Indonesia in The Lusiads
If you ask me, the sixteenth century was when it all changed. The two hemispheres came together in the worst possible way, with destruction and death on an unprecedented scale. A European scourge swept the globe: For the first time European (mostly Iberian) armies marched in Malaysia and Mexico and, assisted by germs and disease and enabled by alliances with short-sighted local powers, Europeans came to dominate vast swathes of the Earth whose peoples had before that point not even heard of Europe. The processes initiated by this global proto-colonial Europeanisation are usually referred to rather bloodlessly as ‘the Columbian Exchange’. What I am interested in, as I have striven to make clear repeatedly on this blog, is the world before this all happened — not necessarily a better world but certainly a different and less European one.
For much of the world, the writing of pre-European / ‘pre-Columbian’ / ‘medieval’ history is dependent on documents written in the sixteenth century in European languages. In terms of acreage the majority of our planet at this time was occupied by people with no decipherable written tradition, and few earlier documents survive from much of the rest for reasons of climate and geography — and also because such texts were often destroyed by European administrators and missionaries for religious and political reasons. This means that the very first written descriptions of many places were made in European languages, and even when we have earlier descriptions the European ones are often longer and more detailed. This is particularly true when it comes to the tropics.
Brazil first appears in writing in the letter of Pêro Vaz de Caminha, written in 1500; it does not appear to have been written about at any prior point in any language. Aside from khipus (most of which cannot at present be satisfactorily interpreted) the Inkas left behind no written texts of their own, so for the history of the Andes before Pizarro we are almost wholly reliant on a combination of archaeology, oral history, and post-conquest accounts written in Spanish. The situation is similar for much (but far from all) of tropical Africa and the Pacific, as well as the Philippines (Figure 1) — and, indeed, the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, for which the texts written by Portuguese conquistadores like Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa, among others, are of particular importance in reconstructing medieval life and times. This is true even though writing in the archipelago, including the writing of history, goes back to the middle of the first millennium CE (as you can read in this lovely article by Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan).
The Portuguese naturally brought along their own biases and their texts seldom replicate the concerns and values of people local to the regions they describe. The same tropes occur frequently in different works, including, in the Malay case, the deadliness of poisoned blowgun darts and the valour of the Javanese. It is naturally quite important to be aware of such things when attempting to use these works for historical ends — to consider where truth ends and trope begins.
I know of no better distillation of the Portuguese view of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago than that found in Canto X of The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas), an epic poem in ten cantos by Luís Vaz de Camões (1524–1580), a one-eyed Portuguese poet, street brawler, and committed Luso-imperialist who is often described as the first European artist of any standing to cross the equator (Figure 2). Camões travelled widely and had a rather exciting life. He lost his eye fighting and was exiled for it, too. His Lusíadas, published in 1572, is generally considered the great work of Portuguese literature. It is in essence an ode to Portuguese colonialism in general and Vasco da Gama in particular.
A mild Camões brag: I bought my copy of Os Lusíadas (a 2016 version edited by Helder Guégués) a couple of years ago at Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon, the world’s oldest bookshop. It’s not the most academic edition of the work but it’ll do for this post, the purpose of which is to give an idea of the representation of the archipelago in The Lusiads and in sixteenth-century Portuguese ethnohistory more generally. Below I’ve presented the relevant Portuguese verses from The Lusiads with original English translations by yours truly.
The poem has been translated many times, but the only complete English version I’ve read is the 2001 Oxford World’s Classics translation by the late Landeg White, which is very good. I also had a look through William Atkinson’s 1952 translation for comparison’s sake. Both of these texts take liberties with the original to make it more readable, including glossing over some regional particularities; Camões’ Sunda becomes ‘Java’ in both texts, and his crises (referring to the keris, the Javanese thrusting knife — Figure 3) become ‘(curved) daggers’. These changes may make the text more readable for a non-specialist audience, but that’s not really my concern here: I have been much less literary and much more literal with my translations below. No matter how bad you think my versions are, in any case, I hope I have avoided the awkwardness of Richard Burton’s peculiar 1880 translation, which you can read here (relevant text beginning on page 378).
Camões’ sections on island Southeast Asia are all to be found in Canto X, the last canto of the poem, the bulk of which is taken up with a recounting of the Portuguese conquests to Vasco da Gama and the Hellenic gods by the Muse Calliope. The exploits of Portuguese heroes — people like Afonso de Albuquerque and Francisco de Almeida — form the first part of the canto. These are then followed by Calliope/Camões’ description of the entire world — an extraordinarily imperialistic depiction that describes Europe as the most sophisticated part of the planet and refers to an African army as a ‘brutish multitude’. It should be clear that this is not a dispassionate depiction of Earth but one centred on and expressing the militaristic supremacist values of sixteenth-century Portugal.
