Page 290 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

Sailors and traders from South Sulawesi (Makasar, Bugis, Mandar, and Buton) explored the
waters until they reached the northern coast of Australian continent, which was rich in sea
cucumbers, clams, hawksbill (tortoiseshell) and other marine products. Sailors and traders
from Tidore, Ternate, and Papua sailed eastward entering eastern waters of Papua when
the monsoon winds blew west. They wandered down to the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu,
and Fiji. They sailed home when the eastern monsoon started to blow.
Products obtained were subsequently exchanged for commodities brought by sailors
and traders from South Sulawesi searching for and trading in the South Maluku islands.
After the transaction, the merchant and sailors from South Sulawesi brought the products
they obtained to the port cities visited by Chinese traders. Most of them started marketing
their products in Makasar. However, their products could not all be sold to Chinese
merchants, because every year only two junks were allowed to visit Makasar. What often
happened was that there were one junk from Macao and one from Canton. This condition
caused the sailors, fishermen and traders who wandered for marine products to continue
their voyage to Singapore to market their commodities. Such conditions eventually
encouraged them to focus more on marketing their commodities at the British free port.
This was the underlying condition of Wong Lin Ken statement that Singapore’s progress
was due the centralization of trade of Bugis traders (Wong, 1960).
The concentration of the trading activities of sailors and merchants from South Sulawesi
in Singapore in turn stimulated the Chinese traders to focus their trade activities on that
commercial port city. The concentration of activity of Chinese traders in Singapore was
also related to the prohibition made by the Chinese imperial government for merchants
to trade to Java (Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya) because the VOC authorities murdered
Chinese people who settled in that commercial port city. Another factor was British
commercial port city’s position as a free port. Moreover, in this free port city, they could
obtain British textile products at low prices in large quantity.
Singapore’s development made the Dutch government worried about the increasingly
widespread influence of other European nations in the region that they claimed as their
own territory, considering the sailors and traders from the archipelago focused their trade
on Singapore. This was caused by the fact that Dutch industrial products were expensive
on the market, leading to smuggling. In addition, British merchant also marketed weapons
of war and taught them how to use them. Therefore, a number of local independent and
sovereign kingdoms directed their people to trade and buy war supplies in Singapore.

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