In Tanimbar with Anna Keith Forbes, Henry Forbes and So’u Melatunan.
In the 1990s, I flew to East Indonesia, to the Tanimbar archipelago in Southeast Maluku, to try to make myself an anthropologist. For the previous two years, I had read everything I could get hold of about Tanimbar: travel accounts, academic papers, reports written by missionaries, obscure anthropological monographs. There wasn’t much to read, this was part of the appeal: Tanimbar seemed always on the periphery, a corner of the world perpetually on the fringes of great events.
What I did read allowed me to piece together a picture of life in the place that later became my home. From the anthropologist, Susan McKinnon, who carried out fieldwork in Tanimbar in the late 1980s, I learned of the Tanimbarese adventurer So’u Melatunan, who travelled through the world of the colonial Dutch powers, bringing back valuables, riches, and stories. From McKinnon, also, I learned how warfare was a ‘persistent fact of life’ in the Tanimbar islands, as if there were something about Tanimbar that was, and had always been, war-like.[1] It was a picture corroborated by the travel narratives of the 19th century travellers, Henry and Anna Forbes, and by their tales of inter-village warfare, head-hunting, and violence. So when, in her elegant account of her stay in Tanimbar, Anna Forbes concluded the Tanimbarese were, ‘a rude people subjected to no restraint,’ I took the war-like nature of the Tanimbarese for granted.[2] Even after I returned home, after I started to weave stories of my own about Tanimbar, I worked on the assumption that this is just how things were, and it was how they always had been. But more recently, I have started to wonder. What if this tale of the war-like Tanimbarese is more complex than it first seems? What if, like everything else, violence has a history? What if I, and everybody else, had got Tanimbar wrong?
What follows is a story of getting things wrong. It is a story about Henry and Anna Forbes. It is a story about So’u Melatunan, whose own tale was darker than I ever imagined. And it is a story about how I—a rude person, subjected to but little restraint—played my own small part in this history of violence.
Arrivals
On the 13th July 1882, after several days of rough seas and fog, the Scottish ornithologist Anna Keith Forbes and her naturalist husband Henry Ogg Forbes arrived in Tanimbar on board the steamer Amboina. It had been a miserable journey. In her 1887 book, Insulinde: Experiences of a Naturalist’s Wife in the Eastern Archipelago, Anna writes how the ship rolled in the heavy seas. They secured the cabin windows closed to keep out the spray and the rain.[3] But as they drew level with the island of Larat, the southmost island in the Tanimbar archipelago, things were looking brighter. The sun started to come out, and Anna started to feel more cheerful. From the deck, they could see the mangrove thickets and the coconut palms, and behind the low, scrubby forests, so different from the lushness of central Maluku.
They looked ashore, knowing this was to be their home for the next three months. The boat anchored near the village of Ritabel. The local people, who knew enough to be apprehensive about new arrivals, came to meet them in small dugout canoes. The Tanimbarese climbed on board, ‘talking in exuberant Papuan fashion,’[4] curious to find out about the new arrivals. It was Anna and Henry’s first meeting with their new neighbours. Anna was initially ambivalent towards the Tanimbarese. She was impressed by the physique of the Tanimbarese men. They were, she wrote, ‘powerful, athletic fellows, having rich chocolate-coloured skins and flowing manes of gold-hued hair, which gave them a most prepossessing air.’[5] But the women she found disappointing, with their ‘untidy mops and dingy sarongs.’[6] Two elderly men came on board the Amboina. They made gestures of raising a cup to their lips, and asked for laru, or alcohol. Anna and Henry obliged, serving them gin from the ship’s supplies. Then passengers and crew from the Amboina clambered down into the waiting canoes, and went ashore.
