Sumatra through Portuguese Eyes: Excerpts from João de Barros' "Decadas da Asia"

Soon after the Portuguese arrived in Indonesia, some four hundred years ago, they undertook a major literary effort to describe its lands and peoples, partly as an inventory of their nascent empire, but mainly as a celebration of their feats of discovery. The sixteenth century became a golden age of Portu guese historical writing when the attention of the Court and the literati was focused on the expansion to the East and when a whole series of reports, chronicles, travelogues and tales of national adventure became available to the reading public.1 Despite the evident bias of the writers in favor of things Portuguese, and their occasional uncritical repetition of the stories and legends they had heard, the bulk of the material which they produced is still of considerable interest, not only as literature but also as a source of information on the early history of the archipelago. Other European travellers had pre viously passed that way, notably Marco Polo on his return from China in the late thirteenth century, but the Portuguese were the first to attempt a systematic description of the region as they found it--before the indigenous society had been deeply affected by Western influence, including their own. 29. Pires lists these places, divided in his terminology between kingdoms (reinos) and countries (terras), as follows: Reino de Achey e Lambry, Terra de Biar, R e m o