are an active, laborious class of men but yet indulge as
freely in opium as any others whatever, are notwithstanding the most
healthy and vigorous people to be met with on the island. It has been
usual also to attribute to the practice destructive consequences of
another nature from the frenzy it has been supposed to excite in those
who take it in quantities. But this should probably rank with the many
errors that mankind have been led into by travellers addicted to the
marvellous; and there is every reason to believe that the furious
quarrels, desperate assassinations, and sanguinary attacks, which the use
of opium is said to give birth to, are idle notions, originally adopted
through ignorance and since maintained from the mere want of
investigation, without having any solid foundation. It is not to be
controverted, that those desperate acts of indiscriminate murder, called
by us mucks, and by the natives mengamok, do actually take place, and
frequently too in some parts of the East (in Java in particular) but it
is not equally evident that they proceed from any intoxication except
that of their unruly passions. Too often they are occasioned by excess of
cruelty and injustice in their oppressors. On the west coast of Sumatra
about twenty thousand pounds weight of this drug are consumed annually,
yet instances of this crime do not happen (at least within the scope of
our knowledge) above once in two or three years. During my residence
there I had an opportunity of being an eyewitness but to one muck. The
slave of a Portuguese woman, a man of the island of Nias, who in all
probability had never handled an opium pipe in his life, being treated by
his mistress with extreme severity for a trifling offence, vowed he would
have revenge if she attempted to strike him again, and ran down the steps
of the house with a knife in each hand, as it is said. She cried out,
mengamok! The civil guard was called, who, having the power in these
cases of exercising summary justice, fired half a dozen rounds into an
outhouse where the unfortunate wretch had sheltered himself on their
approach, and from whence he was at length dragged, covered with wounds.
Many other mucks might perhaps be found, upon scrutiny, of the nature of
the foregoing, where a man of strong feelings was driven by excess of
injury to domestic rebellion.

It is true that the Malays, when in a state of war they are bent on any
daring enterprise, fortify themselves with