A grammar and dictionary of the Malay language : with a preliminary ...

DISSERTATION. ix
this kind of circumstantial evidence, then, we carry Malayan
history back for near seventeen centuries ; but as the Hindus
were probably consumers of the clove and nutmeg long before
Greeks and Romans, Malayan history, in all likelihood, goes a
great deal farther back than this.
In Sumatra, the Malays, from the cradle of the nation, the
interior plain of Manangkabau, pushed their conquests, or settle-
ments, to their present extensive limits. From Sumatra they
emigrated and formed colonies in the Malay Peninsula and in
Borneo ; the first probably, and the last certainly, occupied
before them by rude tribes of the same race of men, who could
offer no effectual resistance. In the remoter islands, or in those
occupied by powerful and civilised nations, the Malays appear
only as settlers, and not colonists, as Java, the principal islands
of the Philippine Archipelago, Timur and the Moluccas.
The peninsula sometimes called Tanah Malayu, or the land
of the Malays, contains an area of above G0,000 square miles.
The geological formation is primitive, rich in metalliferous ores,
but generally poor in soil. "With the exception of a few dimi-
nutive negro mountaineers, it is occupied either by Malays or
by men of the same race ;
for there exist in the interior several
wild tribes, who, although not calHng themselves Malays, speak
the Malay language, and have the same physical form as the
Malays. Whether these wild people be the original inhabitants
of the peninsula before the invasion of the Malays, and who
have adopted the INIalay language, or Malays who rejected the
Mahomedan religion, it is very difficult to say; but as their
language contains many words that are not JNIalay, and as it is
not likely that so extensive a country should be without any
inhabitants when invaded by the Malays, except a few scattered
negroes, the first supposition seems the more probable. Nearly
the whole coast of Borneo is occupied by Malay colonies; but
neither here, nor in the peninsula, can any one of the many
states which occupy them, tell when, or how their forefathers
first arrived. Some intelligent merchants of the state of Brunai,
or Borneo Proper, informed me in 1825 that the present inha-
bitants were, then, the twenty-ninth in descent from the original
settlers from Manangkabau, and that when thev first settled