By John Tiffany
References to "the Malay" no doubt conjure mental impressions of a people long particular to Indonesia and its surrounding areas. But Malay bloodlines run strong from the Philippines to Madagascar. They constitute possibly the world’s most culturally and linguistically fractioned subrace.
The Malay people might reasonably be called "the Vikings of the Orient." Magnificent instinctive shipbuilders, renowned as among the world’s finest sailors, they take to the water like fish, and conquered a goodly portion of the globe before being themselves "discovered" by Europeans. Indeed, they crossed the Indian Ocean to discover and settle the island of Madagascar at a time when Europeans, by and large, were still steering fearfully clear of the open ocean.
Mighty mariners and master traders, many of these seafaring tribes possess the amazing art of psycho-navigation, finding their way through the vast oceans by a sort of sixth sense.
At one time, when Europeans were sailing around in small, clumsy caravels, the Malays possessed the largest ships on the planet. Even today, the great Malay ships known as prahus (or praus) may be seen scything through the seas, the largest working sailing ships left in the world. They are shaped like the galleons of dreams, streaming softly into port under thousands of feet of black canvas. (Blair, Lawrence, Ring of Fire: Exploring the Last Remote Places of the World.)
Associated with the Malayo-Polynesian, or as it is nowadays called, the Austronesian civilization, are mysterious mega liths and more than one remarkable script of unknown, but certainly considerable antiquity.
Like the Vikings, the Malays comprise one of the great seafaring civilizations and spread their culture, language and racial stock all over two vast oceans and three or four continents. Yet there are also significant differences. The Malays have always disliked land interiors, settling generally along coastlines and avoiding the highlands. The Vikings, in contrast, penetrated deeply into Russia, traveling overland and by rivers and inland seas as far as Persia.
In a way the Malays could be described as less "mature" than the Germanic peoples, in that they are quick to laugh, quick to anger, and generally take life less seriously. They have been accused of being hard to hold to their word, and of failing to recognize the value of private property rights. And they are also unusual in their reluctance to form a true nation; their loyalties have as a rule been confined to their family, their tribe, and their locality. Even when they have formed "empires" in the past, these have not been states in the modern sense so much as city-states to which outlying territories might render tribute, but rarely allowed the "capital" to interfere in local affairs.
The fascinating part of the globe which we may call "the Malay world" has touched America more than most people are aware. Christopher Colum bus was sailing in search of the Spice Islands, it is generally believed, when he landed on Caribbean shores. And England acquired Manhattan from the Dutch in a swap: Manhattan for one of the chief islands from which cloves are obtained.
But the Malay world is infinitely more important relative to prehistory and some schools of human evolution.
Java is the home of the so-called Java Man (originally labeled Pithecanthropus erectus by scientists, but later reclassified as Homo erectus). This is thought to be an extinct ape-man or man-ape, using stone tools and dating from as long ago as one million years B.C. to some 250,000 B.C.; in a time when great ice sheets a mile or so in thickness still covered much of North America and Northwestern Europe.
Controversy swirls around another fossil hominid, Solo Man, found in central Java. Some scholars classify Solo Man as an intermediate species dating from perhaps 250,000 years ago, and claim him as evidence of a Southeast Asian evolutionary descent from H. erectus to H. sapiens. Others insist Solo Man was simply an advanced race of H. erectus who survived for a while in isolation, then died out completely.
How a proto-human such as H. erectus wound up in such a seemingly out-of-the-way place as Java is at first glance a mystery, as is the presence of the orangutan on the island of Borneo, the land of the singing fish (see MacDonald). And how did the negritos, the Papuans and other primitive people arrive at these islands, if, as is generally assumed, they originated on the mainland of Eurasia or Africa? Conversely, if they had their start in the islands, how did they get to the continents? These people seem to have neither the knowledge nor the ability to build any sort of seaworthy vessel, even a raft.
