The production of the Bugis and Malay manuscripts in the Library of Congress
Abstract
Bugis and Malay manuscripts now in the Library of Congress found their way to Washington D.C. through the combined efforts of four men in Singapore in the 1840s: Husin bin Ismail and Abdullah bin Abdulkadir (respectively teachers of Bugis and Malay), the missionary Alfred North and the explorer Charles Wilkes. From a quantitative point of view the Bugis collection is of no less value than the Malay one: the manuscripts collection of the Library of Congress possesses 14 Malay and 10 Bugis manuscripts. Together with a small number of works printed in Singapore from that period, these 24 manuscripts constitute one collection: collected for the same purpose, acquired through the same person, and copied by the same scribes. The following history of this collection explains its production within the environment of that small circle of people interested in Malay and Bugis manuscripts in Singapore during the 1840s. An appendix describes all ten Bugis manuscripts.
Summary
Roger Tol reconstructs the production history of the Bugis and Malay manuscripts held in the Library of Congress, tracing their creation to a small circle of four men in 1840s Singapore: the Bugis scribe Husin bin Ismail, the Malay scribe Abdullah bin Abdulkadir, the American missionary Alfred North, and the naval commander Charles Wilkes. The article’s central argument is that these manuscripts were not merely collected but actively produced on commission — North, acting as intermediary for the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, ordered his scribes to copy and translate texts specifically for the American market. Tol draws on North’s own handwritten annotations, colophons, and price notations preserved on the manuscripts themselves to reconstruct the economic and social conditions of manuscript production in colonial Singapore, demonstrating that the collection’s homogeneity reflects a single, coherent production enterprise rather than an accidental accumulation.
A significant portion of the article is devoted to establishing the identity and career of Husin bin Ismail, a figure previously known only fragmentarily in the literature. Tol identifies him as a Bugis teacher from Belawa in Wajoq who worked at the Mission Press in Singapore from at least the late 1820s, first under missionary C.H. Thomsen and then under North. The evidence combines colophons in the Library of Congress manuscripts, four additional manuscripts in UK collections, and Thomsen’s surviving letters. Tol further demonstrates that Husin was the anonymous Bugis translator of the 1833 English-Malay-Bugis vocabulary, resolving a gap explicitly noted by Noorduyn decades earlier.
The article also analyses North’s price notations to reconstruct the economics of manuscript production, comparing rates per square centimetre across scribes and languages. Tol argues that the principal factor determining price was the individual scribe rather than the language involved or the distinction between copying and translating, and that the collection’s integrity — one collector, two scribes, one purpose — makes it a historically significant package whose value lies as much in its documentary traces as in the texts themselves.
Key Findings
- The collection comprises 14 Malay and 10 Bugis manuscripts, all acquired through Alfred North for the Wilkes Exploring Expedition (1838–42), which reached Singapore in February 1842; materials were stored at the Smithsonian Institution and transferred to the Library of Congress in 1865 (pp. 11–12).
- All ten Bugis manuscripts were copied by a single scribe, Husin bin Ismail (Bugis: La Useng), who signed as ‘Guru La Useng’ (‘Husin the teacher’); seven of the fourteen Malay manuscripts were copied by Abdullah bin Abdulkadir (pp. 12–14).
- North’s price notations show average costs of $13.08 per Malay manuscript and $7.98 per Bugis manuscript; Abdullah commanded the highest rate at $0.00024 per cm², more than double Husin’s rate for Malay copying at $0.00011 per cm² (pp. 19–20).
- Manuscript VI (History of Wajoq) is dated 29 March 1837 (21 Dzu al-Hijja 1252 AH) and was written on paper bearing the watermark ‘Joseph Coles 1835’; manuscript VII, written on Arab paper, was copied by Husin before 1836 and purchased from his own stock rather than commissioned by North (pp. 24–26).
- Husin’s Bugis translations of Malay texts (manuscripts VIII–X) cost approximately twice the price of his copying work alone, confirming that translation was treated as a distinct labour cost (p. 20).
- The Bugis manuscripts exhibit a non-traditional ‘European’ style of writing with spaces between words, a feature Tol attributes to Husin’s pedagogical awareness of the difficulties foreigners faced in reading Bugis script (p. 16).
Conclusion
Tol’s definitive historical takeaway is that the Library of Congress collection is not a random assemblage but a single, coherent production package created within a tightly knit professional network in 1840s Singapore. Its significance lies not in the rarity of individual texts but in its documentary integrity: it preserves the material traces of a specific moment in the history of manuscript production, including the economic relationships between collector, scribe, and patron, and the cross-linguistic labour of translation that connected Malay and Bugis literary cultures.
Context
- Primary sources: Alfred North’s handwritten annotations and price notations on the manuscripts; colophons in Bugis and Malay; Thomsen’s letters (1827–32); Wilkes’ Narrative (1844); four Husin manuscripts in Cambridge and SOAS London.
- Historiographical contribution: Resolves the identity of the anonymous Bugis translator in the 1833 vocabulary (Noorduyn 1957); provides the first systematic economic analysis of manuscript production costs in colonial Singapore; establishes Husin bin Ismail as a documented figure in the history of Bugis literary culture.