Military Capability and the State in Southeast Asia’s Pacific Rimlands, 1500–1700
Timor and the Solor groupThe islands in the eastern part of the Savu Sea, i.e. Timor, including
both the Indonesian and Timor Leste halves, as well as Roti, and the
range from Solor to Alor located at the most eastern end of nowadays
Nusa Tenggara, measure approximately 35,000 km^2 , about the same as
the Netherlands. Compared to the Amboina Islands, the Timor area
was quite an arid zone. The climate and the prevailing winds also made
the island rather inaccessible for maritime contacts with other parts
of Southeast Asia during a large part of the year. Nevertheless, traders
from abroad were very interested in Timor, because it had for centuries
been the world’s most important place to obtain white sandalwood.
This product must have found its way to India and China already in
the first millennium C.E. Traders from outside usually came from Java,
sometimes just passing by on their voyage to Banda. Because of the
inaccessibility of Timor proper, such traders, including the Portuguese
from 1561, used Solor, one of the dry islands at the northern side of
the Savu Sea, as the market in between to procure supplies of sandal-
wood. By 1500, Solor was already inhabited by migrants from other
parts of Southeast Asia, which meant that Solor, in contrast to Timor,
had a strong maritime orientation. Besides the trade in sandalwood, it
exported other local produce, amongst other them beeswax and slaves,
the latter basically procured through the continuous warfare that took
place in the region.^14
Population numbers for early modern Timor and surrounding
islands are difficult to find. Hans Hägerdal concludes that nineteenth-
century Timor Island had a population of well below “half a million”. If
this is true, the early modern period might have seen 100,000 or at the
most 200,000 people. The inhabitants, in fact subsistence farmers and
hunters, lived in hamlets and village settlements, with unknown average
sizes. In the case of Solor, fences made of palisades and hedges protected
the villages. Political centralization was not far progressed, but showed
some stratification with a hereditary elite on top. Village leaders were
sometimes, at least by outsiders, addressed as temukung, a title bearing
resemblance to the Javanese temenggung. In sixteenth-century Solor,
- A. de Roever, De jacht op sandelhout: De VOC en de tweedeling van Timor in de
zeventiende eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg Press, 2002): 36, 41–44, 61, 68–69, 74, 77,
80–83, 103; Donkin, Between East and West, 48–50, 54, 161.