Sumbawa as ‘Little Java’
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
The name ‘Java’ has been applied to a few different islands over the years. Marco Polo called Sumatra and Java essentially the same name, Jaua, distinguishing the two islands by size alone — ‘Smaller Java’ and ‘Bigger Java’ respectively. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa called Sumatra ‘al-Jāwa’ and Java ‘Mul Jāwa’, while Niccolò de’ Conti called Sumatra Sciamutera but distinguished two islands called Iaua or Giava (i.e. Java), one of which was presumably Java, the other being unidentified (it’s sometimes thought to be Borneo). The island of Java was still being called ‘Bigger Java’ or ‘Java Maior’ on European maps and in European texts late into the sixteenth century, perhaps because it was believed that another littler Java lurked somewhere out there in the archipelago.
The Portuguese clerk Duarte Barbosa apparently thought that the island of Sumbawa in what is now the Indonesian province of Nusa Tenggara Barat was this smaller Java (Figure 1). He says as much in his book, appropriately entitled The Book of Duarte Barbosa (O Livro de Duarte Barbosa), written in 1516. I thought it would be worth examining Barbosa’s brief description of the island here.
We’ve come across Barbosa before, in an earlier post on European descriptions of the island of Timor. As in that post, I have taken Barbosa’s description of the island of Sumbawa from the edition of Barbosa’s Livro by Maria Augusta da Veiga e Sousa (2000:390); the text in the edition is substantially different from that used by the earlier English translator of the Livro, Mansel Longworth Dames (1921), so I’ve translated it afresh here:
JAOA MENOR
Ao mar desta ilha da Jaoa Maior está outra ilha muito grande, tambem muito farta e abastada de mantimentos de toda a sorte, pavoada de gentios e tem rei gentio e lingoa sobre si.
‘Nos portos de mar vivem algũs mouros sogeitos ao rei gentio, a qual ilha se chama antre eles Cimbava, e os moiros, arabios e persios lhe chamam Jaoa Pequena.
‘In the sea of this island of Jaoa Maior there is another very large island which is also fertile and full of provisions of all kinds. It is peopled by heathens, and they have a heathen king and language of their own.
‘Some Muslims, subjects of the heathen king, live in the coastal ports. Among them [the locals?] this island is called Cimbava, and the Muslims, Arabs, and Persians call it Little Jaoa.’
Sumbawa, here Cimbava, is an old name for the island, featuring in Old Javanese and Old Sundanese texts written before contact with the Portuguese. It even appears by name — Shūmbaba (شومببة) — in Arabic texts, including Aḥmad ibn Mājid’s Fawāʼid, written 1489–90, not long before Barbosa was writing (Tibbetts 1981:499). So why does Barbosa say that it was called ‘Little Java’?
We can only speculate. But there do appear to have been not insignificant links between Java and Sumbawa in earlier centuries, and the appellation might not be as strange as it first seems. The island is after all home to the easternmost surviving Old Javanese inscription, the Wadu Tunti inscription near Bima, which is accompanied by shallow reliefs in a somewhat recognisably East Javanese style (Noorduyn 1987:91–94). This suggests that the island hosted a Javanese colony in the late Middle Ages, something not directly attested on any island further east. As ‘Java’ (Jawa) seems in many cases to be as much an ethnonym as a toponym, the idea of Sumbawa as a ‘little Java’ in the east doesn’t seem so odd — sort of akin to the ‘New England’ (Nova Anglia) reputed to have been founded by English settlers in Crimea in the eleventh century.
As far as I’m aware, this is the only reference to Sumbawa as ‘little Java’, and it might not mean much in itself. It is interesting, though, because it shows the immense flexibility of the name ‘Java’ in medieval and early modern accounts written by foreigners and the difficulties inherent in attempting to conclusively identify Indonesian islands in such works.
References
Barbosa, Duarte. 2000 [1516]. O livro de Duarte Barbosa. Edição crítica e anotada. Volume II. Prefácio, texto crítico e apêndice. Maria Augusta da Veiga e Sousa (ed). Lisbon: Ministério da Ciência e da Technologia. Insituto de Investigação Científica Tropical.
Longworth Dames, Mansel. 1921. The book of Duarte Barbosa. Volume II. London: Hakluyt Society.
Noorduyn, J. 1987. Bima en Sumbawa. Dordrecht: Foris Publications Holland.
Tibbetts, G. R. 1981. Arab navigation in the Indian Ocean before the coming of the Portuguese. London: The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
