The Malay Peninsula appeared in maps drawn by Ptolemy (87–150 B.C.), who tried to make sense in Alexandria of travelers’ tales of eastern lands, but no archipelago geographers are known. Instead, European cartographers preserved the knowledge of Indonesian sailors, captains, traders, pilgrims, and adventurers in maps drawn, with increasing degrees of accuracy, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, a portfolio of twenty-six maps drawn by the Portuguese cartographer Francisco Rodrigues was based in part on a voyage he made in 1511 from Melaka to Java, Bali, Sumbawa, Timor, Banda, Seram, and Flores. The maps also include Brunei and the spice islands, which Rodrigues did not visit but knew of from Indonesian seafarers.
Many European creators of maps did not themselves ever see the lands whose shapes they attempted to define. Captains, merchants, naturalists, explorers, and missionaries came to them, and philosophers and scientists met at their workshops in Venice, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to analyze the information, sort fact from fiction, and fill in blank spaces in their conception of the world. At first mapmakers confused the islands of Sri Lanka and Sumatra, the relative sizes of Java and the Maluku islands, and the relationship of New Guinea to the Australian continent. By the 1550s map-making began to catch up with the pace of voyages of exploration, but there was always a time lag between discoveries and publication.
The VOC employed Europe’s best mapmakers. Seventeenth-century Dutch sea and land atlases show the steady accumulation of knowledge of the world far distant from Holland. Map-making followed, and enabled possession of, distant places by Europeans. Maps summed up the particular knowledge of places of many men, Asian and European. Maps generated a new way of thinking about the world; map-makers allowed individuals to see themselves within geographic and political relationships.
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.
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.