PEPPER AND LIFESTYLE

Pepper was introduced to Sumatra and Java from south India around 600 B.C.E. Black pepper is the result of picking unripened fruits and drying them in the sun, while white pepper comes from larger fruits left on the vine until ripe. The outer skin must then be peeled off and the fruit dried. Pepper could be fitted into farming because the vines were raised on the edges of fields planted with other crops.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries archipelago suppliers felt increased pressures for pepper. Numbers of Chinese buyers in the archipelago increased. Arab and European traders also became regular visitors to pepper ports searching for supplies to sell to the Chinese and for additional sources to divert to Middle Eastern and European markets. The profits to be made from pepper convinced archipelago suppliers to produce more pepper for sale and in regular amounts.

One way to boost production in southeast Sumatra was by changing the   way    farming    families   allocated   jobs   among    members and the amount of time spent on them. Farm women, when offered cloth in exchange for pepper, substituted the time-consuming chore of weaving cotton and directed that freed time to planting more vines and cultivating pepper. In northern Sumatra, Aceh’s kings financed the laying out of   pepper   plantations   from   their   taxes   on   trade.   Their   armed   men raided villages in the non-Muslim interior of north Sumatra and their navy raided villages on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula for males of working age, and sent them to pepper farms that spread along the north     coast  of  Sumatra. In  Banten territories,  pepper cultivation brought forced production for overseas markets and an increase in consumer goods; in Aceh, pepper brought slave production on commercial plantations.

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PLANTS AND PLACE

Plants native to Indonesia are nutmeg, cloves, ginger, sago palm, and bananas. Bananas have been cultivated by archipelago farmers since 1500–1000 B.C.E. Many of the plants important in Indonesian histories as sustenance for local populations and as exports are native to other parts of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Names of the farmers who tried raising food plants native to China (such as rice, a staple for most Indonesians today) or India (pepper) two thousand and more years ago cannot be known.

In this ancient Asian history of experimental farming India is important as the source of many plants established in Indonesian landscapes. Indian plants had a dynamic impact on early Indonesian economies, just as Indian alphabets had on intellectual histories. Cotton, grown for clothing fiber, originated in India and was introduced into Java around 300 B.C.E. It later spread to north Bali, south Sulawesi, and Selayar. The palmyra palm, used for the manufacture of paper, was cultivated by the third millennium B.C.E in southern India and spread into the eastern archipelago. Pepper was domesticated in its native Mumbai region of India by 1000 B.C.E and cultivated in the western Indonesian archipelago from around 600 B.C.E Sugar, native to Southeast Asia, was cultivated by the third or second millennium B.C.E.

Diffusion of plants is not always direct. In Indonesian histories, Europeans introduced coffee bushes from Yemen in the early eighteenth century, breadfruit from Polynesia, and cinnamon which is native to Sri Lanka. (Unlike the early history, the dates and names of many European introducers of foreign species are known, and experiments in cultivating introduced plants in Indonesia can be studied.) In the early twentieth century the Dutch   also   introduced   mulberry   bushes,   which   are   native   to   southern China, to hilly areas of Sulawesi, especially Soppeng. European vegetables such as cabbage, carrots, lettuce, and legumes, and fruits such as strawberries and apples were brought to the archipelago, raised in hill stations, and entered   the   diet   of   local   communities.   From   the   Americas   Europeans brought food plants which form the core of today’s Indonesian diet and cookery: maize, sweet potatoes, cassava, capsicums, chilies, peanuts, and tomatoes. Indonesian farmers and cooks adopted them as mainstays for a population that did not have access to irrigated rice land. They also applied foreign plants to local needs. After oil was pressed out from peanuts, a cake remained which farmers used for manuring garden plots.

Also critical for the livelihood and health of Indonesians was tobacco, which was brought from South America to Indonesia by the Spanish. The modern colonial history of Indonesia is bound up with large-scale growing of tobacco for export to Europe. Since the sixteenth century Indonesian men, women, and children have also smoked and chewed it, and tobacco was of sufficient importance in people’s lives for its introduction to be recorded in a Javanese epic, Babad Jaka Tingkir (Tale of Jaka Tingkir).

BIRDS OF PARADISE

The brilliantly colored plumage of the bird of paradise, native to New Guinea, was used for headdresses to identify a tribe’s fighting men. Beyond New Guinea the feathers entered the collections of exotic goods that kings amassed as a sign and consequence of their wealth. They were part of the treasures of eighth-century kings in Sumatra and China. Trade in the plumes can be traced as far back as the first century B.C.E., and it continued until the 1920s, when the birds were almost extinct and fashions had changed.

Hunters in the area of New Guinea known as Bird’s Head captured the brightly colored male bird of paradise by shooting it with bow and arrow. The entire bird was then skinned and its legs, skull, and coarse wing feathers removed. The inner cavity was treated with wood ash and the prepared bird was smoke-dried. Birds for export were stored in sealed bamboo tubes or palm leaf wrappings and hung near fireplaces to protect them from damage by insects. Sailors from Indonesia’s Aru and Kai Islands, which lie off the Bird’s Head promontory, exchanged baked sago loaves for the plumes.

By the time Portuguese traders sailed the seas of eastern Indonesia in 1512, they were witnessing intricate trade networks. Traders from the Aru and Kai islands brought bird of paradise feathers, parrot skins, and aromatic tree barks, together with their own locally processed sago loaves, to Banda. The Bandanese consumed sago as a food staple. They added the New Guinea products to their own nutmegs, coconuts, and fruit, then transported this cargo to the Maluku islands. Traders from south China and Indian ports sailed to Melaka and Java to pick up spices, aromatic woods, pearls, and feathers for imperial sales agents in China and markets in India. Arab traders who visited Indian ports carried the bird of paradise feathers and other jungle and sea produce to markets in the Middle East and, eventually, Europe. By the thirteenth century the feathers that formed the headdress of New Guinea warriors also adorned the helmets of knights in Europe’s courts.