The Malay Weapons Consist Of The Celebrated Kris, With Its Flame-Shaped
Wavy Blade; The Sword, Regarded, However, More As
An ornament; the
parang, which is both knife and weapon; the steel-headed spear, which
cost us so many lives
In the Perak war; matchlocks, blunderbusses, and
lelahs, long heavy brass guns used for the defense of the stockades
behind which the Malays usually fight. They make their own gunpowder,
and use cartridges made of cane.
The Malays, like the Japanese, have a most rigid epistolary etiquette,
and set forms for letter writing. Letters must consist of six parts,
and are so highly elaborate that the scribes who indite them are almost
looked upon as litterateurs. There is an etiquette of envelopes and
wafers, the number and color of which vary with the relative positions
of the correspondents, and any error in these details is regarded as an
insult. Etiquette in general is elaborate and rigid, and ignorant
breaches of it on the part of Europeans have occasionally cost them
their lives.
The systems of government in the Malay States vary in detail, but on
the whole may be regarded as absolute despotisms, modified by certain
rights, of which no rulers in a Mohammedan country can absolutely
deprive the ruled, and by the assertion of the individual rights of
chiefs. Sultans, rajahs, maharajahs, datus, etc., under ordinary
circumstances have been and still are in most of the unprotected States
unable to control the chiefs under them, who have independently levied
taxes and blackmail till the harassed cultivators came scarcely to care
to possess property which might at any time be seized.
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