Malay Manuscripts and Early Printed Books at The Library of Congress

I

This article has two purposes. Its primary purpose is to describe the Library of Congress holdings of Malay manuscripts and early printed books in terms of their provenance and contents and to highlight the role played by the nineteenth-century missionary Alfred North in acquiring most of the collection. The second purpose is to begin to suggest the significance of the documents for Malay studies. The Library’s holdings of Malay manuscripts, although limited in extent, concern the history and literature of the Malay world in the first half of the nineteenth century. Unlike twentieth-century imprints, which are generally accessible in North America and elsewhere, these early volumes may be the only copies extant.

Before describing the provenance and contents of the collection, it is important to clarify the special way in which the terms “Arabic script” and “Malay” will be used throughout this article. The term “Arabic script” here denotes the Arabic writing system adapted to the Malay phonetical system. In Indonesia, such a writing system is referred to simply as huruf Arab, in Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore, as huruf jawi. The term “Malay” will be used to refer to the name of the language as opposed to the scripts in which the above texts were written. Indigenous to the island of Sumatra, and in use long before the birth of the modern states of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, the Malay language developed over the centuries from being the mother tongue of coastal Sumatrans to being the lingua franca of trade and the learned language of the entire Malay archipelago. The early Malay manuscripts and early printed books to be discussed in this article are part of the body of literature of the people who used the Malay language. In this sense they are the cultural heritage of the Malays of modern-day Malaysia, but also of those in Brunei, Indonesia, and Singapore.

II

The Malay manuscripts and early printed books in the Library of Congress were not described until recent times. Although Horace Poleman reported four of the titles in A Census of Indic Manuscripts in the United States and Canada,¹ nobody seemed to take note of them. Perhaps the title of the census itself was a little misleading, and it may have been assumed that it concerned only Indian manuscripts.

It was not until Professor A. Teeuw came to visit the Library of Congress in 1966 that our Malay manuscripts were first brought to the attention of scholars. I remember how pleasantly surprised he was when I showed him the collection. In the following year, he published a brief article in the Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-, and volkenkunde, reporting the existence of eight of the Library’s Malay manuscripts.² Soon thereafter, we began to receive inquiries about them, as well as requests for photocopies. A positive microfilm copy of the eight manuscripts can now be purchased from the Library of Congress Photoduplication Service.

Most of the Library of Congress Malay manuscripts, and a few of the early printed books, bear the so-called “Smithsonian Deposit” stamps, which are to indicate that they were first acquired by the Smithsonian Institution from the Wilkes Exploring Expedition (1838–1842). The expedition was so named because it was commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes, a US Naval Officer who had earlier explored the Antarctic region. Authorized by the Congress of the United States, the Wilkes Expedition included naturalists, botanists, mineralogists, taxidermists, and, most importantly from our profession’s point of view, a philologist. I imagine one of the purposes of the mission was to collect and bring back examples of “native” culture, and the philologist was there to help identify and select Malay manuscripts and other publications. When the members of the expedition reached Singapore in February 1842, they were greeted by the US Consul, Joseph Balestier and his wife, Maria Revere Balestier, and also by an American missionary, Alfred North, who was stationed there. It was North who helped the expedition acquire not only the Malay manuscripts and early printed books, but also other manuscripts written in the...