In Ritabel, Anna and Henry first went to meet the local post-holder, the resident official for the Dutch colonial regime, ‘an official who, by residence among the savage inhabitants, upholds the authority of the Government, and meanwhile impresses on the natives the benefits of civilisation.’[7] The post-holder was himself from Maluku, and had only been in Tanimbar for a few months. He was accompanied by his wife, their child, two police officers with their wives, and two hunters. He was, Anna said, was a ‘dreamy sort of man’, but his wife was more practical, and was a ‘wonderful little woman, full of energy and tact,’ who got on with the local people far better than her husband.[8] The post-holder’s house was still unfinished, but Anna and Henry rented a room, until they could find a site for a place of their own.[9] Inside the post-holder’s house, they sat and chatted for a while. The post-holder filled them in on the difficulties they had endured over the previous few months. Then the crew and other passengers from the Amboina rose to leave, and Anna and Henry waved them off from the shore.
They sat down on a packing-case and watched the steamer disappear over the horizon, ‘with feelings somewhat of desolation, and not without misgivings, left as we were without the possibility of communicating with civilization for at least three months to come.’[10]
I was 23 when I arrived in the Tanimbar islands in 1994, more than a century after Henry and Anna Forbes. For the previous few years, I had been a student of fine arts. But most of those years I spent in the library, haunting the anthropology stacks, reading up on the Mbuti and the Ik, the Nuer and the Azande, the Trobrianders and the Sa’dan-Toraja. I was entranced by anthropology, by the way it threw light on the parts of my own culture that seemed most unarguable, most necessary, and showed them to be contingent. I immersed myself in books that sung the wonders of human malleability, of the diversity of cultures. And I decided I wanted to join this great tradition, and to become an anthropologist myself.
After some scouring of the map, I settled on Southeast Maluku. I would go to the Tanimbar islands, and I would study the work of sculptors, those who carved in wood and stone. And if information on the Tanimbar islands was scarce, that was part of the point. In the gaps between what little information I could glean—the travellers’ tales, the monographs, the scholarly papers—my mind spun fictions and fantasies. I visited the stores of the British Museum to see their holdings from Tanimbar. I wrote to museums in the Netherlands, and took a research trip where I gazed at Tanimbarese wood-carvings: tavu household altarpieces and loru prow-boards from war-canoes, adorned with spirals and fighting cocks. In the art school, I painted images from Tanimbarese myth, stylised representations of the culture hero Atuf as he speared the sun into ten thousand parts. My tutors, understandably, were baffled.
Over the final years of my degree, I scraped together the funds for the research. I tracked down a bunch of small grants that, when added to my small earnings from busking, made a pot sufficient to cover my expenses. I persuaded the Universitas Pattimura in Ambon to sponsor my research, and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences to issue me with a permit. Then in 1994, shortly after graduating, I flew out to Indonesia.
It was a windy day in September 1995. The tiny Merpati airlines plane from neighbouring Kei circled over the rusted rooftops of Tanimbar, battling against cross-winds. The forest pitched and reeled beneath me. I thought about Henry and Anna Forbes. I thought about the artworks I had admired in shadowy museum stores. I thought of the foreigners who had come before me.
The plane came into land, hitting the tarmac hard. There were only eight or nine of us on the flight, but we clapped enthusiastically as we landed. The man in the seat across the aisle grinned at me: masih hidup, he said: ‘still alive.’
At the airport, a minibus was waiting to take us into town. The minibus dropped me off at the Harapan Indah, the ‘lovely hope’ hotel in the centre of town. I went in and booked the cheapest room they had: a dark, airless place on the first floor.
Warfare
When Henry and Anna arrived in Tanimbar, they had been married for two years. Henry had proposed in their native Aberdeen, before leaving on his expedition. Shortly afterwards, in 1878, he had departed for the Dutch East Indies, on a scientific voyage that was to last five years. Three years later, Anna followed him. She arrived in in the Indonesian archipelago in 1881; and on the 5th April that year, the two of them married in the Javanese city Buitenzorg, now known as Bogor.[11]
After their wedding, Henry and Anna travelled, cataloguing the rich fauna and flora of the region. Henry—despite having only one eye, and thus a poor aim (he lost the other eye while he was a medical student)—took charge of shooting specimens. Anna’s job was to take the specimens and prepare and preserve them.
