Page:EB1911 - Volume 17.djvu/492

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MALAYS
475

however, the first attempt ever made to defy the papal bull. In 1591, three years after the defeat of the Armada, Raymond and Lancaster rounded the Cape, and after cruising off Penang, decided to winter in Achin. They subsequently hid among the Pulau Sambilan near the mouth of the Perak river, and thence captured a large Portuguese vessel which was sailing from Malacca in company with two Burmese ships. In 1595 the first Dutch expedition sailed from the Texel, but it took a more southerly course than its predecessors and confined its operations to Java and the neighbouring islands. During this period Achin developed a determined enmity to the Portuguese, and more than one attempt was made to drive the strangers from Malacca. Eventually, in 1641, a joint attack was made by the Achinese and the Dutch, but the latter, not the people of the sturdy little Sumatran kingdom, became the owners of the coveted port. Malacca was taken from the Dutch by the British in 1795; was restored to the latter in 1818; but in 1824 was exchanged for Benkulen and a few more unimportant places in Sumatra. The first British factory in the peninsula was established in the native state of Patani on the east coast in 1613, the place having been used by the Portuguese in the 16th century for a similar purpose; but the enterprise came to an untimely end in 1620 when Captain Jourdain, the first president, was killed in a naval engagement in Patani Roads by the Dutch. Penang was purchased from Kedah in 1786, and Singapore from the then sultan of Johor in 1819. The Straits Settlements—Singapore, Malacca and Penang—were ruled from India until 1867, when they were erected into a crown colony under the charge of the Colonial Office. In 1874 the Malay state of Perak was placed under British protection by a treaty entered into with its sultan; and this eventually led to the inclusion in a British protectorate of the neighbouring Malay States of Selangor, Sungei Ujong, the cluster of small states called the Negri Sembilan and Pahang, which now form the Federated Malay States. By a treaty made between Great Britain and Siam in 1902 the northern Malay states of the peninsula were admitted to lie within the Siamese sphere of influence, but by a treaty of 1909 Siam ceded her suzerain rights over the states of Kelantan, Trengganu, Kedah and Perlis to Britain.

Singapore is the political, commercial and administrative headquarters of the colony of the Straits Settlements, and the governor for the time being is ex officio high commissioner of the Federated Malay States, British North Borneo, Sarawak, the Cocos-Keeling and Christmas Islands, and governor of Labuan.

See Sir F. Swettenham, British Malaya (1906); H. Clifford, Further India (1904); Journal of the Malay Archipelago, Logan (Singapore); Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Singapore); Weld, Maxwell, Swettenham and Clifford in the Journal of the Royal Colonial Institute (London); Clifford in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (London).  (H. Cl.) 

MALAYS, the name given by Europeans to the people calling themselves Orang Malayu, i.e. Malayan folk, who are the dominant race of the Malay Peninsula and of the Malay Archipelago. Broadly speaking, all the brown races which inhabit the portion of Asia south of Siam and Indo-China, and the islands from the Philippines to Java, and from Sumatra to Timor, may be described as belonging to the Malayan family, if the aboriginal tribes, such as the Sakai and Semang in the Malay Peninsula, the Bataks in Sumatra, and the Muruts in Borneo, be excepted. For the purposes of this article, however, only those among these races which bear the name of Orang Malayu, speak the Malayan language, and represent the dominant people of the land, can be included under the title of Malays. These people inhabit the whole of the Malayan Peninsula to the borders of lower Siam, the islands in the vicinity of the mainland, the shores of Sumatra and some portions of the interior of that island, Sarawak and Brunei in Borneo, and some parts of Dutch Borneo, Batavia and certain districts in Java, and some of the smaller islands of the archipelago. Though in these lands they have for not less than a thousand years enjoyed the position of the dominant race, they all possess a tradition that they are not indigenous, and that their first rulers “came out of the sea,” with a large band of Malayan warriors in their train. In the peninsula especially, where the presence of the Malays is more recent than elsewhere, many traditions exist which point to a comparatively recent occupation of the country. It has been remarked that there is evidence that the Malays had attained to a certain stage of civilization before ever they set foot in Malaya. For instance, the names which they give to certain fruits, such as the duri-an, the rambut-an and the pulas-an, which are indigenous in the Malayan countries, and are not found elsewhere, are all compound words meaning respectively the thorny, the hairy and the twisted fruit. These words are formed by the addition of the substantial affix “-an,” the use of which is one of the recognized methods by which the Malays turn primitive words into terms of more complex meaning. This may be taken to indicate that when first the Malays became acquainted with the fruits which are indigenous in Malayan lands they already possessed a language in which most primary words were represented, and also that their tongue had attained to a stage of development which provided for the formation of compound words by a system sanctioned by custom and the same linguistic instinct which causes a Malay to-day to form similar compounds from European and other foreign roots. For any aboriginal race inhabiting these countries, such important articles of diet as the duri-an, &c., could not fail to be among the first natural objects to receive a name, and thus we find primary terms in use among the Sakai and Semang, the aborigines of the Peninsula, to describe these fruits. The use by the Malays of artificially constructed terms to denote these things may certainly be taken to strengthen the opinion that the Malays arrived in the lands they now inhabit at a comparatively late period in their history, and at a time when they had developed considerably from the original state of primitive man.

In the Malay Peninsula itself there is abundant evidence, ethnological and philological, of at least two distinct immigrations of people of the Malayan stock, the earlier incursions, it is probable, taking place from the eastern archipelago to the south, the later invasion spreading across the Straits of Malacca from Sumatra at a comparatively recent date. The fact that the semi-wild tribes, which are ethnologically Malayan and distinct from the aboriginal Semang and Sakai, are met with almost invariably in the neighbourhood of the coast would seem to indicate that they reached the peninsula by a sea, not by a land route, a supposition which is strengthened by their almost amphibious habits. Many of these tribes have retained their pristine paganism, but many others it is certain have adopted the Mahommedan religion and have been assimilated by the subsequent and stronger wave of Sumatran immigrants. A study of the local dialects to be met with in some of the districts of the far interior, e.g. the Tembeling valley in Pahang, whose people are now Mahommedans and in many respects indistinguishable from the ordinary Malays of the peninsula, reveals the fact that words, current in the archipelago to the south but incomprehensible to the average peninsula Malays, by whom these more ancient populations are now completely surrounded, have been preserved as local words, whereas they really belong to an older dialect once spoken widely in the peninsula, as to-day it is spoken in the Malayan islands. This would seem to show that in some instances the earlier Malay immigrants fell or were driven by the later invaders back from the coast and sought refuge in the far interior.

Until recently many eminent scientists held the theory that the Malayan peoples were merely an offspring of the Mongol stock, and that their advance into the lands they now inhabit had taken place from the cradle of the Mongolian race—that is to say, from the north. In the Theories of Origin. fifth edition of his Malay Archipelago, A. R. Wallace notes the resemblance which he traced between the Malays and the Mongolians, and others have recorded similar observations as to the physical appearance of the two races. To-day, however, fuller data are available than when Wallace wrote, and the more generally accepted theory is that the Malayan race is distinct, and came from the south, until it was stayed by the Mongolian races living on the mainland of southern Asia. The cranial