108 SOME OLD MALAY MSS. 
gence of this manuscript from the text used by R. van Hijsinga 
in his edition of this work. 
For the benefit of those who are not familiar with the 
Arabic character, a transliteration in the Roman character has 
been made, and the six letters, being of some historic interest, 
have been translated into English. 
The followivg is a brief description of the mss. 
(A) is a letter of authority to trade, given by the king of 
Acheen to an English captain, perhaps Sir James Lancaster, who 
was in charge of the first voyage to the Eastern Archipelago 
undertaken by the English Hast India Company, and was at 
Acheen in 1601. This manuscript is in the Bodleian library at 
Oxford, and is numbered MS. Douce Or. e. 5. It is on a single 
sheet of paper, and consists of four quarto pages of writing. 
The first page isin the Arabic language, and is the latter part of 
the letter of the king of Acheen to Queen Elizabeth, an English 
translation of which is found in Purchas’s Yoyages, entitled 
“ Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his pilgrimes, London, 1625, 
fol. 4 vols.” The first part of this Arabic letter was probably on 
another sheet, and may either be lost or possibly is preserved 
among the Araoic mss. in the Bodleian library. The second, third 
and fourth pages of the ms. contain the Malay letter, the text 
of which is given below. The handwriting is apparently that of 
a European, and it seems probable that this manuscript is merely 
a copy of the original documents. The original letter from 
the king of Acheen to Queen Elizabeth is said to be preserved 
‘in the Archives in London,” and it is_ possible that it might be 
found if search were made among the early papers of the Hast 
India Company. The style of this Malay letter bears some re- 
semblance to that of the English version of the letter of the 
king of Acheen to Queen Elizabeth. The heading “ Jawi yang 
di-persembahkan kapitan Inggris itu” would seem to imply that 
the letter had also been written in some other language, prob- 
ably Arabic; and it is remarkable that the word IJnggris is used 
in this heading, whereas in the body of the letter the French 
word “ J/nglitir” is used, as also in letter B, from which it seems 
probable that the heading and the body of the letter were writ- 
ten by different persons. Captain Lancaster’s interpreter was a 
Jew, who spoke Arabic, and we may perhaps conjecture that 
the letter of authority to trade, like the letter to Queen Eliza- 
