A possible origin of the Jong stories
This short note by C. A. Gibson-Hill responds to a legend of the jong (ship) published by Nik Daud bin Haji Nik Mat in the same issue, offering an alternative explanation for the origin of the “Jong stories” (p. 177).
Summary
Gibson-Hill addresses Dato Douglas’s (1949) hypothesis that the Jong stories—narratives of sons returning home after long absence, wealthy and seafaring, only to undutifully deny their parents—may record the arrival of small groups of strangers who later died out from malaria. He finds this unconvincing, noting that malaria is widespread, strangers might be immune, they would have no parents in the new land, and they seldom travelled with wives (p. 177).
He instead proposes that the stories may derive from the situation described in W. E. Maxwell’s account of the Sakai Si Aji legend, in which a Sakai youth who adopted Malay customs and acquired a sea boat denied his aboriginal parents when they came aboard his vessel, prompting a curse that wrecked his ship (p. 177). Gibson-Hill argues it is more plausible that, during the period when Malays were spreading inland from the coast, a Sakai youth joining them might acquire a sea boat and a wife and come, symbolically at least, to deny his ancestry. He also speculates whether aji (a literary term for kingly or royal) may be a play on haji (p. 178).