Camões’ attempt at a vision of Asia before the Portuguese got there is useful, however, precisely because it makes explicit the values and interests that sometimes lie under the surface of the other earlier Portuguese texts like those of Barbosa and Pires. It also provides a neat if slightly distorted précis of the Portuguese material on Southeast Asia. Camões did actually visit the region himself — in fact he was once shipwrecked off Cambodia, and he wrote most of The Lusiads while in Macau — so these sections aren’t necessarily airy literary fancy on his part.
Melaka first appears in the Lusiads in the recounting of the exploits of Afonso de Albuquerque. The keris has already been mentioned; the ‘poisoned arrows’ (setas venenosas) here are actually blowgun darts, which feature frequently in Portuguese descriptions of island Southeast Asia (including notably in the Comentários written by Brás de Albuquerque, Afonso’s son):
44
“Nem tu menos fugir poderás deste,
Posto que rica e posto que assentada
Lá no grémio da Aurora, onde naceste
Opulenta Malaca nomeada.
As setas venenosas que fizeste,
Os crises com que já te vejo armada,
Malaios namorados, jaus valentes,
Todos farás ao Luso obedientes.”
44
‘Nor will you be able to escape him,
No matter how rich and how well-situated
There in the lap of Dawn, where was born
Renowned, opulent Melaka!
The poisoned arrows you’ve made,
The keris with which I already see you armed —
Amorous Malays, valiant Javanese,
You will all make obeisance to the Portuguese.’
In the section devoted to Pêro de Mascarenhas, capitão-mor (‘Captain-Major’) of Melaka in the mid-1520s, we find a mention of Bintan, a small island in the Riau Islands (which also appears in Marco Polo and other medieval texts, incidentally):
57
“No reino de Bintão, que tantos danos
Terá a Malaca muito tempo feitos,
Num só dia as injúrias de mil anos
Vingarás, com o valor de ilustres peitos.
Trabalhos e perigos inhumanos,
Abrolhos férreos mil, passos estreitos,
Tranqueiras, baluartes, lanças, setas:
Tudo fico que rompas e sometas.”
57
‘In the kingdom of Bintan, which has done such
damage to Melaka so many times,
In one sole day the injuries of a thousand years
You will avenge, such is the valour of your illustrious hearts;
Superhuman travails and dangers —
Thousands of iron caltrops, narrow passes,
Stockades, bulwarks, lances, arrows:
I warrant you’ll break and subdue them all.’
The next few verses are taken from the later part of Canto X — the Lusocentric world vision. Verse 123 begins with a description of the more southerly parts of peninsular Southeast Asia, including Kedah and Melaka in Malaysia; verse 124 looks at Sumatra; and 125 comes back again to the Malay Peninsula, with references to Singapore, Pahang, and Patani. The notion in verse 124 that Sumatra was once joined to mainland Southeast Asia is sort of corroborated by modern geology, and when sea levels were low enough 10,000+ years ago one could have walked from Sumatra to the Eurasian mainland — but this really has nothing to do with the ‘Golden Chersonese’. The Chao Phraya River (rio Menão) doesn’t originate in a ‘Lake Chiang-Mai’, either, as far as I understand it. Low marks for Camões in the geology quiz here.
123
“Olha Tavai cidade, onde começa
De Sião largo o império tão comprido;
Tenassari, Quedá, que é só cabeça
Das que pimenta ali têm produzido.
Mais avante fareis que se conheça
Malaca por empório enobrecido,
Onde toda a província do mar grande
Suas mercadorias ricas mande.124
“Dizem que desta terra com as possantes
Ondas o mar, entrando, dividiu
A nobre ilha Samatra, que já dantes
Juntas ambas a gente antiga viu.
Quersoneso foi dita; e das prestantes
Veias de ouro que a terra produziu,
Áurea por epiteto lhe ajuntaram;
Alguns que fosse Ofir imaginaram.125
“Mas, na ponta da terra, Singapura
Verás, onde o caminho às naus se estreita;
Daqui tornando a costa à Cinosura,
Se encurva e para a Aurora se endireita.
Vês Pam, Patane, reinos, e a longura
De Sião, que estes e outros mais sujeita;
Olha o rio Menão, que se derrama
Do grande lago que Chiamai se chama.”
123
‘See the city of Dawei, where begins
Siam, the broad empire of such great extent;
Tanintharyi; Kedah, the foremost place
over there where pepper is produced;
Further on you’ll go to view
The ennobled emporium of Melaka,
Where every province of the vast sea
Sends its rich merchandise.
