On 27 February, 1623, Gabriel Towerson, the chief factor or merchant of the English East India Company in Amboyna, was beheaded by command of the local Dutch governor, Herman van Speult. Nine other Englishmen, ten Japanese and one Portuguese shared Towerson's fate. The charges brought against these unfortunate men were that they planned to kill Speult and overwhelm the Dutch garrison of Fort Victoria as soon as an English ship appeared in the roadstead to support them. It is not the purpose of the present article to re-open the more controversial aspects of the Amboyna tragedy. Suffice it to say that the plausibility of the Dutch accusation has never commanded much respect in the estimate of British historians and it is unlikely that this attitude will change. On the other hand, there is every evidence to suggest that Speult, despite English suspicions to the contrary, was genuinely convinced that an English plot was afoot to overthrow his government. Normally the governor was a humane and reasonable man, who had received Towerson at his table on many occasions, and his bitterness at the strange turn of events in February, 1623, is very understandable. Dr. Stapel has recorded the reputed reply of Towerson to Speult when the latter upbraided him for thus abusing his hospitality and friendship: “Alas! If it were to beginne againe, it should never be done”. Is this the response of a man who knew he was innocent? asks Dr. Stapel. On the face of it, Towerson would appear to be condemned by his own words, but it must be remembered that his physical condition at that time was pitiful. He had firmly protested his innocence under prolonged and severe torture until his powers of endurance were broken, after which he sought relief, presumably, by telling the Dutch what they wanted to hear. In these circumstances, it is difficult to attach to Towerson's rather cryptic expression of repentance the importance it would otherwise deserve.

The importance of the Portuguese sources for our knowledge of Malayan history has long been recognized. Fortunately, most of them are now available in translation, and thus accessible to historians who have difficulty in reading 16th or 17th century Portuguese.

In the first place we should mention the English translations issued by the Hakluyt Society. These are:

In the year 1814, Great Britain, recuperating from the effects of the Napoleonic Wars and anxious to protect itself against another outbreak of “Revolutionary Madness”, determined to restore the balance of power in Europe. To this end, it turned its attention towards the problem of rebuilding a strong and united Kingdom of Holland. Because the stability of this new Kingdom depended on the prosperity it could derive from its colonial possessions, Britain restored to it, by the Anglo-Dutch Convention of 1814, all the factories and establishments which Holland had possessed in the Eastern Seas at the commencement of 1803. These were Java and its dependencies, Celebes and the smaller islands situated in the Straits of Macassar, the Moluccas, Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, and various establishments on the island of Sumatra. Great Britain also ceded to the Dutch the island of Banca.

The history of the state of Nan-chao () is closely interwoven with episodes in the history of Northern South-East Asia. The writings of Pelliot and G. H. Luce have shown the importance of eighth and ninth-century Nan-chao incursions into what is now Burma, while a Nanchao invasion of Tongking in the ninth century, with the help of local tribes, played its part in weakening the Chinese grip and contributing to the independence of Vietnam. There is, moreover, the vexed question of the relationship between Nan-chao and the Thai states of Siam, still far from being solved.

Kalah was the earliest recorded settlement of Muslims in this part of the world, and from Arab and Persian descriptions of it from the middle of the ninth to that of the fourteenth century, it was undoubtedly an important port in South East Asia.

But where was it actually located? The problem has baffled some of the best minds of the east and the west. It has been debated since 1718. During this long period eminent historians, geographers, Arabicists, Indologists and Sinologists have made an effort at solving the riddle, but at best they have succeeded only partially. Earlier attempts at identification were very much wide of the mark. Abbe Renaudot (1718) who initiated the debate identified it with Malabar, while Gildemeister (1838) located it in Coromandel, and Reinaud (1845) equated it with Galle in Ceylon. Alfred Maury (1846) was the first to realise that the search for it must be made in the Malaysian region and he suggested Kedah. Walckenear (1852) made this equation famous by accepting it in his commentary on the story of Sindbad the sailor. P. A. van der Lith (1883–6) gave massive support to it in his elaborate and erudite discussion on the subject in his annotation and edition of Buzurg bin Shahriyār's Book of the Marvels of the Indies. It seemed that van der Lith had clinched the issue by getting the philological support from no less an eminent authority on the subject than M. Kern, who stated that the Malay d was pronounced very like an Arab 1. And then followed a galaxy of great Arabicists, like de Goeje (1889) and G. Le Strange (1905) all of whom accepted this equation. Pelliot (1901) and other Sinologists, and Coedes (1918) and other Indologists found it handy in their own search of Malaysian place-names.