Page:A Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language with a Preliminary Dissertation- Dissertation and Grammar, in Two Volumes, Vol. I (IA dli.granth.52714).pdf/23

 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 Romaus, 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 Mânangkabau, 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 Mâlayu, or the land of the Malays, contains an area of above 60,000 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 calling 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 Malay language, or Malays who rejected the Mahomedan religion, it is very difficult to say; but as their language contains many words that are not Malay, 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 Mânangkabau, and that when they first settled