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History of East Timor: the sandalwood island in its early travel accounts

Long before any European arrived, Timor was known across the archipelago and as far as China for its white sandalwood. Around 1225 the customs inspector Zhao Rugua listed it among the lands dependent on Java; around 1349 the merchant Wang Dayuan described its mountains thick with sandalwood and the junks that came to load it, at the risk of fever. In 1365 the Javanese poem Nagarakertagama counted the island among the tributaries of Majapahit.

The Portuguese, masters of Malacca from 1511, heard of it at once. Around 1515 the apothecary Tomé Pires wrote in his Suma Oriental that, according to Malay merchants, God had made Timor for sandalwood. The first account by a European who actually landed there is Antonio Pigafetta's: in January 1522 the Victoria, last surviving ship of Magellan's expedition, anchored off the north coast. He described the chiefs, the trade in sandalwood and wax, and a disease he called the sickness of Saint Job.

Dominican friars came by way of neighbouring Solor, where they built a fort in 1566, and baptised Timorese chiefs. In the seventeenth century the island became a prize between rivals: the Dutch settled at Kupang from 1653, while the Topasses, Portuguese-speaking people of mixed descent from Larantuka led by the Hornay and da Costa families, controlled the sandalwood trade from Lifau. The English seafarer William Dampier, calling with the Roebuck at Kupang and then Lifau in 1699, left a precise picture of this division, its forts, villages and crops.

In 1702 António Coelho Guerreiro became at Lifau the first governor appointed by Lisbon; besieged by the Topasses, one of his successors, António José Teles de Meneses, moved the capital to Dili in 1769. In the nineteenth century Dili welcomed scientific voyages: Louis de Freycinet and the Uranie called in 1818, and his wife Rose, who had sailed in secret, kept a journal of the visit. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace stayed in Dili in 1861 and found it poor and feverish; Henry Ogg Forbes ventured into the mountainous interior in 1882 and described its small kingdoms, sacred houses and the Tetum language.

The treaty of 1859 and the arbitral award of 1914 fixed the border that splits the island in two, leaving the eastern half and the Oecusse enclave Portuguese. The Manufahi revolt, led in 1912 by Dom Boaventura, was the last great resistance of that long colonial century.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early accounts of East Timor.

Our titles on this subject

Cover of The Star Raft by Fei Xin

The Star Raft

Fei Xin, 1409-1433

Half a century before Vasco da Gama, a soldier of Zheng He's fleet describes forty-four countries across Asia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and East Africa. A Chinese view of the fifteenth-century world.

In the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent the largest fleets of the age into the Indian Ocean. Fei Xin sailed with them as an ordinary soldier, neither envoy nor admiral, and he writes as a literate member of the crew. His forty-four entries, each closed by a poem, describe Malacca, Calicut and Hormuz as the Chinese empire saw them, before the Portuguese arrived to redraw the trade routes of the whole region.
Cover of Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India by Garcia de Orta

Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India

Garcia de Orta, 1534-1563

In Goa, the physician Garcia de Orta tests Galen and Avicenna against what he has seen, tasted and treated of the drugs of India.

Printed in Goa in 1563, Garcia de Orta's Colloquies are among the first books printed in India. A physician settled for nearly thirty years in Portuguese India, Orta describes there, drug by drug, the spices, plants and stones of Asia, setting what he has seen against the Greek and Arabic authorities. Spread through Europe by Clusius's Latin abridgement as early as 1567, the book remained for a long time the European reference on the materia medica of India.
Cover of Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies by Alexander Hamilton

Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies

Alexander Hamilton, 1688-1723

A Scottish merchant spends thirty-five years crossing the Indian Ocean, from the Cape to Basra and Bombay. Shipwrecks, trading posts, the court of the Great Mughal: up to the reckless war Aurangzeb wages against the English Com...

Around 1700 the western Indian Ocean was changing masters: the Omanis of Muscat drove the Portuguese from the Swahili coast, Safavid Persia collapsed before the Afghans, and the English Company risked its first war against Aurangzeb. Hamilton, an independent trader whom the companies regarded as an interloper, watched these upheavals from the coffee ports, the Persian Gulf and Gujarat. Free of any official tie, his testimony lights up the merchant side of a world being reshaped.

Volumes I II III

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

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