Читать книгу Early Mapping of Southeast Asia - Thomas Suarez - Страница 13

Chapter 3

Asian Maps

of Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia had a place in much of the literature and cosmography of her continental neighbors. Some of these references were direct cartographic records, while others were cosmographic concepts in which Southeast Asia played a significant role. Most often, however, Southeast Asia is found in textual entries. These include literary allusions, and the substantive content of travel records, as well as the itineraries of the pilots who sailed to the 'lands below the winds' or the 'southern ocean'.

Arab and Indian pilots relied on itineraries and sailing directions rather than charts. Although Marco Polo and other early European travelers in the Indian Ocean mentioned their pilots' 'charts', no such Arab or Indian navigational maps of the region are known. Detailed lists of places, latitudes, and relative compass bearings contained in some Arab navigational texts could in theory be used to construct maritime maps of the seas and oceans, but there is no firm evidence to suggest that any such charts were ever employed.

Marco Polo, making the trek westward across the Indian Ocean in the latter part of the thirteenth century, twice mentioned seeing maps. Once, in an apparent reference to sea charts and pilots' books used by his vessel's pilots, Polo stated that "it is a fact that in this sea of India there are 12, 700 Islands, inhabited and uninhabited, according to the charts and documents of experienced mariners who navigate that Indian Sea."

Polo's other testimony to his Indian Ocean pilots' use of maps is especially important, because in it he unknowingly left us one detail which corroborates his story. He explains that although Ceylon has a circumference of

2, 400 miles... in old times it was greater still, for it then had a circuit of about 3, 600 miles, as you find in the charts of the mariners of those seas.

Polo's explanation of the size accorded Ceylon on the chart was that the chart's geography originated at an earlier time before much of the island had been submerged. In fact, what this passage indicates is that the chart followed the Ptolemaic model with its characteristic reversal of the relative proportions of Ceylon and India. Yet Ptolemy's Geographia, and maps constructed from it, were virtually unknown in Europe at this time, even among academics, and remained so until a century after Polo's return. Thus Polo clearly did not fabricate this key Ptolemaic error, which he himself did not understand. Ptolemy's Geographia was, however, known to Arab scholars, and had profoundly influenced the Arab conception of Southeast Asia. But the fact that the map seen by Polo retained such an incorrect dimension for Ceylon supports the view that native pilots guided their vessels by navigational texts, and did not refer to the charts themselves.

Another important European witness to south Asian sailing was Nicolò de' Conti. In the first half of the fifteenth century, Conti mentioned that Arab and Indian sailors steered their vessels for the most part by the stars of the southern hemisphere, and made a statement which has commonly been interpreted as meaning that they were not acquainted with the use of the compass. In fact, he merely said that they did not rely on the needle for navigation.⁶⁸

At the very end of the fifteenth century, Vasco da Gam a was purportedly shown a chart of India by a 'Moor of Guzarat', just before his crossing of the Arabian Sea, but this is only mentioned retrospectively by João de Barros in the 1540s, and is not reported in earlier accounts of the voyage. Barros wrote that this chart was "of all the coast of India, with the bearings laid down after the manner of the Moors, which was with meridians and parallels." This is reminiscent of Ludovico di Varthema's claim that his Southeast Asian (presumably Malay) pilot consulted a chart marked with coordinates (1505). Barros described the map seen by da Gama as containing "bearings of north and south, and east and west, with great certainty, without that multiplication of bearings of the points of the compass" which typified Portuguese charts.

India

India's record of Southeast Asia is an enigma. Despite the profound influence of Indian civilization on much of Southeast Asia, there remains hardly any trace of Indian voyages to the east. No Indian maps of Southeast Asia whatsoever are known, nor geographic treatises detailing the itineraries and commerce of Indian sailors and traders. How is the contradiction between the undeniably extensive Indian presence in Southeast Asia and the utter void in cartographic and historical evidence reconciled?

India never 'colonized' Southeast Asia. Contact was not organized on any large scale, nor did Indian culture have the sense of posterity which led the Chinese to keep meticulous records of the world as they knew it. With the exception of military expeditions sent by the Chola emperors to Malaya and Sumatra in the eleventh century, India did not undertake a conquest of Southeast Asia. Rather, Indian influence was probably the result of successive individual initiatives as merchants sailed east to find their fortunes among the fabled isles of gold. No doubt many perished, but others established themselves in coastal communities where they married the daughters of local chiefs and assumed some degree of influence. These same local rulers, noting the legitimacy to a king's power afforded by Indian religion and political thought, were receptive to adapting the foreign ideas for their own ends, and similarities between indigenous and Indian traditions made this assimilation all the more natural and fluid. Indians who became respected citizens on Southeast Asian soil eventually returned to their homeland, where others in their family or village, on hearing their story, elected to join them when next they ventured east.

Although the sort of small-scale peregrinations which seem to have characterized Indian contact with Southeast Asia did not leave any formal histories or maps, what they did foster were references to Southeast Asia in Indian literature. Early traces are found in India's jataka fables of popular Buddhist lore, which originated well over two thousand years ago but assimilated stories about Southeast Asia as Indians returned and shared their adventures. These tales became associated with Mahayana Buddhism and its affini ty for common folk, for trade, and in turn, travel.

Some of the legends describe Indian merchants who sailed to Southeast Asia on trading expeditions. We hear, for example, of a Prince Mahajanaka, who joined a group of merchants bound for Suvarnabhumi, the Land of Gold, representing either Sumatra or Southeast Asia as a whole. Similarly, in the tale of Kathasaritsagara, a Princess Gunavati, while en route to India from Kataha (possibly Kedah, Sumatra), is shipwrecked on the coast of Suvarnadvipa (Golden Island or Golden Peninsula). Clear references to Southeast Asia are also found in the Ramayana, the classic epic poem about the abduction of Rama's wife by the king of Ceylon and Ram a's attempts to rescue her. These stories record seven kingdoms on the 'Gold and Silver Islands' beyond Ceylon.

China

Chinese cartography, which dates back to ancient times, influenced Vietnamese mapmaking, but was not a major cartographic influence in the rest of Southeast Asia (and the West, in turn, was not as much of an influence on Chinese mapmaking as once was assumed).⁶⁹

In China, as in Southeast Asia, the earth was generally believed to be flat. Chinese cosmography, however, held that the flat earth was not level. The plane of the earth was believed to be tilted, that is to say, inclined to the mountainous northwest and falling away to the southeast. The incline made the waters of the earth flow via rivers 'downward' from northwest China, emptying into the ocean sea, which itself leaned to the south and east. Southeast Asia figured importantly in this tilted flat earth concept, since it was in the 'low' southeast corner of the earth, the vast sea world of Austronesia, that all the earth's waters ultimately accumulated. Chinese seafarers, heading south to the lands of the 'barbarians', may thus have envisioned their course as literally 'down'. Mendes Pinto, exploring Southeast Asia and China in the mid-sixteenth century, noted that Sumatra, Makassar, and the other Indonesian islands are "referred to as 'the outer edge of the world' in the geographical works of the Chinese, Siamese, Gueos [a purported Southeast Asian nation of cannibals] and Ryukyu [the chain which includes Okinawa]."

