The three principal and largest of these islands are Sumatra, Great Java, and Borneo, which are the largest of all that ocean, next to the island of St. Lawrence, which is deemed to be the greatest of all. All the peoples of these islands in their disposition, manners, features, and language, approach those of the mainland of Malaca, which leads me to conjecture that these islands have been peopled by the Malays. The other islands are innumerable, lying quite near each other, all inhabited or but few not so, and each having a separate king, and some having more than one. They are fertile in peculiar fruits and merchandise, such as spices and other drugs that are found nowhere else; and excepting Sumatra and Java, which are fertile of all things, the rest abound only in one particular thing and are sterile of all else. So this one product wherewith they abound must furnish them with everything else; this is why all kinds of food are very dear, save their own product, which is cheap, and why these people are constrained to keep up continual intercourse with one another, the one supplying what the other wants.

In Sumatra and Java grow many things that are very good and valuable; the chief traffic is in pepper, theirs being larger than that of the Malabar coast, because, as I believe, these islands are farther toward the east and nearer the line, and the soil is moistened by more copious dews than the mainland.