Once they had settled in to Tanimbar, Anna and Henry took their leave of the post-holder, and went to explore. They were excited and apprehensive, and they were eager to find a place to build a house, so they could work undisturbed. As they attempted to leave the village of Ritabel, they were apprehended by the local villagers. In his book A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago — A Narrative of Travel and Exploration from 1878 to 1883, Henry told the story like this:
All round the village we found a high strong palisade, with a portion removable, however, on the shore side in the daytime. In attempting to pass out by the landward gateway, we were at once restrained by several of the villagers following us, who pointed to the ground in an excited manner, demonstrating to us its surface everywhere set with sharpened bamboo spikes, except along a narrow footpath. Their gestures instantly opened our eyes, with an unpleasant shock, to the truth that we were environed by enemies, and the village was standing on its defence.[12]
Unperturbed, the Scottish visitors edged along the footpath, and left the village, heading out into the forests and plantations beyond. From the first, Henry was entranced by the richness of the flora and the fauna. He netted a swallow-tail butterfly (Papilio aberrans). He found an iridescent beetle (Cyphogastra splendens). In the trees, he spotted a scarlet lory (Eos reticulata), a bird that later he would pride himself on being ‘perhaps the First European’ to see alive in its natural environment, and, ‘certainly the first to shoot.’[13]
It was close to sunset when they climbed the cliff-path to the village of Ridol. As they did so, they were stopped by a group of men from Ritabel. The villagers, Anna wrote, ‘with the most earnest insistence tried to hinder us from going farther.’[14] But Anna and Henry were too eager to see what lay at the top, and would not be stopped. At the end of the path, they found the village abandoned, half-burned to the ground, ‘and from the branch of a high tree before us a human arm, hacked out by the shoulder-blade dangled in the breeze, and at no great distance further were recently gibbeted human heads and limbs.’[15]
Anna and Henry clambered back down the hill. The men from Ritabel were waiting for them, and solicitously accompanied them back to the village. ‘I often recall my impressions of that hour with pleasure,’ Anna wrote imperturbably, as if coming across the site of a recent massacre was something of no consequence:
You could see us on the sea-beach at sundown,—would that I could fill in the picture so that you could distinctly imagine the group accompany us, and see the savage at home. Twenty lithe, handsome young fellows, their golden manes bound—some with scarlet cloth and some with yellow leaves—with bright feather or gay flower decorations stuck at the side and floating on their dark brown skins, capering round, waving their bows and arrows in the air, and brandishing their spears, and now and again drawing near to examine our clothes and touch our hands and faces.’[16]
One of the first people I met in Tanimbar was the Dutch Catholic pastor—the last of a lineage stretching back eighty years. I went to visit him in the pastoran, the church house just outside of Saumlaki. It was an enviable spot for a house: there were breezes coming in from the sea, and the little cottage was surrounded by low, scrubby gardens. Nearby, a group of seminarians was playing volleyball. They called out and waved as I passed them. I waved back.
The first official Catholic mission arrived in the Tanimbar islands in 1910, just over a quarter-century after Henry and Anna. The Dutch priests Father Cappers and Father Klerks came with petrol, gunpowder, and a small entourage of servants and assistants. Three years later, the first baptisms took place. A monument in the village of Olilit Tua still marked the place. The monument read: ‘a milestone in the history of the development of the Catholic religion in Tanimbar’[17]
I knocked on _pastoran _door. A slight, serious-looking man in his sixties appeared, and we introduced ourselves. His name was Pastor Cornelius Bohm. ‘Come in,’ Pastor Bohm said, ushering me over the threshold. He pulled out a chair for me to sit down. ‘Beer?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said.
As he went to fetch the beer, I examined the plastic sugar bowl on the table. On the bow was sign in Indonesian. ‘Please keep closed,’ the sign said. ‘Ants like sugar too.’
Pastor Bohm handed me a beer, and cracked one open for himself. We drank and chatted as the sun set, and the priest filled me in on what I needed to know about Tanimbar. He had been in the islands for years, and he was more knowledgeable about them than any outsider. When he found out I was interested in sculptures, he went over to a cabinet and took out some wood carvings. He handed them to me, one by one. They were made from kayu hitam, the local black wood, and were very finely carved. There were figures of women carrying baskets, of head-hunters, of warriors with spears. ‘These are all from the village of Tumbur,’ Pastor Bohm said, ‘There are many sculptors in the village. Once I tried to get the sculptors to make religious figures, you know? But they were derivative and without creativity. But these… these are something special.’
