THE POMPEII OF THE EAST - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 2

fee, pepper, and cotton. Others collected honey or tiny bird's nests from the seaside cliffs, an
aphrodisiac much sought after by wealthy, lovelorn Chinese. In the grassy fields of the village,
meanwhile, Sumbawa's famous horse breeders groomed their stock. 2 For these commodities,
the raja and his villagers traded a range of practical and luxury items, including cattle, salt
and spices from the islands to the east, bronze bowls from China, and prettily decorated pots
from what are now Cambodia and Vietnam. 3
Figure 1.2. This map of Sumbawa shows Tambora's dominance of the northeastern Sanggar peninsula,
sparsely populated since 1815. The island capital, Bima, lies to the east. Out of picture, to the west, lie the
smaller but better-known islands of Lombok and Bali, and beyond these, Java, the principal island in the
region. Sumbawa's eastern neighbor is the island of Komodo, home of the famous “dragon” lizard.
Sumbawa had been settled by people from the neighboring larger islands of Java, Celebes,
and Flores about four hundred years earlier. These pioneers converted large stretches of the
densely wooded landscape to rice paddies and grasslands for grazing cattle and horses. Pre-
eruption Sumbawa boasted a great diversity of ethnicities and languages. The Sanggarese, for
example, on the northeastern peninsula, looked nothing like their compatriots on the west-
ern side of Sumbawa; nor could they understand each other's speech. Of the mother islands,
Celebes had maintained the strongest influence on Sumbawa as a kind of vassal state, its
powerful capital Macassar exacting crushing taxes upon the Sumbawans. Then, in the seven-
teenth century, the Dutch arrived to stake their claim upon the region. It was the good fortune
of the Sumbawans that the Dutch took little interest in their island while at the same time
curbing the power of Macassar. The early nineteenth century, then, saw Sumbawa in a better
position than it had ever known: economically integrated in the region but with a degree of
political independence.
Even in the midst of this prosperity, however, the raja of Sanggar could never relax. Now
that sailing conditions had improved after the abating of the rains, he kept a wary eye out for
pirates from the Sulu islands to the north, who preyed upon coastal villages looking for hu-
man prizes for the slave market. 4 With sleek sailboats carrying up to a hundred armed men,
and a gift for surprise attack, the pirates were a terrible sight for the people of Sanggar. Given
sufficient warning, the young men might escape deep into the forest. But everyone was vul-
nerable, and the raja could not have thought of his own children without anxiety. Once taken
by pirates, their inherited privileges—and their happy village life on Sumbawa—would be
lost forever. But slavery was a fact of life, nevertheless. While resources were abundant in the
islands, labor was not. Human beings were thus the most valuable of commodities, and the
oceangoing traffic in flesh was cruel and unrelenting. Between the 1770s and 1840s, sever-
al hundred thousand people passed through the slave markets of the East Indies, the largest
slave system outside the Atlantic zone. 5