Yet the idea of a spherical earth, literally and poetically, coexisted along side this scheme of things. At least as far back as the second century B.C., Chinese astronomers had written about the sphericity of the earth.⁷⁰ Taoist cosmography, philosophically describing a spherical earth, held that heaven, after which man was modeled, 'revolved' from left to right, while earth, after which woman was conceived, did so from right to left.⁷¹ The traditional concept of yin and yang was also applied to the Chinese world concept. Yin, the passive power, was associated with the colder north, while the active power, yang, was associated with the hotter climes of southern China and the southern realms of Southeast Asia.

In Taoist creation myths, the emperor of the South Sea (that is, Southeast Asia) was Shu (Brief). Shu periodically visited the central region, Hun-tun, which was conceived as a cosmic egg or gourd, where he met with Hu (Sudden), the emperor of the North Sea.⁷² Interestingly, the analogy of an egg yoke for the earth floating in the heavens was used both in ancient China and ancient Greece.

China and Southeast Asian Trade

Chinese awareness of india, of the Roman Empire, and of the possibilities of trade with both, was heightened in the latter part of the second century B.C. (Han Dynasty) as a result of the adventures of an explorer/diplomat by the name of Chang Ch'ien. Chang made two expeditions, the first in 128 B.C. to Central Asia, during which he was taken prisoner for a decade by the Hsiung Nu (Huns) in the Altai Mountains, and again in 115 B.C. to western China. On his first expedition he found cloth and bamboo in Bactria and Fergana (north of modern Afghanistan), which in turn had been acquired from India, but which Chang recognized as being ultimately of southern Chinese origin. This was to prove eventful for both China and Southeast Asia, since it opened China's eyes to the possibilities of more direct trade with lands to the west, and it set the stage for the role that Southeast Asia would play as a facilitator of this trade. On the second expedition, Chang had his envoys continue further west, bringing gold and silks to Persia and the eastern periphery of the Greco-Roman world. Chang's endeavors led to the birth of the Silk Road along whose length there subsequently flowed not only trade but also an improved knowledge of the world. The latter was shared between Rome and China, and the lands that bordered the route; China learned of Burma and other neighbors in Southeast Asia.

The Southeast Asian mainland, however, was not itself an important destination for the earliest Chinese traders. What little it offered them in terms of indigenous resources could be obtained in ample quantities from sources farther north. It was, rather, itineraries to the west that first lured Chinese seafarers into the Indian Ocean. Thus for early Chinese sailors, Southeast Asia was an impediment as well as a destination, in the same manner that America was initially seen as an obstacle to Europeans sailing west in quest of Asia. Similarly, both the Europeans in America and the Chinese in Southeast Asia sought short-cuts across isthmuses. Many Chinese and Indian traders may have opted to cross the northern neck of the Malay Peninsula at the Isthmus of Kra rather than undertake the arduous voyage around the peninsula and through the Malacca Strait, just as European sailors experimented with crossing Central America at Darien to avoid the lengthy route around South America and through the Magellan Strait. Yet another parallel can be found between the Gulf of Siam and the vast mouth of the Rio de Ia Plata in Brazil; both must surely have tricked pilots into believing that they had reached the end of the continental obstruction, only for them subsequently to discover that they still had the full Malay Peninsula and the whole of South America, respectively, to round.

Fig. 22 Traiphum, 1776 (anonymous). (Section illustrated measures 51.8 x 138 cm) [With permission of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin- PreuRischer Kulturbesitz Museum für Indische Kunst]

The fragmentation of the celestial kingdom resulting from the fall of the Han dynasty between 190- 225 A.D., expedited the beginning of Chinese intercourse with Southeast Asia. As a result of the dynasty's demise, most of the territory south of the Yangtze River became part of the kingdom of Wu which, though isolated from countries to the west, controlled the long southern Chinese coastline and thus was in an ideal position to trade with Southeast Asia. In order to exploit this window of opportunity looking on to the countries that lay to the south, an embassy was dispatched, in the third century A.D., to southern Indochina under the guidance of K'ang-Tai, a senior secretary, and Chu-Ying, who was in charge of cultural relations. Although the original accounts of this enterprise are lost, much of their content has been passed on to us by way of the many later Chinese documents that quote directly from them. These extracts are often confusing and have probably been corrupted by copyists, but nonetheless they constitute much of what is known about Southeast Asia at the time of the early Christian period, and they have provided us with the only clear record of the kingdom of Fun an.

Chhinese maritime contact with Southeast Asia probably began over two thousand years ago. According to the Han Shu (History of the Han Dynasty), Chinese vessels were visiting Sumatra, Burma, Ceylon, and southeastern India during the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.− 8 A.D.).⁷³ The scholar and official, Jia Dan (730-805), described the sea route from Canton (Guangzhou) to Baghdad, via Singapore and the Malacca Straits, the Nicobar Islands and the Indian Ocean, Ceylon and India, and finally the Arabian Sea and the Euphrates, at which point the journey was completed by land.

Chinese vessels began regularly to make the round trip to Southeast Asia in the eleventh century, during the Song Dynasty.⁷⁴ Although the Song era is remembered as being primarily a period of intellectual strength, and a time when advances were made in printing techniques, it was also one in which curiosity about the outside world was not deemed respectable. Confucian philosophers, in particular, sought to discredit both the accuracy and the merit of knowledge about distant realms.

Some Song government bureaucrats did, however, chronicle the reports they heard about the lands to the south and two texts have survived with details pertaining to Southeast Asia. One was written in 11 78 by Chou Ch'ü-fei, an official of the maritime province of Kuang-hsi, the second a half century later, in 1226, by Chao Ju-kua, the Commissioner of Foreign Trade at Ch'üan-chou (coastal province of Fukien). Chou Ch'ü-fei explained that

The great Encircling Ocean bounds the barbarian countries [Southeast Asia]. In every quarter they have their kingdoms, each with its peculiar products, each with its emporium on which the prosperity of the state depends. The kingdoms situated directly south [of China] have [the Sumatran maritime state of Srivijaya] as their emporium; those to the south-east [of China] have She-p'o [Java].⁷⁵

Referring to Indochina, Chou states that although

it is impossible to enumerate the countries of the South-Western Ocean... we have to the south [of Chiao-chih = Tongkin] Chan-ch'eng [Annam], Chen-la [Cambodia], and Fo-lo-an [?].

To the west of Cambodia (in present-day Thailand?) lies

the country of Teng-liu-mei. its ruler wears flowers in his hair, which is gathered into a knot. Over his shoulders he wears a red garment covered with white. On audience days he ascends an open dais, since the coumry is wholly without palace buildings of any kind. Palm leaves are used as dishes in eating and drinking; spoons nor chopsticks are used in eating which is done with the fingers.

Another kingdom is Tan-rna-ling, probably in the region of Ligor. Around the city of Tan-rna-ling

there is a wooden palisade six or seven feet thick and over twenty feet high, which can be used as a platform for fighting. The people of Tan-ma-ling ride buffaloes, knot their hair behind and go barefoot. For their houses, officials use wood while the common people build bamboo huts with leaf partitions and rattan bindings.

Among the products of Tan-rna-ling are bee's wax, various woods including ebony, camphor, ivory, and rhinoceros horn.