‘This one,’ the Pastor said, picking up a sculpture, ‘is a head-hunter. The Tanimbar islands used to be a war-like place. But these days, the people play football instead.’
Before I left, the Pastor gave me a large, yellow book that looked as if it had been run off on a photocopier. It was the Indonesian translation Petrus Drabbe’s ethnography of the Tanimbar islands, first published in Dutch in 1940. ‘You will find this interesting,’ he said. ‘Also, do you need a typewriter? We have one somewhere that you can borrow. It might be useful. I’ll see if I can find it. Come back in a few days’ time.’
I thanked him and left, the book under my arm.
A week later, I caught a boat out to the island of Sera, a little way to the west. I had heard that there was a sculptor in the village of Rumah Salut, and I was eager to meet him. The sculptor was called Matias Fatruan, and he carved strange, fantastical creatures that he wouldn’t allow me to photograph. We spent a week or two together, talking about art and Tanimbarese history. Matias was disabled. Several years before, he had fallen from a coconut palm and shattered his legs. For several years, he had made a scant income from carving images. It was clear he was bored. He enjoyed the company and the attention. But he was also suspicious of me. He told me he didn’t trust me, because I had come to steal from him. I protested that I was there only to find out about his work, to tell the world about the sculptors of Tanimbar. But Matias stopped me. ‘I do not think that you have come to steal with the hands,’ he said. ‘I am afraid that you have come to steal with the eyes.’[18]
I travelled back to Saumlaki a few days later, and moved back into the Harapan Indah. But Tanimbarese friends told me I shouldn’t waste my money on hotel bills, so they fixed up for me to stay nearby in the village of Olilit Baru, where I rented a room from Ibu Neli, a local schoolteacher who lived alone with her son Lucky. Ibu Neli’s place was perfect. She was a solicitous host. At breakfast time, she gave me hot, sweet tea to drink, and platefuls of bread and margarine, sprinkled with crystal sugar. She treated me like an adopted son, usually indulgent and sometimes stern. She set me up with a room of my own, a small corner of the middle room of the house with a curtain that I could pull closed in the evening. I had a desk and a chair set up by the window. I picked up the typewriter from Pastor Bohm and settled into the routine of work.
I started to make networks of friends. People invited me out for picnics. They included me. They suffered my faltering Indonesian with good grace. They put up with my idiot questions. And they ribbed me gently about how I was not getting any younger, and should think about marrying a local woman before it was too late.
My main base was in Ibu Neli’s house. But I took trips out by bus, by boat and on foot to remote villages. I recorded conversations on my small portable tape-recorder. ‘We are impressed,’ my Tanimbarese friends said kindly. ‘You have come all this way to find out about our lives. You have come all this way for knowledge.’
One evening, I was sitting at my desk and working when I heard a commotion outside. I got up and went to see what was happening. Ibu Neli was ushering a small group of people into the house. They were distant relatives and had come on foot from the village of Wowonda, a distance of twelve miles. Ibu Neli gave them tea, and asked them what had happened.
They were afraid, they said. They were fleeing out of fear for their lives, because the village of Wowonda was at war with the neighbouring village of Ilgnei. The skirmish had arisen out of a dispute in the pool hall in Saumlaki. An unmarried man from Wowonda, in his early twenties, was sent into town by his family to buy rice. He staked the money on a game of pool, and he lost. In an attempt to win back the lost money, he played again, this time staking his jeans. Once again he lost. He stripped off his trousers and handed the prize over to the victor. Then he walked home along the sea shore, bare-legged and humiliated. He reappeared in Wowonda after dark, without rice, money, trousers or dignity. His relatives beat him. Then they asked him what had happened. He told them about the pool game, and said his opponent was from the neighbouring village of Ilgnei. So the men-folk of Wowonda gathered together and dressed for battle, armed with bows, spears and arrows. Then they marched on the neighbouring village. The people of Ilgnei either fled, or else barricaded themselves into their homes, praying their enemies would not burn their houses down while they were inside. The warriors from Wowonda waved their spears, yelled belligerently, and torched a few unoccupied buildings. Then they returned to Wowonda. But now the village was on a war-footing. And so some of the women and children from Wowonda, fearing reprisals, had slipped away southwards, to end up on our doorstep.
