Moluccas

“ The people of the Moluccas cannot be classed as savages. They possess an intelligence and form of government which lifts them above aboriginal natives. Each island has its king, who is, nevertheless, subservient to the chief Thedori, by whom we were received. ”

“ That greater and more distant island of the Moluccas was only a definite shadow of lilac. Behind it were monstrous billows of vapor that could have rolled from a fire which had been immense, but was extinct. The volumes of smoke, and that sea of tarnished silver, had been stilled. Nothing had moved there since the last of the old navigators sailed westward. Close to us soared the two imperative heads of Ternate and Tidore. Whether the fires of Ternate were alight, or whether the dawn had merely kindled a cloud at its summit, it was hard to say. ”

“ A forest of mangos, mangosteens, bread-fruit, and cocoa-palms, extends between the town and Fort Teloko, the first Portuguese stronghold, and now a rocky outpost of Fort Orange, the headquarters of the Dutch troops. Beyond shadowy nutmeg groves lies the Laguna, a volcanic lake between mountain and sea. In the poetic Moluccas one draws closer to the warm heart of Nature than in any other part of the vast Archipelago, for the great Mother seems calling her children to rest, as she raises the veil from her inmost shrine and discloses her altar of peace. ”

“ Saavedra, of whom we have lately made mention, returned from the Moluccas towards New Spain, in May 1529: and, during, the voyage, came in sight of land, in lat. 2°S. He ran along the coast to the S.S.E. from that time to the end of August, upwards of 500 leagues, finding a clean coast, free from shoals and rocks, with good anchoring ground, inhabited by a black people, with curled hair. The people of the Moluccas named the inhabitants of this coast Papuas because they are black with frizzled hair and both Portuguese and Spaniards have adopted the same name. ”

“ This termination of the quarrel on the part of Portugal was a justification of the claims of the Spaniards, and an acknowledgment in some sort that the Moluccas were in their hemisphere. After such an arrangement, the Portuguese could not show any discoveries made to the eastward, or even under the meridian of these islands. The greatest part of New Holland is more to the east than the Moluccas; hence it is to be believed that for this reason the Portuguese have kept silence respecting their discovery of it. ”

“ Crawfurd says: “It is only in its native localities, the five small islets [Moluccas] on the western coast of the large island of Gilolo, that it is easily grown, and attains the highest perfection. There, it bears in its seventh or eighth year, and lives to the age of 130 or 150.” He also states that the Dutch, in their attempt to secure the monopoly of the clove trade, exterminated the clove trees from the Moluccas, and endeavored to limit their growth to the five Amboyna islands, in which they had introduced the clove. ”

“ Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans. ”

“ The islands they inhabit are fertile, but they do not practise any cultivation, and live on sago, which grows wild in great quantities in this archipelago.
The religion of the inhabitants of the Moluccas is a corruption of Mahometanism.
The only persons who go clothed are the women and the priests; the men only cover the head with a hat, painted in different colours, made of the leaves of the latanier; the rest of the body is naked, with the exception of a bit of narrow cloth, for the sake of decency. ”

“ Since 1867, when the political unity, under a governor, was dissolved, the Moluccas are often named by the Dutch the “Great East” (Groote Oost) . Most of the islands are mountainous, with still active volcanoes. As they lie near or under the equator, the monsoons blowing over them are less regular, and the rainfall, of large volume throughout the year, is dependent on the height and direction of the chains. The vegetation of the small and narrow islands, all encompassed by the sea, is very luxuriant, and the products, principally nutmegs, mace, and other spices, include also rice and sago. ”

“ Cortes, not yet resolved on submitting to the authority of Mendoça, fitted out two ships, under the command of Ferdinando de Grijalva and one Alvarado, on purpose to discover the route to the Moluccas by the way of the equinoctial line, because the islands of Cloves are under that parallel. They went first to St Michael de Tangarara, in Peru, where they landed succours for Pizarro, and thence, all along the line, to the Moluccas, as they were ordered; and they are said to have sailed above 1000 leagues without sight of land on either side the whole way. ”

