First Contact

Recently, I wrote an Insight piece about the earliest peopling of the islands of Indonesia, and that long, long period during which they were first settled by Homo sapiens. If we look to later migrations however, and contacts between various centres of culture and influence on the one hand, and the by then ‘native’ peoples of the islands on the other, we find much of interest. Necessarily, much depended on visitors from other parts of Asia knowing and fully understanding the different monsoon seasons and the patterns of winds and currents that went with them.

The Arabs were probably among the earliest visitors to what is now Indonesia. Any of them discovering the Sunda Straits and heading east and then north would have passed through Riau and Lingga. According to some chroniclers, the journey from Sarandib (Serendipity) or modern Sri Lanka to Sumatra would have taken fifteen days, a trip for which haphazard knowledge would have been a dangerous thing. Stops for water and food would probably have been made along the way in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, although from what we know of the tribal peoples of these groups, visitors would have had to have been ready for a hostile welcome.

Arab knowledge would have been passed to the Romans. So the $50,000 dollar question is…were they here? According to one account, “The geographer Ptolemy, who lived around the middle of the Second Century AD, under the reigns of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, describes the limits of the earth as far as they were known in his time. Soon after Ptolemy’s time the whole coast of Malacca and the Siamese Sea was explored (by whom, it is not stated) and the Romans appear to have had some knowledge of the Indian archipelago and its great islands, Java, Sumatra and Borneo.” If this is so, did they acquire this knowledge firsthand, or from the Arabs?

If the presence of the Romans in the region is debatable, then that of a much later Italian, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, is not. Polo is probably the most famous of all pre-modern travellers. Making his famous journey to China in the 13th Century, he returned from there via the Straits of Malacca and could very well have stopped off in Riau. The Venetian famously reported that he had seen a ‘unicorn’ in Sumatra. It is not difficult to surmise that this was a Sumatran rhinoceros, which were then considerably more plentiful than they are today.

Polo is also reported to have introduced the Italians to the business of noodle-making, a skill he is said to have picked up in China. However the writer Peter Robb, in his excellent Midnight in Sicily which is essentially a treatise on food, argues that on the island of Bangka, Polo witnessed locals making noodle-type food from substances derived from the sago plant. Italian noodles as we know them came, Robb argues, from the Arabs.

It would be more than two centuries after Marco Polo that Europeans arrived on the scene. The first were the Portuguese, who overran the Sultanate of Malacca in 1511 and who then proceeded to maraud down both sides of the Straits and, of course, through Riau and Lingga.

This was, of course, highly consequential. The Sultan of Malacca was forced to flee across the peninsula to east coast of Pahang. He then, along with his entourage, made his way south to pitch camp in Bintan in Riau, thus establishing influence over this and neighbouring islands. This in turn lead to him heading the Sultanate of Johor, which would later become Johor-Riau-Linnga, from 1528.