which, from soil and other circumstances, repay culture or commerce; and the blacks are found in greatest number at the outskirts of civilization, till towards New Guinea, the farthest boundary of the Archipelago, they are the sole inhabitants.

The following is Symes's description of the oriental negro, which is allowed, by Crawford and others, to be perfectly accurate "The Andamaners are not more

favoured in the conformation of their bodies than the endowments of their minds. In stature they seldom exceed five feet; their limbs are disproportionally slender, their bellies protuberant, with high shoulders and large heads; and, strange to find in this part of the world, they are a degenerate race of negroes, with woolly hair, flat. noses, and thick lips; their eyes are small and red, their skin of a deep sooty black, whilst their countenance exhibits the extreme of wretchedness, a horrid mixture of famine and ferocity. They go quite naked, and are insensible of any shame from exposure." The type here, it will be seen, is taken from the Andamans, islands actually within the Bay of Bengal; and the same oriental negroes are found in the interior of the Malay Peninsula, as well as scattered throughout the rest of the Archipelago. But wherever they are met by the brown race, they are looked upon as their natural property, and are either reduced to a state of slavery or hunted down like wild beasts. At first sight this might seem to be merely the tyranny of the strong over the weakthe succumbing of spare and puny frames under those of better proportions; but even in the present advanced stage of civilization, the same antagonism of races renders Africa the prey of the world, although there the negro is next to the European in vigour: and terrible and humbling as the idea may be, we are irresistibly

driven to the conclusion that human beings, in their intercourse with each other, are governed by instincts and antipathies identical with those of the brutes.

Supposing the brown race to be of foreign origin, they appear to have degenerated in the Indian islands; and the same physical circumstances which produced a tribe of inferior negroes, have acted upon their conquerors. Their medium stature is four inches less than that of Europeans, and they have smaller pretensions to beauty, even according to their own standard of taste, than any of the continental nations we have as yet examined. Dampier's description of the inhabitants of one of the islands may be taken as the type of the whole." The Mindanaoans, properly so called," says the illustrious traveller, "are men of mean stature, small limbs, straight bodies, and little heads. Their faces are oval, their foreheads flat, with small black eyes, short low noses, pretty large mouths; their lips thin and red, their teeth black yet very sound; their hair black and straight; the colour of their skin tawny, but inclining to a brighter yellow than some other Indians, especially the women."

In the islands of Java, Sumatra, and Celebes, the chief tribes of this somewhat ungainly family are located, and such civilization as they attained to has radiated thence over the other islands. The history of the Javanese, the farthest advanced in knowledge, has not been explored farther back than the twelfth century; and even then it is neither clear nor interesting till the end of the fifteenth, which was signalized by the establishment of Mahomedanism on the ruins of some form of Hindooism. At a much earlier date, however, we have at least a glimpse of this island, in the narrative of Fa-heen, a Chinese traveller of the beginning of the fourth century of our era. According to this authority, the religion of Java

was then Brahminism; a faith which was subverted either wholly or in part by the Buddhists, who began to fly from India before the rival sect in the following century. From the dawn of authentic history, at the introduction of Mahomedanism, the annals are such a tissue of vice and crime as is rarely to be met with even in the polluted archives of history; and it gives us satisfaction to find that the actors are too mean and obscure to require our attention. The Portuguese arrived in 1511, and the Dutch in 1595. The conquest of the British in 1811 has already been described, and the restoration of the island by them to the Dutch in 1816.

The Malay Peninsula is not, as might be supposed, the original country of the Malay nation. This sailor people, who are to be found on all the coasts of the Archipelago, and sometimes with no other connection with the things of the land than the roving bark, which is the habitation of themselves and their families, are from the interior of Sumatra, where their ancestors, enclosed by mountain ranges, never heard of the ocean but in the marvellous reports of travellers. This emigration is not an event of ancient date. It took place, in all probability, so late as the year 1160; but the Malays, although not actually destitute of historical compositions, have no record which relates the circumstances which compelled or induced them to so extraordinary a step. The lands in their own territory may have become overstocked by the increase of population, or political events may have converted a portion of the people into outlaws and refugees ; but, however this may be, the fact is certain, that this inland race, instead of merely crossing the rivers which bounded their territory, and spreading themselves on either hand over the surface of their native country, descended one of the great streams to the sea, and

threading their way through the innumerable isles and islets that there stud the ocean, crossed to the opposite side of the strait, and founded Singapore on its southeastern extremity.

Singapore remained the capital of the emigrants for about a century, till at length, in 1252, they were expelled by rival adventurers from Java, and retiring along the Peninsula, founded Malacca on the western coast. About 1276, they were converted from Hindooism to Mahomedanism, and in that year the first Mussulman prince mounted the throne. The Peninsula, being almost uninhabited, was, in process of time, fully settled by the Malays, and was supposed by strangers to be their original country. From this colony (not from Sumatra) successive swarms were thrown off to so many of the islands, that the Malay tongue, which is of singular simplicity of construction, became to a considerable extent the commercial language of the Archipelago.

The tribes of Celebes, and more especially the Bugis, are at present the Phoenicians of these seas, and would, in any part of the world, be reckoned an enterprising race of mariners. Their history, however, is still more obscure than that of the Javans and Sumatrans ; and it was not till a century after the arrival among them of the Portuguese that they were converted to Mahomedanism. The people of these three islands, and the oriental negroes, form the mass of the inhabitants of the Archipelago; although there are also, in various places, such as the interior of the Philippines, various other tribes, that neither in language nor manners present any affinity with the predominant races.

The intercourse of Europe with the Archipelago has, till very recently, been a series of detestable crimes, which it will take ages of beneficence to expiate. If the wealth

of these remote islanders had consisted in the precious metals, they would have been robbed like the Americans and those who resisted extirpated; and the invaders would then have either retired, or have settled quietly down as colonists. The treasures, however, which tempted them were the productions of the soil, for which, from time immemorial, an eager appetite had existed in the whole western world-an appetite hitherto stimulated rather than gratified by the scanty supplies obtained through the successive agency of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the Venetians. These treasures depended upon the labour of the natives, an industrious and commercial people; and it became the interest of the strangers to subdue without utterly destroying them, to grind them down to a level with the soil without burying them beneath it, and to obtain the things they coveted by the sweat and the tears, but no oftener than necessary by the blood of the natural owners of the country.

In 1511 Alphonzo Albuquerque, at the head of eight hundred Portuguese, and six hundred Indians from the coast of Malabar, captured Malacca, the capital of the Malays, an entrenched city defended by thirty thousand natives; the invaders loosing only eighty of their number in the assault. Only two years before this the flag of Don Emanuel had been seen for the first time in the Archipelago; and the Portuguese had now sailed through the unknown Straits, encompassed by vast countries, swarming with a warlike population, and had coolly disembarked to carry by storm a place defended by a force twenty-five times the number of their own! But India beyond the Ganges was in the same state of disorganization as Hindostan at the conquest of the English; and Albuquerque received embassies from the kings of Java, Sumatra, and Pegu, to congratulate him upon his good fortune, and