Langkasuka

Six days and six nights' sail from Tan-rna-ling is Langkasuka, one of the most enduring names of early Southeast Asia. Langkasuka was centered in the vicinity of Patani, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and is amply recorded in Chinese, Arabic, and Javanese history (fig 121). Probably founded in about the second century, Langkasuka experienced the eclipses and renaissances of any long-lived state; it still appeared on a Chinese map compiled from early fifteenth century data known as the Wubei zhi chart (fig. 23), but seems to have disappeared just before Portuguese familiarity with Malaya began in the early sixteenth century. So prevalent is the kingdom in early annals that its name was considered for that of independent Malaysia after the Second World War.

Chinese records of Langkasuka date back as early as the seventh century. It is described as a kingdom in the Southern Sea, covering an area thirty days' journey east-to-west, and twenty north-to-south, lying 24,000 li from Canton. Its climate and products are similar to those of Funan. The capital

is surrounded by walls to form a city with double gates, rowers and pavilions. When the king goes forth he rides upon an elephant. He is accompanied by banners, fly-whisks, flags and drums and he is shaded with a white parasol. It is customary for men and women to go with the upper part of the body naked, with their hair hanging dishevelled down their backs, and wearing a cotton sarong.

Langkasukawas also mentioned by Chinese monks making the pilgrimage to India. I-Ching records one such visit in the late seventh century, and was clearly impressed by the warm hospitality of the inhabitants of Langkasuka. On one voyage, three pilgrims "let hang the mooring ropes" from their port on the Gulf of Tongkin

and weathered innumerable billows. In their ship they passed Chen-la ('Funan' in the text] and anchored at Langkasuka, [where] the king [bestowed] the courtesy appropriate to distinguished guests.

Another Buddhist pilgrim en route to Langkasuka

buffered through the southern wastes in an ocean-going junk, [passing] Ho-ling [Java] and traversed the Naked Country [Nicobars]. The kings of those countries where he stayed showed him exceeding courtesy and treated him with great generosity⁷⁶

The Islands

Chou Ch'ü-fei wrote that "to the south of [Srivijaya, i.e., Sumatra] is the great Southern Ocean, in which are islands inhabited by a myriad and more of peoples." Then the concept of a flat earth comes into play, so that "beyond these one can go no further south." The Chinese belief that the flat world is angled becomes especially important to the east of Java, for here "is the great Eastern Ocean where the water begins to go downward."

Chou Ch'ü-fei described the relative importance of these trading itineraries to the south: "of all the wealthy foreign lands which have great store of precious and varied goods, none surpasses the realm of Ta-shih (Arabia)." He believed that trade with Java (She-p'o)was second in importance, and Sumatra (San-fo-ch'I) ranked third. Sumatra, however, because of its position, "is an important thoroughfare on the sea-routes of the foreigners on their way to and from [China]."

Chao Ju-kua also recorded an active role for the Sumatran intermediaries in trade via Southeast Asia, noting that "because the country [Sumatra] is an important thoroughfare for the traffic of foreign nations, the produce of all other countries is intercepted and kept in store there for the trade of foreign ships." He compiled information about twenty-eight countries from discussions with both Chinese and foreign sailors and his book, entitled Chu-fonchih (Description of the Barbarians), records information about various countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and as far west as Africa and even the Mediterranean. Although the reports from his first-hand interviews form the principal value of the work, it is supplemented with information from older records.

From Chao Ju-kua we also learn a curious lesson about how Southeast Asian nomenclature could be deliberately manipulated. The Chinese appetite for Javanese pepper was such that the Chinese court, alarmed about the considerable exodus of copper coinage to Java to pay for it, banned trade with the island. The Javanese traders, in order to circumvent the trade ban, simply renamed their island; the Chinese traders were now buying their pepper from a land called Sukadana (Su-ki-tan).⁷⁷

Fig. 23 The section of the Wubei zhi Chart covering Southeast Asia, 1621. [Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., E701.M32.1]

Religion was another reason for Chinese incursions into the Indian Ocean, and another reason why Southeast Asia benefited from being on the crossroads between two great civilizations. By the first century A.D. Buddhism had reached China, and by the third century it was established along the delta of the Red River in Vietnam. Soon, some of its more devoted adherents began to undertake pilgrimages to their Holy Land, India. Monks traveled to India by both a land route through Burma and the sea route via the Malacca Strait. The earliest surviving record left by such a pilgrim is that of Shih Fa-Hsien, who, inspired to make an accurate Chinese transcription of Buddhist texts from the original Sanskrit, traveled overland from China to India in 399 A.D., returning by sea in 4 13-14. On the way back home to China from Ceylon, Fa-Hsien's ship went aground off the coast of Java, and he was lost at sea for seventy days before finally reaching China. This is the earliest record of a return to China from southern Asia via the maritime route.

As a result of this sea route, Buddhism was well established in Sumatra by the seventh century. I-Ching, who was in India and the southern seas between 671 -695 and compiled records of sixty pilgrims' journeys to India, mentioned a multi-national community of a thousand monks (Mahayana Buddhist) in the Sumatran state of Srivijaya in 671.

China and the Philippines

Chinese commercial interest in the Philippines dates back at least to A.D. 982, when an Arab ship carrying goods from Mindoro is recorded as having reached Canton.⁷⁸ Direct Chinese trade with islands to the east began by the twelfth century. In 1127 A.D., the Song rulers were forced south of the Yangtze River, and a southern capital was established at Hangzhou, from whence ceramics and other commodities were exported to the Philippines. Chinese sailors became increasingly familiar with northern Borneo and the Philippines, and trade links were established as far afield as the Spice Islands which were reached via the Sulu Sea. These trading networks probably elevated Filipino knowledge of their islands as well, since they precipitated an elaborate system of trading centers to gather the forest goods sought by the Chinese and to distribute the wares acquired from them. In 1226, Chao Ju-kua referred to the Philippines by the general term Ma-yi, and to the Visayan islands as San-hsu (three islands). He also used the term Lin-hsing, which probably referred to Luzon. Interest in Philippine commodities is evidenced by a Chinese writer in 1349, who noted that "Sulu pearls are whiter and rounder than those of india," and that they commanded a high price.⁷⁹ Embassies from Luzon were sent to China in 1372 and 1408, bringing such gifts as "small but strong" horses, and returning with Chinese silk, porcelain, and other goods. Chinese trade with the Philippines was evident to the earliest Europeans to reach the islands; the lords of Cebu had Ming porcelain when Magellan reached there in 1521.

Although Chinese interest in Southeast Asia was traditionally commercial, the Philippines were briefly the target of an emperor's conquest. In about 1405-1410 Yung Lo, second Ming emperor, sent an imposing fleet under Zheng He (Cheng Ho) in a bid to establish a foothold in the Philippines. He was unsuccessful.

Zheng He

Zheng He, however, had considerable success in opening China up to much of southern Asia and parts of eastern Africa. In the years between 1405 and 1433- ironically, the very period that Portugal was beginning to flex its muscles and push ever further around Africa− this Chinese navigator, who became known as the 'three-jewel eunuch', led seven expeditions to the southern seas, following the Southeast Asian coast into the Indian Ocean and along the eastern shores of Africa, possibly reaching as far as Kerguelen Island in the southern Indian Ocean. The scale of these undertakings was fantastic. The first expedition purportedly boasted 62 large vessels, 225 smaller ones and a crew in excess of 27,000 men; it touched on the shores of Sumatra on the outward voyage, and Siam and Java on the return. By the seventh voyage, Zheng He had won China commercial and diplomatic ties with 35 countries in the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, and eastern Africa. Fra Mauro, on his world map of 1459, records Chinese naval junks off the east coast of Africa -probably those of Zheng He− which came from Arabic sources.

