66

CROCODILE CATCHING.

WE were in the back verandah of my bungalow, and in front of me a Malay squatted on the floor, and beside him were weird implements-some gigantic hooks, four or five coils of rattan, a basket full of odds and ends, and four dead fowls.

Manap was his name,-Abdulmanap bin Muhammad Arsad, to give him his full ceremonial name, and Manap Rimau or Tiger Manap, to give him his distinguishing name. He was a professional crocodile catcher, making his living out of the reward offered by the Government for the extermination of these animals. His skill and extraordinary daring in shooting tigers, also of course for the Government reward, had earned him his sobriquet. He lived near the sea, close to the mangrove swamps where his work lay, and had come up to Taiping in answer to a letter from me. As he sat on the floor amid his paraphernalia we talked of indifferent subjects for the period prescribed by etiquette, and then I asked him to show me the lines he had brought with him.

"It is cooler in the house than by the lake," he said, picking up the basket; "shall I bait the hooks here?" He pulled out a knife, with a cutting edge some

twenty inches long, and carefully thumbed the blade. "And the Tuan wants to know not only how to catch crocodiles but learn the charms and lore in connection with it? Well, whatever it be that one intends to learn, one must start from the beginning. The boys at school begin with Alif, the first letter of the alphabet, and to catch crocodiles one must know the beginning of crocodiles. The first crocodile had its origin in the following manner. Siti Fatimah was the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and Petri Padang Gerinsing was the name of her nurse. One day the nurse took the sheath of a betel-nut palmleaf, and on it moulded some clay into the shape of what is now a crocodile; and the palm-leaf sheath formed the belly of the animal. Of the joints of some sugar-cane she made its ribs. On its head she placed a pointed stone, and bits of turmeric formed its eyes; its tail was a leaf of the betel-nut palm. She then tried to give life to it, but at once it fell to pieces. Twice this happened, but the third time she prayed to the Almighty God for life for it, and at once the animal breathed and moved. For many years it was the plaything of the prophet's daughter, but at last, with increasing size, it became disobedient, and, Petri Padang Gerinsing being by this time old and feeble, Siti Fatimah cursed the animal, saying, 'Thou shalt become the crocodile of the sea, nothing that thou shalt eat shall have taste for thee, and pleasure and desire shall not be known to thee.' She forthwith drew out all its teeth and pulled the tonsils from its mouth, and then to close its mouth drove nails through from the upper to the lower jaw and from the lower

to the upper jaw. The crocodile was allowed to escape, but soon found a way to open its jaws, and the nails driven in by Siti Fatimah have become the teeth that it now has."

Manap knew the folk-story off by heart, and probably repeated it in the identical words in which he had first heard it.

"Now," he continued, "we must remember this: the eyes of the first crocodile were made of turmeric, and to this day a crocodile cannot struggle successfully against a man who knows the properties of turmeric. A piece of it rubbed on the line weakens the crocodile's resistance, and if we sprinkle the boat with water in which it has been soaked the crocodile will not attack it. Turmeric, if rubbed on a crocodile's head, when the proper charms are repeated, will quickly kill it."

"And this is the way to bait the hooks."

From the coil of rattans he produced one about twenty yards long; a piece of stout native-made rope about three yards long was attached to one end of it, and at the end of the rope was a hook. The fine strands of which the rope was composed were separate from one another, and when the hook was taken by a crocodile they would slip into the interstices of its teeth and afford nothing on to which the animal could bite.

The hook was some seven inches long, and three and a half inches across from point to shank. It was of native-wrought iron, and half way up the shank on the side towards the point of the hook was a loop. The rope was attached to the hook at this loop; that is to say, it was attached to the hook half-way up the

shank, instead of at the end of the shank, as is the case in the ordinary hook. The point of the hook was not barbed, and the end of the shank was sharpened.

The effect of this curious attachment is obvious: supposing the bait to be swallowed, a strain on the line would tend to pull the hook transversely across the gullet of the crocodile; the point of the hook would catch in some part of the throat, and, as soon as this happened, the sharpened shank-point would catch in the opposite side of the throat. An animal thus hooked could only escape by breaking the line.

"I brought fowls for bait because I was hurried. White fowls are the best, for the crocodile can see them farther, but if I had had time I would have shot a monkey. There is nothing that a crocodile likes better than one of the grey long-tailed kind. He sees them playing and leaping in the mangrove-trees at high tide, and trooping over the mud flats at low tide : at all times they scream and scold and chatter at him, for between the crocodile and the monkey there is an old standing feud. It is seldom that a crocodile catches a monkey, but when he does it is very sweet to him."

Manap then took a fowl, which he had previously gutted and half-plucked, and eyed it carefully, and, after looking at it and at the hook from every point of view, split it open down the breast. He then buried the length of the hook in the incision he had made. The bend of the hook fitted closely to the curve of the fowl's rump, and the hook's point was hidden under the wing, while the sharpened point of the shank could be felt near the fowl's neck. With some native fibre he then bound the bait as tightly as

possible to the hook near the loop, taking great care not to impede the pivotal action of the loop. At the two extremities of the hook he tied the bait on with a much finer fibre, and tied it so that, while the meat could not slip and uncover the hook, yet at a sudden jerk on the main line the slender bands would snap, and the hook-point and shank-point would start from the protecting covering and stand ready to pierce any part of the crocodile's gullet that they might touch.

It did not take him long to bait the four hooks he had brought, and he was then ready to make a start. In the meantime I had explained the reason of my having sent for him. Taiping, the town in which we were, is the capital of the leading native state of the Malay Peninsula, and is happy in the possession of a beautiful public garden and an ornamental lake. Until they were made, their site had been a wilderness of abandoned mine-holes and spoil-banks. The Chinese method of winning alluvial tin ore (the mineral on which the source of the wealth of Perak at present depends) is to open an enormous pit and to bodily remove the earth from it until the substratum that carries the tin ore is exposed. When the mine is worked out and abandoned, there is left a hole which may vary from twenty to sixty feet in depth, and which, in exceptional cases, may extend for half a mile in length and a hundred yards or more in breadth; and beside this gigantic excavation, which in the rainy climate of the Peninsula quickly fills to the brim with water, there are mounds of corresponding extent where the overburden has been taken out and deposited. To form the Taiping lake a series of such abandoned mines