These people are remarkable for their docility and expertness in handicraft work, and become excellent house-carpenters and joiners, and as an instance of their skill in the arts they practise that of letting blood by cupping, in a mode nearly similar to ours.  Among the Sumatrans blood is never drawn with so salutary an intent.  They are industrious and frugal, temperate and regular in their habits, but at the same time avaricious, sullen, obstinate, vindictive, and sanguinary.  Although much employed as domestic slaves (particularly by the Dutch) they are always esteemed dangerous in that capacity, a defect in their character which philosophers will not hesitate to excuse in an independent people torn by violence from their country and connexions.  They frequently kill themselves when disgusted with their situation or unhappy in their families, and often their wives at the same time, who appeared, from the circumstances under which they were found, to have been consenting to the desperate act.  They were both dressed in their best apparel (the remainder being previously destroyed), and the female, in more than one instance that came under notice, had struggled so little as not to discompose her hair or remove her head from the pillow.  It is said that in their own country they expose their children by suspending them in a bag from a tree, when they despair of being able to bring them up.  The mode seems to be adopted with the view of preserving them from animals of prey, and giving them a chance of being saved by persons in more easy circumstances.

The island is divided into about fifty small districts, under chiefs or rajas who are independent of, and at perpetual variance with, each other; the ultimate object of their wars being to make prisoners, whom they sell for slaves, as well as all others not immediately connected with them, whom they can seize by stratagem.  These violences are doubtless encouraged by the resort of native traders from Padang, Natal, and Achin to purchase cargoes of slaves, who are also accused of augmenting the profits of their voyage by occasionally surprising and carrying off whole families.  The number annually exported is reckoned at four hundred and fifty to Natal, and one hundred and fifty to the northern ports (where they are said to be employed by the Achinese in the gold-mines), exclusive of those which go to Padang for the supply of Batavia, where the females are highly valued and taught music and various accomplishments.  In catching these unfortunate victims of avarice it is supposed that not fewer than two hundred are killed; and if the aggregate be computed at one thousand it is a prodigious number to be supplied from the population of so small an island.