Dudley Leavitt (1772-1851) was a New Hampshire educator, newspaper editor, and polymath, who was the publisher of the Leavitt's Farmers Almanack -- one of America's earliest almanacs. Levitt's papers reside in the NH State Library. The documents represented in KSCommons were selected for use in the NH Citizen Archivists' Initiative.
While women specialize in making baskets and mats of pandanus leaves (Pandanus spp.), men usually make the rattan (Calamus spp.) baskets. This man is making an openwork rattan basket for leaching poison out of a species of poisonous yam (Dioscorea hispida).
People usually cook gadong again, after the poison has been leached out, by steaming it over a fire in a section of bamboo, sometimes with fish or vegetables mixed in. Here a man has split open the bamboo container and is removing the cooked gadong.
One of the most abundant wild tubers is gadong (Dioscorea hispida), which grows mainly on sandy riverbanks. The tubers are larger than potatoes and are shallowly rooted, so they are easy to dig up. Their drawback is that they are poisonous in their natural state. Batek process them to remove the poison. These women have peeled some gadong tubers and cut them into chunks. They are now slicing them into thin slices which they will boil in the iron pot (center). (They can slice the chunks before or after boiling.) Later they will put the slices in an openwork rattan basket, which they will anchor in a stream for a day or so, using the flowing water to leach out the poison. Gadong is easy to gather, but laborious to process.
This woman is sitting in her family lean-to shelter surrounded by some of the typical accoutrements of Batek life. Beside her are a bamboo blowpipe dart quiver, some pandanus baskets, some wadded up cloth sarongs, a pile of uncooked takop tubers (Dioscorea orbiculata), and a charred section of bamboo which has been used for cooking. Behind her, stuck in the thatch, are some sections of blowpipe bamboo, and in front, hanging from a pole, is a bundle of pith that will be used to make the butt-cones of blowpipe darts.
This man is applying coats of poison to newly made blowpipe darts. The latex of the poison tree (Antiaris toxicaria) has been dried on a bamboo spatula, which is stored in a thin bamboo tube. Here he is heating the spatula to soften the poison and then rolling the tips of the darts in the sticky poison. A bundle of pith from a type of rattan vine, which will be made into dart butt-cones, dries over the fire.
Adolescent boys, sometimes together with girls, often live in separate shelters from their parents and do some of their own cooking. Here some boys are cooking dumplings made from wheat flour obtained by trade.
Most meat in the Batek diet comes from arboreal game (monkeys, gibbons, squirrels, etc.) killed by means of blowpipes and poisoned darts. Blowpipes consist of inner and outer tubes of thin-walled bamboo, each tube composed of two lengths of bamboo spliced end-to-end. To make a blowpipe or replace a section of an existing blowpipe, one dries a length of blowpipe bamboo over a fire, wiping and straightening it in the process, as this boy is doing here.
Although men do most blowpipe hunting, some women, especially young ones without children, hunt for fun. This young woman was an active hunter. She had her own blowpipe, made by a male friend, but no dart quiver, so she stored her darts in her hair. Here she is carrying her blowpipe and two lengths of unprocessed blowpipe bamboo.
Women are skilled at plaiting strands of natural materials into necklaces and armbands. Here a woman plaits a necklace from black rhizomes of a fungus that grows on rocks. Such rhizomes are thought to ward off disease. Batek wear the necklaces themselves or trade them to Malays.
Dart poison kills by stopping the victims heart. It can kill all kinds of monkeys and apes up to the size of pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina), which weigh as much as 30 pounds for a mature male. This is a small dusky leaf monkey (Presbytis obscura) that has been killed by blowpiping.
Hair lice are a constant nuisance for Batek. Men sometimes shave their heads to get relief, but women usually depend on friends and relatives to pluck out the lice and crush them. Here a woman is delousing her mother using a thin bamboo spatula made especially for this purpose, a common scene during leisure hours in Batek camps.
This is a typical camp scene a man resting in his shelter, his son working on his blowpipe, and his grandson blowing on the fire. On the lower left lie three bamboo containers full of tuber slices; a blowpipe leans against the roof; and a metal pot with scraps of food in it lies beside the fire.
Much of childrens play is imitation of the serious activities of adults. Children of both sexes learn how to dig tubers by accompanying their mothers on tuber-digging expeditions. Here a little boy (left) digs with a full-sized digging stick, while a girl (right) scoops pretend tubers out of a hole. A rattan basket used to leach gadong slices lies behind them.
Besides arboreal animals, Batek pursue several animals that live in holes in trees or in the ground, including bamboo rats (Rhizomys sumatrensis), scaly anteaters (Manis javanica), and porcupines (Hystrix brachyura, Atherurus macrourus). Here a man is cutting up some porcupine meat and putting it in a metal pot while his wife sits inside their shelter. Note the resin torch on the left.
Men and women often wear good-smelling plant parts during singing sessions to attract and please the superhuman beings. Here a young woman, her adolescent brother, and a girl wear bandoliers of crushed and twisted ginger stems and wild ginger leaves before a singing session.
Women are especially skilled at making lean-to shelters. Here a woman fastens thatch shingles, each consisting of three palm fronds, to the upright poles by knotting leaflets around the poles.
Occasionally people bring in more meat than camp members can eat in a single day. Here some porcupine meat is being dried to preserve it for few days. Pieces of pith for blowpipe darts dry on top of the meat.
In the 1970s, Malay rattan traders came up the Lebir River and its tributaries in outboard motorboats. They brought foodssuch as rice, flour, and sugarand other goodsincluding metal tools and clothto trade for rattan. They made agreements with individual Batek to collect certain amounts of rattan by a date when they would return. Here some Malay traders are assembling a consignment of rattan on bamboo rafts, which they paid some Batek to build. The traders will then pole the raft-loads of rattan downstream to their villages.
A young man pulls down the vine of a thick rattan after he cut the vine loose from its crown. He will then slice all the leaves off the vine, cut it into nine-foot sections, and tie the sections into bundles of four or five pieces, which he will carry to the collection place on his shoulder.
Thick species of rattan (Calamus manan, Calamus ornatus) are in demand for making walking canes and furniture frames. These species cling so firmly to the treetops, the vines cannot simply be pulled down. Here a young man climbs the tree supporting a thick rattan so he can cut the vine loose from the crown.
