356 The Present Condition of the Indian Archipelago. 



remains, physically and morally, in all the broader and deeper traits 

 of nature, what he was when he first entered the Archipelago; and 

 even on his manners, usages, and habits, influenced as they have 

 been, his distinctive original character is still very obviously im- 

 pressed. 



We cannot do more than allude to the growth of population and 

 civilization in those localities which, from their extent of fertile soil 

 or favourable commercial position, rose into eminence, and became 

 the seats of powerful nations. But it must be borne in mind that, 

 although these localities were varied and wide-spread, they occupied 

 but a small portion of the entire surface of the Archipelago, and 

 that the remainder continued to be thinly inhabited by uncivilized 

 tribes, communities, or wandering families. 



Prevented, until a very recent date, by stubborn prejudices and 

 an overweening sense of superiority, from understanding and influ- 

 encing the people of the Archipelago, the European dominations 

 have not directly affected them at all ; and the indirect operation of 

 the new power, and mercantile and political policies which they in- 

 troduced, has been productive of much evil and very little good. 

 While, on the one hand, the native industry and trade have been 

 stimulated by increased demand and by the freedom enjoyed in the 

 English ports, they have, on the other hand, been subjected by the 

 Portuguese, English, and Dutch, to a series of despotic restraints, 

 extending over a period of three hundred years : and, within the 

 range of the last nation's influence, continued, however modified, to 

 this hour : which far more than counterbalance all the advantages 

 that can be placed in the opposite scale. 



The efl^ect of the successive immigrations, revolutions, and admix- 

 tures, which we have indicated or alluded to, has been that there ai'e 

 now in the Archipelago an extraordinary number of races, differing 

 in colour, habits, civilization, and language, and living under forms 

 of government and laws, or customs, exhibiting the greatest variety. 

 The same cause which isolated the aborigines into numerous distinct 

 tribes and kept them separate, — the exuberant vegetation of the 

 islands, — has resisted the influence, so far as it was originally 

 amalgamating, of every successive foreign civilization that has domi- 

 nated ; and the aboriginal nomades of the jungle and the sea, in 

 their unchanged habits and mode of life, reveal to their European 

 contemporary the c:)ndition of their race, at a time when his own 

 forefathers were as rude, and far more savage. The more civilized 

 races, after attaining a certain measure of advancement, have been 

 separated by their acquired habits from the unaltered races, and 

 have too often turned their superiority into the means of oppressing, 

 and thereby more completely imprisoning in the barbarism of the 

 jungles, such of them as lived in their proximity. So great is the 

 diversity of tribes, that if a dry catalogue of names suited the pur- 

 pose of this sketch, we could not afford space to enumerate them. 