The likely explanation for how primitives got to such places as Indonesia and Malaysia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Australia and Madagascar becomes evident when we examine a map of the area during the Pleistocene era. The surface of the ocean then was at today’s 40 fathom line, and vast areas now submerged were then above water. Indeed, it was possible to walk from the mainland of Asia to all of Malaysia, including the island of Borneo (this entire area was one landmass, called by geologists Sundaland), and to the Philippines, and it appears that man followed in the footsteps of elephants, rhinoceri and stegodons along this route.
All Southeast Asian H. sapiens fossils prior to about 5,000 B.C. are of the type known as Bacson-Hoabinhians (because their culture was first recognized from the provinces of Hoa-binh, Hoa-nan, and Tan-hoa, in Vietnam’s Bacson mountains). The cave-dwelling Hoabinhians have been identified as members of the Australoid Veddoid group of peoples, who survive in isolated pockets in Malaya and the Philippines today. (The Toalas of southern Celebes would be examples of the Veddoid type.)
The Hoabinhians seem to have been of a commanding stature, six feet or so tall, with heavy bones, and possessed of large skulls with massive jaws and well-developed brow ridges. Their only known products were crudely chipped hand axes that can only with some difficulty be recognized as tools rather than naturally occurring rocks. Their skeletons are remarkably similar to present- day Melanesians, such as the people of New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands. It is therefore thought that Australoids were the original "modern men" of this part of the globe, and that they were absorbed, driven to the uplands or pushed eastward by waves of Caucasoid and Mongoloid migration. These first modern men of the area seem to have been cannibals, as crushed human bones are found alongside discarded shells and debris of such prey animals as tapirs, elephants, deer and rhinoceri.
The first human burials and partial cremations in the area date from about 20,000 B.C. The first cave paintings in the region (mainly hand stencils but also human and animal figures) may be 10,000 or more years old and come from southwestern Sulawesi and New Guinea.
We know that the Malay region today contains races ranging from such primitive forms of humanity as the dwarf negritos, the Papuans and the Kubus, to the highly civilized Indian-Javanese, who more than 600 years ago built such fabulous monuments as the Buddhist Borobudur (Barabodur) and the Hindu chandi Prambanan. These jewels of Oriental art are noted for their magnificent sculptures and reliefs. It is a mystery why Hinduism was unable to disseminate itself over vast territories as did Buddhism, its penetration being limited to the Malay archipelago, Cambodia and Champa. Nevertheless, it struck root there so deeply that, like Buddhism, its influence has persisted down to the present day. (See Bosch for an analysis of this puzzle.)
On the small island of Bali, separated from Java by a strait only two miles wide, are found various relict groups, survivals of earlier times. First there are the majority of Balinese, who are Hin dus. In ancient times, Java was Hindu, but it was taken over by Mos lems. In Bali, Islam seems never to have achieved a foothold.
At one time Bali was populated by a race referred to by Covarrubias (Island of Bali) as "pure Indonesians", the Bali Aga. These people still have their own villages, from which outsiders, including other Balinese, are rigid ly excluded.
The negritos or Semang, although believed to be more recent arrivals than the Australoids and closely related Veddoids, are the most primitive race in Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago. These small and black woolly-headed nomads are of the same stock as the Aetas of the Phil ip pines and the Min copies of the Andaman Islands. They build neither houses nor boats but sleep around an open fire under a leafy shelter propped up by a stick.
Living in family groups with no tribal organization, they fear thunder and lightning and draw blood from their shins to appease the unseen powers that cause them. For their food they depend on what they can gather or kill with their blowguns and poison arrows. The negritos speak Mon-Khmer-related languages. These tongues belong to the Austro asiatic language family, not to be confused with the Austronesian language family which includes the other indigenous languages of modern Malaysia, in cluding Malay. It is believed the Aus tro asiatic language family was once found over the whole of the southern Indo chinese mainland.
