ABORTED JOURNEY: FROM MAREGE’ TO AUSTRALIA

Australia’s   northern   shores   formed   the   southern   boundary   of   Indonesian   waters   for   sailors   from   Sulawesi.   They   were   hunting ground and worksite for Makasar and Bugis men, who fished for trepang which was in demand in Chinese markets. They secured use rights from Aboriginal communities by giving titles and flags to local chiefs and gifts of tobacco and metal axes. They named their work areas Kayu Putih (today’s Kimberley) and Marege’ (now Arnhem Land). In this history, which begins in the seventeenth century, trepang collectors were seasonal visitors. Because Aborigines did not gather or manufacture items salable on their sea routes, trepang collectors did not settle agents on Australian shores or establish permanent settlements. Nor did they hire locals as workers or raid their territories for slaves.

Australian shores were Sulawesi worksites in a period of European exploration and settlement. From the middle of the nineteenth century the northern coast was being pulled into an Australian history made in the south of the continent. By 1906 Australian authorities denied Indonesian trepang  collectors  fishing  rights.  Although  Buginese  and  Makasar  menere the first regular visitors to the coastal fringe of northern Australia, they did not put down roots, build permanent settlements, attract traveling ulamas, or reproduce their own civilization within Aboriginal societies. The named spaces of Australia never became a part of the Indonesian state.

photocredit: supercoloring.com

BANDA: MONOPOLY WITHOUT KINGS

 Ten small islands forming the Banda group lie remote in the Banda Sea, but they were the object of sailors on account of the nutmeg trees   which   grew   only   on   the   islands   of   Lontor,   Neira,   Ai,   Run,   and Rosengain. When the Dutch first visited the Banda islands, they estimated a total indigenous population of around fifteen thousand and fifteen hundred traders from Java and Melaka. Monarchy had not evolved in this mini-archipelago. The Dutch borrowed from international traders the term orang kaya (rich people) for the heads of leading families, who had become rich through the nutmeg trade. Dutch agents acting for the VOC established a trading post on Neira. To survive the intense competition for the nutmeg trade, they fortified it. Nassau Castle, built in 1609, was the first Dutch fort in Indonesia.

Banda was unable to control foreign traders as it lacked a central authority and its ships were adapted for trade, not naval warfare. VOC policymakers determined to seize control of nutmeg production and limit the   number   of   trees   in   order   to   keep   prices   high.   After   ten   years   of warfare, Jan Pieterszoon Coen injected a new fleet into the eastern archipelago made up of European soldiers and Javanese and Japanese mercenaries. They again attacked Banda villages, expelled foreign traders, exiled Banda’s leading families, and this time enslaved surviving commoners. The VOC then leased nutmeg groves to Dutch men who imported their work force from Java, Irian, Tanimbar, Bali, south Sulawesi, and Butung. Ambonese foremen supervised the plantation laborers.

The Dutch monopoly on production of nutmeg and mace, which continued until 1824, brought about the complete transformation of Banda. Multiethnic slave labor raised a single crop; inhabitants became dependent on Dutch suppliers for all outside goods; new ruling classes of Dutch     and   Ambonese     controlled   workers’   lives.  Eventually   Banda slipped into insignificance in the colonial economy because its plantation crop was geared to pre-industrial uses.

photocredit: thelostogle.com

DE BRITO’S INDONESIAN JOURNEYS

It is possible to get a vivid idea of the Indonesian island world five hundred years ago from the Portuguese Miguel Roxo de Brito’s account of his fifteen-month voyage of trading and raiding in the eastern archipelago. In May 1581 de Brito joined a party of Malay traders on the cloveproducing island of Bacan off the southwest coast of Halmahera. The kora-kora on which he was a passenger carried two hundred rowers and passengers. The ships put in for water at both inhabited and uninhabited islands dotting the seas. Wherever possible, they also took on food, additional rowers, and trade goods.

Their route took them to Wetar, Alor, Solor, and Flores islands, then to Java, and east to Bali and Bima to purchase gold and cloth. The ships then traveled to southern Sulawesi where the traders exchanged the gold and textiles for iron machetes. The machetes were transported to the northwestern tip of the New Guinea coast to exchange for massoy bark. The traders also picked up New Guinea slaves which they sold in Seram for sago loaves. De Brito’s companions sold the loaves in Javanese ports to traders who needed a stock of this staple food to exchange in Banda for nutmeg and mace. At the end of the voyage, the final cargo consisted of New Guinea slaves, gold bars, and jewelry, aromatic and medicinal barks, and pearl shell.

The villages de Brito observed in the eastern end of the archipelago, where   they   stopped   for   supplies   of   fish,   vegetables,   and   sago,   paid homage to the visitors as lords and described their exchange of goods as gift and tribute. De Brito noted that the commoner populations of east Indonesian   villages   were   scantily   clad,   while   their   ruling   classes   wore elaborate cloths with gold thread, acquired from the foreign traders who came seeking the products of the villagers’ labor. On Banda, Seram, and the Raja Ampat islands De Brito saw villages surrounded by stone walls with watch towers and small guns, the effects of warships which captured people to sell or to put to work as rowers.

photocredit: globalivf.com

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).