R. Barnes The Majapahit dependency Galiyao

In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 138 (1982), no: 4, Leiden, 407-412

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THE MAJAPAHIT DEPENDENCY GALIYAO

The Nagara-Kërtagama contains a list of dependencies of Majapahit, including a series of islands in eastern Indonesia, among them Galiyao, Sumba, Solot and Timur (Pigeaud 1962, IV:34). In a recent article van Fraassen (1976) has attempted to identify Galiyao with Kalao between Saleier and Flores. I shall try on the contrary to bring Galiyao back to the Solor Archipelago. It speaks in favor of van Fraassen's choice that the name Galiyao appears in a sequence of locations around Sulawesi, but as Pigeaud notes, the list has no order, six remote islands being mentioned for example between Solor and Timor. Kalao does indeed look more like Galiyao than do the designations of any of the other islands or districts which have been suggested from time to time, and the strength of van Fraassen's position lies in this similarity. •There are a number of early sources for Galiyao. In a bopk first published in 1563, Galvao (1944:85, 170) describes the first Portu- guese expedition to the Moluccas as sailing in 1511 from Java past Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Solor, Galao and Malua (Alor). Pigafetta's account and chart of the "Victoria's" voyage into the Ombai Strait in January 1522 refer likewise to Galiau between Zolot and Mallua. Galian appears between Sulawesi and Buru'on the world map by Ortelius of 1564. Mercator's world map of 1569 places Galiam, Noceuamor and Zolot incorrectly in the Flores Sea to the north of Alor (Vatter 1932, table 7). His later map of the Far East joins Pantar and Lembata into one island named Louballo (Mercator 1636). Linschoten's map of Asia shows Guliam between Solor and Alor, but like other sources of the time does not distinguish Lembata from Pantar (Lin- schoten 1579-1592). The early map makers copied one another, and all those showing Galiyao derive one way or another evidently from Pigafetta.

Dr. R. H. BARNES, a social anthropologist lecturing at the University of Oxford, from which university he also holds a doctorate, is the author of Kédang: A Study of the Collective Thought of an Eastern Indonesian People, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Dr. Barnes may be contacted at the Institute of Social Anthropology, 51 Banbury Rd., Oxford, England.

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In a letter from Appolonius Schotte after his capture of the Solor fort in 1613 (Tiele and Heeres 1886, 1:19), Schotte mentions that the natives of Gallejau, like those of other locations, had come under the Dutch as a result of the Dutch taking the fort and that all had been in truce with the Portuguese when the Dutch had first appeared. Tiele remarks that he cannot determine whether Galiyao means Lomblen (Kawela). Galvao's Portuguese editor Visconde de Lagoa also identifies Galao with Lembata (known to him as Lomblen). In a letter of lst May 1614, A. van de Velde mentions Galiou as a place near Solor (Tiele and Heeres 1886:89). I agree with van Fraassen that Galiyao is not Lomblen. Kawela, a district in the southwest of Lembata, has never appeared significantly in history, and its name is phonetically unlike Galiyao. In 1733 Lucas de Santa Catharina (p. 793) described three islands a short distance from the island of Levoleba (i.e., Lembata) named Levotolo, Queidao and Galiao, contiguous with each other and separated by small straits. Their population were gentiles (that is, pagans) and Moors (Moslems), but there were no Christians. Never- theless, they maintained commercial ties with Larantuka. Santa Catharina derived his account of the islands almost word for word from a manuscript of 1624-1625 (see Fundagao ... 1956:487-488). Although the document contains a strange mixture of fact and confusion, it gives evidence about several features of local life for which there are no other sources until the nineteenth or even the twentieth centuries. Levotolo is Ilé Api, northeast of Lewoleba on Lembata. "Queidao" represents the first historical mention of Kédang, at the east end of Lembata. Following this sequence, Galiao would be the next location farther east. Beyond these three islands, four leagues (12 miles) distant, lies the island of Malua.1 Le Roux (1929), in a publication not cited by van Fraassen, has made the best effort to locate Galiyao. It is his opinion that Galiyao is the same as Kayan on Pantar. On 8th January, 1522, the "Victoria" sailed (according to Francisco Albo's diary) between two islands called la Maluco and Alicura, which Le Roux — quite correctly in my opinion — interprets as the two coastal trading villages Maloku on Pantar and Kalikur (in Kédang language Aliur) in Kédang on Lembata. Pigafetta mentions Galiyao among the islands they passed on that day and his map shows three large islands called Zolot, Galiau and Mallua. It has repeatedly been confirmed that Malua is a region of Alor (van Lynden 1851:329; Le Roux 1929:11; Vatter 1932:25; Bouman 1943: 484); so there can be no doubt on that score. However, there are two large islands (Lembata and Pantar), not just one, between Solor and Alor. Le Roux's explanation is that the two Tidorese pilots who were guiding the "Victoria" through the archipelago took their bearings across the sea on the isolated and prominent volcano Komba north