Both the negritos and the Melanesians are believed to be of basically Australoid inheritance. Despite some marked resemblances, such as short stature, dark skin and kinky hair, the African pygmies (the only pure- blooded Negroes) and the Asian-Oce anic negritos have different origins, and their similarities are probably the reflection of adaptation to similar environmental conditions. (See Bellwood.) The negritos appear to have evolved in situ from their more typically Australoid ancestors, over a period of tens of thousands of years, possibly having lost contact with related population groups when the water level rose at the end of the last ice age. Genetic studies indicate that the Luzon and Mindanao negritos have probably been separated from each other for at least 10,000 years.
Far higher on the scale of evolution are the taller, fair-skinned, wavy-haired semi-nomadic Sakai or Senoi of the mountains and foothills of Malaysia. They are a cinnamon-colored people of "Indonesian" racial stock, but their language, interestingly enough, is mainly Mon-Annam or (AKA) Mon-Khmer.
In the southern half of Malaysia are found primitive tribes whose "proto-Malay" (AKA Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian) ancestors trekked down, according to one theory, from what is now Yunnan and overran Indochina. These Jakun, as they call themselves, speak a pure form of Malay, unmixed with Sanskrit and other foreign loan words, but racially some of them have absorbed so much Australo-Melanesoid blood that they cannot readily be distinguished from Papuans, being big, black and bearded.
The Encyclopedia Britannica (Volume 17, London and New York) states that Madagascar’s natives, collectively known as Malagasy, "are divided into a considerable number of tribes, each having its distinct customs." Although geographically an African island on the Indian Ocean, the Encyclopedia notes that "the majority of its inhabitants are derived, the lighter portion of them from the Malayo-Polynesian stock, and the darker races from the Melanesian. This is inferred from their similarity to the peoples of the Indian and Pacific archipelagoes in their physical appearance, mental habits, customs and, above all, in their language. The Negroid influence is derived from slaves brought from nearby Africa by Arab traders. Whereas indigenous Malays traveled 2,000 miles in countless voyages to first discover and then colonize Madagascar, Negroes could not navigate 200 miles from Africa.
Madagascar is 800 miles long and about 200 miles wide at one point. Unlike most Malay concentrations, the Encyclopedia states that “The most striking proof of the virtual unity of the inhabitants of Madagascar is that substantially but one language is spoken over the whole country.” The Malay origin of the Malagasy were noted by Westerners in the 16th century. The Malagasy never devised a written language (consequently producing no manuscripts or inscriptions). Their language was eventually reduced to writing by English missionaries.
Madagascar remains a temperate, tranquil and rather idyllic place, underpopulated by elements not particularly interested in the chaos of the outside world. Even today, some wonder: What if the "final solution" plan devised by the Polish government in the late 1930s and cribbed by the Germans (to create a state for Europe’s Jews on Madagascar) had not been bashed to smithereens by World War II? Would not a terrible and bloody burden have been averted; the postwar creation of that Jewish state in Palestine?
The proto-Malays are shorter and darker than the "Malays proper" and are believed to have been a mixture of Caucasoid and Mongoloid peoples, while a later wave of Malays, called the "deutero-Malays", were entirely Mongoloid. The American anthropologist H. Otley Beyer, who lived in the Philippines most of his life, believed these two waves occurred something like 5,000 and 3,500 years B.C., respectively.
Another theory is that the Malays did not come from mainland Asia, but originated in the Minangkabau area, where they are still found today. The Minang kabau or Minang people are known as the most advanced and educated in Indonesia, living in their saddle-roofed traditional houses, set on stilts, with palm-fiber roofs and walls covered in ornate carvings, like the Torajas of the highlands of Celebes. They are matrilineal, with property and power passing from mother to daughter.
The proto-Malays are the ancestors of the Ibans and most of the Dayaks of Borneo (Dyaks, AKA Land Dayaks, to distinguish them from the Ibans, who are sometimes called the Sea Dayaks). The proto-Malay type also survives in the Bataks of Sumatra, the islanders of Nias, and the Torajas, noted for their ship- shaped houses and their strange burial rites (the bodies are placed in niches cut into the faces of vertical cliffs, where “tau-tau” effigies of the dead are erected to stare out at the living). The Torajas still erect megaliths and have a most unusual form of writing in which each letter looks like a mandala or posy. (The Buginese also have an ancient, i.e., pre-Hindu, script, in which, it is said, each letter resembles the cross section of a different spiral seashell.)
