of reason that they say they are good by nature, for a better-natured or more inoffensive people are no where to be found. The Moravians say of them that they were always ready to do a kind action to their friends, and that their dispositions were generally gentle, except when jealousy, or other provocations roused them, and then the Danish soldiers experienced that they knew how to revenge themselves. The missionaries found them uniformly peaceable, generous, and affectionate.

The cap

We used,' says Mr. Haensel, to buy of them what we wanted, and pay with tobacco, the common medium. Even when they had nothing to sell they would come and fetch their portion of tobacco, which we never refused them as long as we had any, till by the non-arrival of the ship we were left entirely without it. We therefore told the captain of the village, that as we had no more tobacco the people need not bring us any more provisions, for we had nothing to give in exchange. tain did as we desired, yet on the very next day we were supplied more plentifully than ever with the things we wanted. They would not even wait for pay, but hung up their fruit and meat about the house and went away. We called after them and told them how we were situated. Their answer was, when you had plenty of tobacco you gave us as much as you could spare; now though you have got no more of it, we have provisions enough, and you shall have as much as you want, as long as we have any, till you get more tobacco. This promise they most faithfully performed.'

Nothing can be more simple than their state of society, which indeed differs only in the slightest possible degree from perfect savage independence. No person acknowledges any controul; there are however in every village men who claim the rank of captain or omjah, as being cleverer than their neighbours, and one of them is acknowledged as the omjah karru, or great master of the house. The only privilege which this cofers is, that when a ship arrives he is entitled to go first on board, and make the bargain if they have any thing to barter. They are commonly good-natured men, disposed to make and preserve peace among the common people; and it is a remarkable proof of the peaceable disposition of these islanders, and of their docility, that rank among them, such as it is, is yielded to intellectual and not to bodily powers. Mr. Fontana asserts that there are casts among the natives; no other writer hints at this, and though the silence

of many can rarely be allowed to weigh against the testimony of one, the existence of such an institution appears altogether inconsistent with the rudeness, poverty, and scanty population of the Nicobars. Adultery, according to this gentleman, where it involves breach of cast, is punished in the women by repudiation and infamy, and sometimes with death; but it is common for men of the same cast to exchange wives for a time, and the accommodation is legalized by the ceremony of giving a leaf of tobacco in public. It is remarkable that there should be any punishment for this crime where marriage is dissolved whenever the parties think proper, and where those dissolute manners prevail which plenty and idleness never fail to produce. In consequence of that dissoluteness the men are short-lived, few are to be seen above fifty. The women live much longer; but one who bears three children is esteemed fruitful. This cannot be accounted for by the hardships which they endure, for though, as is too often the case among savages, they are the only cultivators of the ground, little cultivation is required in a country where the Cocoa tree grows, and which has a bread-fruit. The natives call the tree which produces this food leram, the Portugueze mellori; it is described and well represented in the third volume of the Asiatic Researches. Four of the plants had been brought from Nicobar, and seemed at that time to be flourishing in the Company's botanical garden at Calcutta. A fruit,' says Sir William Jones, weighing twenty or thirty pounds, and containing a farinaceous substance both palatable and nutritive in a high degree, would perhaps if it were common in these provinces, for ever secure the natives of them from famine.'

The villages are small, generally built upon the beach, and consisting of some fifteen or twenty houses of that construction which is common in the Malay countries. They are raised six feet or more from the ground upon pillars; this mode of building must have originated in a swampy country, or one liable to inundations. It has the advantage of keeping the houses free from rats and snakes; the more effectually to guard against these visitors, the pillars are bound round with a smooth leaf, and should they succeed in mounting this, their further progress is stopt by a broad piece of wood near the top. The houses are round, and have the appearance of Brobdignag beehives. They are spacious, and generally contain more than one family, all herded together; parents and children, guests, young and old, lying naked on the floor, with nothing under them but a hetfat, the leaf of a species of palm. Wherever savages are thus gregarious, habits of early debauchery inevitably arise. The flooring, which is usually made of split bamboos, is open enough for the admission of light and air; and in those bays and inlets which are E

VOL. XI. NO. XXL

sheltered from the surf, they build near the margin of the water that the tide may flow under it, and wash away the filth of the household which collects below. These villages, placed in thick Cocoa groves, are seldom seen at a distance. Poles therefore of a great height are planted in front of them a little way in the water, and hung like may-poles, with tufts of grass, or strips of bark, to serve as landmarks for the fishermen. A high pole which is erected in every village with long pendants of ground rattans, and which has the reputation of serving as a scare-devil, may perhaps be intended also for this wiser purpose.

The men wear no other clothing than a narrow piece of cloth about three yards long, which is wrapt twice round the waist, and being past between the legs, and through the girth behind, drags after them. These are the tails which Kiopping saw, which Linnæus was inclined too readily to believe, and for which, in becoming deference to his opinion, Mr. Fontana sought in vain, not being able, he assures us, in all his examinations to discover any sort of projection whatever on the os coccygis of either sex! This cloth is drawn so tightly between the legs as to produce a degree of compression there, which is supposed to be the principal cause of the infecundity of the inhabitants. When they visit strangers they put on hats and old clothes which Europeans have given, and in which they fancy themselves as fine as any King Tom of the gold coast in a lace coat from Monmouth-street. The women where the missionaries dwelt, wore a sort of cloth apron, which was commonly blue, about a foot wide, and hardly reaching to the knees. But Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Fontana describe a sort of fleecy petticoat made of rushes or grass, or the threads of the cocoa bark, hanging like a thatch. De Bry has represented a similar covering among his prints of the Floridan tribes, but he has disposed it more in the costume of an opera dancer than of a savage. They are an ugly race; their eyes small and obliquely cut, with a yellowish hue over the white, their ears large, probably lengthened by art, for the purpose of ornamenting them with holes in the lobes large enough to admit a man's thumb. They improve nature with equal taste by flattening the occiput of their infants, in order that the hair may remain close to the head, and the upper fore teeth be as prominent as possible. With all this propensity to deform themselves, they have not the fashion of disfiguring themselves with any kind of paint, and have a pleasure in personal cleanliness, priding themselves upon their fine skin.de

The mellory, which nature has provided for them without any care of their own, is their chief article of food. They have also abundance of good fruit, and several good roots. Shell-fish abound upon their shores; and they allure other species into shallow water