A chart based on Zheng He's voyages (fig. 23) is found in a printed work entitled Wubei zhi (Treatise on Military Preparations) completed by Mao Yuanji about 1621 (the date of the book's preface), and presented to the throne in 1628. Mao does not name the source of the map, but there is little question that it is based extensively on Zheng's voyages. "His maps," Mao states, "record carefully and correctly the distances of the road and the various countries and I have inserted them for the information of posterity and as a momento of [his] military achievements."⁸⁰ We know from the text of the Treatise that maps and information were collected before each of Zheng's voyages, and that charts were compared and corrected for compass bearings and guiding stars, with copies made of drawings of the configuration of islands, water bodies, and the land.⁸¹ The map, as it has survived, however, appears to have been constructed in part from textual sources.

Originally, the Wubei zhi chart was probably a long, single piece, stored as a scroll, though for the book it was divided into a series of strips. One consequence of the strip format (whether in scroll or segmented) is that orientation is not consistent. In addition, scale is stretched and compressed according to the amount of detail included in a particular section. The cluttered and dangerous coastal area of Singapore, for example, is drawn on a scale more than three times larger than that of the east coast of Malaya and two-and-a-half that of the west coast.⁸²

The map included sailing instructions that modern scholars have found to be fairly accurate.⁸³ Sailing the Malacca and Singapore Straits from west to east, the pilot guide states that (using modern compass bearings)

having made the Aroa Islands, setting a course of 120° and then of 110°, after 3 watches the ship is abreast of [South Sands]. Setting a course of 115° and then 120° for 3 watches the ship comes abreast of [Cotton Island]. After 10 watches on a course of 130' the ship is abreast of [Malacca]. Setting sail from Malacca on a course of 130°, after 5 watches the ship is abreast of [Gunong Banang]; after 3 watches on a course of 130° the ship is abreast of [Pulau Pisang]...⁸⁴

From Pulau Pisang, a course of 135° brings them to Karimun, and from there, 5 watches of 115° and then 120° and the ship makes Blakang Mati, passing out through Dragon-Teeth Strait. With 5 watches at 85°, the vessel then reaches Pedra Branca (Pulau Batu Puteh), and after passing Pedra Branca, sets a course of 25° and then 15° for 5 watches, which brings the ship abreast of 'East Bamboo Mountain', one of the two peaks of Pulau Aur. Finally, setting a course of 350° and then 15°, the ship passes outside of Pulau Condor.

The budding commercial empire pioneered by Zheng He was short-lived. After the death in 1424 of the emperor who sponsored him, Yung-lo, and the death of Zheng He himself a decade later, Chinese authorities rejected any further forays in the southern seas. Commerce in the Indian Ocean trade was once again relinquished to networks of Muslim and Southeast Asian traders on the eve of the Portuguese penetration of eastern waters.

Japan and Korea

Although Japanese vessels were plying Southeast Asian seas from about the turn of the fifteenth century, no Japanese charts are known prior to the arrival of a substantive European presence in the region. Japanese traders were already well familiar with the South China Sea when Europeans first appeared in those waters, and are mentioned, for example, by Spanish sailors reaching the northern Philippine islands of Luzon and Mindoro in the 1560s, yet Japanese mapmaking of Southeast Asian waters is not known until after Europeans introduced their chartmaking techniques into Japan in the latter sixteenth century. These charts of maritime Southeast Asia were known as nankai karuta (south-sea charts), as differentiated from charts of their own coasts, nihon karuta.

'India' appears in early symbolic Japanese and Korean maps of the world which were inspired by Buddhist pilgrimages to holy sites in the land where Buddha was born. One such world view which may have had a place in China, Japan, and Korea was the so-called Buddhist world map, or Gotenjiku ('Five Indias'). Inspired by the travels of a Chinese monk in the Tang Dynasty, named Xuanzhuang (602-64), the world is depicted here in the shape of an egg, with north, the larger end of the egg, uppermost. As in many other world views which have their origins in Buddhist and Hindu cosmologies, Mount Sumeru lies at the center. Southeast Asia is not recorded on this map as such; a 'Mr. Malaya' in the south is another mythical mountain on whose summit sirs the 'Castle of Lanka'.

Fig. 24 Map of the world, Chonhado ('Map of all under heaven'), manuscript, Korean, probably seventeenth or eighteenth century. Among the countries in the inner ocean ring are the 'islands' of Siam and Cambodia. (26.8 x 32.4 cm) [Martayan Lan, New York]

Southeast Asia is, however, recorded in a popular Korean view of the world known as the 'Map of all under heaven', or Ch'ŏnhado (fig. 24). This particular representation of the world probably originated in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and was copied with little or no change into the nineteenth century. The Ch'ŏnhado did not reflect the best geographic knowledge available to the society which created it, but, as with the more enduring naive maps in Europe, it is doubtful whether this was its authors' intention. The map depicts a central landmass comprising China, Korea, and several historical and mythical countries. In the inner of the two encircling oceans lie the world's island countries, which in addition to Japan and the Ryukyus, include the 'islands' of Cambodia and Thailand. Mainland Southeast Asia was a long sea voyage from Korea, and it is understandable that Cambodia and Thailand would have been treated as islands like Japan and the Ryukyus (just as many Western mapmakers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed Korea to be an island). Reinforcing the idea of Cambodia and Thailand's insularity was the cultural 'sea' separating them from China and Korea, the mapmaker envisioning them as lands of a different tradition and people.

The ocean sea which harbors these 'islands' is itself ringed by land. While the central landmass and its neighboring 'islands' embrace both the real and the fictional, this outer ring of land records exclusively fictional places and features. The Ch'ŏnhado remained popular through the late nineteenth century.

The Arab View of Southeast Asia

Arab pilots began searching the shores of Southeast Asia for spices and drugs in the early seventh century. The information by these sailors and traders, who were primarily interested in commerce rather than in science for its own sake, subsequently appeared in travelers' accounts, and in the geographical, historical, and medical (herbal) treatises which, in turn, drew on these accounts. The earliest known compilations of Arab travelers' tales dealing with Southeast Asia, date from the mid-ninth century, though some of the stories which appear in them are older.⁸⁵ Some authors interviewed their informants directly, but most- in particular the later geographers -simply copied and elaborated upon earlier writings. This material is the source of most of what is known of the early Arab experience in Southeast Asian waters.

Most of the places mentioned in the various Arabic geographies and navigational tracts cannot be identified with certainty, nor can they even be presumed to have always represented the same place to each sailor or author. Although most of the locations commonly mentioned were originally based on fact, many gradually assumed a mythological status, slowly becoming the progeny of sailors' lore. Some of the fanciful places may derive from the Alexander Romances, or perhaps from attempts to reconcile Ptolemaic geography with the Qur'an.

Arab geographic knowledge of Southeast Asia after about 1000 was beset by two major problems. First, geographers failed to tap reports of more recent voyages to the region, if such information was available. Instead, the centuries-old stories, by now largely mythicized, continued to be recycled. The great Arab geographer, al Sharif al-Idrisi, based in Sicily in the twelfth century, certainly dedicated himself to gathering information from travelers, yet his Southeast Asian material remains the product of lore dating back three centuries. Not even the account of Ibn Battuta's journeys in the early fourteenth century, the period's unique surviving first-hand travel narrative, appears to have been utilized by geographers.

