When The Portuguese First Reached Those Regions Pedir Was The Leading
State Upon The Coast, And Certainly No State Called Sumatra Continued To
Exist.
Whether the city continued to exist even in decay is not easy to
discern.
The Ain-i-Akbari says that the best civet is that which is
brought from the seaport town of Sumatra, in the territory of Achin, and
is called Sumatra Zabad; but this may have been based on old
information. Valentyn seems to recognise the existence of a place of note
called Samadra or Samotdara, though it is not entered on his map. A
famous mystic theologian who flourished under the great King of Achin,
Iskandar Muda, and died in 1630, bore the name of Shamsuddin Shamatrani,
which seems to point to the city of Sumatra as his birth place.[2] The
most distinct mention that I know of the city so called, in the Portuguese
period, occurs in the soi-disant "Voyage which Juan Serano made when he
fled from Malacca," in 1512, published by Lord Stanley of Alderley, at the
end of his translation of Barbosa. This man speaks of the "island of
Samatra" as named from "a city of this northern part." And on leaving
Pedir, having gone down the northern coast, he says, "I drew towards the
south and south-east direction, and reached to another country and city
which is called Samatra," and so on. Now this describes the position in
which the city of Sumatra should have been if it existed.
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