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Updated: May 26, 2025
The villages of the Sumatran Malays are somewhat peculiar and very picturesque. A space of some acres is surrounded with a high fence, and over this area the houses are thickly strewn without the least attempt at regularity. Tall cocoa-nut trees grow abundantly between them, and the ground is bare and smooth with the trampling of many feet.
Radin Tamanggung, son of a king of Madura, a very intelligent person, and who as a prince himself was conversant with these topics, positively asserted to me that it was an original Sumatran empire, antecedent to the introduction of the Arabian faith; instructed, but by no means conquered, as some had imagined, by people from the peninsula.
Among the ruminants are four species of deer, two smaller than a hare, and one as large as an elk; a wild goat similar to the Sumatran antelope; the domestic goat, a mean little beast; the buffalo, a great, nearly hairless, gray or pink beast, bigger than the buffalo of China and India; a short-legged domestic ox, and two wild oxen or bisons, which are rare. The bat family is not numerous.
Many of the other Sumatran people are in the possession of a very high degree of freedom, founded upon a rigid attachment to their old established customs and laws. The grand council of the nation consists of the king or Sultan, the maharaja, laksamana, paduka tuan, and bandhara.
Gay turbans swathe the stately heads, and the golden filagree of barbaric breastplates, heavy earrings, and broad armlets, lights up the shadowy gloom of stone galleries and al fresco stalls, beneath the drooping boughs of ancient waringen-trees. The Sumatran Malays are energetic traders, and the dignified personality of the Sumatran woman is perpetually in evidence.
Their smell and hearing are extremely acute, so that it is difficult to approach them; but as their sight is very limited, they may be avoided by slipping on one side when they are in pursuit of an enemy. The Javanese and Sumatran species are smaller, lighter, and consequently less ferocious and powerful than the others.
"Is it possible that you do not realize that ether, if for a moment we adopt Challenger's preposterous supposition, is a universal substance which is the same here as at the other side of the world? Do you for an instant suppose that there is an English ether and a Sumatran ether?
But, upon inquiry of an ingenious person long resident in China, I learned that the Japan camphor is by no means a factitious substance, but the genuine produce of a tree growing in abundance in the latter country, different in every character from that of Sumatra or Borneo, and well known to our botanists by the name of Laurus camphora, L. He further informed me that the Chinese never mix the Sumatran camphor with that from Japan, but purchase the former for their own use, at the before-mentioned extravagant price, from an idea of its efficacy, probably superstitious, and export the latter as a drug not held in any particular estimation.
This Duyong, described as a creature seven or eight feet long, with a head like that of an elephant deprived of its proboscis, and the body and tail of a fish, frequents the Sumatran and Malayan shores, and its flesh is held in great estimation at the tables of sultans and rajahs. The reptiles are unhappily very numerous.
The resolute mien and dignified carriage of the Sumatran woman denote clear consciousness of her supreme importance. The cringing submission so painfully characteristic of Oriental womanhood is wholly unknown, and though nominally of Mohammedan faith, the humble position prescribed by the Korán to the female sex is a forgotten article of Sumatra's hereditary creed.
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