surprising that they should have been unable to furnish the world with
any particular and just description of a country which they must have
regarded with an evil eye. The Dutch were the next people from whom we
had a right to expect information. They had an early intercourse with the
island, and have at different times formed settlements in almost every
part of it; yet they are almost silent with respect to its history.* But
to what cause are we to ascribe the remissness of our own countrymen,
whose opportunities have been equal to those of their predecessors or
contemporaries? It seems difficult to account for it; but the fact is
that, excepting a short sketch of the manners prevailing in a particular
district of the island, published in the Philosophical Transactions of
the year 1778, not one page of information respecting the inhabitants of
Sumatra has been communicated to the public by any Englishman who has
resided there.

(*Footnote. At the period when this remark was written, I was not aware
that an account of the Dutch settlements and commerce in Sumatra by M.
Adolph Eschels-kroon had in the preceding year been published at
Hamburgh, in the German language; nor had the transactions of a literary
society established at Batavia, whose first volume appeared there in
1779, yet reached this country. The work, indeed, of Valentyn, containing
a general history of the European possessions in the East Indies, should
have exempted a nation to which oriental learning is largely indebted
from what I now consider as an unmerited reflection.)

To form a general and tolerably accurate account of this country and its
inhabitants is a work attended with great and peculiar difficulties. The
necessary information is not to be procured from the people themselves,
whose knowledge and inquiries are to the last degree confined, scarcely
extending beyond the bounds of the district where they first drew breath;