Rahul Goswami :
Amongst the many risky professions in 19th century South-East Asia was that of the hydrographer. As the cartographer mapped land and terrain, so the hydrographer charted the seas and bays. If he was well funded by a rajah or a colonial governor, the cartographer enlisted all manner of people but especially those who could interpret the notebooks and annals of earlier periods, so that useful correspondences could be made between what he was measuring and marking, and what had been chronicled earlier.
A competent cartographic unit collected as much evidence as it could from as many sources they could find – the oral histories of elderly folk, notebooks, fragments of maps of earlier ages, administrative records, tales and legends, records of commerce.
And so it was with hydrographers too. To chart the waters they pored over the log books of sea captains and navigators, and consulted long with fishing folk, whose ancestors had carried the first charts in their minds and who knew the ways of the waves just as the farmer knows soil. But the land is mapped and marked more readily than the water, and in the 19th century it was politics local and colonial that was the hydrographer’s bane.
In the seas, both the British and Dutch jockeyed over where their maritime frontier would lie and so accurate hydrographic readings became more and more important to international diplomacy and trade. But much as both the colonial powers needed up-to-date and reliable hydrography, they too created conditions that made it difficult for all but the most foolhardy, or the most reckless, of hydrographers to flourish.
Where formal hydrography was concerned, it had never been otherwise. The would-be sea charters of 19th century colonial South-East Asia saw in their unsteady commissions a chance to win renown as had their predecessors: such as Antonio Pigafetta who in 1534 provided the engraved maps contained in the volumes of Magellan’s ‘Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation’; Thomaso Porcacchi, the Italian, and his ‘L’isole piu famose del mondo’, published in Venice (1576); Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas whose ‘Descripcion de las Indias Occidentales’ was published in Madrid in 1601; Willem Janszoon Blaeu whose work in two parts, ‘Nouvel atlas du Theâtre du monde’ found upon its release in Amsterdam, 1638-1640, a waiting audience; Arnoldus Montanus who issued in 1669 the ‘Gedenkwaerdige gesantschappen der Oost-Indische maatschappy’; Nicolas Sanson who completed his well-known ‘Geographische en historische beschryvingh der vier bekende wereldsdeelen’ in Utrecht, 1683; or Georges-Louis Le Rouge with his ‘Atlas nouveau portatif’ Paris, 1748.
But the 19th was a different century, with powerful interests competing against each other and a host of regional challengers. And that is why evolving priorities are reflected in hydrographic maps of the period, especially in places like Eastern Borneo which abutted the Anglo-Dutch frontier.
Relationships were needed with the many small polities existing along this frontier – in places well marked and in others imaginary – in order for these colonial states to be able to undertake their hydrographic measurements. Yet as European power was still comparatively underdeveloped until late in the century, especially hydrographically, complex arrangements were formulated to bind these relationships.
In Jambi, the sultan was made responsible by contract for the safety of shipwrecked Dutch seamen (but not others, and we anyway have it on no authority whether the contract signed was honoured). The sultan of Gunung Tabur in East Borneo was punished for his involvement in sponsoring piracy, but meanwhile foolish novice cartographers and greedy traders were reckoned to sometimes disappear off his shores, apparently at the connivance of the ruler himself. In Riau, letters written in the Bahasa of the period show how mapping expeditions were forced upon local rulers – the British and the Dutch believed that these rulers had little say as to whether their domains should be surveyed or not, but their rate of success at mapping is not a subject dwelt upon at length by either colonial administration.
More curious still, despite their adversarial relationship, there was some attempt at cooperation of a reluctant sort between the two colonial regimes. Both Batavia and Singapore were required by treaty to send copies of all agreements signed with local potentates to each other, so that their metropolitan capitals could judge how sound contacts were along the border.
Naturally, local rulers (from sultan to chieftain) paid close attention to the evasive possibilities of this complicated system – and there were many, to be exploited for profit or piracy – while also trying to play off one European power against another to further their own independence. In such a milieu did the chartmakers toil to describe the seas through which, unconcerned about frontiers and their soldiers, the great archipelagos sprawled.
(Rahul Goswami is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia)
