orang-laut

Updated: June 16, 2025

Those Malay families whose young men are thus employed as sampan-men, are called Orang-Laut, or "People of the sea," from their living entirely afloat. The middle of the river just opposite the town of Singapore, is crowded with boats about twenty feet long by five wide, in which these poor people are born, live, and die.

G. F. Davidson - Trade and Travel in the Far East: or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java,: Singapore, Australia and China.

He was a vagabond of the seas, a true Orang-Laut, living by rapine and plunder of coasts and ships in his prosperous days; earning his living by honest and irksome toil when the days of adversity were upon him.

Joseph Conrad - An Outcast of the Islands