Warring Societies of Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia_ Local Cultures of Conflict Within a Regional Context

Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asia

with the Company.^ Informed of the murder, Salawo’s brother sailed
to Siau and demanded its raja to surrender the culprit for retribution.
But the raja refused. The party from Malurang went home only to
return with a raiding fleet of their Maguindanao overlords. They suc-
ceeded in destroying Siau’s main settlement, signaling the beginning of
Maguindanao’s incessant raids of the islands.
The story of Salawo is similarly recalled and invoked by the
Maguindanao raiders themselves. In 1789, when the Company was
drafting a peace treaty with sultan Kibad Syahrial of Maguindanao, the
latter refused to ratify by invoking among others the unjust murder of
Salawo.^82 The sultan also recalled the damage inflicted by a combined
Sangirese and Dutch expedition of 1770 to Salawo’s settlement and
Maguindanao’s vassal polity of Sarangani (Batulaki).^83 In this expedi-
tion, interpreted as a retaliation of Maguindanao’s previous destruction
of Siau immediately after Salawo’s murder, approximately three hundred
houses and one hundred vessels were burned and surrounding agricul-
tural fields destroyed.^84
The story of Salawo resurfaces in the records in 1825 – sixty-five
years after the actual murder – when the Dutch functionary A. J. van
Delden visited Sangir to reassert colonial authority.^85 The Sangirese
informants affirmed that the murder of Salawo was the root of enmity
between Sangir and Maguindanao. They likewise echoed the standard
sequence of the events. After Salawo’s murder in the island of Maju,^86
Salawo’s partisans requested the assistance of Maguindanao and jointly

82. A draft of this treaty can be found in Stapel, 592–95.


83. A reference to this attack can found in William Lessa, Drake’s Island of Thieves.
    Ethnological Sleuthing (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1975): 141–43;
    Carteret’s Voyage Round the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
    1965): 1.75.


84. NA, VOC 8138, Letter from the Governor of Ternate and Council to the High
    Government, 12 August 1771, fol. 107.


85. ANRI Manado inv. 46, no. 2, Van Delden, Sangir-Talaud Eilanden, 1826, fols.
    76–77 ; A. J. van Delden, “De Sangir-eilanden in 1825”, Indisch Magazijn 1.7-9
    (1844): 24.


86. Maju [Dutch: Mejauw] is an island halfway between the north Sulawesi peninsula
    and Halmahera. In the nineteenth century, the area gained notoriety as a base for
    ‘pirates’ based in Sulu. KITLV Archives (Leiden) H 1345, W. J. M. Michielsen
    Herinneringen, Dl. 2: In Gouvernements Dienst. Ambtenaar ter beschikking
    residentie Menado, 177.