Chapter UJUNGTANAH to UMBRELLA of U by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

reason as the fables allege. There is no lack of adjoining vegetation; the spreading branches are clothed abundantly with parasitical plants, and numerous birds and squirrels frequent them. The stem throws out ‘wings’ or buttresses (see Horsfield in the Bat. Trans., and Blume’s Pl.) like many of the forest trees of Further India. Blume refers, in connection with the origin of the prevalent fables, to the real existence of exhalations of carbonic acid gas in the volcanic tracts of Java, dangerous to animal life and producing sterility around, alluding particularly to a paper by M. Loudoun (a Dutch official of Scotch descent), in the Edinburgh New Phil. Journal for 1832, p. 102, containing a formidable description of the Guwo Upas or Poison Valley on the frontier of the Pekalongan and Banyumas provinces. We may observe, however, that, if we remember rightly, the exaggerations of Mr. Loudoun have been exposed and ridiculed by Dr. Junghuhn, the author of “Java.” And if the Foersch legend be compared with some of the particulars alleged by several of the older writers, e.g. Camell (in Ray), Valentijn, Spielman, Kaempfer, and Rumphius, it will be seen that the basis for a great part of that putida commentatio, as Blume calls it, is to be found in them.

George Colman the Younger founded on the Foerschian Upas-myth, a kind of melodrama, called the Law of Java, first acted at Covent Garden May 11, 1822. We give some quotations below.⁵

Lindley, in his Vegetable Kingdom, in a short notice of Antiaris toxicaria, says that, though the accounts are greatly exaggerated, yet the facts are notable enough. He says cloth made from the tough fibre is so acrid as to verify the Shirt of Nessus. My friend Gen. Maclagan, noticing Lindley’s remark to me, adds: “Do you remember in our High School days (at Edinburgh) a grand Diorama called The Upas Tree? It showed a large wild valley, with a single tree in the middle, and illustrated the safety of approach on the windward side, and the desolation it dealt on the other.”

[For some details as to the use of the Upas poison, and an analysis of the Arrow-poisons of Borneo by Dr. L. Lewin (from Virchow’s Archiv. fur Pathol. Anat. 1894, pp. 317–25) see Ling Roth, Natives of Sarawak, ii. 188 seqq. and for superstitions connected with these poisons, Skeat, Malay Magic, 426.]

c. 1330.—“En queste isole sono molte cose maravigliose e strane. Onde alcuni arbori li sono … che fanno veleno pessimo … Quelli uomini sono quasi tutti corsali, e quando vanno a battaglia portano ciascuno uno canna in mano, di lunghezza d’un braccio e pongono in capo de la canna uno ago di ferro atossiato in quel veleno, e sofiano nella canna e l’ago vola e percuotelo dove vogliono, e’ncontinente quelli ch’è percosso muore. Ma egli hanno la tina piene di sterco d’uomo e una iscodella di sterco guarisce l’uomo da queste cotali ponture.”—Storia di Frate Odorigo, from Palatina MS., in Cathay, &c., App., p. xlix.

c. 1630.—“And (in Makasser) which is no lesse infernall, the men use long canes or truncks (cald Sempitans—see SUMPITAN), out of which they can (and use it) blow a little pricking quill, which if it draw the lest drop of blood from any part of the body, it makes him (though the strongest man living) die immediately; some venoms operate in an houre, others in a moment, the veynes and body (by the virulence of the poyson) corrupting and rotting presently, to any man’s terrour and amazement, and feare to live where such abominations predominate.”—Sir T. Herbert, ed. 1638, p. 329.

c. 1631.—“I will now conclude; but I first must say something of the poison used by the King of Macassar in the Island of Celebes to envenom those little arrows which they shoot through blowing-tubes, a poison so deadly that it causes death more rapidly than a dagger. For one wounded ever so lightly, be it but a scratch bringing blood, or a prick in the heel, immediately begins to nod like a drunken man, and falls dead to the ground. And within half an hour of death this putrescent poison so corrupts the flesh that it can be plucked from the bones like so much mucus. And what seems still more marvellous, if a man (e.g.) be scratched in the thigh, or higher in the body, by another point which is not poisoned, and the still warm blood as it flows down to the feet be merely touched by one of these poisoned little arrows, swift as wind the pestilent influence ascends to the wound, and with the same swiftness and other effects snatches the man from among the living.

“These are no idle tales, but the experience of eye-witnesses, not only among our countrymen, but among Danes and Englishmen.”—Jac. Bontii, lib. v. cap. xxxiii.

1646.—“Es wachst ein Baum auf Maccasser, einer Cüst auf der Insul Çelebes, der ist treflich vergiftet, dass wann einer nur an einem Glied damit verletzet wird, und man solches nit alsbald wegschlägt, der Gift geschwind zum Hertzen eilet, und den Garaus machet” (then the antidote as before is mentioned). … “Mit solchem Gift schmieren die Bandanesen