The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither | Page 9

Newbold is ordinarily so careful and accurate that it is almost
presumptuous to hint that in this particular case he may not have been
able to verify the statements of the natives by actual observation.]
Nor are our own water birds wanting. There are bitterns, rails,
wild-duck, teal, snipes; the common, gray, and whistling plover; green,
black, and red quails; and the sport on the plains and reedy marshes,
and along the banks of rivers, is most excellent.
Turtles abound off the coast, and tortoises, one variety with a hard shell,
and the other with a soft one and a rapid movement, are found in
swampy places. The river fish are neither abundant nor much esteemed;
but the sea furnishes much of the food of both Malays and Chinese, and
the dried and salted fish prepared on the coast is considered very good.
At European tables in the settlements the red mullet, a highly prized
fish, the pomfret, considered more delicious than the turbot, and the
tungeree, with cray-fish, crabs, prawns, and shrimps, are usually seen.
The tongue-fish, something like a sole, the gray mullet, the
hammer-headed shark, and various fish, with vivid scarlet and yellow
stripes alternating with black, are eaten, along with cockles, "razor
shells," and king-crabs. The lover of fishy beauty is abundantly
gratified by the multitudes of fish of brilliant colors, together with large
medusae, which dart or glide through the sunlit waters among the
coral-groves, where every coral spray is gemmed with zoophytes,
whose rainbow-tinted arms sway with the undulations of the water, and
where sea-snakes writhe themselves away into the recesses of coral
caves.
Nature is so imposing, so magnificent, and so prolific on the Malay
Peninsula, that one naturally gives man the secondary place which I
have assigned to him in this chapter. The whole population of the
Golden Chersonese, a region as large as Great Britain, is not more than
three-quarters of a million, and less than a half of this is Malay. Neither
great wars, nor an ancient history, nor a valuable literature, nor stately
ruins, nor barbaric splendors, attract scholars or sight-seers to the

Peninsula.
The Malays are not the Aborigines of this singular spit of land, and,
they are its colonists rather than its conquerors. Their histories, which
are chiefly traditional, state that the extremity of the Peninsula was
peopled by a Malay emigration from Sumatra about the middle of the
twelfth century, and that the descendants of these colonists settled
Malacca and other places on the coast about a century later. Tradition
refers the peopling of the interior States to another and later migration
from Sumatra, with a chief at its head, who, with all his followers,
married Aboriginal wives; the Aboriginal tribes retreating into the
jungles and mountains as the Malays spread themselves over the region
now known as the States of the Negri Sembilan. The conquest or
colonization of the Malay Peninsula by the Malays is not, however,
properly speaking, matter of history, and the origin of the Malay race
and its early history are only matters of more or less reasonable
hypothesis. It is fair, however, to presume that Sumatra was the ancient
seat of the race, and the wonderful valley of Menangkabau, surrounded
by mountains ten thousand feet in height, that of its earliest civilization.
The only Malay "colonial" kingdoms on the Peninsula which ever
attained any importance were those of Malacca and Johore, and even
their reliable history begins with the arrival of the Portuguese. The
conversion of the Sumatra Malays to Mohammedanism arose mainly
out of their commercial intercourse with Arabia; it was slow, not
violent, and is supposed to have begun in the thirteenth century.
A population of "Wild Tribes," variously estimated at from eight
thousand to eleven thousand souls, is still found in the Peninsula, and
even if research should eventually prove them not to be its Aborigines,
they are, without doubt, the same races which were found inhabiting it
by the earliest Malay colonists.
These are frequently called by the Malays "Orang Benua," or "men of
the country," but they are likewise called "Orang-outang," the name
which we apply to the big ape of Borneo. The accompanying engraving
represents very faithfully the "Orang-outang" of the interior. The few
accounts given of the wild tribes vary considerably, but apparently they

may be divided into two classes, the Samangs, or Oriental Negroes or
Negritos and the Orang Benua, frequently called Jakuns, and in Perak
Sakei. By the Malays they are called indiscriminately Kafirs or infidels,
and are interesting to them only in so far as they can use them for
bearing burdens, clearing jungle, procuring gutta, and in child-stealing,
an abominable Malay custom, which, it is hoped, has received its
death-blow in Perak at least.
The Samangs are about the same height as