The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither | Page 5

in valuable volumes now out of print, or scattered
through blue books and the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of
Singapore, I make no apology for prefacing my letters from the Malay
Peninsula with as many brief preliminary statements as shall serve to
make them intelligible, requesting those of my readers who are familiar
with the subject to skip this chapter altogether.
The Aurea Chersonesus of Ptolemy, the "Golden Chersonese" of
Milton, the Malay Peninsula of our day, has no legitimate claim to an
ancient history. The controversy respecting the identity of its Mount
Ophir with the Ophir of Solomon has been "threshed out" without
much result, and the supposed allusion to the Malacca Straits by Pliny
is too vague to be interesting.
The region may be said to have been rediscovered in 1513 by the

Portuguese, and the first definite statement concerning it appears to be
in a letter from Emanuel, King of Portugal, to the Pope. In the antique
and exaggerated language of the day, he relates that his general, the
famous Albuquerque, after surprising conquests in India, had sailed to
the Aurea Chersonesus, called by its inhabitants Malacca. He had
captured the city of Malacca, sacked it, slaughtered the Moors
(Mohammedans) who defended it, destroyed its twenty-five thousand
houses abounding in gold, pearls, precious stones, and spices, and on
its site had built a fortress with walls fifteen feet thick, out of the ruins
of its mosques. The king, who fought upon an elephant, was badly
wounded and fled. Further, on hearing of the victory, the King of Siam,
from whom Malacca had been "usurped by the Moors," sent to the
conqueror a cup of gold, a carbuncle, and a sword inlaid with gold.
This conquest was vaunted of as a great triumph of the Cross over the
Crescent, and as its result, by the year 1600 nearly the whole commerce
of the Straits had fallen into the hands of the Portuguese.
Of the remaining "Moorish", or Malay kingdoms, Acheen, in Sumatra,
was the most powerful, so powerful, indeed, that its king was able to
besiege the great stronghold of Malacca more than once with a fleet,
according to the annalist, of "more than five hundred sail, one hundred
of which were of greater size than any then constructed in Europe, and
the warriors or mariners that it bore amounted to sixty thousand,
commanded by the king in person." The first mention of Johore, or Jhor,
and Perak occurs about the same time, Perak being represented as a
very powerful and wealthy State.
The Portuguese, by their persevering and relentless religious crusade
against the Mohammedans, converted all the States which were
adjacent to their conquests into enemies, and by 1641 their empire in
the Straits was seized upon by the Dutch, who, not being troubled by
much religious earnestness, got on very well with the Malay Princes,
and succeeded in making advantageous commercial treaties with them.
A curious but fairly accurate map of the coasts of the Peninsula was
prepared in Paris in 1668 to accompany the narrative of the French
envoy to the Court of Siam, but neither the mainland nor the adjacent

islands attracted any interest in this country till the East India Company
acquired Pinang in 1775, Province Wellesley in 1798, Singapore in
1823, and Malacca in 1824. These small but important colonies were
consolidated in 1867 into one Government under the Crown, and are
now known as the Straits Settlements, and prized as among the most
valuable of our possessions in the Far East. Though these settlements
are merely small islands or narrow strips of territory on the coast, their
population, by the census of 1881, exceeded four hundred and
twenty-two thousand souls, and in 1880 their exports and imports
amounted to 32,353,000 pounds!
Besides these little bits of British territory scattered along a coast-line
nearly four hundred miles in length, there are, on the west side of the
Peninsula, the native States of Kedah, Perak, Selangor, and Sungei
Ujong, the last three of which are under British "protection;" and on the
east are Patani, Kelantan, Tringganu, and Pahang; the southern
extremity being occupied by the State of Johore. The interior, which is
scarcely at all known, contains toward its centre the Negri Sembilan, a
confederation of eight (formerly nine) small States. The population of
the native States of the Peninsula is not accurately known, but,
inclusive of a few wild tribes and the Chinese immigrants, it is
estimated at three hundred and ten thousand; which gives under nine
inhabitants to the square mile, the population of the British settlements
being about four hundred and twenty to the square mile.
The total length of the Peninsula is eight hundred miles, and its breadth
varies from sixty to one hundred and fifty miles. It runs down