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;
and but very rarely have the almost impervious woods of Sumatra been
penetrated to any considerable distance from the sea coast by Europeans,
whose observations have been then imperfect, trusted perhaps to memory
only, or, if committed to paper, lost to the world by their deaths. Other
difficulties arise from the extraordinary diversity of national
distinctions, which, under a great variety of independent governments,
divide this island in many directions; and yet not from their number
merely, nor from the dissimilarity in their languages or manners, does
the embarrassment entirely proceed: the local divisions are perplexed and
uncertain; the extent of jurisdiction of the various princes is
inaccurately defined; settlers from different countries and at different
periods have introduced an irregular though powerful influence that
supersedes in some places the authority of the established governments,
and imposes a real dominion on the natives where a nominal one is not
assumed. This, in a course of years, is productive of innovations that
destroy the originality and genuineness of their customs and manners,
obliterate ancient distinctions, and render confus