We also find proto-Malays today in the Igorot and Ifugao of northern Luzon. They tend to be frank and open people and are excellent farmers. They probably represent the primitive Malay type, little affected by foreign influences.
The nomadic Punan (or Penan) Dyaks of central Borneo, a fascinating subtribe of non-headhunters, are, in terms of their racial appearance, as purely Mongoloid as any people on earth. The lovely, “topless” young maidens of this “lost tribe,” whose very existence is denied by the Indonesian government, perform a kind of water music by slapping their cupped hands against the surface of a nameless, uncharted river. A kind of “Borneo bluegrass” is also played after dark on the nose flute and two strange stringed instruments, the satung and the sapeh.
The Punans find their way through the dense jungles of Borneo by psycho-navigation, like the Australian aborigines, the Dinka of the Sahara and the Bugis seafaring tribes. They are re nowned as the finest weavers of rattan in the world and are noted for their beads, of astonishing age and variety, including beads identical to those extracted from Mesopotamian graves 2,300 years old. Little is known of the Punans’ religion, save that they worship Aping, the forest god.
The deep jungle natives of Borneo include not only the Punans, but the Muruts (who speak several different languages), and various other peoples. In Sabah, there are the Muruts and the Kadazan (formerly called the Dusun). The Kadazan, like the Muruts, speak several different languages. These Mon go loid tribes look very much alike to the untrained eye, but each has its own characteristic social organization and customs. To some extent they have influenced one another since emigrating to the island, but many differences still distinguish their various groups. In particular, they have not evolved a common language, although they have lived for ages as neighbors on the same rivers. They speak a multiplicity of unconnected tongues, each incomprehensible to the next-door communities upstream or downstream (see MacDonald).
Coates disputes the theory of a Chinese origin for the prehistoric Aus tro nesian or proto-Malay civilization (also called the Pacific or Oceanic civilization). He argues that it is of Pacific origin, perhaps having its starting point in the Gilbert Islands, approximately 4,500 miles east of Java (Islands of the South, by Austin Coates). Whatever the origin of the Austronesian culture, a key fact is that these Caucasoid Malayo-Polynesian people, at their height, spanned the globe from Tahiti and perhaps Easter Island to Madagascar. (An “Indonesian” group of tribes in Madagascar is believed to be descended from settlers from the Sulu Islands.)
Unfortunately, because of the presence of a large mass of incompatible Mela nesians in their center, who were regarded and treated by the majority of Malays as an inferior and unmarriageable people, the Malay- Polynesians became split into an eastern civilization, the Poly nesians, and a western civilization, the Malays and Indonesians, each of which lost all knowledge of their “other half.”
The difference between the continental mind and the Austro nesian mind is illustrated by this contrast: Water, in the form of the endless ocean to the west, was the major obstacle for European explorers in their discovery of the New World. But the Gilbert Islanders have an oral history telling of their own discovery of South America in the distant past. On sighting the Andes after an ocean voyage of four months, they were far from pleased, and according to legend, turned around and sailed in disgust back toward their native atolls. They described South America as “Maiwa,” the wall at the side of the world, four moons’ sail to the eastward, a land which stretches to the north and to the south without end: “beyond the furthest eastward island it lies, a wall of mountains up against the sun.” To these islanders, a continent was an obstacle; to Westerners, an ocean was the obstacle.
The prehistoric Austronesian civilization included the island of Ceylon in the west and the Philippines in the east. Today the Filipinos are considerably sinified, some Filipinos being racially almost indistinguishable from the Chinese. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) has been even more heavily indianized, and shows no surviving traces of any Malayo-Poly nesian speech. Yet in both these areas much of the Austronesian lifestyle and manner have survived.