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of Lembata as they sailed from the direction of Buru. They then took their vessel through the Alor Strait between Lembata and Pantar and sailed along the south coasts of Pantar and Alor seeking protection from the strong storms which are always present at this time of year. Approaching the Alor Strait from the northeast, the crew of the "Victoria" would not have seen Solor,. which would have been com- pletely obscured by Lembata. Doubtless "Zolot" was for the Tidorese pilots a term which could be usied for the general area to the west of Kalikur. In Le Roux's interpretation, Pigafetta's Zolot is actually Lembata and his Galiau is Pantar. Le Roux has travelled through this area himself, as have I, and his interpretation is based on reliable practical experience. It may be said in passing that the. form "Solot" in the Nagara- Kërtagama and the equivalent in Pigafetta is more accurate than the version "Solor" later adopted by the Europeans and now fixed in common usage. The name of this island comes through an h/s shift from holot, as in Lamaholot (place of the people). If one looks at Pigafetta's map, which Le Roux reproduces (adjacent p. 10), one can see that the relationships between "Zolot", "Galiau" and "Mallua" correspond to those of Lembata, Pantar and Alor, pro- vided that one knows them only through an approach from the north- east and that the top of the chart is to the west, the right side to the north. Le Roux makes just these assumptions in his reconstructed map (facing p. 56). Pantar, likè "Galiau", is as Le Roux notes the only island surrounded by smaller .islands, and he satisfactorily identifies the latter with Pulau Komba, Lapan-Batang, Pulau Rusa, and Tere- weng. He leaves only one small dot of land near "Zolot" unexplained, and that might well be Pulau Suangi at the western tip of Lembata. It is interesting that Lembata is the only island recognizable from its shape on Diego Ribeiro's map of 1529 (Le Roux, facing p. 59), al- though again the island has been rotated so that the west end has been drawn to the north, the east to the south. I have never heard any mention of Galiyao by speakers of the Kédang or Lamaholot languages or by Europeans resident in the islands; and I am fairly sure that it is not applied to Lembata. I am less certain though that Le Roux is correct in holding that Galiyao (or Galian, if we assume a scribe's error) is a version of Kayan or Kayian, a village in west Pantar. The fac't that Schotte also referred to Galiyao would suggest that that pronunciation was the correct one. But for whatever reason, Galiyao appears to have been a name for Pantar, and the early map makers, not knowing that there were two islands in the area, did not bother to distinguish this Galiyao from Lembata. Leitao (1948:66), working from Portuguese sources, includes it in a list of various designations for Pantar: Galiao, Putar, Alao, Galécio and Pondai.

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Van Fraassen suggests that we may learn more from native sources. Indeed there is local confirmation of Javanese trade on Pantar. Ac- cording to the Nagara-Kërtagama, an expedition set out from Java in 1357 to subdue Dompo, Sumbawa. This force sailed further to the east, where it conquered many localities, including Larantuka, Flores (Brandes 1897:128, Le Roux 1929:47). Kayan, Maloku, Blangmerang and Bernusa are a series of settlements on the north coast of Pantar which speak a language akin to that used on Solor. The population is mostly of foreign origin, made up of a mixture of trading peoples from Ternate, Ujung Pandang, Buton and the nearby Solor or Lamaholot area. Local traditions recount that a colony of Javanese settled along the north coast of Pantar about five or six hundred years ago (Ano- nymous 1914:77), that is between 1300 and 1400 A.D. A legend recorded on the island during World War II (Talib in Lemoine 1969) tells how a Javanese named Modjopahit settled on the north coast at Blangmerang and later colonized Pandai and Bernusa on Pantar, Alor Besar on Alor, as well as Lembata. A second such story relates that the Javanese destroyed a kingdom on the northeast tip of Pantar called Muna. An earlier report of the same tradition (Anonymous 1914:77) recounts that the survivors from Muna fled to Alor, where they reestablished themselves on the coast and in the interior. Kayan itself is said to have once been located on the island of Marisa (Bouman in Le Roux 1929:15), and to have derived from these Javanese colonists. The clan Marisa of Kalikur on Lembata, which has historical ties with the population around Kayan, claims to descend from Majapahit Java- nese (Barnes 1974:11). Bouman wrote to Le Roux that his sources described to him a thick, golden finger ring which may be found on the uninhabited Pulau Rusa, where according to his informants the village of Maloku was once located. This ring lay on the beach in a large shell and received offerings from nearby seafolk. Later Bouman visited Rusa himself and described (1943:498), in addition to the object in the shell, a small, bronze Hindu figure on a knoll and an upright monolith near the beach of such regular shape that it appears to have been worked by human hands. The many potsherds and venerated bronze rings lying about derive, according to Bouman's companions on the trip, from the old inhabitants of Nuha Bawa, an island which sank into the sea after a volcanic eruption some sixteen generations ago, leaving behind Rusa and two other islands. That there was once an inhabited land between Pantar and Lembata may be taken as certain, for the legend of this disaster exists throughout the Lamaholot area, where many clans claim to have lived in the district variously called Keroko-Pukan or Lapan-Batang (Vatter 1932:9-10). Peoples on Lembata as distant from each other as those of Kédang and Lamalera regard Rusa as the abode of their dead.

