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A History of Trade in the Sea of Melayu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Leonard Y. Andaya
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Extract

The first reference to a ‘Sea of Melayu’ is from an Arabic document dated c. 1000, which noted that travellers ‘reaching the Sea of Melayu, were approaching the area of China’. While the location of the Sea of Melayu is not specified, the practice of naming a sea after a dominant people surrounding its shores suggests that this particular body of water must have been the Straits of Melaka. This is clear in the only other known reference to the use of this name, which is found in Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay written in 1613 by Emanuel Godinho de Eredia, a Eurasian Jesuit born in Portuguese Melaka. Eredia refers to the Sea of Melayu as that ‘land-enclosed sea between the mainland of Ujontana [Malay Peninsula] and the Golden Chersonese [Sumatra]’. He was clearly referring to the Straits of Melaka, though it was obviously not yet called that by his contemporaries. Eredia's description of that ‘land-enclosed sea’ clearly reveals a commonly held assumption of the greater significance of a land mass over a body of water. But for Malays and many other sea and riverine peoples, the focus was on water, not land, and entities were formed by seas and rivers joined by short land passages.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 87 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2000

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References

Notes

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6 See L.Y. Andaya, ‘The Search for the Origins of Melayu’ (in press).

7 Sources for the trade in Southeast Asia up to the fifteenth century are few and scattered. While documents for the early modern period (c. 1500-c. 1800) are somewhat better, they are principally focused on major entrepots or coastal kingdoms. I have tried in this essay to rely solely on authors who have used contemporary materials in reconstructing the past, but at times I have resorted to using later accounts where one could argue that later practices may have been similar to those of an earlier period.

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82 Barnard, ‘Multiple Centres’, 64–65, 77, 80–83.

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92 The history of Srivijaya is a history of the interrelations between Java and Sumatra. See L.Y. Andaya, ‘The Search’, 5–8, passim. So intertwined were the fortunes of both areas that the Persians and Arabs tended to view them as belonging to one kingdom. Ferrand, G., Relations des Voyages et Textes Géograhiques Arabes, Persans el Turks Relatifs a l'Extréme-Orient du VII au XVIII Siècles (Paris 1913) 91–94Google Scholar, 99–100.

93 Wolters, Fall of Srivijaya; L.Y. Andaya, Kingdom of Johor.