20 A TRANSLATION OF THE KEDDAH ANNALS. 
ginal annotations, where he thought the sense obscure. He states 
in a note that u this translation is merely a free rendering of some 
of the principal incidents it contains, Ibrahim the Moonshee made 
a copy of the Salelata Salatin at Malacca, and took it with him to 
Bengal, where he was in the service of Dr Leyden. Ibrahim read 
the book to the Doctor and explained the meaning to him, and he 
wrote down what he seems’to have considered as worthy of notice. 
This is the account which Ibrahim gives me. It would indeed be 
tedious to translate all the prolixity and repetitions of a Malayan 
author, but this translation is tolerably faithful. There is consi¬ 
derable variation in the Malayan copies.’* These remarks seem to 
me quite justifiable. 
(5) 7he aborigines of Kedah. —The Girgassi and the Rak- 
shasas are classed together by the Indo-Chinese nations in their 
tales of Genii and demons. Our Ambassador, it may be recol¬ 
lected, had married the daughter of a Rakshasa father and Girg&sd 
mother; hence he is described as being acquainted with the caste 
of these Keddah Girgassis. The exclusiveness of Asiatic navigators 
and travellers of ancient times, is often betrayed in the names 
they give to the aborigines of the countries visited by them. 
The civilized European sneeringiy termed two thirds of the human 
race—blacks—while lie himself had not long before escaped from 
under the Roman epithet “ barbarian.*' The natives on the 
continent of India who had ascended pretty high on the ladder 
of civilization, found by their own accounts the Island of Ceylon 
inhabited by Yakhas or demons, so branded by them, who were 
driven by them into the woods, where their descendents are to 
be found to this day of British civilization and ascendancy. Then 
there are the Burmese, Siamese and other Indo-Chinese nations 
who look upon and treat the various aboriginal tribes whom they 
have nearly supplanted—such as the Kareans, Samangs, Bila and 
others—as beings but little elevated above the orang-utan—while 
the far more barbarous tribes of the Archipelago behold in the 
same light the Harafuias and other races who have been driven by 
them into the fastnesses of the Islands. 
Yet many of these expelled races have fairer complexions, and 
as good proportions of body as their tyrants—and have better 
claims to antiquity, if they be not the remnants of a far anterior 
civilization shattered by time and superior force. 
Our author only observes in this place, when alluding to the 
external appearance of these Girgasi, that they were “ very large 
men”—but lie elsewhere tells us, that they had, like the Rakshasas 
- —hideous tushes— a belief still prevalent amongst the Malays of 
Keddah; although they are now Mahomedans But our author is 
further on obliged to confess that Marong Mahawangs&’s descen - 
dants intermarried with these aborigines— for such they seem to 
have been. This tribe or people seems to have belonged to the 
Siamese race—-and it is probable that the portion of the present 
