376 REMARKS AND OPINIONS. 



as the use of a less perfect alphabet necessarily 

 implies.* The language, monuments, and history 

 point back to India. 



History first shows us, in the twelfth century, 

 one of these tribes, the Malays, extending from the 

 country of Manangkabau, in the soutli-west of 

 Sumatra, their first abode, their conquests and 

 the law of Mahomet, which they had received 

 from Arab merchants, as well on the peninsula 

 of Malacca, as on the coasts of the other islands. 

 The converted nations were often confounded with 

 them, and the expression Malays, Moors, and 

 Mahometans employed as synonjqnous. 



We find in the third book of Marco Polo, a 

 picture of this archipelago at the end of the 13th 

 century ; and this picture is still like. The ob- 

 servations of this traveller, within the circuit of 

 his own experience, are always faithful ; and the 

 fables he relates on the authority of others, are 

 not yet forgotten in the places where he collected 

 them. Pigafetta deserves similar praise. Marco 

 Polo found that the people, who lived on the sea 

 coast of the kingdom of Felech, in the island of 

 Little Java, were Mahometans, who had received 

 the law of Mahomet from merchants trading 

 thither. Pigafetta, who was in Tidore in the year 

 15^il, says, that about fifty years before, the 

 Moors had conquered the Moluccas, and had in- 



* Leyden, 1. c. p. 190. 