The Philippines are the home of eight different “civilized peoples,” sometimes referred to as tribes. There are the Visayans, Tagalogs, Ilocanos, Bicols, Pangasinans, Pampangans, Cagayans and the Zambalans. However, the loose use of the word “tribes” to designate these peoples is very misleading. The truth is that they are the descendants of originally distinct tribes or peoples which have gradually come to resemble each other. There is a marked tendency of the Tagalogs and the Visayans to impose their will on the others. The actual differences between a Tagalog and a Visayan are not great, from an American point of view, but the Tagalogs and Visayans consider them to be considerable.
Oddly as it may seem, there are more sharply distinct dialects spoken in the Philippines than there are peoples. The Visayans, for example, are split three ways among speakers of Cebuano, Ilongo and Cuyuno.
Some Filipinos have wanted to alter their racial stocks by an infusion of white blood. Juan Araneta, a very intelligent Visayan of Negro ancestry, stated around the turn of the 20th century that white blood is the only hope for his people, that if he had his way he would jail every American soldier who did not leave at least three children behind him.
Besides the civilized peoples, there are also the Ifugao, the Igorot, the Manobo, and the Bukidnon, and the wild Tingians of Apayao, who proved the most difficult of the hill tribes of northern Luzon to bring under effective governmental control. There, as in Borneo, headhunting is connected with religious beliefs and observances. As recently as 1967, there were massive genocidally-flavored outbreaks of headhunting and cannibalism by the Dayaks of Borneo.
There is little racial difference be tween southern India and Ceylon, but culturally they are worlds apart. As Coates notes: “The faces on either side of the Palk Strait [separating India from Ceylon] look the same, but whereas in South India they were mournful and solemn, in Ceylon they are cheerful and one hears laughter. It is an entirely different and more relaxed atmosphere, itself a subtle reminder of the Austro nesian character, which everywhere left its imprint.”
Austronesia, as a culture, formerly extended deeply into Southern Asia, including the Indochinese peninsula, much of southern China and northeastern India. The enlargement and expansion of the continental civilizations of the Orient, and in particular the southward expansion of the Chinese culture (which in turn caused large numbers of adjacent peoples, such as Burmese, Thais and Vietnamese to move south into Indochina) had the effect of submerging the Austronesian culture there. Some of the tribal peoples in Burma, southern China and northeastern India, such as the Nagas, represent remote surviving enclaves of Austronesian influence.
The relationship between the Malay and Polynesian languages is not disputed. Certain Moi dialects in southern Annam are also related to this language family. Even the Mundas of Chota Nagpur in India present rather striking likenesses to the “pre-Malays” and the Mois.
Records of actual events in Singapore do not appear until about the 14th century A.D. By this time the island was a small but flourishing center of trade. It had acquired the name, of unknown derivation, of Temasek, which has been interpreted by some as meaning “Sea Town” and by others as meaning “Place of Festivals.” The name “Singapore,” or Sing a pura, was later bestowed upon Tem a sek by the Hindus. But Swetten ham argues that Temasek is not a Malay term at all, and is itself of very ancient South Indian origin. Singa is Sanskrit for “lion” and pura for “town.”
Megalithic monuments are known from the southern Malay peninsula and northern Borneo, as well as in some other locations in the Malay world. One of those places is Sumba, an island south of Komodo, which is the home of the famous “dragons” (actually giant, carnivorous lizards). These megaliths are still raised to honor the dead.
Throughout the Malay archipelago, the sea serves as a link with other peoples. The larger islands have many sizable rivers which are navigable by ship and in places cut through thick jungle which would otherwise be inaccessible, making sea transport essential to the life of the people. The decoration of boats is a cultural necessity, and the decorations are connected with the people’s concepts of the cosmic system. Great care is devoted to their execution, and among them are found examples of the highest artistic skill.
