Sailing from China - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 124

Gamalama is the name of the volcano on which this tiny island sits. Chinese
isn't a good language in which to transcribe anything but Chinese. To pronounce
Gamalama, southern Chinese would drop the first syllable ga , and would nasalise
the second syllable as man , which in Mandarin would become wan. La is a weak
syllable in Chinese: it would slide to lao . The gao at the end simply means 'tall',
whichiswhatmountainsare.AndsofromtheMalaynameGamalama wearriveat
Wanlaogao.
Ternate was the furthest outpost of the spice empire as well as the further reach
of the Chinese trading empire. As for the alleged line of division, that too is true.
The Dutch landed and built a fortified base in 1607 on the other side of Gamalama
from the Spanish and divided the island between them until the Spanish withdrew
in 1663. The Selden map includes two labels that commemorate this story. One of
these - 'Where Red Hairs live' - caught Hyde's attention and got him scribbling
'Hollanders' in the margin. These are the Dutch interlopers. The second label be-
side it reads, 'Where shapeshifters live'. This, of course, refers to the beleaguered
Spanish.
What the Selden map doesn't show is the route connecting Ternate to the rest of
theSouthChinaSeanetwork,whichJohnSaristooktogettherein1613.Weknow
that Chinese sailed this way on the strength of Saris having kidnapped the master
of a Chinese ship en route, yet the map gives no trace of that link, which would
connect the Eastern Sea route out to the Philippines with the Western Sea route
down to Java. For Chinese mariners the two routes formed a great circle, but not
for the Selden cartographer. Ternate was the outermost point that his knowledge
reached. Indeed it barely reached there at all, everything on that side of the map
beyond Borneo being a confused swirl of overpainting that hedges what is water
and what is land.
IfTernatewasattheedgeofbeingoutofrangefortheSeldencartographer,soit
was too for John Saris. Having nothing to tempt the Spanish beyond a few pairs of
seamen's boots, Saris gave up on the hope of turning the Spice Islands into a free
sea and turned north to Japan, plotting a route across open ocean to the east of the
Philippines, which no Chinese vessel would have taken and which the Selden map
does not mark with a line. Saris sailed beyond the outer edge of the Eastern Sea
route to reenter the system from the far end of the Northern Sea route. That endrun
would not provide the asset the Company needed to earn enough to justify staying
on in Japan waiting for the China trade to open. Seven years after Saris returned