30 Boundaries and Beyond
Islands “was carried out by Malay and Javanese seafarers”.^106 On voyages
to and from the Spice Islands it had long been the practice that their ships
made stopovers along the southern coast of Celebes to take on fresh
water and supplies. These essential stopovers contributed to the rise
of Makassar. After the fall of Malacca, in their search for a new trading
hub large numbers of Malays and Javanese as well as Chinese, Arabs and
Indians turned to the north coast of Java and the southwest coast of South
Celebes for their supplies of spices. Not content with their minor role
of supplying the foreign ships, the Makassarese began to build trading
ships themselves.^107 In this same period, Muslim Malay traders from
Johor, Pahang and Pattani appeared in Makassar in increasing numbers.
An estimate of 1625 shows that these Malays who lived in Makassar
numbered many thousands. They sent about 40 ships each year to the
Spice Islands. Eventually, the availability of spices from the Spice Islands
and goods from China and India in the port also attracted the Europeans
to Makassar. Since the Dutch were locked in a struggle to obstruct the
Portuguese from trading directly in the Moluccas, the latter also began
to pour into Makassar in great numbers instead. Their visits intensiβied
after the Dutch capture of Malacca in 1641, when some 3,000 Portuguese
were recorded as living in Makassar.^108 Around this time, the port town
truly became an international entrepôt with the arrival of all the major
European trading nations, namely the Netherlands, Denmark, England
and France, all now competing with Portugal.^109 As Gerrit Knaap and
Heather Sutherland indicate, Makassar also traded with Mindanao (3 to
4 vessels), Sulu (3 to 4 vessels), Macao ( a few vessels), Manila (2 junks),
Cebu (2 to 3 junks), Siam (a few ships), Cambodia (5 to 6 big vessels),
Malacca and Aceh (4 to 5 vessels), Banjarmasin (6 to 8 vessels), Sukadana
(2 to 3 vessels), Java (30 to 40 vessels) and the eastern Kalimantan ports
of Pasir and Kutei (a few ships). Makassar remained active commercially
even after it was crushed by a Dutch-Bugis alliance in the years 1666‒69.
The Amoy junks, for example, were still arriving in the port to trade in the
mid-eighteenth century.^110
The Makassarese also had a rival much closer to home, their
neighbors the Bugis, whose indigenous home was also in South Celebes.
- Gene Ammarell, Bugis Navigation (Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1999), p. 11.
- Ibid., pp. 14, 16–7.
- Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), pp. 117–8. - Christian Pelras, The Bugis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 5.
- Gerrit Knaap and Heather Sutherland, Monsoon Traders: Ships, Skippers and
Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Makassar (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004),
pp. 13, 18, 145.
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