Ibu Neli gave the refugees tea and said they could stay as long as they liked. She said that her connections in the Catholic Church would be able to mediate the dispute, and there was nothing to worry about. A few days later, the refugees drifted back to Wowonda, and I heard nothing more of the dispute. But when I travelled north through Ilgnei on the bus a couple of weeks later, I saw the remnants of the burned-out building.
Headhunting
In Tanimbar, for a long time warfare has been tangled up with the hunting of heads. Writing in the early 1990s, Susan McKinnon argued that even if headhunting was no longer an integral part of warfare in Tanimbar, it remained ‘an integral part of people’s consciousness.’[19] In the dry season, the traditional season for the taking of enemy heads, there were regular headhunting scares. If headhunting was no longer practiced the fear of headhunting was still alive. Tanimbarese friends still told tales and circulated rumours of headhunters from elsewhere. And it was possible to detect a strange nostalgia for these days of heady violence. ‘Today,’ my Tanimbarese friends sometimes told me, ‘we are modern. We no longer do these things.’ And when they said things like this, it was possible to detect a note of sadness.
One day, Ibu Neli and her friend, Suster Astrid, invited me to the school kitchen to teach her to make courgette cake. Suster Astrid was one of my favourite people in Tanimbar. She was a nun who worked both in the school and the local clinic, and she seemed almost supernaturally cheerful. I never met anybody who said a word against her. She teased and cajoled Ibu Neli, and seemed to overflow with an ebullient liveliness that knew no limits. I had been talking with Ibu Neli about courgette cake, and she suggested I teach them how to make it, so they could raise funds for the school. So I took an afternoon away from my desk, and we grated courgettes in the school kitchen, and Suster Astrid chatted about her work in the hospital.
‘We get a lot of men who have fought with people in next-door villages,’ she said. ‘Some of them have bad injuries. People get drunk and angry, and they forget they are no longer headhunters.’
It took less than three weeks for Anna and Henry to build their new house. It was just by the tide-line, raised up on stilts, and spacious enough to carry out their work, and to receive guests, who came crowding in in large numbers, trying to gain intelligence about these new arrivals. There was a certain mutual suspicion between the Scottish naturalists and their Tanimbarese hosts. But from their written accounts, it seems that Anna was more at home in Tanimbarsese society than was Henry. Anna seems to have got on well with the people of Ritabel. She spent time with the young mothers of the village. She played with their babies (the babies, she said, were ‘good, interesting little creatures, profusely adorned with beads’).[20] But Henry were more preoccupied himself with matters of science. For him, the Tanimbarese not so much people to hang out with as they were fascinating specimens to be studied. ‘The people that came about us to gaze,’ he wrote, ‘were all subjects deserving the closest study.’
