Spitting Cobras

Abstract

THE following note may be of interest, the more so as the existence of cobras in Borneo is denied in a recent work on Borneo (“Seventeen Years among the Sea Dyaks”). In your “Notes” in NATURE of May 4 (p. 320) you refer to the “spitting cobras” of East Africa. The cobra of East Borneo also has the power of projecting its poison to a distance of at least 1 metre. In January of last year I was walking along a narrow jungle track about twenty miles from the coast, in lat. 1° 10′ S., when I saw a cobra erect preparing to strike at me. I struck it about 30 cm. from the head and broke its back (as I thought). It then projected two streams of liquid at me as I stood over it. A Bugis close beside me exclaimed, “dia menumpit!” (menumpit=to shoot with the blow-pipe). One stream struck the lapel of my coat, but I did not notice where the other struck. I placed the dead (?) cobra on a tree, intending on my return to carry it to my camp and bottle it, but when I returned it was gone.