If dipped in water and then toasted, they become almost as good as when fresh baked; and thus treated they were my daily substitute for bread with my coffee.
Soaked and boiled they make a very good pudding or vegetable, and served well to economize our rice, which is sometimes difficult to get so far east.
It is truly an extraordinary sight to witness a whole tree-trunk, perhaps twenty feet long and four or five in circumference, converted into food with so little labour and preparation.

A good-sized tree will produce thirty tomans or bundles of thirty pounds each, and each toman will make sixty cakes of three to the pound.

Two of these cakes are as much as a man can eat at one meal, and five are considered a full day's allowance; so that, reckoning a tree to produce 1,800 cakes, weighing 600 pounds, it will supply a man with food for a whole year.

The labour to produce this is very moderate.

Two men will finish a tree in five days, and two women will bake the whole into cakes in five days more; but the raw sago will keep very well, and can be baked as wanted, so that we may estimate that in ten days a man may produce food for the whole year.