LIMITED INTELLIGENCE OF THE MALAYS. 255 



Mr. Crawfurd describes the Javanese as a peaceable and indus- 

 trious people, but Barbosa, who visited Malacca about the year 

 1660, informs us that they are extremely cunning and great 

 cheats ; that they seldom speak the truth, and are ever ready 

 for a villanous deed. 



Their intelligence seems to be incapable of any higher 

 flight. They comprehend nothing which goes beyond the 

 simplest combination of ideas, and have little taste, and energy 

 to obtain an increase of knowledge. The civilisation they 

 possess shows no traces of original growth, but is entirely con- 

 fined to those nations or states which have adopted the 

 Mahometan religion, or in still earlier times received their 

 culture from India. 



It must, however, be remarked in their favour that the curse 

 both of domestic tyranny and of a foreign yoke weighs heavily 

 upon them, and that the extension of European domination in 

 the Indian Ocean has been as fatal to their race as it has been 

 in America and Africa to the Eed-skin and the Negro. 



' The first voyagers from tJie west,' gays Eajah Brooke, 'found 

 the natives rich and powerful, with strong established govern- 

 ments, a flourishing literature, and a thriving trade with all 

 parts of the eastern world. The rapacious European has 

 reduced them to their present abject condition. Their govern- 

 ments have been broken up ; the old states decomposed by 

 treachery, by bribery, and intrigue ; their possessions wrested 

 from them under flimsy pretences, their trade restricted, their 

 vices encouraged, and their virtues repressed.' 



' Among the Malays of the present day,' says Newbold, ' we 

 look in vain for that desire of knowledge which excited their 

 ancestors to transplant the flowers of Arabian literature among 

 their own forests. Works of science are now no longer trans- 

 lated from the Arabic, and creations of the imagination have 

 almost ceased to appear. The few children educated among 

 them learn nothing but to mumble in an unknown tongue a 

 few passages from the Koran, entirely neglecting arithmetic 

 and the acquirement of any useful manual art or employment. 

 Painting, sculpture, architecture, mechanics, geography, are 

 totally unknown to the Malays. Their literature declined 

 with the fall of their empire in the Archipelago, nor could it 