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Whether these events have any connection with the Javanese can be determined no doubt only by geological and archaeological investi- gation. Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence permits the hypo- thesis that the Javanese set themselves up as rulers of the area around Pantar, including lands since disappeared, around 1357. The sixteen generations since Nuha Bawa sank would place the natural catastrophy about a century later, c. 1450.2 Vatter's estimation of the middle or end of the seventeenth century appears to me much too late. It may be that even the Dutch references to Galiyao, like the infor- mation on the maps they used, derive ultimately from Pigafetta. But if this were the case, there remains the remarkable coincidence that the Galiyao listed in the Nagara-Kërtagama turned up again in Piga- fetta's record when he sailed into the Ombai Strait. The early seven- teenth-century manuscript which Santa Catharina plundered precisely located Galiao between Kédang and Alor. The balance of evidence, therefore, favors Le Roux's identification of Galiyao with Pantar.

NOTES

1 I wish to thank Joao de Pina-Cabral for his help in reading Santa Catharina. 2 The region is still prone to major disasters affecting life and leading to migration. In July 1979, while the author was working in Lamalera, Lembata, several hundred persons died in three villages some twelve miles to the east through the combined effects of volcanic activity at sea, the tumbling of half of a mountain into the sea, sinking of land and tidal waves. For four days the Indonesian newspaper Sinar Harapan carried the erroneous report of the deaths of the author, his family and two colleagues.

REFERENCES Anonymous 1914 'Dé eilanden Alor en Pantar, Residentie Timor en Onderhoorigheden', Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genoot- schap 31:70-102. Barnes, R. H. 1974 Kédang: a study of the collective thought of an eastern Indonesian people, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bouman, M. A. 1943 'De Aloreesche dansplaats', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volken- kunde van Nederlandsch-Indié 102-3/4:481-500. Brandes, J. 1897 Pararaton (Ken Arok), Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genoot- schap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen 49, no. 1. Fraassen, Ch. F. van 1976 'Drie plaatsnamen uit Oost-Indonesië in de Nagara-Kertagama: Galiyao, Muar en Wwanin en de vroege handelsgeschiedenis van de Ambonse Eilanden', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 132-2/3: 293-305.

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Fundacao das Primeiras Cristandades nas llhas de Solor e Timor, 1956 transcrito do Códice 465, existente no Fundo Geral da Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Artur Basflio de Sa (ed.), Documentagao para a História das Missóes do Padroadö Portugüês do Oriente, Insulindia, vol. 4, Lisbon: Agenda Geral do Ultramar. '.'.-' Galvao, Antónia (Visconde de Lagoa, ed.) 1944 Tratado dos Descobrimentos, 3rd. ed., Porto: Livraria Civilizafao. Leitao, Humberto 1948 Os Portugueses em Solor e Timor de 1515 a 1702, Lisboa. Lemoine, Annie 1969 'Histoires de Pantar', L'Homme 9-4:5-32. Le Roux, C. C. F. M. 1929 'De Elcano's tocht door den Tïmorarchipel met Magalhaes schip "Victoria"', Feestbundel Uitgegeven door het Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen bij gelegenheid van zijn 150-Jarig Bestaan 1778-1928, vol. 2, Weltevreden: Kolff. Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 1579-1592 Itineraria. Voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan Huyghen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, vol. 3, Amsterdam: Claesz. Lynden, D. W. C. Baron van 1851 'Bijdrage tot de kennis van Solor, Allor, Rotti, Savoe en omliggende eilanden, getrokken uit een verslag van de Residentie Timor', Natuur- kundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië 2:317-336, 388-414. Mercator, Gerardus 1636 Atlas or a geographicke description of the world, Amsterdam: Hondius and Johnson. Pigeaud, Theodore G. Th. 1962 lava in the 14th Century. A study in cultural history. The Nagara- Kërtagama by Rakawi Prapahca of Majapahit, 1365 A.D., vol. IV. The Hague: Nijhoff. Santa Catharina, Lucas de 1733 Quarta. Parte da Historici de S. Domingós, Lisboa: Academia Real. Tiele, P. A., and J. E. Heeres (eds.) 1886 Bouwstoffen voor de geschiedenis der Nederlanders in den.Maleischen Archipel, vol. 1, The Hague: Nijhoff. Vatter, Ernst 1932 Ata Kiwan, unbekannte Bergvölker im Tropischen Holland, Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut.

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