When you leave Locac and sail for 500 miles towards the south, you come to an island called PENTAM, a very wild place.  All the wood that grows thereon consists of odoriferous trees.[NOTE 1] There is no more to say about it; so let us sail about sixty miles further between those two Islands.  Throughout this distance there is but four paces’ depth of water, so that great ships in passing this channel have to lift their rudders, for they draw nearly as much water as that.[NOTE 2]

And when you have gone these 60 miles, and again about 30 more, you come to an Island which forms a Kingdom, and is called MALAIUR.  The people have a King of their own, and a peculiar language.  The city is a fine and noble one, and there is great trade carried on there.  All kinds of spicery are to be found there, and all other necessaries of life.[NOTE 3]

NOTE 1.—­Pentam, or as in Ram. Pentan, is no doubt the Bintang of our maps, more properly BENTAN, a considerable Island at the eastern extremity of the Straits of Malacca.  It appears in the list, published by Dulaurier from a Javanese Inscription, of the kingdoms conquered in the 15th century by the sovereigns reigning at Majapahit in Java. (J.A. ser.  IV. tom. xiii. 532.) Bintang was for a long time after the Portuguese conquest of Malacca the chief residence of the Malay Sultans who had been expelled by that conquest, and it still nominally belongs to the Sultan of Johore, the descendant of those princes, though in fact ruled by the Dutch, whose port of Rhio stands on a small island close to its western shore.  It is the Bintao of the Portuguese whereof Camoens speaks as the persistent enemy of Malacca (X. 57).

[Cf. Professor Schlegel’s Geog.  Notes, VI. Ma-it; regarding the odoriferous trees, Professor Schlegel remarks (p. 20) that they were probably santal trees.—­H.C.]

NOTE 2.—­There is a good deal of confusion in the text of this chapter.  Here we have a passage spoken of between “those two Islands,” when only one island seems to have been mentioned.  But I imagine the other “island” in the traveller’s mind to be the continuation of the same Locac, i.e. the Malay Peninsula (included by him under that name), which he has coasted for 500 miles.  This is confirmed by Ramusio, and the old Latin editions (as Mueller’s):  “between the kingdom of Locac and the Island of Pentan.”  The passage in question is the Strait of Singapore, or as the old navigators called it, the Straits of Gobernador, having the mainland of the Peninsula and the Island of Singapore, on the one side, and the Islands of Bintang and Batang on the other.  The length of the strait is roughly 60 geographical miles, or a little more; and I see in a route given in the Lettres Edifiantes (II. p. 118) that the length of navigation is so stated:  “Le detroit de Gobernador a vingt lieues de long, et est for difficile quand on n’y a jamais passe.”