The History of Sumatra (Marsden 1783)
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| Author | William Marsden |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 1783 (2nd edition 1784; 3rd, enlarged edition 1811) |
| Publisher | Printed for the author; sold by Thomas Payne and Son (1783); Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown (1811) |
| Place | London |
| Pages | 76 (1783); 91 (1811) |
|---|---|
| Regions documented | Sumatra (the west coast around Fort Marlborough) |
| Varieties described | Ganjo / ganja (hemp) |
| Preparations | Bang, prepared for smoking, taken in pipes with tobacco; a drink of bruised blossoms, young leaves and stalk noted for "other parts of India" |
| Uses documented | Intoxicant; rope-making explicitly excluded |
| Digital facsimile | View on BHL |
|---|---|
| Original held at | First edition widely held; Internet Archive scans of the 1783, 1784 and 1811 editions; Project Gutenberg text of the 1811 edition |
The History of Sumatra is a description of the island of Sumatra by William Marsden, published at London in 1783 as the work of "William Marsden, F.R.S., late Secretary to the President and Council of Fort Marlborough", the East India Company's settlement at Bencoolen on the island's west coast.[1] A second edition followed in 1784 and a much enlarged third edition, with plates, in 1811.[2] The book treats the island's geography, natural productions, peoples, laws, customs, languages and history. Its survey of cultivated plants records that cannabis was grown on Sumatra as an intoxicant: hemp, called ganjo by the Malays, "cultivated in quantities, not for the purpose of making rope … but for smoking, and in that state it is called bang".[1]
As the account of a Company servant who wrote, in his own words, to supply the "information respecting the inhabitants of Sumatra" that no Englishman resident there had yet published, the book is evidence of the East India Company's way of seeing the island as much as of the island itself and its vocabulary ("the natives", "the Malays") is the administrator's.[2] Modern readers use it in that double light: as an 18th-century European record of cannabis cultivation on Sumatra that names the plant, the preparation and the mode of use and as a text whose ethnographic categories need attribution.
The book's own terms are ganjo (1783) or ganja (1811), hemp, cannabis and bang; the wiki uses cannabis.
Origins
Marsden served the East India Company at Fort Marlborough, and the first edition's title page presents him as its late secretary and a Fellow of the Royal Society.[1] In the preface he complains that, apart from a short sketch published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1778, "not one page of information respecting the inhabitants of Sumatra has been communicated to the public by any Englishman who has resided there", and that the Portuguese and the Dutch, for all their long intercourse with the island, were "almost silent with respect to its history".[2] The book was printed for the author and sold by Thomas Payne and Son.[1] The third edition of 1811, printed by J. McCreery and sold by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, added plates published by Marsden in 1810, a set of author's footnotes to the earlier text, and much new material; its index enters the cannabis passage under "Hemp or ganja, its inebriating qualities, 91".[2]
The book
The work proceeds from geography and climate through the island's vegetable and mineral productions, agriculture, the manners and customs of the inhabitants, their laws, religion and languages, to the kingdoms of Aceh, Menangkabau and the other native states. The cannabis sentence stands in the survey of cultivated and useful plants, in the 1811 edition in Chapter 4, "Agriculture", among the "plantations of coconut, betel-nut, and other vegetables for domestic use", between the fibre plants and the palas shrub whose rough leaf is used to polish kris hilts and sheaths.[1][2]
Cannabis of Sumatra as documented by Marsden
The 1783 text
In the first edition the passage reads:
The cannabis or hemp, called ganjo by the Malays, is cultivated in quantities, not for the purpose of making rope, which they never think of applying it to, but for smoking, and in that state it is called bang, and has an intoxicating quality.— Marsden 1783, p. 76
The sentence follows a note on twine made from the bark of a shrub called endeeloo and precedes the palas shrub.[1] It gives four facts: the plant is cultivated "in quantities"; the Malay name is ganjo; it is not used for rope, "which they never think of applying it to"; and the prepared, smokable form is called bang and intoxicates. It gives no locality beyond the implicit setting of Marsden's observations on the west coast, no description of the plant or of the preparation, and no estimate of the extent of use.
