The History of Sumatra | Page 4

impositions of travellers. The study of their
own species is doubtless the most interesting and important that can
claim the attention of mankind; and this science, like all others, it is
impossible to improve by abstract speculation merely. A regular series
of authenticated facts is what alone can enable us to rise towards a
perfect knowledge in it. To have added one new and firm step in this
arduous ascent is a merit of which I should be proud to boast.
...
Of this third edition it is necessary to observe that, the former two
having made their appearance so early as the years 1783 and 1784, it
would long since have been prepared for the public eye had not the
duties of an official situation occupied for many years the whole of my
attention. During that period, however, I received from my friends
abroad various useful, and, to me at least, interesting communications
which have enabled me to correct some inaccuracies, to supply
deficiencies, and to augment the general mass of information on the
subject of an island still but imperfectly explored. To incorporate these
new materials requiring that many liberties should be taken with the
original contexture of the work, I became the less scrupulous of making
further alterations wherever I thought they could be introduced with
advantage. The branch of natural history in particular I trust will be
found to have received much improvement, and I feel happy to have
had it in my power to illustrate several of the more interesting
productions of the vegetable and animal kingdoms by engravings
executed from time to time as the drawings were procured, and which
are intended to accompany the volume in a separate atlas.

...

THE HISTORY OF SUMATRA.
CHAPTER 1.
SITUATION. NAME. GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE
COUNTRY, ITS MOUNTAINS, LAKES, AND RIVERS. AIR AND
METEORS. MONSOONS, AND LAND AND SEA-BREEZES.
MINERALS AND FOSSILS. VOLCANOES. EARTHQUAKES.
SURFS AND TIDES.
If antiquity holds up to us some models, in different arts and sciences,
which have been found inimitable, the moderns, on the other hand,
have carried their inventions and improvements, in a variety of
instances, to an extent and a degree of perfection of which the former
could entertain no ideas. Among those discoveries in which we have
stepped so far beyond our masters there is none more striking, or more
eminently useful, than the means which the ingenuity of some, and the
experience of others, have taught mankind, of determining with
certainty and precision the relative situation of the various countries of
the earth. What was formerly the subject of mere conjecture, or at best
of vague and arbitrary computation, is now the clear result of settled
rule, founded upon principles demonstratively just. It only remains for
the liberality of princes and states, and the persevering industry of
navigators and travellers, to effect the application of these means to
their proper end, by continuing to ascertain the unknown and uncertain
positions of all the parts of the world, which the barriers of nature will
allow the skill and industry of man to approach.
SITUATION OF THE ISLAND.
Sumatra, the subject of the present work, is an extensive island in the
East Indies, the most western of those which may be termed the
Malayan Archipelago, and constituting its boundary on that side.

LATITUDE.
The equator divides it obliquely, its general direction being north-west
and south-east, into almost equal parts; the one extremity lying in five
degrees thirty-three minutes north, and the other in five degrees
fifty-six minutes south latitude. In respect to relative position its
northern point stretches into the Bay of Bengal; its south-west coast is
exposed to the great Indian Ocean; towards the south it is separated by
the Straits of Sunda from the island of Java; on the east by the
commencement of the Eastern and China Seas from Borneo and other
islands; and on the north-east by the Straits of Malacca from the
peninsula of Malayo, to which, according to a tradition noticed by the
Portuguese historians, it is supposed to have been anciently united.
LONGITUDE.
The only point of the island whose longitude has been settled by actual
observation is Fort Marlborough, near Bencoolen, the principal English
settlement, standing in three degrees forty-six minutes of south latitude.
From eclipses of Jupiter's satellites observed in June 1769, preparatory
to an observation of the transit of the planet Venus over the sun's disc,
Mr. Robert Nairne calculated its longitude to be 101 degrees 42
minutes 45 seconds; which was afterwards corrected by the Astronomer
Royal to 102 degrees east of Greenwich. The situation of Achin Head is
pretty accurately fixed by computation at 95 degrees 34 minutes; and
longitudes of places in the Straits of Sunda are well ascertained by the
short runs from Batavia, which city