exists mainly in valuable volumes now out of print, or scattered
through blue books and the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of
Singapore, I make no apology for prefacing my letters from the Malay
Peninsula with as many brief preliminary statements as shall serve to
make them intelligible, requesting those of my readers who are familiar
with the subject to skip this chapter altogether.

The Aurea Chersonesus of Ptolemy, the "Golden Chersonese" of Milton,
the Malay Peninsula of our day, has no legitimate claim to an ancient
history. The controversy respecting the identity of its Mount Ophir
with the Ophir of Solomon has been "threshed out" without much result,
and the supposed allusion to the Malacca Straits by Pliny is too vague
to be interesting.

The region may be said to have been rediscovered in 1513 by the
Portuguese, and the first definite statement concerning it appears to
be in a letter from Emanuel, King of Portugal, to the Pope. In the
antique and exaggerated language of the day, he relates that his
general, the famous Albuquerque, after surprising conquests in India,
had sailed to the Aurea Chersonesus, called by its inhabitants Malacca.
He had captured the city of Malacca, sacked it, slaughtered the Moors
(Mohammedans) who defended it, destroyed its twenty-five thousand
houses abounding in gold, pearls, precious stones, and spices, and on
its site had built a fortress with walls fifteen feet thick, out of the
ruins of its mosques. The king, who fought upon an elephant, was badly
wounded and fled. Further, on hearing of the victory, the King of Siam,
from whom Malacca had been "usurped by the Moors," sent to the
conqueror a cup of gold, a carbuncle, and a sword inlaid with gold.
This conquest was vaunted of as a great triumph of the Cross over the
Crescent, and as its result, by the year 1600 nearly the whole commerce