THIS TEXT IS extracted by Ooi Kee Beng from Sir George Leith’s A Short Account of the Settlement, Produce and Commerce, of Prince of Wales Island in The Straits of Malacca in 1805.
Leith (1775–1842) was the Governor of Prince of Wales Island from 1800 to 1803. Immediately after he took up this position, he successfully negotiated with the Sultan of Queddah (Kedah) for a strip of land on the peninsula to be added to the jurisdiction of the island. This estate was subsequently named Province Wellesley, after Richard Wellesley, the Governor-General of India at that time, and the brother of Arthur, the first Duke of Wellington who dealt Napoleon Bonaparte his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. “India” as a term contemporarily included more or less the region we now know as South-East Asia. Apparently, “Indonesia” (from the Latin Indus – the river that gave India its name – and nesus – island) dates from the mid-1800s, but seemed have to have had currency only among the English, and not the Dutch. James Logan (1819–1869) of Penang fame preferred “Indian Archipelago” in denoting the region. “The Laddas” are the Langkawi group of islands, during this period sometimes mentioned as “Lancava” or “Langaway”; while “Pulo Dinding” was the name the Europeans used for Pulau Pangkor.