Secondly, the introduction of Ptolemaic theory into the Arab world view created irreparable confusion. Geographers such as Khwarizmi (tenth-century) attempted to incorporate elements of Ptolemy's Geographia into their conception of Southeast Asia, juggling their data to make it 'work'. This was exacerbated by the Ptolemaic idea of an enclosed Indian Ocean which led to a mixing up of information from Southeast Asia (al-Zabaj) with material from East Africa (al-Zanj), even though Arab geographers did not accept the existence of the land bridge itself(see figs. 27 & 28).

When the Portuguese reached Southeast Asia at the turn of the sixteenth century, the Arab geographical concept of Southeast Asia had stagnated for three centuries, and Persian and Turkish geographers were beginning to rise to prominence. For example, 'Abd al-Razzaq, a Persian historian of the fifteenth century, already cites Tenasserim (Burma) and Shahr-I Naw (Siam) as being among the destinations of sailors leaving Hurmuz. Arabic mapping of Southeast Asia began to utilize European sources in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.

Southeast Asian Landfalls in Arab Navigational Texts

Navigational texts offer better insight into the Arab geographic conception of Southeast Asia than the geographers' treatises, though even they are often ambiguous and inconsistent. The better Arab geographical texts, such as that of Ibn Sa'id (d. 1274), also record detail about topography, and quote information derived from earlier navigational tracts.

The earliest surviving Arab navigational treatises detailing travel in Southeast Asian waters are relatively late, dating from the latter part of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, but incorporate data from previous centuries of navigation. They were written by two fifteenth-century sea captains, Ahmad ibn Majid, whom tradition tenuously ascribes as the pilot Vasco da Gama hired to conduct his fleet's crossing from northeast Africa to India, and Sulaiman al-Mahri. Ibn Majid's work was written in poetry to facilitate committing its instructions to memory. These pilot books seem to have been the culmination of at least four centuries of such texts; ibn Majid, in fact, cites predecessors to his work dating back to the early twelfth century, and a travel narrative from the beginning of the eleventh. These navigational works, however, had no obvious impact on Arab mapmaking.

The pilots' tracts cite compass bearings, and latitudes, measured in isba' (approximately 1° 43') from a given star. A sample passage about Sumatra from Ibn Majid's text gives a flavor of these works:

Sumatra begins on the north with mountain of Lamuri at 77/8 isba' against the Little Bear, but according to some 7¾ isba'; and it ends in the south with a place called Tiku Tarmid. People disagree as to the latitude of this place and there are three opinions: the first that there the Little Bear is at 4 isba' and most of the Indians lean toward this; the second is not quite 4 isba' and the Arans and some of the Cholas prefer this; while according to others, it is 3½ isba'.

Ibn Majid believed the last of these to be the most accurate.

Sulaiman al-Mahri's navigational tract reads similarly. He notes islands off the west coast of Siam (Malaya)

which are called Takwa, and are from 5 isba'- 2 isba' Pole Star. The first of them is the island of Fali. This is a large island, the northern point of which is 5 isba' Pole Star, and the southern one, 4 ¾ isba' Pole Star. Next, to the south in line with it is Fali Kara, the northern point of which is 4½ isba' Pole Star, and facing it on the east is the island of Lamamand and the estuary of Markhi. After it on the south is another island nearby called Awzamanda, having the appearance of the large sail [of an Arab boat]. The Pole Star there is 4¼ isba'... [Another is] the island of Pulau Lanta, an inhabited island, whose inhabitants are permanently settled. Fruits are found there and it is at 2¾ isba' Pole Star... Now the island of Urang Salah Junk Ceylon, = Phuket] is a large, long island [whose cape is] at 2¾ isba' Pole Star.

The most important destination covered by these navigational texts, and one whose identity is not in question, is Malacca, which had risen as the region's principle trading center for Arab navigators during the fifteenth century (see extract, page 104). Singapore, parts of Sumatra and Java, and China were also focal points of these sailing instructions.

The coasts of Burma and the Andaman-Nicobar Islands were well-frequented, and are described in the pilot books. The texts group the shores of Malaya with Siam, and the mainland to the east with China, though Zaiton (Quanzhou) is considered the threshold of the kingdom of China proper. Along the route from Singapore to China, the ports described included Shahr-I Naw, referring to the Thai metropolis of Lop Buri or Ayuthaya. The term Shahr-I Naw (new city) was later borrowed from Arab acquaintances by Europeans such as Mendes Pinto, and incorporated by some mapmakers (see fig. 80). Beyond it, along the eastern shores of Indochina, the navigators frequented Champa (Shanba), and the port of Kiao-Chi in Annam. Borneo was visited, the Arabs' Barni referring to the sultanate of Brunei; other parts of Borneo are probably recorded by some of the unidentified place-names, the sailors who visited them not realizing that they were parts of the same island. To the northeast, Arab merchants sailed as far as Formosa, which was known as Likiwa (Liu-ch'iu) or al-Ghurand was described in Ibn Majid's navigational text of 1462. The Portuguese chronicler, Tomé Pires, writing in 151 2-15, had heard both names, noting that "the Lequeos are called Guores." Timor, Sulawesi and Banda were the southeastern limit of the Arab pilots' traditional ports of call. This passage from al-Mahri illustrates the limits of Arab navigational confidence to the east, as well as the texts' tendency to offset the Indonesian islands to the south:

Know that to the south of the island of Jawa [Sumatra or Java] are found many islands called Timor and that to the east of Timor are the islands of Bandam, also a large number. The latter are places for sandal, aloeswood, and mace. The island called the Isles of the Clove [i.e., the Moluccas] as east of Jawa; they are called Maluku.

Since many of the islands described in the navigational and travel texts have not been identified with any confidence, the extent of Arab sailors' familiarity with the region is not known. For example, although Arab traders were apparently transporting merchandise from the Philippine island of Mindoro to Canton at least as early as 982, there is no reference to the Philippines in the pilot books which is clearly recognizable to us now. Some of the unidentified places mentioned in the pilot books are probably parts of the Philippines. For example, the island of Fariyuq, which is described in a navigational treatise by the fifteenth-century captain, Sulaiman al-Mahri as a "large, inhabited island to the southeast of the ports of China", may be Palawan.

Geographical Treatises and Travel Narratives

Whereas the authors of navigational texts had little interest in recording anything that was not specifically of value to the seafaring merchant, the authors of geographical treatises and travel narratives filled their pages with descriptions of fauna, vegetation, strange peoples and lore about the region, which they compiled from existing books, or from the testimony of sailors and traders who claimed to have been there. These works are the most numerous extant Arab texts about Southeast Asia.

