The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

250 REVIEW ARTICLES
dityavarman. That is all except for one or two local chronicles such as
the Sejarah Melayu. This document is on a par with the Thai chronicles
of Nakorn Sri Thammaraj, of the Phra Dbatu Nakorn, of Patalung, of
Patani and such, where legends are mixed with what might have been
facts, but the historians of Malaya have given it a bloated importance
compared to its Thai counterparts. As it happens the Sejarah Melayu
is a Malayan and not a Sumatran document, anyway.
The Sumatran external evidence include Javanese and Chinese
records but they are not very relevant. Wolters uses the Chinese records
a great deal but his Sri Vijaya-Palembang and Malayu-Jambi are not
realistic. One Chinese notice should be mentioned, namely the Ming
Annals about the end of the 14th century recorded that a Chinese named
Liang Tauming set himself up as master of Ku-kang or Kieou-kieng.
He was a Chinese pirate.
On page 118 of his book, Wolters gives a quotation from Pires'
Suma Oriental, of which I will requote only one sentence, namely that
Pararneswara "had no trade at all except that his people planted rice and
fished and plundered their enemies, and lived on this in the said channel
of Singapore". Meanwhile Wheatley, on page 307 of The Golden
Khersonese, writes, "A band of corsairs from the southwards, under the
leadership of a renegade Sumatran or Javanese called Parameswara,
established themselves in at least two localities on the west coast of the
peninsula, namely Muar and the Bertram district, sorne two leagues
north of Malacca".
Everybody seems to agree about pirates even if Wolters calls them
'harbour princes', so I will continue with the subject. Pirates are the
same the whole world over. There are two species of them, namely
legal and illegal pirates. Sir Francis Drake in Elizabethan times and
Samuel White in the Ayudhia period (Maurice Collis' Siamese White)
were examples of the legal pirates. They used the king's flag (or queen's
flag in the case of Drake) to enrich the royal coffers a little, and
themselves a lot. The illegal pirates buried their treasure and in
due course expected to buy their way to respectability. I wiii cite ll