Their every gesture and every custom had to be watched with microscopic acuteness, if we were to improve our opportunities and not fail in deciphering the story—only thus recorded and to be ere long blurred and blotted by foreign contact—of their race, incessantly being unfolded before us in their every unconscious word and commonest action.[21]
Henry soon made clear to the people of Ritabel that he was keen to accumulate natural history specimens to add to his collection. And of all natural history specimens, it was human skulls that interested him the most.[22] Over the three months he was in Tanimbar, he gathered together eleven skulls which were later ferried back to the British Museum, where they were studied by Dr. J.G. Garson, from the Royal College of Surgeons. Because when you have a person’s skull in your hand, you can at last begin to understand them. You can have their person at your disposal. You can finally know with whom you are doing business. It is almost as if you have a part of their soul.[23]
When Henry’s enthusiasm for collecting skulls became clear to the people of Ritabel, the Forbes’s new home became a frequented by visitors eager to sell body parts. Anna, who was at the time suffering from fever, wrote that, ‘it having got abroad that H. wanted skulls,’ the Tanimbarese ‘imagined that skulls and bones of any kind would be equally acceptable, and gathered from the refuse-heaps near the village all they could find, offering them with such a clamour that I was quite irritated in my weakness.’[24]
But not all sellers were equally eager. Sometimes, they would only part with these natural history specimens with reluctance. Henry wrote of how he bartered with a man to buy his father’s skull. ‘It seems,’ he wrote, as if there existed in these countries a superstitious dread of any part of their person being in possession of another. One day, when I purchased from a man his father’s skull, something of the same dread appeared; for as soon as the bargain was completed, the seller took from his luvu (or siri-holder) a piece of areca-nut, and, setting the skull before him, he placed the nut between its teeth, and before handing it over to me, he repeated a long and devout invocation.[25]
A Boy Named So’u
Almost everybody agrees that Tanimbar has been, from the very beginning of time, a place suffused by violence, by warfare and by headhunting. Beginning in the 17th century, travellers to the region have all told the same story: the villages on cliff-top positions, surrounded by tall defensive palisades; the inter-village feuds; the traditions of hunting heads.[26] And my friends in Tanimbar told me the same story. Tanimbar, they said, was a place with a proud warrior past. Once the Tanimbarese were indeed a rude people, subjected to no restraint. They were naturally given to hunting heads and to acts of savagery Brave and courageous, they were in need of taming. And so—through baptism, through football, through the benevolence of the colonial regime, through the good offices of the Indonesian state—the people of Tanimbar slowly entered into the shared circle of humanity and civilisation.
But there is good reason to think that this story doesn’t add up. And here, the story of So’u Melatunan—adventurer, trickster, storyteller, traveller—may be instructive. I first stumbled across So’u in McKinnon’s From a Shattered Sun, a work of beautiful and intricate ethnography that, as a young anthropologist a quarter century ago, I carried with me through the Tanimbar islands like a bible. From the stories that McKinnon tells, So’u emerges as a kind of culture hero, a trickster figure who journeys among savages, and brings home treasures and tales. According to McKinnon, So’u—who was also known as Falaksoru Melatunan—was from the village of Rumya’an. It was in his home village that he first met the people the Tanimbarese called the Portugis, but who were, in fact, the Dutch. According to the story, a small fleet of Dutch ships arrived in the village, and So’u went on board. Quick-witted and adventurous, he remained on ship, and he went off adventuring with these savage outsiders. So’u took with him a stinking hunk of ambergris that had been found on the beach at Nus Wotar by the people of the Bungaa lineage. The ambergris was named ‘Fish Shit’, because of its stench.[27] The Bungaa folk did not know what to do with it, so they gave it to So’u, so he might exchange it with the Portugis
When the Portugis departed, So’u left with them. And because the Portugis were savages, who didn’t know how to speak his name, they inducted So’u into their rites, and gave him a new name: henceforth, they said, you will be Cornelis Falcksoor. And this is the name he came to be known as in the strangers’ books. So’u travelled to Ambon, to Banda, even as far as Batavia. He was skilled in the arts of exchange. With the Portugis, he traded Fish Shit for one hundred and sixty elephant tusks. He journeyed to the island of Roti, far to the west, where the people are said to be more cunning than any snake;[28] and there he tricked the noble households out of their heirloom gold—their shining breast pendants, and their armbands made of shells. He went to Banda, to the place where the Portugis fashioned intricate valuables from gold. He snuck in to the place where the strangers fashioned gold, and he made the gold stick to his feet. Then he walked right out, bold as anything, and nobody noticed his deception.[29]
In this way, So’u became famous. And when he at last returned to Tanimbar, he brought with him great riches. He brought back the one hundred and sixty elephant tusks, keeping one hundred himself, giving the other sixty to the people of the Bungaa folk. He brought a box carved from ivory. Carved on the lid of the box was a naked man who stood by a tree, around which was wrapped a great serpent. He brought a knight’s armour, and a dagger, the hilt made of copper.[30] And he brought many stories of his travels.