“ But I will tell you that to go direct from these islands of the Ladrones to the Moluccas it is necessary to sail south-west a 1000 miles, and there occur many islands, to which we gave the name of the Archipelago of Saint Lazarus. A little further there are the islands of the Moluccas, of which there are five, namely, Ternate, Tidor, Molir, Machiam, Bachian. In Ternate the Portuguese had built a very strong castle before I left. ”

“ They openly asserted them, and pronounced this trade with the Moluccas by the Spanish an encroachment on their prior discoveries and possession, as well as a violation of the Papal Compact of 1494, and prepared themselves energetically for defense and offense. On the other hand, the Spaniards as openly declared that Magellan's fleet carried the first Christians to the Moluccas and by friendly intercourse with the kings of those islands, reduced them to Christian subjection and brought back letters and tribute to Cæsar. ”

“ Moluccas or Spice Islands (400) , an archipelago of mountainous islands, mostly volcanic, between Celebes and New Guinea, is in two main groups; in the N. the largest island is Jilolo, but the most important Tidor and Ternate, which export spices, tortoise-shell, and bees-wax; in the S. Buru and Ceram are largest, most important, Amboyna, from which come cloves; the people are civilised Malays; the islands are equatorial, but tempered by sea-breezes, and healthy; discovered by the Portuguese in 1521, they have been in Dutch possession since 1607, except when held by Britain 1810-1814. ”

“ The Philippines and Moluccas are commonly divided into two distinct Archipelagos; but, in my opinion, all these islands in reality form but one; and if they were all under one Sovereign, they would, doubtless, be comprehended under one designation.
The Philippines are attached to the crown of Spain, and the Dutch possess the Moluccas. These last are more deserving of consideration, and richer than the [252] first. They owe their fertility to the industry of a nation laborious, commercial, and addicted to cultivation. ”

“ Neopus, a Malayan eagle, is said to occur in the Moluccas. We find then only three characteristic Indo-Malay types in the Moluccas,—Criniger, Batrachostomus, and Treron. All are represented by distinct and well marked species, indicating a somewhat remote period since their ancestors entered the district, but all are birds of considerable powers of flight, so that a very little extension of the islands in a south-westerly direction would afford the means of transmission, but this could not well have been by way of Celebes, because the two former genera are unknown in that island. ”

“ Taking this, in conjunction with the absence of the two genera of Papuan kangaroos and the other smaller groups of marsupials, and we must be convinced that the Moluccas cannot be mere fragments of the old Papuan land, or they would certainly, in some one or other of their large and fertile islands, have preserved a more complete representation of the parent fauna. Most of the Moluccan birds are very distinct from the allied species of New Guinea ”

“ The desire to obtain the monopoly of the spice trade has been a potent force in the fashioning of Asiatic history. The Moluccas were, from the first, the objective of the Portuguese invaders, and no sooner had the white men found their way round the Cape of Good Hope and established themselves successively upon the coast of East Africa, in the neighbourhood of the Gulf of Aden and the Malabar coast, than Malacca, then the chief trading centre of the Malayan Archipelago, became the object of their desire. ”

“ Before leaving the Moluccas, it may be proper to acquaint the reader with some circumstances respecting the trade and state of these islands. Through the whole of the Moluccas, a bahar of cloves consists of 200 cattees, the cattee being three pounds five ounces haberdepoiz, so that the bahar is 662 pounds eight ounces English averdupois weight. For this bahar of cloves, the Dutch give fifty dollars, pursuant to what they term their perpetual contract; but, for the more readily obtaining some loading, I agreed to pay them sixty dollars. ”

