On the Indian Archipelago. 417 



hordes, but must have owed its aborigines to the occasional wan- 

 dering of small parties or single families. The migrations from one 

 island to another were probably equally limited and accidental ; and 

 the small and scattered communities in such as were inhabited, must 

 for a long period have remained secluded from all others, save when 

 a repetition of similar accidents added a few more units to the hu- 

 man denizens of the forests. 



We cannot here attempt to retrace in the most concise manner 

 the deeply interesting history of the tribes of the Archipelago, so 

 exciting from the variety of its elements, and its frequent, though 

 not impenetrable, mystery. We can but distinguish the two great 

 aeras into which it divides itself: — that, at the commencement of which 

 some of the inhabitants of the table-land of Asia, having slowly 

 traversed the south-eastern valleys and ranges, a work perhaps of 

 centuries, appear on the confines of the Archipelago, no longer no- 

 mades of the plains but of the jungles, with all the changes in ideas, 

 habits and language which such transformation implies, and pre- 

 pared by their habits to give rise, under the influences of their new 

 position, to the nomades of the sea ; — and the second aera, that, at the 

 commencement of which the forest and pelagic nomades, scattered 

 over the interior and along the shores of the islands of the Archipe- 

 lago, in numerous petty tribes, each with some peculiarities in its 

 habits and language, but all bearing a family resemblance, were dis- 

 covered in their solitudes by the earliest navigators from the civilized 

 nations of the continent. 



The ensuing, or what, although extending over a period of about 

 two thousand years, we may term the modern history of the Archi- 

 pelago, first exhibits the Klings from southern India, — who were a 

 civilized maritime people probably three thousand years ago, — fre- 

 quenting the islands for their peculiar productions, awakening a taste 

 for their manufactures in the inhabitants, settling amongst them, 

 introducing their arts and religion, partially communicating these 

 and a little of their manners and habits to their disciples, but neither 

 by much intermarriage altering their general physical character, nor 

 by moral influence obliterating their ancient superstitions, their com- 

 parative simplicity and robustness of character, and their freedom 

 from the effeminate vanity which probably then, as in later times, 

 distinguished their teachers. At a comparatively recent period, 

 Islamism supplanted Hinduism in most of the communities which had 

 grown up under the influence of the latter, but it had still less modi- 

 fying operation ; and amongst the great bulk of the people, the con- 

 version from a semi-Hindu condition to that of Mahomedanism was 

 merely formal. Their intellects, essentially simple and impatient of 

 discipline and abstract contemplation, could as little appreciate the 

 scholastic refinements of the one religion, as the complex and elabo- 

 rate mythological machinery and psychological subtleties of the other. 

 While the Malay of the nineteenth century exhibits in his manner, 

 and in many of his formal usages and habits, the influence which In- 

 dians and Arabs have exerted on his race, he remains, physically and 

 morally, in all the broader and deeper traits of nature, what he was 



