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ince times immemorial, ’s seas have been : The Art of Indonesian Shipbuilding natural crossroads of migration, communication and Scommerce. Human conquest of the Pacic began here millennia ago and unied seafaring and trade among Horst H. Liebner, PhD, MA Association for the Protection of Maritime Cultural Heritage diverse people and customs into a cultural zone once known as the Malay world. €e vehicles powering these developments were the perahu , the countless types of indigenous vessels, the legacy of the perhaps most sophisticated maritime traditions of our world. Indonesian sailing vessels are classied by two terms, one for the rig and and another for shape and type of the hull. €e pinisi (/peeneeseek/), which today epitomizes Indonesian perahu shipping, refers only to the vessel’s , a -plan of seven to eight sails recalling the western - that came into use by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet, a pinisi’s hull would be constructed following tradi- tions that contravene modern western naval architecture: It is not assembled around a framework sheathed with planks, but built as a shell of planks connected to one another with wooden dowels, into which frames are only later inserted. One An eighth century Indonesian , depicted on panel 1.86 could call the pinisi a hybrid vessel, were it not the truly indig- on the Borobudur Temple © Horst Liebner enous arrangement and handling of the sails, the two long A pinisi lying o! the rudder blades that substitute the single central rudder used on requires many hands, and in modern times labor and wages bridge at Tonrang, western , and the harmony of hull and that mark have become more important factors, even in seemingly tradi- , c. 1937, the pinisi as a type of its own. tional economies. Today, the picturesque vessels available for Coll# 3807 © Koninklijk Still today, pinisi are constructed in the villages of Tana holiday charters, which are marketed as ‘phinisi’ due to some Instituut vor Taal Beru and Ara, for centuries a main hub of shipbuilding on obscure pronunciation issues, carry masts much too short to the southern coast of Sulawesi, an island in the center of the move the ship with sails alone. Almost none of these ships use archipelago. Here, the age-old art of indigenous shell-rst the genuine because an engine requires proper fasten- assembly developed into sophisticated blueprints that ings for its propeller-sha" and midship rudder, features the pre-determine arrangements, lengths, and forms of the many traditional sailing hull cannot provide. An alternative became planks needed, establish the positions of the hundreds of the , a square-sterned hull that copies European designs dowels used to t the planks together, and précise the places developed in the #$%&s for small, -rigged ( nade ) trad- were frames will be inserted. When the rst local vessels were ers that would carry a central rudder. However, patterns used to be rigged as pinisi, the modied schooner sails were set on to construct a lambo are not overly di1erent to those used to hulls constructed by a plan called tatta tallu (three-times-cut) build a palari or salompong: To achieve a technically sound enlarged by additional plank-strakes. However, the stepped structure, positions of dowels, planks, and frames have to be bow and overhanging a" deck of the resulting lopi (ship) dened before the building process commences, and while salompong are in more or less the same style already found on form and sizes may vary, the applied routines use the same portrayals of Indonesian ships recorded by the rst western concepts, terminologies, and solutions. intruders: the shipwrights continued a centuries-old tradition, Unquestionably, the complexity of these approaches mark now modied to produce the sharper form of a salompong the art of Indonesian shipbuilding, and their very adaptabil- palari (running salompong) that could better handle the driv- ity helped such traditions survive into our computerized age. ing power of the new sails. Sometime in the late #$%&s, the €e biggest vessels recently built in southern Sulawesi reached people of Ara developed a new pattern for the pinisi, the lengths of over "y meters with cargo capacities of a thousand ‘four-times-cut, allowing for larger hulls with a more *exible metric tons, yet alongside these leviathans were small plank pattern that avoided the salompong “step” on the bows (net-shing boats) constructed according to the tatta tallu and better integrated the a"-deck, the genuine palari. pattern. As demonstrated by comparable patterns for position- Today, true pinisi are all but gone. In the #$+&s the once ing dowels and arranging a hull’s planks on two recently found biggest *eet of sailing merchantmen le" in this world was shipwrecks of the seventh and the ninth centuries CE, such motorized, and soon the pinisi’s sails became a mere support procedures must have also governed the construction of the for the engine. With increasingly bigger engines, the canvas sailing cra" depicted on the Borobudur: €e construction of a was reduced in size, and by the end of the #$0&s the mizzen seagoing vessel has always involved highly specialized knowl- masts of the few remaining ships were removed, thus rescind- edge and sophisticated cognitive e1orts, the very substance of ing the very denition of the ships’ name. Using many big sails intangible heritage. „

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