Chapter UJUNGTANAH to UMBRELLA of U by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

have the cover belonging to it, which is of no further use to the Owner, by applying to the Porter at the Royal Hotel.”—(From Personal Recollection.)—It is a curious parallel to the advertisement above from the Female Tatler.

UPAS, s. This word is now, like Juggernaut, chiefly used in English as a customary metaphor, and to indicate some institution that the speaker wishes to condemn in a compendious manner. The word upas is Javanese for poison; [Mr. Scott writes: “The Malay word upas, means simply ‘poison.’ It is Javanese hupas, Sundanese upas, Balinese hupas, ‘poison.’ It commonly refers to vegetable poison, because such are more common. In the Lampong language upas means ‘sickness.’”] It became familiar in Europe in connection with exaggerated and fabulous stories regarding the extraordinary and deadly character of a tree in Java, alleged to be so called. There are several trees in the Malay Islands producing deadly poisons, but the particular tree to which such stories were attached is one which has in the last century been described under the name of Antiaris toxicaria, from the name given to the poison by the Javanese proper, viz. Antjar, or Anchar (the name of the tree all over Java), whilst it is known to the Malays and people of Western Java as Upas, and in Celebes and the Philippine Islands as Ipo or Hipo. [According to Mr. Scott “the Malay name for the ‘poison-tree,’ or any poison-tree, is pohun upas, puhun upas, represented in English by bohonupas. The names of two poison-trees, the Javanese anchar (Malay also anchar) and chetik, appear occasionally in English books… The Sundanese name for the poison tree is bulo ongko.”] It was the poison commonly used by the natives of Celebes and other islands for poisoning the small bamboo darts which they used (and in some islands still use) to shoot from the blow-tube (see SUMPITAN, SARBATANE).

The story of some deadly poison in these islands is very old, and we find it in the Travels of Friar Odoric, accompanied by the mention of the disgusting antidote which was believed to be efficacious, a genuine Malay belief, and told by a variety of later and independent writers, such as Nieuhof, Saar, Tavernier, Cleyer, and Kaempfer.

The subject of this poison came especially to the notice of the Dutch in connection with its use to poison the arrows just alluded to, and some interesting particulars are given on the subject by Bontius, from whom a quotation is given below, with others. There is a notice of the poison in De Bry, in Sir T. Herbert (whencesoever he borrowed it), and in somewhat later authors about the middle of the 17th century. In March 1666 the subject came before the young Royal Society, and among a long list of subjects for inquiry in the East occur two questions pertaining to this matter.

The illustrious Rumphius in his Herbarium Amboinense goes into a good deal of detail on the subject, but the tree does not grow in Amboyna where he wrote, and his account thus contains some ill-founded statements, which afterwards lent themselves to the fabulous history of which we shall have to speak presently. Rumphius however procured from Macassar specimens of the plant, and it was he who first gave the native name (Ipo, the Macassar form) and assigned a scientific name, Arbor toxicaria.¹ Passing over with simple mention the notices in the appendix to John Ray’s Hist. Plantarum, and in Valentijn (from both of which extracts will be found below), we come to the curious compound of the loose statements of former writers magnified, of the popular stories current among Europeans in the Dutch colonies, and of pure romantic invention, which first appeared in 1783, in the London Magazine. The professed author of this account was one Foersch, who had served as a junior surgeon in the Dutch East Indies.² This person describes the tree, called bohon-upas, as situated “about 27 leagues³ from Batavia, 14 from Soura Karta, the seat of the Emperor, and between 18 and 20 leagues from Tinkjoe”. (probably for Tjukjoe, i.e. Djokjo-Karta), “the present residence of the Sultan of Java.” Within a radius of 15 to 18 miles round the tree no human creature, no living thing could exist. Condemned malefactors were employed to fetch the poison; they were protected by special arrangements, yet not more than 1 in 10 of them survived the adventure. Foersch also describes executions by means of the Upas poison, which he says he witnessed at Sura Karta in February 1776.

The whole paper is a very clever piece of sensational romance, and has impressed itself indelibly, it would seem, on the English language; for to it is undoubtedly due the adoption of that standing metaphor