Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Foreigners and trade
Lacking the spices of the eastern isles, Bali appears not to have been in the mainstream of
the archipelago's early trading history. The
Chinese
visited Bali, which they knew as Paoli or
Rice Island, in the seventh century, but by this time trade had been established on nearby is-
lands for a thousand years. Bali became known to
Europeans
at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury when Portuguese, Spanish and English explorers came in search of the lucrative Spice
Islands. They marked Bali on their maps as Balle, Ilha Bale or Java Minor, but sailed on by.
The first documented contact between Europeans and the Balinese occurred in the sixteenth
century. The
Portuguese
, having won the race for the Spice Islands, dispatched a ship from
Malacca in 1588, aiming to construct a trading post on Bali. The ship hit a reef just off Bali
and sank. The survivors were treated kindly by the
dewa agung
but not permitted to leave the
island. Portuguese attempts at establishing contact were not repeated.
On February 9, 1597, four
Dutch
ships under the command of Commodore Cornelius Hout-
man anchored off Bali and three sailors landed at Kuta. Among them was Aernoudt Lintgens,
whose report of his experiences is the first account by a Westerner of the island. The other
two crew members were so entranced that they did not return to the ship.
The Dutch came again in 1601, when Cornelis Heemskerk arrived with a letter from the
prince of Holland requesting
formal trade relations
, which the
dewa agung
accepted. The
VOC, or
Dutch East India Company
, was formed in 1602, and its headquarters founded in
Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) in 1619, from where the Dutch trading empire expanded as far
as Sumatra, Borneo, Makassar and the Moluccas.
From then until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Bali was largely ignored by
Europeans, as it produced little of interest to them. The exception was
slaves
, who were sold
through Kuta to Dutch merchants from Batavia and French merchants from Mauritius.
The situation in Lombok
During the seventeenth century, the west of Lombok was invaded by the
Balinese
from
Karangasem in the far east of Bali; the
Makassarese
of Sulawesi, who had conquered Sum-
bawa in 1618, also invaded eastern Lombok. The first major conflicts between these two out-
side powers occurred in 1677 when the Balinese, assisted by the indigenous
Sasak
aristo-
cracy, defeated the Makassarese.
From the end of the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the Balinese struggled to se-
cure control over Lombok. In 1775,
Gusti Wayan Tegah
, who had been placed on the throne
by the raja of Karangasem, died, and disagreements over the succession resulted in four rival
principalities in the west vying for control: Pagasangan, Pagutan, Mataram and Cakranegara.
Meanwhile the Sasak aristocracy in the east of the island faced little interference in their af-
fairs.