The one first-hand travel narrative of a credible voyage to Southeast Asia is the classic Rihlah (Travels) of the most famous of Arab travelers, Ibn Battuta. Battuta's odyssey, which began in 1325, came relatively late in the history of Arab voyages to Southeast Asia, and although his text is certainly based to a large extent on the author's own extensive travels, whether or not even he actually reached Southeast Asia is disputed. The only earlier extant account which purports to be first-hand is the tenth-century work Meadow of Gold by al-Ma'sudi, who claimed to have traveled to Southeast Asia and China in the pursuit of knowledge, but the veracity of his voyage is doubted, and his work was probably compiled from the stories he heard in the port of Siraf.⁸⁶

One of the most important Southeast Asian destinations, according to Arab texts, was the port of Zabaj, which was said to belong to the empire of a Maharaja and was located along the sea route to China, though far to the south, perhaps on the equator. It was believed to be closer to China than India, but was considered part of latter. There is no definite identification for Zabaj; though it was certainly an Indonesian island. Probably it was Java or the east coast of Sumatra; Zabaj may be related to the term Srivijaya, the great Indonesian maritime empire of a thousand years ago.⁸⁷

Some of the same texts which describe Zabaj also refer to the island of jaba. As with medieval European maps which depict an island of 'java; jaba may have been either Java or Sumatra, or both, depending on the author. From jaba it is said to be about fifteen days' sail to the Islands of Spice− clearly Java, assuming the texts' 'spice islands' to be the Moluccas- yet it is also described as being situated on the sea route to China, which makes Sumatra more likely.

Volcanoes are mentioned in connection with both Zabaj and jaba. Akbar al-Sin wa 'l-Hind (mid-ninth century), wrote that

near Zabaj is a mountain called the Mountain of Fire, which it is not possible to approach. Smoke escapes from it by day and a flame by night, and from its foot comes forth a spring of cold fresh water and a spring of hot water.

The report conjures up an image of a monumental volcano such as Krakatau or one of the smaller volcanic Indonesian islands known as 'Gunung Api' ('fire mountain'); a tamer one is described at about the same time by Ibn Khurdadhbih as being on jaba:

There is in Jaba a small mountain with fire on its summit stretching for the distance of a hund red cubits but having only the height of a lance. One sees its flames at night but only smoke during the day.

The island of Ramni is clearly Sumatra, usually described as being the first to be reached after leaving Ceylon, and washed by two seas− Harkand (Bay of Bengal) and Salahit (Malacca Strait). In the mid-ninth century, Akbar al-Sin wa 'l-Hind wrote that on the island of Ramni there are plantations called fansur, the latter being the name of a Sumatran kingdom later visited by Marco Polo. By about the year 1000, there are references in Arab texts to an island named Lamuri, another of Polo's Sumatran ports-of-call, as well as of Friar Odoric and other early European visitors. In the fourteenth century we find the island referred to by its modern name, Sumutra, in the text of Rashid al-Din (d. 13 18) and Samutra in the travelogue of Ibn Battuta (dictated in 1355).

Another Southeast Asian port frequented by Arab sailors in the route from India to China was Kalah. Reference to Kalah is found as early as 650 in accounts of Nestorian Christians, and appears in Arab writings two centuries later. It lay roughly six days' sail from the Nicobars, and ten days from Tioman, an island off the southeast coast of Malaya. In about 940, Abu Dulaf stated that it was at the limit of Chinese sea-faring. Kalah's people, or at least its trading community, were dressed in sarongs, the men and the women alike. Abu Dulaf describe the town as

very great, with great walls, numerous gardens and abundant springs. I found there a tin mine, such as does not exist in any other part of the world.

The thousand-year-old lore of Sind bad described Kalah as a great empire bordering on India, in which there are mines of tin, plantations of bamboo, and excellent camphor." Scholars have proposed that Kalah lay on the coast of Mergui (northwestern Malaya), or Kedah, or one of the islands which lie on the western waters of Malaya, such as Phuket.⁸⁸

Champa is described by many texts, which refer to the kingdom as Sanf It is said to lie along the sea route to China between Qmar (Khmer, i.e., Cambodia) and Luqin (Lung-p'ien, a port at the mouth of the Red River). Akbar al-Sin wa 'l-Hind (ca. 850) noted the kingdom's export of aloeswood, and that mariners en route to China next called at an island with fresh water named Sundur Fulat (logically Hainan, but possibly Pulo Condore).

As with the Ramayana and India, the legendary voyages of Sind bad record some distant memory of Arab voyages to Southeast Asia. Sindbad traded extensively in India (the 'Sind' of Sind bad denoting a region of India, now part of Pakistan) and traveled to Ceylon and beyond. In the course of his first voyage, he visited the island of Kasil, describing it in terms matching the island of Bartayil of the geographers. On his third voyage, Sind bad reaches Salahit, a place cited by several Arab geographers which probably lies in Sumatra. During the course of the fourth voyage, he went to Naqus (Nicobar Islands) and Kalah (western Malaya?), and the fifth voyage he reached islands with spices and aloeswood. The people of these last islands "love adultery and wine and do not know about the proper methods of praying"- complaints commonly made by Arab sailors about some Southeast Asian islands.

Waq-waq: the Life of a Myth

One of the most recurring and enduring place names recorded in Islamic tradition which is associated with Southeast Asia is the island or archipelago of Waq-waq. Various solutions have been suggested to the riddle of the island's identity− Sumatra is most often proposed, but so is Madagascar, since the integration of Ptolemaic geography into the Arab world view had created confusion between the islands of eastern Africa and those of southern Asia. The only realistic answer is that Waq-waqwas some undetermined Indonesian island, and that the popular lore associated with it eventually transformed it into a mythological place just out of reach of the conventional trade routes. Different sailors may well have identified different landfalls as Waqwaq.⁸⁹ The island's most distinguishing characteristics were its namesake tree, which bore fruit of girls (figs. 25 & 26), and its abundance of gold.

The metamorphosis through which Waq-waq was transformed from a real place to a legend by the progressively fanciful lore surrounding it, offers an ideal chance to examine the life of a Southeast Asian geographic myth. We will look at several descriptions of Waq-waq and its tree, in chronological order, and see how an unassuming description of local features was gradually transformed into the magical land of Waq-waq.

A geography by the Persian author Hudu al-'Aiam, dated 982 relates that

"east of [China] is the Eastern Ocean; south of it, the confines of Waq-waq, the Sarandib mountain, and the Great Sea.. Wag-wag belongs to the hot zone... its capital is M.qys, which is a small town (where) merchants of various classes stay."⁹⁰

Another text, the Masalik wa'l Mamalik attributed to Kurtubi (d. 1094?), states that "occasionally due to the strength of a violent wind some ships reach the island and through the perseverance of the sailors land on [it]."⁹¹

Our metamorphosis begins in about the year 1000, with the geographical treatise of Aja'ib al-Hind. Al-Hind wrote that

Muhammad ibn Babishad rold me that he had learned from men who had landed in the country of Waq-waq, that there is found a species of large tree, the leaves of which are round but sometimes oblong, which bear a fruit similar to a gourd, but larger and having the appearance of a human figure. When the wind shook it there came from it a voice... A sailor seeing one of these fruits, the form of which pleased him, cur it off to bring it back, but it immediately collapsed and there remained in his hands [only a Aabby thing] like a dead crow.

There are no mysterious or mystical claims here. The author had simply heard from second-hand sources that the island had a curious tree which bore a gourd-like fruit that resembled the human figure. The fruit made a sound with the wind, and it lost its hardness when removed from the branch. Many retelling the story of the tree, however, fell to the temptation to elaborate upon the curious description of the tree's fruit. Shortly after Al-Hind's text, another author, Biruni (973- 1048), was already trying to stop the wild stories that had sprouted up about Waq-waq:

The island of al-Waq-waq belongs to the Qmair islands [Qmar]. Qmair is not, as common people believe, the name of a tree which produces screaming human heads instead of fruits, but the name of a people the color of whom is whitish. They are short in stature and of a build like that of the Turks.