For years, I imagined So’u as a kind of trickster-storyteller, the Odysseus of Maluku, sailing the outer fringes of Dutch imperial might in the middle of the seventeenth century, getting himself in and out of scrapes. But when you look more closely, Sou’s story is more complex and unsettling: from the Dutch colonial records, a darker picture emerges. In a letter dated to 1685, sent from the Banda islands in central Maluku, So’u is implicated in a massacre of 150 people in the village of Alouta in Babar, to the West of Tanimbar, and in the selling of the survivors into slavery—presumably to the Dutch.[31] He crops up several more times in the records, where he invariably involved in murder, slave-trading and havoc, a lone operator who is increasingly a thorn in the side of the colonial powers. The last time he appears is in a letter at the end of the seventeenth century. It is 1692, and by now, So’u is back in Tanimbar, where he has come to the attention of the Dutch authorities for having committed several murders, including that of the merchant, Aarnout de Begue.[32] The authorities are unsure what to do with him. On the one hand, they propose to should send a militia to arrest him; on the other hand, So’u is popular in Tanimbar, and his arrest will cause consternation among the Tanimbarese who—being ‘strong, stout and courageous’—might well resist. So in the end, the order to arrest him remains unexecuted.
Later, in his Beschrijvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie 1639–1701, or ‘Description of the East Indies Company 1639–1701’, Pieter van Dam writes of the people of the Tanimbar islands, how they are ‘warlike, strongly built, tough and treacherous’, and he adds that out of all of them, ‘the greatest and most prominent rabble-rouser and scoundrel’—the word in the original is ‘roervinck’, literally meaning ‘stir-finch’—is Falcksoor.[33]
After this, So’u disappears from the records for good.
The History of Violence
What, then, of the history of violence, here in the margins of the world? The scholar Antoinette Schapper writes of how the defensive villages found by Henry and Anna Forbes in the Tanimbar islands are part of a broader pattern of fortification that stretched from the eastern tip of Timor in the west, to the Aru islands in the east. Across this whole region, from the 17th century, almost all villages in southern Maluku were fortified. And this is weird: sporadic fortification of villages took place elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago, but in Southern Maluku, ‘stone walls fortifying villages were the rule rather than the exception.’[34]
Visitors to the area from the middle of the 17th century generally assumed this had always been the case. And yet the evidence gathered by Schapper suggests otherwise. Accounts from very early in the 17th century suggest that fortifications were uncommon, and that they emerged only towards the end of first half of the century, with the building of fortifications intensifying as the century continued. This is corroborated by carbon-dating of fortified sites in Timor, in the far West of the region. Schapper writes that, ‘village fortification began in the early 17th century and was in full swing by the mid 17th century.’
If this is so, the question is why this sudden militarisation of the villages of Southern Maluku? Schapper identifies one cataclysmic event: the massacre on Banda carried out by the Dutch in 1621. In this year, claiming treaty violations, the governor-general of the VOC, or Dutch East Indies Company, Jan Pieterszoon Coen turned up with a Dutch fleet, sixteen hundred soldiers and one hundred Japanese mercenaries, and he seized direct control of the islands. It was necessary, he wrote, ‘that Banda be once and for all subjugated, and populated with other people.’[35] In other words, his aim was to wipe out the population, and turn the islands into a slave colony. Of the fourteen thousand Bandanese, many died fighting, many more died of sickness and starvation, and thousands fled to the relative safety of other parts of Maluku. By the end of Coen’s campaign, only 480 people remained. Schapper argues the massacre was a ‘triggering event’ that ‘sent shock waves through Maluku as the Bandanese survivors fanned out across the Maluku islands.’ And it was in the wake of this trauma that the rush to village fortification began.
But the story of So’u Melatunan adds another piece to this history of violence. A buccaneer on the fringes of colonial Dutch power, So’u takes advantage of the growing chaos brought about by the Dutch, as he murders, enslaves and trades in human lives, equally parasitic on local populations and on the Dutch infiltrators. There must have been other So’u Melatunans as well, riding the cresting waves of violence and disorder for personal gain. In the face of this—caught between the stir-finch So’u and the brutal Dutch colonial powers, between violence and violence—what else is there to other than build walls and ramparts and defences?