The 1811 text
The third edition rewrites the sentence and adds a comparison with India:
Ganja or hemp (cannabis) is extensively cultivated, not for the purpose of making rope, to which they never apply it, but to make an intoxicating preparation called bang, which they smoke in pipes along with tobacco. In other parts of India a drink is prepared by bruising the blossoms, young leaves, and tender parts of the stalk.— Marsden 1811, p. 91
The 1811 version spells the plant name ganja, turns "in quantities" into "extensively cultivated", makes bang a "preparation" rather than a state of the plant and adds that it is smoked "in pipes along with tobacco"; the added second sentence, on the drink of bruised blossoms, leaves and stalk "in other parts of India", is the bhang drink of the subcontinent, not a Sumatran practice.[2] The passage is followed in both editions by a note on the small tobacco plantations "met with in every part of the country".[1][2]
What the passage does and does not attest
Marsden's sentence attests, for the Sumatra known to a Bencoolen official of the 1770s and 1780s, the cultivation of cannabis as a smoking intoxicant under the Malay names ganjo or ganja for the plant and bang for the preparation, and the absence of any use of the plant for fibre. It is the statement that P. J. Veth's Dutch Schets van het eiland Sumatra repeats in 1867, almost word for word, as the cultivation of hemp "niet om de vezels, maar ter bereiding van een bedwelmende stof, bang geheeten, die zij met tabak rooken".[3] The same pairing of gandja for the plant and bang for the preparation was still current on the Sumatran coasts when the Netherlands Indies government surveyed the plant in 1913–1918.[4]
The passage does not attest export. The statement that gangah was "brought from the Island Sumatra" to the Coromandel coast, where it sold at five times the price of the local bangha, belongs to a different and earlier source, the manuscript account of the East India Company merchant Thomas Bowrey covering the years 1669 to 1679, printed by the Hakluyt Society in 1905, whose editor adds Dampier's report of ganga or bang at Aceh in 1688.[5] The two passages have sometimes been run together in secondary accounts as a single "Marsden" quotation; the smoking sentence is Marsden's own, and the export sentence is Bowrey's (Hakluyt edition, pp. 78–79).
Reception and historiography
The book was translated and reprinted, and Marsden's account of the island's productions was drawn on by later writers on Sumatra, among them Veth.[3] Its cannabis sentence entered the Dutch literature through the Schets and, in 1918, W. G. Boorsma's survey could still describe the Sumatran product as a hemp grown for its leaves rather than its fibre.[4] The sentence has circulated widely in modern popular writing on Indonesian cannabis, usually in its 1811 wording and sometimes with Bowrey's export claim attached to it; the two are distinct sources a century apart.
On this wiki the passage supports the statements on the Indonesia and Lake Toba pages about the ganja and bang vocabulary of Sumatra. It cannot be used to place cannabis in any named district, to characterise the extent of use, or to attribute the practice to any people other than the "Malays" of Marsden's coast.
Legacy
Marsden's sentence is an early point in the European-language record of cannabis on Sumatra: Bowrey's account of gangah brought from the island in the 1670s and Dampier's report of ganga or bang at Aceh in 1688, as quoted by Bowrey's editor, precede it.[5] Its two later echoes, Veth's Dutch paraphrase of 1867 and the colonial survey of 1918, and the ordinances of 1924 and 1927 that prohibited the plant, make up the rest of the sequence.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Marsden, William (1783). The History of Sumatra, Containing an Account of the Government, Laws, Customs, and Manners of the Native Inhabitants, with a Description of the Natural Productions, and a Relation of the Ancient Political State of that Island. London: Printed for the author. p. 76 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Marsden, William (1811). The History of Sumatra, Containing an Account of the Government, Laws, Customs, and Manners of the Native Inhabitants, with a Description of the Natural Productions, and a Relation of the Ancient Political State of that Island (3rd ed.). London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. p. 91 – via Project Gutenberg.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Veth, P.J. (1867). Schets van het eiland Sumatra (in Nederlands). Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen. p. 41. Leiden University Digital Collections, item 129225.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Boorsma, W.G. (1918). "Over het voorkomen en het gebruik van Indische hennep in Ned.-Indië". Teysmannia (in Nederlands) (VI): 324–334.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Bowrey, Thomas (1905). Temple, Richard Carnac (ed.). A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669–1679. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society.