Similar repudiation came from al-Idrisi (d. 1165), who sifted through texts and travelers' reports in Sicily: "[In Waq-waq] there is the tree about which Mas'udi [Arab geographical author, d. 956] tells us unbelievable stories which are not worth telling."

Nonetheless, the writings of another twelfth-century author, Kitab al-Jugh rafiya (Spanish), reveal how embellished and horticulturally precise the myth had become:

In the part of the land of China which is in the sea... the largest and most important island is Wag-wag. It is so called because there are great tall trees there [which] bear fruit in the month of Adar [March], and they are [at first] fruit like the fruits of the palm-tree. These fruits end in the feet of young girls, which project from them; on the second day of the month the two legs protrude, and on the third day the two legs and thighs. This continues so that a little more protrudes each day until they have completely emerged on the last day of the month of Nisan [April]. In the month of May their head comes out and the whole figure is complete. They are suspended by their hair. Their form and statures are most beautiful and admirable. At the beginning of the month of June, they begin to fall from these trees and by the middle of the month there is not one left on the trees. At the moment of falling to the ground they utter two cries: "Wag, Wag". When they have fallen to the ground, Aesh without bones is found. They are more beautiful than words can describe but are without life or soul.

The writer explains that Waq-waq lies at the end of the inhabited world to the east, where the coast touches the Greater Sea. A century later Qazwini (d. 1283), much of whose material was recycled from older writings, adds an Amazonian twist to the island. He repeats the story that the Waq-waq fruit looks like women hanging from the branches by their hair, and notes that

al-Mubarak of Siraf claimed to have been into the island and seen the queen seared upon a throne, completely naked and with a crown on her head, surrounded by four thousand young virgin slaves, also naked. Others say that these islands are called this because there is found a species of tree, having fruit, which produces a noise "Waq-waq!" The inhabitants of this island understand this noise and draw disagreeable omens from it.

Kurtubi informs us that man does not live on Waq-waq, but ra ther that

there is a kind of great tree whose fruit, which grow among its blossoms and boughs, are always lovely women such that those who see the beauty of their shape and the grace of their body are asronished. The breast and vulva of each one are like [those of] other women, and in the branches of the tree they are suspended from the branches by their heads [hair] like a kind of fruit. Sometimes they all make the sound vak-vak. Therefore they call the island Vak-Vak.

Fig. 25 The Waq-waq tree, said to grow on the island of Waq-waq, somewhere in insular Southeast Asia. Ottoman, ca. 1600. [Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul]

Friar Odoric, a European who reached China via Southeast Asia in the early thirteenth century, was told a version of the story of the Waq-waq tree, and a Chinese writer, Tu Huan, noted one rendering of it as well. The fabulous Waq-waq tree is depicted in Islamic art with both male and female 'fruit', but the tree was described in the Pali language as nari phala ('girl-fruit tree'). In the early nineteenth century the Thai poet Sunthorn Bhoo borrowed the idea, writing of "a garden of magical fruits [whose) trees bear beautiful women as fruits," and the image of the tree is found in Thai art as a tree with 'woman mango fruit' (fig. 26). Another recurring motif of Waq-waq is the plenitude of gold to be found there. Gold is considered to be so abundant in Waq-waq that it is not highly esteemed, and is even used for dog collars.

The corroborative evidence for Waq-waq led al-Idrisi to include it as a group of islands in his atlas of the world (fig. 28), though he dismissed the fantastic lore associated with it. Waq-waq remained a prominently mapped feature into the middle of the seventeenth century, when the island is found in the position of Sumatra on the map of the world by Indo-Islamic cartographer Sadiq Isfahani.

Bartayil

Bartayilwas an island which was associated with the beating of drums, musical instruments, and the sounds of dancing. From this island "one continually hears the noise of the drums, flutes, lutes, and all sorts of musical instruments, a sound soft and agreeable, and at the same time dancing steps and the clapping of hands." This story was repeated by various writers with minor embellishment (the size of the ensemble grew in the later renderings). The island was also believed by sailors to be the dwelling place of the Antichrist. Some sources noted that cloves are purchased there from "invisible people", probably referring to the common system of silent barter. An animal, looking like a horse but with a mane of such length that it trailed on the ground, came onto the island from the sea. Sailors were said to be too frightened to investigate the island or its music. The island was visited by the legendary Sindbad, who called it Kasil.

Fig 26 A Thai adaptation of the waq-waq tree, the landmark of an Indonesian island described in Arabic geographic texts. The tree was incorporated into Thai poetry as "a garden of magical fruits [whose] trees bear beautiful women as fruits," and the artist who executed this image, labeled it as a tree with "women mango fruits." From a southern Thai manuscript, probably late eighteenth century.

As with Waq-waq, there is no reliable identity for Bartayil. Sailors' imagination probably made the association of Bartayilwith the Antichrist from the appearance of the island's people (they were said to have faces resembling shields of leather, with split ears) and the unearthly effect of its incessant music with no visible source. The idea that the Antichrist would be found in the east probably grew from the tradition of the apocalyptic monsters, Gog and Magog, while Bartayils strange horse may have evolved from the lore of the Chinese triple-headed goddess, Kwan-yin, who was sometimes said to assume the form of a horse, and who was supposed to have been born in the southern ocean from a father whose empire extended from India to Southeast Asia. The purchase of cloves does not mean that the island was itself a source of the spice (which at that time would have meant the Moluccas), but simply that it was a market place for them- as the sixteenth-century Portuguese historian, João de Barros, noted, Portuguese and Malay merchants preferred to conduct their trade in the Banda group, rather than sail all the way to Ternate itself.

Fig. 27 World map of al-ldrisi, mid-rwelfi:h century, a copy bearing the date 960 AH (1553 A.D.). Oriented with south at the top, Africa wraps around the southern Indian Ocean. The Arabic tide of al-ldrisi's geography translates as The Recreation for Him Who Wishes to Travel Through the Countries. (Approx. 23 cm diameter) [Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms. Poe. 375]

The Islands of Spice

'Islands of Spice' are, of course, presumably references to the Moluccan and Banda Islands, but many allusions to spice islands in Arab texts are vague and semi-mythical. The principal question regarding the identification of the Arab texts' reference to "Spice Islands" with the Moluccas is whether the sailing time they quote for reaching the islands is sufficient, and the answer to that question depends on the identity of the points of departure. As early as about 850, Ibn Khurdadhbih stated that the "Islands of Spice" are said to be reached after fifteen days' sailing from "Jaba, Salahit, and Harang." If, as some scholars believe, these three places lay at the southern end of the Malacca Strait, then the fifteen days would doubtfully have taken a vessel further than eastern Java.⁹² Other authors repeat the same figure, among them, interestingly, the Italian traveler Nicolò de' Conti. Conti stated that he sailed fifteen days from Sumatra and Java to Sanday, a source for nutmeg, and Bandam (Banda), a source for cloves. In fact, Banda was the source for nutmeg, and only served as a market for cloves which were brought there from Ternate and Tidore in the Moluccas.

Even as late as the fifteenth-century, al-Mahri's navigational text is little more specific than to acknowledge Banda as the source of nutmeg, that "the islands of Cloves are called Maluku and are four islands [actually five], " and to place the islands to the southeast of jawa (they actually lie to the northeast, but Arab pilots tended to envision Indonesian islands aligning to the southeast). He states that the latitude of these islands "is certainly unknown, although people of some knowledge have suggested their latitudes." Islands of spices of less definite identity are described in earlier Arab writings, recorded by different names and not placed in clearly identifiable places, but probably all refer to the Moluccas, even if based on second-hand data.

