The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.

The city of Melaka, owing to her occupation by the Portuguese, has the privilege of being the most thoroughly described sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Southeast Asian urban centre, both in textual and iconographic sources. There are some ten to twelve known Portuguese sketches depicting various aspects of the city; ground plans of the fortress, plans of the whole city, maps of the city and its surroundings, or else panoramic views representing specific events in Melaka's history, such as the sieges by Aceh in 1568 or in 1629.

Relations between the sexes are one of the areas in which a distinctive Southeast Asian pattern exists. Even the gradual strengthening of the influence of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism in their respective spheres over the last four centuries has by no means eliminated this common pattern of relatively high female autonomy and economic importance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the region probably represented one extreme of human experience on these issues. It could not be said that women were equal to men, since there were very few areas in which they competed directly. Women had different functions from men, but these included transplanting and harvesting rice, weaving, and marketing. Their reproductive role gave them magical and ritual powers which it was difficult for men to match. These factors may explain why the value of daughters was never questioned in Southeast Asia as it was in China, India, and the Middle East; on the contrary, ‘the more daughters a man has, the richer he is’ (Galvão, 1544: 89; cf. Legazpi, 1569: 61).

The real issue at stake is the following: Since 1595 merchants from Holland and Zeeland have sent ships for trading purposes to several islands of the Indies that are not dependent upon Portugal. Now when the crews of these ships as well as the natives that were friendly to them had suffered great losses of lives and possessions due to the mischief of the Portuguese and their henchmen—unreliable and violent people who did not shrink from openly attacking the Dutch with force of arms—only then did the Dutch at long last fit themselves out to take revenge. After several hostilities from both sides Jakob van Heemskerck received command over an Amsterdam fleet of eight sails and with it he forced into submission on February 25th 1603 in the Strait of Singapore (that is, one of the two straits that separate Sumatra and Malacca) a Portuguese vessel, a so-called caracca, named Catarina and loaded with merchandise. merchandise. He released the crew and carried off the ship as a prize. Others have performe such exploits before and afterwards, yet because this feat of arms has caused the greatest stir, have decided to emphasize it in my enquiry so that one can easily judge the other events on basis of it.