A Sea Dyak tradition of the deluge and consequent events
This is a brief ethnographic note by the Revd. J. Perham recording a Sea-Dyak flood myth, published in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1881, pp. 289–291).
Summary
The text presents a narrative in which Dyak women mistake a stupor-struck boa-constrictor for a fallen tree; men kill and fry the snake, and the resulting rain drowns the world except one woman who reaches a high mountain (p. 289). There she discovers fire by rubbing the warm root of a jungle creeper, and from the union of the woman and the fire-drill is born Simpang-impang, a half-bodied figure with one eye, one ear, and one limb (p. 289).
Simpang-impang then pursues the Spirit of the Winds to recover a handful of padi that was blown away from a tree-stump, en route delivering messages from plantain growers, a lake, and a bird-laden tree (p. 290). After a series of ordival contests in which Simpang is represented by a fish, a swallow, and an ant, he threatens to burn the Spirit’s house with the fire-drill, compelling the Spirit to offer Simpang a complete body as compensation (pp. 290–291). The Spirit then answers the accumulated questions, explaining taboos governing plantain and sugar-cane cultivation, the blocked outlet of a lake, and the felling of the tree, after which the world resumes its normal order (p. 291). Perham closes by noting that the recovery of the padi itself is left unexplained, adding that “completeness and consistency must never be expected in Dyak myths” (p. 291).