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

DISSERTATION. xlix
had also settlements. Indragiri is Sanskrit, meaning the
mountain of Indra, and Jambi takes its name from the
Javanese word for the Areca palm. Here were discovered,
a few years ago, the remains of Hindu temples, with genuine
Hindu images. On the rivers of Dili and Asahan are the
remains of two settlements still called Kut'a Jawa, signifying
the Javanese castles or towns.
The earliest notice we have, and it is on native authority,
of the carrying trade of the Javanese is a.d. 1304, when this
people is mentioned in the annals or chronologies of Ternate,
one of the Moluccas, as trading with that island and settling
in it. Subsequent settlements are stated to have been made
in 1322, in 1358, in 1465, and in 1495 ; while, as late as 1537,
the Javanese are stated by the Portuguese historians to have
entered into a league with the traders of Celebes, for the
purpose of overthrowing the monopoly of the spice trade which
had been established by the Portuguese. Barbosa, before
quoted, gives an account of the Javanese who traded with,
or were settled at Malacca in the beginning of the fifteenth
century, before the Portuguese conquest. He describes them
as not only carrying on trade, but settling there with their
families. His account of them is by no means so favourable
as might be given of the Javanese of our times. According
to him, they were ingenious and skilful in the arts, but
perfidious, malicious, untruthful, and greatly addicted to run
amuck, which he, or his transcribers or printers, write "amilos."
They had, he says, no clothing from the waist upwards, and
no covering to the head, but dressed their hair in a peculiar
fashion. Barbosa, however, it should be recollected, must
have seen them within thirty years after their conversion
to the Mahomedan religion. The commodities which they
imported from Java, he informs us, consisted of great
quantities of rice; the cubeb pepper, now known to be an
exclusive product of that island ; the dried flesh of oxen,
deer, and hogs ; a certain yellow dye, which he calls cazuba,
evidently kasumba, or safflower ; onions, garlick, common
poultry, and such arms as spears, shields, swords of fine steel
with highly wrought hilts. These are such articles as the