Seven Months in The Tin Country: Perak (Malacca Peninsula).

The following article is a translation of 'Sept Mois au Pays de l'Étain. Perak (Presqu'ile de Malacca)', by J. Errington de la Croix, which was published in the Bulletin de la société de géographie (Paris), 7th Series no. 6 (1885): 394-432. The accompanying maps appeared in the same journal in 1883 together with an earlier article by the same author entitled "Le royaume de Perak" (pp. 333-52; the maps follow p. 380). John Errington de la Croix (1848-1905), was a mining engineer. He travelled to Southeast Asia with Xavier Brau de Saint Pol Lias (1840-1914), an explorer and diplomat with a strong interest in French colonial expansion. The footnotes are those in the French text unless otherwise indicated. The author visited Aceh prior to coming to Perak, and adopted Dutch colonial conventions for writing Malay, using Tj for a ch sound (written in modern Malay as c), ou for u, and so on. In this translation, spellings have been left as in the French text and have not been glossed unless the meaning is obscure. In referring to 'la Malaisie', the author follows a nineteenth century convention that applied 'Malaysia' to the Malay world. The French text sometimes refers to the Malay Peninsula as presqu'île de Malacca and sometimes as la peninsule malaise, both of which are translated here as Malaya. The adjective Malaise is translated as Malay and the noun Malais as Malays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]