Fra Mauro, Who Got Much From Conti, Gives Us Isola
Siamotra Over Taprobana; And It Shows At Once His Own Judgment And
Want Of Confidence In It, When He Notes Elsewhere That "Ptolemy,
Professing To Describe Taprobana, Has Really Only Described Saylan."
We have no means of settling the exact position of the city of Sumatra,
though possibly an enquiry among the natives of that coast might still
determine the point.
Marsden and Logan indicate Samarlanga, but I should
look for it nearer Pasei. As pointed out by Mr. Braddell in the J. Ind.
Arch., Malay tradition represents the site of Pasei as selected on a
hunting expedition from Samudra, which seems to imply tolerable proximity.
And at the marriage of the Princess of Parlak to Malik Al-Salih, we are
told that the latter went to receive her on landing at Jambu Ayer (near
Diamond Point), and thence conducted her to the city of Samudra. I should
seek Samudra near the head of the estuary-like Gulf of Pasei, called in the
charts Telo (or Talak) Samawe; a place very likely to have been sought
as a shelter to the Great Kaan's fleet during the south-west monsoon. Fine
timber, of great size, grows close to the shore of this bay,[1] and would
furnish material for Marco's stockades.
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. But all the rest
of the tract is mere plunder from Varthema.[3]
There is, however, a like intimation in a curious letter respecting the
Portuguese discoveries, written from Lisbon in 1515, by a German,
Valentine Moravia, who was probably the same Valentyn Fernandez, the
German, who published the Portuguese edition of Marco Polo at Lisbon in
1502, and who shows an extremely accurate conception of Indian geography.
He says:
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