Amandira with five of
her seven sails raised
on the Flores Sea of
eastern IndonesiaI
n the early 1930s, British explorer GEP Collins
sailed to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi on a
phinisi, a twin-masted, seven-sailed schooner used
for cargo, fishing and raiding around the
archipelago since the 16th century. It was slow,
cumbersome and riddled with rats, but Collins became
so enamoured with the grace and beauty of the high-
sterned vessel copied from Portuguese ships that he
decided to build a phinisi of his own.
So he sailed on to Bira, a village on the tip of south
Sulawesi, where the seafaring Bugis people have built
phinisis on the beach using primitive construction
techniques unchanged for hundreds of years.
Collins’ layover in Bira was anything but smooth: he
caught a volley of tropical diseases, was swindled atevery turn and faced repeated delays. The Bugis told
him the build would take two months, but it took
more than a year. The exasperated Englishman wrote
about his exploits, including descriptions of the Bugis’
magic rites, piratical tendencies and boatbuilding
techniques in Makassar Sailing, published upon his
return to London in 1937. “To record all the tricks my
boatbuilders and their gang of rascals tried would fill
half this book,” he recalls.
Collins’s story bears striking resemblance to that of
another Englishman Erik Barreto, a Singapore-based
fund manager for alternative assets I met early last
year at a dinner party in Bali.
At one stage during the evening, I found myself
in the villa’s kitchen admiring the rich dark