selves would seem to be left untouched by the treaty ! The Dutch, however, interpret it more liberally on their own side-so liberally that they claim the whole Archielago south of the Sooloo Sea, while the English, without insisting upon reading the treaty as if it had been framed upon the common principles of grammar, suppose themselves at liberty to place any counterpoise to the Dutch influence they please north of the line in question.*

Singapore, Malacca, Pinang, and Province Wellesley-the tract of coast on the main land beside Pinang-are under one government, called the Straits' Settlements; and although Malacca has declined in importance as a depôt, being situated between Singapore and Pinang, it shares in their prosperity, owing to the generally liberal and enlightened policy of the present day. The position of Singapore after the recent opening of the Chinese ports affords sufficient indication of the elasticity of its resources. The junks may stay at home, and to a certain extent have done so, since their customers have gone to them; but it is on the development of the resources of the Archipelago that the prosperity of this settlement depends-and already both Europeans and Malacca-Chinese are sending squarerigged vessels to China for productions they formerly received at their own doors. The junk trade may cease; the Dutch islands are to a certain extent sealed by the narrow policy of their masters; Manilla sends its produce home, since Spain has discovered the value of her colonies; and the nameless King of Siam has set up as a rival merchant:-but Singapore increases in her European, American, and Indian trade, and will continue to be floated

*The English do not exclude themselves by the treaty from forming settlements or alliances south of 1° 30′, but on any island which lies to the south of that line.

triumphantly on by the destinies of the Archipelago. The population by the census of 1845 amounts to fifty-seven thousand four hundred, one half of whom are Chinese.

It may be desirable here to give some slight sketch of the topographical system of these islands, so important to the commercial destinies both of India and Great Britain; and for this purpose we shall commence our survey with the western and southern limits in the Indian Ocean.

The sea from Cape Negrais to the northern point of Sumatra is included within the Bay of Bengal, and between these two points lie the Andaman and Nicobar clusters, the former of which is obviously the commencement in this direction of the Archipelago. The Great Andaman is in reality three distinct islands, though separated by very narrow straits. It is one hundred and forty miles long, and only twenty broad; while the Little Andaman, further to the south, is still narrower, and only twenty-eight miles long. The former has a mountain in the centre two thousand four hundred feet high, and is generally of a wild and romantic aspect; while the latter is an almost unbroken flat, covered with dense and lofty woods. The inhabitants are oriental negroes, wandering gaunt and naked along the rocks, or tumbling in rude canoes among the surges of the sea, in quest of a meal, which nature grants capriciously and in niggard quantities to their hunger. They look with dread and hatred upon all of the human kind but themselves. But these wild men have a religion. They worship the genii of the mountains, woods, and waters, and in storms recognise the voice of the Evil One as he rushes through the forest, or scatters their canoes upon the deep. On these occasions the two or three thousand miserable beings who form the population of the islands join, in their tribes and families, in screaming rude hymns to the spirit of the tempest.

The Nicobars, an extensive series of isles and islets, lie between these and Sumatra, and are inhabited by the brown race, who live in villages, with some kind of municipal regulations, and subsist by trafficking with each other, and with the passing ships, in cocoa-nuts, fowls, hogs, birds' nests, and other articles, in exchange for which they receive from Europeans cloth, silver-coin, iron, and tobacco. They exhibit also a common feature of eastern civilization in an extreme jealousy of their women; but in this they are probably even excelled by the grotesque savages of the Andamans; two females of whom having suffered themselves, when faint from hunger, to be taken on board an European ship, were in such terror on account of their chastity that the one watched while the other slept.

To the south-eastward of the Nicobars the Straits open between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. The Peninsula is seven hundred and seventy-five miles long, by about a hundred and twenty-five miles in breadth, and is traversed in its whole length by a range of mountains, inhabited in some places by oriental negroes in their most savage state. With the exception of the British settlements, and a colony of Bugis from Celebes, the whole country is Malayan, and the petty states into which the nation is divided exhibit every symptom of degradation and decay. Abounding in the productions of the tropics, both animal and vegetable, watered by innumerable rivers, streams, and rills descending from the mountains, and with a climate so healthy wherever the land is tolerably cleared, that Pinang is one of the chief sanatoria of Bengal-nature seems to point out this territory as an advantageous site for European colonization. At the mouth of the Straits there are Bintang, and innumerable other isles and islets, which, as well as those

southward in the China Sea as far as Natuna, belong nominally to the Malay principality of Johore.

The western coast of the Straits is formed by the great island of Sumatra, upwards of one thousand miles long, by an average breadth of a hundred and sixty-five miles, and containing nearly six million inhabitants. The north-eastern coast is divided, according to the imperfect knowledge we have as yet obtained of its productions, into three regions: that of sago, the rattan, dragon's blood and benzoin, that of black pepper, and that of the areca palm. The first of these beginning at the Straits of Banca is low, flat, and swampy, with numerous large rivers and alluvial islands; the second, though likewise low, is less moist, and has no large rivers or islands; and the third has a comparatively bold and mountainous face towards the sea. The south-western coast is uniformly well supplied with water, but the rivers are too short and rapid for navigation; and a chain of islands of considerable size runs parallel with this side in its whole length, appearing to have originally formed part of the main land. The soil is covered with a perpetual verdure of rank grass, brushwood, and timber trees, so as to form a nearly impervious forest. The whole eastern extremity of the island to the northern inlet of the Straits of Banca is described as a forest of mangroves, growing out of a morass, and throwing their arched branches into the sea, to form roots at the bottom. Oysters may be gathered from this aquatic wood, and thus the story of shell-fish growing on trees is no fable. Sometimes portions of the land are torn away by the river floods, and so thickly interwoven is the mass of roots and soil that they continue to drift about as floating islands with the wind and current. The prospect from the sea is dreary and monotonous. No tree of the forest overtops its fel

lows, and no motion of animal life lends interest to the view the Malays, whose lair is far up the muddy creeks, skulking from the daylight to watch for stranded vessels, and breaking, by no human sound, the preternatural stillness of the jungle. But should the winds or tides, or the singularly unequal shoaling of the shore, give a victim to their desires, all is sudden commotion in the desert, and a hundred bird-like canoes darting out of the forest into the sea, gather, as a witness observes, "like gulls about a dead whale."

In the interior, but nearer the coast on the southwestern side, a range of mountains, sometimes between twelve and thirteen thousand feet high, and occasionally divided into several parallel ridges, runs from one extremity of the island to the other. Among these heights are numerous lakes and tarns, and the sources of countless streams; and this profuse irrigation of a soil naturally rich clothes the whole island with the most exuberant vegetation, and in some parts, indeed, renders it one immense forest. In the proper season, rice is raised in vast quantities, with little trouble; and the interminable groves of cocoa-nuts, betel-nuts, bamboos, sago, and other trees, require little or no attention. In the mineral kingdom there is abundance of copper, iron, and tin; gold is obtained in considerable quantities, although no mineralogical knowledge is brought to bear upon its collection; coal, but of an indifferent quality, is gathered rather than dug; and saltpetre is extracted from earth impregnated with guano. Besides elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, and other wild animals peculiar to this climate, the ourangoutang inhabits the forests, and has been known to attain the stature of seven feet.

Near the north-eastern extremity of Sumatra, lies Banca, from which the Straits derive their name, an