A Charm Made of Tears

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, writing on the dugong from Sumatra, recorded a belief among Malay women that made the animal worth hunting for reasons that had nothing to do with its meat. A captured dugong calf, they held, always sheds tears for the loss of its mother, and those tears, if preserved, were "an infallible charm to recover lost affections."^[1]

The book records the mother's side of it too. She is devotedly attached to her young, and is said to follow them even through a crowd of people. Raffles's own verdict on the charm: "as poetical as the fable of the siren's song."