Duarte Barbosa’s Account of Sunda
The book now known as O Livro de Duarte Barbosa (‘The Book of Duarte Barbosa’) is an important primary source on Asia, especially South and Southeast Asia, in the early sixteenth century. Its eponymous author was a Portuguese conquistador, clerk, and ship’s captain who worked directly for Afonso de Albuquerque, the conqueror of Goa and Melaka. Barbosa spent most of his time in Asia working in India, but his Livro includes descriptions of places as far away as Banda and China — indeed, a mid-sixteenth-century English translation of Barbosa’s book is the likely source of the English name ‘China’, which entered Portuguese from Malay Cina.
One of the places Barbosa wrote about (but may not have visited) is Sunda, the western part of the island of Java, then an independent non-Islamic kingdom. Barbosa’s text on Sunda is short — one long rambling sentence with an addendum about Sunda’s relationship with Portugal — but it is important as one of the earliest surviving texts written by a foreigner about the area.
There are some earlier Old Sundanese inscriptions — the stone inscriptions from Kawali, for instance, and the so-called Kebantenan copper-plate inscriptions now in the Museum Nasional in Jakarta — as well as several palm-leaf manuscripts that must be older than or roughly contemporary with the coming of the Portuguese. But foreign eyes see different things: The Sundanese pepper trade is not discussed in any surviving Old Sundanese text, as far as I know, but it is mentioned in Zhao Rukuo’s 諸蕃志 (Zhū Fān Zhì, c.1225 — see here for my translation of the Sunda section), the Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (before 1515), and Barbosa’s Livro (1516). These accounts may be brief but that does not make them worthless.
I am interested in the fifteenth century and earlier, as I have made clear in a couple of other pieces on Medium (see here and here). But in island Southeast Asia we have relatively few sources on this period; we are forced to make use of accounts written in the sixteenth century (and sometimes later) in order to make sense of things pre-1500. It is an unfortunate necessity in a region whose hot and humid climate is generally hostile to organic materials (like manuscripts).
The text here is taken from the critical edition of the Livro put together by Maria Augusta da Veiga de Sousa (Lisbon, 2000), which draws on all the surviving manuscripts (unlike Ramusio’s edition, used as the basis of most English translations). The section on Sunda is found on page 382 of the second volume. Here is what it says:
Çunda
A ilha de Çamatra tem, a leste, a ilha de Jaoa e apartam-se ambas per um canal de 10 ou 12 leguas que tem muitas ilhas pequenas, antre as quaes está Çunda que tem muita pimenta que daqui levam as naos e juncos de Malaca e doutras partes, e muitos escravos. Tem rei sobre si o qual deseja amizade dos portugueses.
‘Sunda (Çunda) (1)
To the east of the island of Sumatra (Çamatra) is the island of Java (Jaoa). They are separated from one another by a channel of ten or twelve leagues which has [in it] many small islands (2), among which is Sunda (Çunda) (3), which has a lot of pepper which the ships and junks of Melaka and of other places take away from there (4), and [it has] many slaves (5). They have a king of their own who desires the friendship of the Portuguese (6).’
NOTES
(1) Çumda and Zumda are variants of this name in the Barbosa manuscripts. In Sundanese oral tradition the pre-Islamic kingdom in West Java is usually known as Pajajaran, but this is not a name commonly encountered in the older texts (aside from a couple of inscriptions, where it appears to be a name for the capital city). Instead, we find that people across Afro-Eurasia referred to the kingdom as some version of ‘Sunda’: Zhao Rukuo’s Xīntuō guó (新拖國, c.1225), Ahmad ibn Mājid’s Jebel Sunda (ﺠﺒﻞ ﺴﻨﺪﻩ , the ‘Mountain of Sunda’, c.1489), and the Sunda/Zumda (etc.) found in the Portuguese accounts. Sunda is found in the Kebonkopi II inscription, a mid-ninth-century stone inscription in Old Malay and Old Javanese, now lost, from West Java, and it is the normal name in Old Sundanese and Old Javanese texts for the kingdom in West Java. The use of Pajajaran for the kingdom seems to be a later sixteenth-century development.
(2) These many small islands are also depicted on the Mao Kun map (Fig. 1), indicating that they were reasonably well-known to foreigners operating in the archipelago. Krakatau, the volcano, was among these islands, and some ships’ itineraries suggest that passage through the Sunda Strait (Barbosa’s canal) was commonplace. In the fifteenth-century Old Sundanese narrative poem Bujangga Manik, for instance, a junk is said to be heading to Palembang (on Sumatra’s southeast coast) and then onto Pariaman (on the west coast); the simplest journey would take the ship through the Sunda Strait.
(3) The implication here is that Sunda is an island, unless the phrase antre as quaes (modern Pt: entre as quais ‘among which, including’) has changed its meaning over the last five centuries. That is possible, of course, but it may simply be another case of non-Indonesian people being confused by the terminology used in island Southeast Asia. In the aforementioned Bujangga Manik, for instance, several non-islands are referred to as nusa, the basic meaning of which is ‘island’, including China, Delhi, and Lampung. Calling Sunda a nusa may have confused Barbosa’s source. (UPDATE — see below)
(4) Some manuscripts say that this pepper was taken to China (pera a Chyna), or that Chinese ships were the ones who traded in it (Carregam muitas naos da China). The fact that Zhao Rukuo had mentioned Sundanese pepper three centuries before Barbosa lends credence to this idea, although by the time the Portuguese were in the region most Chinese merchants were officially forbidden from engaging in overseas trade (the 海禁, or ‘sea ban’, which lasted until 1576).
(5) Slavery was not uncommon in pre-modern Indo-Malaysia, but enslaved people are not often encountered in Old Sundanese texts. It is thus notable that Barbosa mentions them explicitly here.
(6) It is true that the Portuguese and Sundanese were hoping to establish an alliance at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The objective was to counter Muslim influence in the region; Tomé Pires — hardly an unbiased observer, of course — says that the Islamic takeover of the Javanese coastal cities had scared the Sundanese, and Muslims were banned from entering most of Sunda as a result (although Pires also says they could be found in settlements on the Cimanuk River). The alliance never materialised: the Sundanese ports were conquered by Muslim armies in the 1520s, cutting the interior of West Java off from the Portuguese, who were based at Melaka. The vast majority of Sundanese people are now Muslims, although some are not, and the conversion was not achieved entirely though force of arms.
Post-Script
In 1519 Duarte Barbosa left Portuguese service and joined Ferdinand Magellan’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe, financed by Spain. After Magellan was killed at Mactan Island in the Philippines — now, incidentally, the location of Mactan-Cebu International Airport, the main modern gateway to the Visayas — Barbosa was one of the people tasked with negotiating the return of the body. During the negotiations he was murdered, and Barbosa was thus unable to update his Livro to include information from his new experiences in island Southeast Asia (and elsewhere).
New Haven, Yale College Library, Beinecke MS 351, f.50v.
UPDATE (2019–13–11)
As I note above, Barbosa refers to Sunda as an island, which it isn’t. Interestingly, another early-sixteenth-century Portuguese source, the Atlas Miller (or Miller Atlas — Paris, BnF, GE DD-683), depicts Sunda in much the same way. You can read more about that in a more recent post here.
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