Over the centuries the Malay peninsula area developed into a conglomeration of small sovereign Malay states which proved too weak to resist the encroachments of a succession of outside imperialistic powers. They fell under the empires based in Sumatra, Java or Siam. Not until the century did the indigenous people succeed in gaining control of their own destiny. For a few glorious decades, the whole peninsula formed part of a great Malay empire, with its center in the fortified city of Malice (Malacca).
Malacca was founded by the piratical Hindu prince called Parameswara (mean ing prince consort). He had been forced to flee from Palembang in his native Sumatra in 1377 (when his father- in-law, who ruled the empire of Maj Apahit, Java, destroyed the city for declaring independence) to Old Singa pore, which was then known as Tuma sek. After only eight days in Tumasek, Parameswara had the local ruler, his host, killed, and took control of the city. This ruler had been the son-in-law of the king of Siam, who ordered the ruler of Patani to punish Parameswara by destroying Singapore.
Parameswara was, in turn, forced to flee from Singapore and wound up at Malacca after an undetermined period in Muar. By cleverly converting to Islam and marrying the daughter of the sultan of Pasai about 1414, Parameswara (who now took on the title of Megat Iskandar Shah) was able to make his new town of Malacca the great trading center he wished it to be.
Malacca was destined to become the center from which Islam spread throughout the region. The religion was brought there from northern Sumatra (the states of Pasai and Perlak), where it had been established by traders from India, mostly by Gujerati merchants from the northwest of India, although a convincing case has been made for Islam first having been introduced into Sumatra by merchants from the Coromandel coast. The Hikayat Raja Pasai states that Islam came from south India.
The fact that Islam was brought to this heavily Hinduized region by Indians rather than by Arabs was key to the rapid and peaceful spread of the new religion, as the Moslem Indians did not seek to change traditional customs very much. By about 1414, there was a fairly numerous Moslem trading community in the city. Malacca itself was now firmly established, with the support and protection of the Ming emperors of China, who were useful allies against the Siamese.
During the 15th century Malacca rose to become, in the words of Tome Pires, the 16th century Portuguese apothecary and historian, “of such importance and profit that it seems to me it has no equal in the world.” Although building upon an illustrious past, these were the glory days of the Malay people, in which were established a pattern of government and a lifestyle which was emulated by subsequent Malay kingdoms and became the basis of what was later termed traditional Malay culture and statecraft.
For all its glory, however, Malacca never really succeeded in making the Malay straits its private lake. The northern Malay states of Patani, Kelantan, Trengganu and Kedah continued for a long time to acknowledge the overlordship of Ayudhya (Thailand), and only toward the end of the 15th century was Malacca’s influence really felt there. Even on the opposite side of the strait, Pasai continued as an independent port able to satisfy foreign traders, and Aur too continued to retain its autonomy.
Amok, the "Malay malaise", is one of the few Malay words to enter into the English language, along with ketchup (catsup). The Malays are a very sensitive people, easily offended, with a tendency to contain their anger and hold a grudge. A person who ran amok would be a typical Malay man who broods over a real or fancied affront until he becomes enraged, running through the streets of his village slashing anyone within reach with a machete-like instrument.
In racial terms Indonesia’s population, consisting of hundreds of tribes and ethnic groups, is basically of Malay stock. There are at least 14 major ethnic groups in Indonesia: Atjehnese, Batak, Minan g kabau, Coastal Malay, Sundanese, Java nese, Madurese, Balinese, Dyaks, Makas sarese, Buginese, Torajas, Menandonese, Ambonese, and perhaps a few others. We must not forget the East Timorese, victims of an anti-Christian holocaust starting in 1975. Isolated fighting still continues in East Timor. It remains a very sensitive topic politically. East Timor has been closed to tourists by the Indonesian government.
Each ethnic group in Indonesia occupies its own region, speaks its own language and possesses its own forms of social organization. These communities have a sense of distinctness and a local pride that tend in some circumstances to take precedence over feelings of loyalty to the “nation” (more accurately described as an empire) of Indonesia. Java, of course, has more than half the population of the entire empire, making the ethnic distribution of power quite a lopsided one.