“ Main events while at the Moluccas, are related substantially the same by the “Roteiro” (Stanley, pp. 23–25) as by Pigafetta, although much shorter. The “Roteiro” says however that the king of Tidore sent twenty-five divers to locate the leak of the “Trinidad.” The anonymous Portuguese (Stanley, pp. 31, 32) names the five Moluccas and mentions the island of Banda. See A. Bastian’s Indonesian oder die Inseln des Malayischen Archipel, which contains sections entitled: Die Mölukken (Berlin, 1884) ; Timor and umliegende Inseln (Berlin, 1885) : and Borneo und Celebes (Berlin, 1889) . ”

“ He died at Manila in February or March, 1627. After Saíd was carried away from Ternate, his son Modafar became king; the ruler of Tidore at that time was Cachil (or Prince) Mole. See Valentyn’s history of the Moluccas, in his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën, in the annals of Saíd’s reign and life are recorded in pp. 208–255 therein (a separate pagination, after the introductory sketch of the Netherlands dominion) . On pp. 3, 4 are listed the islands subject to Temate; they include Mindanao, the Talaut or Tulour group, Ceram, Amboina, Solor, the Moluccas proper, and many others. ”

“ His particular destination 135 was the Moluccas, which the Spaniards claimed as lying within the hemisphere granted to them by the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It appears that Magellan had seen some map, of unknown origin, on which was represented a strait instead of an open sea at the southern point of America—probably the conjecture of some geographer, for, says Humboldt, "dans le moyen âge les conjectures étaient inscrits religieusement sur les cartes." ”

“ Probably the cannon belonging to Magalhães's ship "Trinidad," which the Portuguese seized in October, 1522; they had built a fortified post on the island of Ternate in the preceding summer, their first settlement in the Moluccas. Ternate, Tidore, Mutir, and two others, are small islands lying along the western coast of Gilolo; on them cloves grew most abundantly when Europeans first discovered the Moluccas. ”

“ But our men, who sought not monsters but spices, neglecting this nonsense, went straight to the Moluccas, and they discovered them eight months after their admiral, Magellan, had fallen in Mauthan. The islands are five in number, and are called Tarante, Muthil, Thidore, Mare, and Matthien: some on this side, some on the other, and some upon the equinoctial line.
One produces cloves, another nutmegs, and another cinnamon. All are near to each other, but small and rather narrow. ”

“ A day’s sail took us off Amboyna, the capital of the Moluccas. It is one of the oldest European settlements in the East. The island is divided into two parts by the sea, a narrow sandy isthmus alone joining them. We sailed up the western inlet, the shores of which were lined by groves of cocoa-nut palm-trees, furnishing food and shade to the natives who dwell in the rude huts beneath them. We came to an anchor off the town of Amboyna. In few places we visited was the forest vegetation more luxuriant or beautiful than on this island. Ferns and palms of graceful forms were seen everywhere ”

“ The Moluccas form a considerable archipelago, which extends in longitude from Java to New Guinea. On the coasts of Papua, and adjoining islands, are formed colonies of the inhabitants of New Guinea, and which are dependencies on the Moluccas. The Dutch have factories in all the islands of this archipelago, but at Amboyna and Banda they have forts, and considerable establishments1. ”

“ They have dresses of cotton, and almost all the animals that we have, except the sheep, the ox, and the ass; but their horses are very small and feeble. The produce of camphor, of ginger, and of cinnamon, is great among them. Thence our men, having saluted this king, and heaped him with presents, directed their course to the Moluccas, which had been pointed out to them by the same king. They came to the shores of the island of Solo, where they heard that there were pearls as big as dove's eggs, and sometimes as hen's eggs, but which can only be fished up from the very deepest sea. ”

“ This island was at one time in possession of the Portuguese, who were said to have tyrannised over the natives. They were driven out by the Dutch, who are themselves accused of not being over careful of the well-being of the people they conquered. This island and several in a line to the south of it are known as the Moluccas, or Spice Islands. It was the original country of the clove, and here alone it was cultivated. Although the early visitors procured nutmegs and mace from the inhabitants, these were brought over from New Guinea, and the neighbouring islands, where they grew wild. ”