n a state
of celibacy being extremely rare. The necessity of purchasing does not
prove such an obstacle to matrimony as is supposed. Was it indeed true
that every man was obliged to remain single till he had accumulated, from
the produce of his pepper-garden, a sum adequate to the purchase of a
wife, married pairs would truly be scarce. But the people have other
resources; there are few families who are not in possession of some small
substance; they breed goats and buffaloes, and in general keep in reserve
some small sum for particular purposes. The purchase-money of the
daughter serves also to provide wives for the sons. Certain it is that
the fathers are rarely at a loss for money to procure them wives so soon
as they become marriageable. In the districts under my charge are about
eight thousand inhabitants, among whom I do not conceive it would be
possible to find ten instances of men of the age of thirty years
unmarried. We must then seek for other causes of the paucity of
inhabitants, and indeed they are sufficiently obvious; among these we may
reckon that the women are by nature unprolific, and cease gestation at an
early age; that, almost totally unskilled in the medical art, numbers
fall victims to the endemic diseases of a climate nearly as fatal to its
indigenous inhabitants as to the strangers who settle among them: to
which we may add that the indolence and inactivity of the natives tend to
relax and enervate the bodily frame, and to abridge the natural period of
their lives.

...

MODES OF MARRIAGE.

The modes of marriage, according to the original institutions of these
people, are by jujur, by ambel anak, or by semando. The jujur is a
certain sum of money given by one man to another as a consideration for
the person of his daughter, whose situation, in this case, differs not
much from that of a slave to the man she marries, and to his family. His
absolute property in her depends however upon some nice circumstances.
Beside the batang jujur (or main sum) there are certain appendages or
branches, one of which, the tali kulo, of five dollars, is usually, from
motives of delicacy or friendship, left unpaid, and so long as that is
the case a relationship is understood to subsist between the two
families, and the parents of the woman have a right to interfere on
occasions of ill treatment: the husband is also liable to be fined for
wounding her, with other limitations of absolute right. When that sum is
fin