a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the Land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove Islands, the navigation of the Chinese and the Gores [people of Formosa], with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen.
He claimed to the king that the Javanese chart revealed
the course your ships must take to the Clove Islands [Moluccas], and where the gold mines lie, and the islands of Java and Banda, of nutmeg and mace, and the land of the king of Siam.
Albuquerque assured his king that the map was a
very accurate and ascertained thing, because it is the real navigation, whence they come and whither they return.
If Albuquerque was accurate in reporting that the Javanese chart included Portugal and the 'Land of Brazil', which clearly must have come from European sources, then the sharing of geographic data was already a reciprocal affair.
These or similar Javanese maps probably supplied some of the data for charts drawn by the Portuguese pilot Francisco Rodrigues in about 1513. Although the Javanese original is not known to have survived, an extant manuscript has been identified as being the Rodrigues derivative.60 Rodrigues, together with Antonio de Abreu and Francisco Serrão, penetrated insular Southeast Asia as far as Banda with the assistance of Malay pilots in 1512. His charts record these and other islands, and were probably compiled on the basis of Javanese information.
Yet there remains the enigma of why Indonesian charts, which were so readily acquired in the early years of Portugal's presence in Southeast Asia, would subsequently have become so mysterious. Willem Lodewijcksz, a member of Cornelis de Houtman's expedition to Java in 1596, reported that the Javanese, although transporters of goods among the islands, did not use maps for sailing, nor did they have the compass until they acquired it from the Portuguese. Buginese (Sulawesi) mariners' charts from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries are extant, but these show a strong Western influence.61
Fig. 19 Thai map of the west Malay coastline from the Thai-Burmese border south to Phuket, "sketched by a Siamese Priest at Pungah [Phang-nga]." From Henry Burney's papers.[By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library]
After the Portuguese reference to tapping indigenous charts in the early sixteenth century, there is little mention of European reliance on native Southeast Asian maps for two and a half centuries. In the middle and latter eighteenth century some mapmakers dedicated to surveying Southeast Asian shores, notably Alexander Dalrymple, openly acknowledged appropriating Malay charts for their own (page 238, below). Was the practice of European cartographers incorporating Southeast Asian sources unusual? Or was Dalrymple simply being more forthright than most?
In the northern periphery of Southeast Asia, evidence of indigenous surveying is found in early European accounts of their attempts to map the imposing expanses of mountains and plateaus in Tibet. Missionaries made a large-scale survey of Tibet in 1717 in which they took maps "drawn on the spot from the report of the natives, by the Lama Mathematicians". The map explains that since "the Lamas made no Astronomical observations in the Course of their Survey, the Missionaries have corrected this Map with their own."62
Burma enjoys a relatively rich cache of surviving geographic maps, or copies of such maps. In 1795 Francis Hamilton sought out maps while traveling through Burma, and his analysis, along with engraved reproductions, was published in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century.63 But with the act of examining something comes the risk of altering it, and indeed Hamilton's wonderful zeal to acquire indigenous maps led him to commission them, which in turn may have influenced his Burmese cartographers. Hamilton himself makes this bluntly clear, noting that the Burmese map-makers he employed were "wonderfully quick in comprehending the nature of our maps [and] very soon improved their plans." Thus Burmese maps often form exceptions to generalizations which might be made about indigenous Southeast Asian maps, having been influenced by Western prototypes.
Although surviving Southeast Asian geographic maps present a wide diversity of characteristics, some generalizations can be made. Cartography was doubtfully a profession in itself. As with pre-Renaissance Europe, Southeast Asian cartographers rarely left any mark of their authorship, and maps were rarely dated. Maps generally lacked a uniform scale and were not constructed on any particular projection. No known Southeast Asian map has any grid to represent latitude or longitude, though both Varthema and Albuquerque alluded to rhumb lines on Javanese charts.
Southeast Asian cartographers tended to stylize features and exaggerate waterways. Chinese art and cartography are similar in this regard, and the stylization of water systems can be found on medieval European maps as well.64 Stylized maps have their uses and are still employed when simplicity and clarity are of a higher priority than accuracy of scale or direction, as is the case when mapping subway lines or depicting electronic circuits.
The more stylized and metaphorical nature of early Southeast Asian maps, as opposed to European maps, may be said to be consistent with their approach to art and language in general. The French envoy to Siam, La Loubère, certainly oversimplifying, correlated this to climate:
In cold countries, where the imagination is cold, every thing is called by its Name... it is not the same in hot Countries, (where] the briskness of the Imagination employs them in a hundred different ways, all figurative... to them it seems that an exact Imitation [in art] is too easie, wherefore they overdo every thing. They will therefore have Extravagancies in Painting, as we will have Wonders in Poetry... the Secret is, to give all these things a Facility, which may make them appear Natural.
Itineraries
Travel in early Southeast Asia was probably more dependent on itineraries than maps per se. The sorts of geographic aids used by Southeast Asian peoples may well have amounted to instructions, not so different from the types of aids a pilgrim or sailor may have used in medieval Europe. The village to which one was traveling would be 'mapped' as being so many days by perahu upriver, after which the traveler finds a bend in its course and a certain landmark, at which point one then leaves the boat and crosses the mountains just to the left of where the sun rises, and after two more days following sundry other topographical clues, one reaches one's destination.
In such itineraries, two different methods could be used to measure distances. A journey could be recorded either in units of linear measurement, or else in units of elapsed time. In Thailand, for example, linear distance was measured in wa (fathom), a unit which probably equaled about 1.8 meters, but is today fixed at 2 meters.65 According to oral tradition, one of the people in the king's retinue would carry a 'wa-stick', a stick cut to the exact length of one wa. It would be that person's responsibility to flick the stick over and over with his wrist, as they walked, to record the number of wa traveled.
Fig. 20 Part of Mindanao and the Carolines, based on indigenous data contained in figure 13. From a Jesuit report by Joseph Stocklein, 1726. (22.4 x 35.3 cm)
Elapsed travel time, however, was the more common gauge of distance for longer journeys, and in Thailand this was usually measured in khrao (overnight stages). The association of physical space with time, rather than literal distance, is perhaps one reason why indigenous maps generally appear to have no uniform scale -scale may have been consistent with the elapsed time of travel rather than linear distances per se.
A surviving itinerary from sixteenth century Lan Na, The Chronicle of Chiang Mai, records the travels of King Mä Ku from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai, Thöng-Phayao, Phrä-Lampäng, Lamphun, and back to Chiang Mai, in 1559. This text records distances both in linear terms (wa, or fathoms), as well as in units of elapsed time (khrao, or overnight stages). An excerpt follows:
From