124
‘They say that this land was, by powerful
Waves breaking in, split from
The noble isle of Sumatra, which formerly
Ancient people saw joined with it;
“The Chersonese” it was called, and from the prodigious
Seams of gold that the land yielded
They added “Golden” to it by way of epithet —
Some imagine that this was Ophir.
125
‘But, at the tip of the land, Singapura
You will see, where the route narrows itself to the ships,
The coast turning from there towards Ursa Minor,
Curving and straightening itself towards the Dawn;
You see Pahang, Patani — kingdoms — and the length
Of Siam, which subjugates these and others more;
See the River Chao Phraya, which spills
out of the great lake they call Chiang-Mai.”
These next few verses are also taken from the description of the world — in this case the infinite islands of the Oriental seas, starting with Ternate, Tidore, and Banda in eastern Indonesia, continuing with Borneo, Timor, and Sunda, and closing with a description of benzoin from Sumatra (referred to obliquely as ‘the one time turned into an island’, cf. verse 124). The ‘golden birds’ in 132 are supposed to be birds-of-paradise; the ‘dark red fruit’ in 133 is nutmeg; and the idea in verse 134 that Sunda/Java was an enormous island that extended far to the south is found in other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works — it can be seen, for instance, in Jean Rotz’s 1535–1542 Boke of Idrography (Figure 4, below) — although it had all but been debunked by Camões’ time. The daughter of Cinyras in 135 is a reference to myrrh; Camões is saying that Sumatran benzoin is better than Arabian myrrh.
132
“Olha cá pelos mares do Oriente
As infinitas ilhas espalhadas:
Vê Tidore e Ternate, com o fervente
Cume, que lança as flamas ondeadas.
As árvores verás do cravo ardente,
Com o sangue português inda compradas.
Aqui há as áureas aves, que não decem
Nunca à terra e só mortas aparecem.133
“Olha de Bandas as ilhas, que se esmaltam
Da vária cor que pinta o roxo fruto;
As aves variadas, que ali saltam,
Da verde noz tomando seu tributo.
Olha também Bornéu, onde não faltam
Lágrimas no licor coalhado e enxuto
Das árvores, que cânfora é chamado,
Com que da ilha o nome é celebrado.134
“Ali também Timor, que o lenho manda
Sândalo salutífero e cheiroso;
Olha a Sunda, tão larga que uma banda
Esconde para o Sul dificultoso;
A gente do sertão, que as terras anda,
Um rio diz que tem miraculoso,
Que, por onde ele só, sem outro, vai,
Converte em pedra o pau que nele cai.135
“Vê naquela que o tempo tornou ilha,
Que também flamas trémulas vapora,
A fonte que óleo mana, e a maravilha
Do cheiroso licor que o tronco chora,
Cheiroso, mais que tanto estila a filha
De Ciniras na Arábia, onde ela mora;
E vê que, tendo quanto as outras têm,
Branda seda e fino ouro dá também.”
132
‘Look there, to the seas of the Orient,
The infinity of scattered islands:
See Tidore, and Ternate, with its boiling
Peak throwing up sputtering flames;
The trees you’ll see of spicy cloves
To be bought with Portuguese blood;
Here are the golden birds that descend not
Ever to earth and only show up when dead.
133
‘See the islands of Banda, enamelled
With the diverse colours that the dark red fruit paints;
The varied birds which there leap,
Taking unripe nuts as their tribute;
See Borneo as well, where there is no lack of
Teardrops of liquor coalesced and dried
From trees, called ‘camphor’,
For which the island’s name is celebrated.
134
‘There, too, Timor, which sends wood –
Sandalwood, wholesome and sweet-smelling;
Look to Sunda, so vast that a band
Is hidden far to the precipitous South;
The hinterland folk who travel the country
Speak of a river that they hold miraculous,
Which, up where it flows alone,
Converts to stone the wood that in it falls.
135
‘Look on that one which time turned into an island,
Which too exhales tremulous flames —
The spring that exudes oil, and the marvel
Of the fragrant liquor that oozes from the trunk;
Fragrant moreso than all that which the daughter
Of Cinyras distills in Arabia, where she lives;
And see that, matching what the others have,
It produces soft silk and fine gold too.’
Camões is presenting us here in the closing verses with an image of the world before the Portuguese got to it, but even in the heights of epic poetry he can’t get far from the real preoccupation of the conquistadores: The luxurious produce of each place and implicitly the profits that could be turned from it, and the dangers of even approaching such places. It is hardly surprising that we see such a gulf between what appears in the ethnohistoric accounts and what we find in the texts written locally.
A. J. West — Leiden, April 2020.