By the time Henry and Anna arrive two centuries later, violence is well-embedded in Tanimbar, and the Scottish travellers marvel to find themselves among warlike headhunters. And as Henry goes round politely asking to buy up heads, the local people are obliging: not because they don’t care for the remains of their ancestors, but because the polite, good-humoured requests of this mild-mannered Scotsman are backed up by a history of over two hundred years of violence and exploitation. So the people of Tanimbar hand over the skulls of their fathers, their loved ones, in exchange for a few bits and pieces, a few scraps, they wait for the next turn in the cycle of violence, and they hope for the best. And when, towards the end of the century after, at the tail-end of this history of violence, a young English anthropologist—a rude person, subjected to no restraint—sits in the dark of a sculptor’s house, and the sculptor says, ‘you have come to steal… not with the hands, but with the eyes,’ the anthropologist smiles and nods, and begins to understand a little.
A little, but not enough.
Notes
This essay was first published in Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine (Anthem Press).
[1] Susan McKinnon, From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 7.
[2] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 178.
[3] Anna Forbes, Insulinde: Experiences of a Naturalist’s Wife in the Eastern Archipelago (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1887), p. 138
[4] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 126.
[5] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 139.
[6] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 178.
[7] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 140.
[8] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 147.
[9] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 140
[10] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 142
[11] Roy Ellen, ‘The Contribution of H.O. Forbes to Indonesian Ethnography: A Biographical and Bibliographical Note.’ Archipel, 16:1 (1978), pp. 135–159.
[12] Henry O. Forbes, A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago: A Narrative of Travel and Exploration from 1878 to 1883 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), p. 303
[13] Forbes, Wanderings, p. 304
[14] Forbes, Insulinde, p. 143
[15] Forbes, Wanderings,_ _p. 304
[16] Forbes, _Insulinde, _p. 144
[17] Will Buckingham, Stealing with the Eyes: Imaginings and Incantations in Indonesia (Haus Publications, 2018), p. 24
[18] Ibid., p. 54
[19] Susan McKinnon, From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 8.
[20] Forbes, _Insulinde, _p. 155
[21] Forbes, Wanderings, p. 307
[22] Sandra Pannell, ‘Travelling to Other Worlds: Narratives of Headhunting, Appropriation and the Other in the “Eastern Archipelago”’, _Oceania _62 (1992), pp. 162-178.
[23] This is a well-worn theme in the literature. See, for example, Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930 (Palgrave 2010). Garson’s findings are published in his paper, ‘On the Cranial Characters of the Natives of Timor-Laut,’ _Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland _vol. 13 (1884), pp. 386-402.
[24] Forbes, _Insulinde, _p. 164
[25] Forbes, Wanderings, p. 309
[26] McKinnon, _Shattered Sun, _pp. 4-8
[27] McKinnon, _Shattered Sun, _p. 50
[28] This comes from my friend Grace Susetyo, herself of Rotinese heritage: the saying goes that if you see somebody from Roti contending with a snake, you should first save the snake.
[29] McKinnon, Shattered Sun, p. 60
[30] J. B. J. van Doren, ‘De Tenimber-eilanden, ten zuid-westen van de Keij-eilanden,’ in: Bijdragentot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië. (1864), 67–101.
[31] Generale missiven van gouverneurs-generaal en raden aan heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, vol 4 (1675–1683, GS 134), p. 173. See also the note in McKinnon, Shattered Sun, p. 60.
[32] Generale missiven van gouverneurs-generaal en raden aan heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, vol 5 (1686-1697, GS 150), p. 518.
[33] Thanks to Alexia Lagast for the translation here, and for her help in unpicking this sorry tale.
[34] Antoinette Schapper. (2019). ‘Build the wall: Village fortification, its timing and triggers in southern Maluku, Indonesia.’ Indonesia and the Malay World, 47:138, p. 240.
[35] Quoted in J. A. M. Straver, Vaders en dochters. Molukse historie in de Nederlandse literatuur van de negentiende eeuw en haar weerklank in Indonesië (Leiden University Doctoral Thesis, 2018), p. 90.
Image: Women cleaning the village steps in the village of Sangliat Dol. Photograph copy Will Buckingham 1995.