Recent excavations at two sites in northern Thailand have revealed that a metal-using culture was under way there in the fourth millennium B.C.—much earlier than in either China or India. This discovery has overturned the conception of Southeast Asia as a backwater of prehistory, and some experts now speculate that the area was in fact one of the cradles of human cultural development. Archeology has uncovered numerous sites in present-day Kedah which may one day reveal the existence of an important center of civilization in northern Malaya and southern Thailand, according to Ryan. The Malay peninsula’s most important relics of the bronze age, oddly enough, are two kettledrums—one was revealed by a flood in Pahang, and the other was dug up in Selangor by the Japanese in 1944.
Of Thailand (whose name means “Land of the Free”), it is interesting to note that the Thais themselves are relative newcomers to what we now call Thailand, having arrived there from China only about 1,000 years ago. The older name for the country, Siam, etymologically means “dark brown people,” evidently a reference to the difference in skin color by a lighter colored people. Whether this term was first employed by the natives to describe the Thai invaders or vice versa remains problematical.
Fossils of H. sapiens have been found in China and mainland Southeast Asia dating from as early as 60,000 B.C. This compares favorably with the ap pear ance of modern man in other parts of the world, although two imprecisely dated African fossils are said to be more than 90,000 years old. (One theory, as yet neither proved nor disproved, is that modern man could have evolved separately in different regions.) Modern man is known to have inhabited Indonesia, New Guinea and Aus tralia about 40,000 years ago, and possibly earlier.
The empire of Srivajaya (Shrivajaya) in south Sumatra was, from the second half of the seventh to the 13th century A.D., the greatest of the Indonesian sea powers, after Java. Some of the major classical kingdoms and Islamic principalities were Malacca in the north, Melayu and Srivijaya in Sumatra, and Minangkabau on the west coast
In the 13th century, Marco Polo and Rustichello wrote of the numerous Malay kingdoms of the time, which Polo visited after departing from Japan: Chamba; “Java”; Lokak; the island of Malayur; “Lesser Java” with at least eight kingdoms including Ferlec and Basman (where they had wild elephants and “unicorns as big as the elephants”), the “kingdom of Sumatra,” Dagroian, Lambri and Fansur. He also visited the mysterious island of Gauenispola, and the Nicobar and Andaman islands, before moving on to Ceylon. Back in Europe, Polo was scorned for his tall tales of people actually eating the nests of birds, which they boiled over fires of burning black stones. Centuries would elapse before the same black stones would be discovered in Europe, where they would fuel the Industrial Revolution.
The Bugis from the Celebes Islands (especially the port of Macassar) were (and still are) renowned as excellent sailors and mercenary soldiers. They were hired as mercenaries by Sultan Ibra him of Johore in the late 17th century. But once having visited the peninsula, the ferocious Bugis proved hard to get rid of, and were a rising influence throughout the 18th century, despite the very real fear of the fierce Bugis pirates.
It must be noted that once the Dutch gained power in the region, they could not allow a port such as Macassar to compete with them. They conquered it in the 17th century and ruined its trade. This is what forced the Bugis to take up the occupation of piracy. They had learned to use guns and body armor from the Portuguese, and many a South east Asian ruler called on them for help in war.
The most complicated galleys de signed outside the Mediter ranean were Malay. Indeed, while most of their oared craft were single banked, one trireme that was sketched about 1767 had a hull about 105 feet long and 16 feet wide, with double outriggers projecting about 26 feet. There were 25 rowers in each bank and, for added zip, 18 more paddlers on each outrigger.
The Malay pirates were renowned seamen whose skill, daring and just plain lust for blood were the equal of anyone who ever raised the Jolly Roger. Even today, the great Bugis prahus may be seen scything through the seas, the largest working sailing ships left in the world, shaped like the galleons of dreams, streaming softly into port under thousands of feet of black canvas. F
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