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.
