When the Portuguese first reached those regions Pedir was the leading State upon the coast, and certainly no State known as Samudra or Sumatra then continued to exist. Whether the city continued to exist, even in decay, is obscure. The Āīn, quoted below, refers to the "port of Sumatra," but this may have been based on old information. Valentijn seems to recognise the existence of a place called Samudra or Samotdara, though it is not entered in his map. A famous mystic theologian who flourished under the great King of Achīn, Iskandar Muda, and died in 1630, bore the name of Shamsuddīn Shamatrānī, which seems to point to a place called Shamatra as his birthplace. And a distinct mention of "the island of Samatra" as named from "a city of this northern part" occurs in the soi-disant "Voyage which Juan Serano made when he fled from Malacca" in 1512, published by Lord Stanley of Alderley at the end of his translation of Barbosa. This man, on leaving Pedir and going down the coast, says: "I drew towards the south and south-east direction, and reached to another country and city which is called Samatra," and so on. Now this indicates the position in which the city of Sumatra must really have been, if it continued to exist. But, though this passage is not, all the rest of the narrative seems to be mere plunder from Varthema. Unless, indeed, the plunder was the other way; for there is reason to believe that Varthema never went east of Malabar.
There is, however, a like intimation in a curious letter respecting the Portuguese discoveries, written from Lisbon in 1515, by a German, Valentino Moravia (the same probably who published a Portuguese version of Marco Polo, at Lisbon, in 1502) and who shows an extremely accurate conception of Indian geography. He says: "The greatest island is that called by Marco Polo the Venetian Java Minor, and at present it is called Sumotra from a port of the said island" (see in De Gubernatis, Viagg. Ital. 391).
It is probable that before the Portuguese epoch the adjoining States of Pasei and Sumatra had become united. Mr. G. Phillips, of the Consular Service in China, was good enough to send to one of the present writers, when engaged on Marco Polo, a copy of an old Chinese chart showing the northern coast of the island, and this showed the town of Sumatra (Sumantala). It seemed to be placed in the Gulf of Pasei, and very near where Pasei itself still exists. An extract of a Chinese account "of about A.D. 1413" accompanied the map. This was fundamentally the same as that quoted below from Groeneveldt. There was a village at the mouth of the river called Talu-mangkin (qu. Telu-Samawe?). A curious passage also will be found below, extracted by the late M. Pauthier from the great Chinese Imperial Geography, which alludes to the disappearance of Sumatra from knowledge.
We are quite unable to understand the doubts that have been thrown upon the derivation of the name, given to the island by foreigners, from that of the kingdom of which we have been speaking (see the letter quoted above from the Bijdragen).
1298.—"So you must know that when you leave the Kingdom of Basma (Pacem) you come to another Kingdom called Samara on the same Island."—Marco Polo, Bk. iii. ch. 10.
c. 1300.—"Beyond it (Lāmūrī, or Lāmbrī, near Achīn) lies the country of Sūmūtra, and beyond that Darband Niās, which is a dependency of Java."—Rashīduddīn, in Elliot, i. 71.
c. 1323.—"In this same island, towards the south, is another Kingdom by name Sumoltra, in which is a singular generation of people."—Odoric, in Cathay, &c., i. 277.
c. 1346.—"... after a voyage of 25 days we arrived at the island of Jāwa" (i.e. the Java Minor of Marco Polo, or Sumatra). "... We thus made our entrance into the capital, that is to say into the city of Sumuthra. It is large and handsome, and is encompassed with a wall and towers of timber."—Ibn Batuta, iv. 228-230.
1416.—"Sumatra [Su-men-ta-la]. This country is situated on the great road of western trade. When a ship leaves Malacca for the west, and goes with a fair eastern wind for five days and nights, it first comes to a village on the sea-coast called Ta-lu-man; and anchoring here and going south-east for about 10 li (3 miles) one arrives at the said place.
"This country has no walled city. There is a large brook running out into the sea, with two tides every day; the waves at the mouth of it are very high, and ships continually founder there...."—Chinese work, quoted by Groeneveldt, p. 85.