Cloves were said to be purchased on these islands by silent barter. Traders, upon reaching the shore, would spread out leather sheets and place upon them their purses with dinars corresponding to the amount of cloves they wished to purchase, then return to their ship for the night. The next day they would return to the shore, in the anticipation that the islanders will have replaced the money on each leather sheet with cloves. If the trader was satisfied with the exchange, he would gather up the cloves, thereby consummating the purchase. If not, he left the cloves on the leather sheet, returning the next day to find his dinars fully replaced in his purse. Such exchanges were said to be undertaken with confidence, without fear of injustice.

Fig. 28 Southeast Asia from al-ldrisi's atlas, mid-twelfth century, a copy bearing the date 960 AH (1553 A.D.). Six pages of the atlas have been joined together in this illustration; south is at the top. (Each section is approx. 21 x 30.5 cm) [Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms. Poe. 375, fol. 33v-34r, 38v-39r, 42v-43r, 77v-78r, 81v-82r, 84v-85r]

The Island of Women

In contrast to the Islands of Spice, the long and colorful tradition of an island of women somewhere in Southeast Asia defies identification and probably belongs to the region's purely mythical landscape. One source dating back about a thousand years, the geographer 'Aja'ib al-Hind, relates the story of a ship in the Sea of Malayu (Malaya), en route to China, which after encountering a storm landed on an unknown island. As the sailors were disembarking from their ship,

a parry of women arrived from the interior of the island, the number of which God alone could count. They fell on the men, a thousand or more to each man. The women carried them off to the mountains and forced them to become the instruments of their pleasure.

All but one man died of exhaustion, the survivor, a Spaniard, being hidden by one of the woman. Together they escaped in a boat filled with gold that she had discovered on her island, and the two safely reached the port from whence the sailor had come.

Other authors note that the island of women "is situated at the limit of the sea of China," and repeat the various traditions that its inhabitants make themselves pregnant by facing the wind, by eating the fruit of a particular tree, or by beholding their own image (see Ortelius, fig. 86). As we have seen, the island of Waq- waq, as a result of its fabled tree, also became the object of Amazonian lore. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Western map makers recorded such islands in Southeast Asia (see, for example, Bordone & Gastaldi, pages 120 & 143, below).

The Island of the Castle

Some early Arab authors wrote of "a white castle which stands on the sea and appears to the sailors before the dawn." Alexander the Great is said to have reached the island with the castle, whose inhabitants were clothed in leaves. Although one story noted that sailors "rejoice when they see the island, for it assures them of safety, profit, and good luck," stepping foot on the island was also said to induce insanity, which could only be cured by eating a particular fruit which grew there. Other stories associated the island with misfortune. Some accounts give a specific location to the island, such as "in the sea off Champa (central Vietnam)," though the tradition is generally of a place somewhere in the outer ocean.

The Motionless Sea (Sea of Darkness)

Sailors venturing into the eastern periphery of Arab voyages risked drifting in to a 'Sea of Darkness' (Bahr al-Muzlim), in which sailors are tossed about forever.⁹³ Ibn Battuta, in Southeast Asia in the early fourteenth century, reported that after 34 days' sail from Muljáwa (Java) he and his party "came to the sluggish or motionless sea [in which] there are no winds or waves or movement at all in it, in spite of its wide extent" (see page 105, below).⁹⁴ Friar Odoric, his European contemporary, repeated a similar story when describing the seas near Java. Odoric refers to an island called Panten, or Tathalamasin, whose king counts many islands under his dominion. "By this country," according to Odoric, is a sea called Mare mortuum (dead sea), which flows continually to the south, and into which "whosoever falleth is never seen again." These images perhaps tie in with the Chinese idea of a flat world tilted 'down' to the southeast, to where the earth's water incessantly flows.

Sharif al-Idrisi

The work of the twelfth-century Sicilian geographer al-Idrisi is the earliest surviving Arab view of Southeast Asia. Al-Idrisi's atlas was divided into a world map (fig. 27) and seventy regional maps, of which six covered southern and Southeast Asia (joined together in figure 28). His map is a composite of sources. Some of his data can be traced back as far as the mid-ninth century text, Akhbar al-Sin, and the geographer, Ibn Khurdadhbih; much of it is rooted in intervening geographers; and some of it is new, or at least newly-interpreted. The maps illustrated are from a fine copy of al-Idrisi's atlas, bearing the date of 960 AH (1553 A.D.).

The landmass running along the top (south) is Africa, which al-Idrisi, influenced by earlier Arab geographers, shaped around a landmass which Ptolemy believed connected Southeast Asia with Africa (see al-Idrisi's world map, figure 27). This concept, Arab geographers' one dramatic concession to Ptolemy, was influential, being found in Western sources such as the 1320 mappamundi of Sanudo (fig. 3). But contrary to Ptolemy, al-Idrisi followed the overwhelming Arab consensus in leaving the eastern (left) end of the Indian Ocean open.

The southeasternmost archipelago (upper left) comprise the islands of Waq- Waq, a colorful land of plentiful gold and trees with blossoms of girls. These isles lie in the sea off China, which is the mainland coast below. To the left of the mainland cape lies the archipelago of Sila, which is identified with Korea. Skipping to the upper right (west), the large round island in the corner is Ceylon, and the large, fat island near the mainland to the lower left (northeast) of Ceylon is Ramni, a kingdom of Sumatra for which the island was sometimes named. Various small 'Java' islands lie to east (left) of Ramni, including Salahit, visited by Sindbad and probably part of Sumatra, and Harang, one of the departure points for the Spice Islands and probably part of Sumatra or Java. Sanf, which is Champa in Indochina, is the island directly between eastern Ramni and the mainland. Among the mainland coastal cities near the eastern end of Ramni is Cattigara, an emporium noted by Ptolemy whose location was eagerly sought during the Renaissance.

Now we reach the long, prominent narrow island which dominates the Indian Ocean. al-Idrisi identifies this as al-Qumr, which is Madagascar, the island lying in its 'proper' place off the wildly mis-located African coast. Al-Idrisi notes that the same island is also called Mala'i. This could refer to a placename on Madagascar, or to the Malayu of other Arab geographers, which is part of Malaya or Sumatra. In addition, one of the locales on the large island is Qmar, which is Cambodia (i.e., Khmer). Thus the island may be both Madagascar and part of the Southeast Asian mainland and Sumatra.

Champa (Sanf) was erroneously depicted as an island because little was known about it except that it was a port-of-call en route to China. A more dramatic example of the pitfalls of charting lands based on inexact textual references can be found in three archipelagoes off eastern 'Madagascar'. They are Ma'id, the large island between 'Madagascar' and the mainland which is evenly divided between the upper-left and upper-central sheet; Muja, one of the islands off the southeast coast of 'Madagascar'; and Qamrun, the group of five small islands caught between 'Madagascar' and the Ptolemaic African coast. All three places are described in the mid-ninth century text, A khbar al-Sin, as lying between India and China, which al-Idrisi interpreted as meaning that they lie on the sea route between the two. In fact they lie on the overland route: Qamrun is Assam, while Ma'id and Muja are kingdoms along the border between Burma and Yunnan.