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PHINISI SCHOONER
HISTORY
Since the
earliest times of human settlement of Indonesia, her
seas have been the natural lanes of migration,
communication and commerce. Not surprisingly, today’s
inhabitants of the Archipelago inherit the perhaps most
sophisticated maritime tradition of our World; and, it
was this bequest of seafaring and trade that unified the
immense diversity of people and customs of more than
17.000 islands into a cultural zone once known as the
Malay World, which mellowed into the modern nation of
Indonesia. The vehicles of these developments were the
perahu, the countless types of indigenous sailing
vessels of the Archipelago.'
Traditionally,
 an
Indonesian ship or boat is classified in two ways, i.e.
by a term for her rigging and sails and a different name
for shape and type of the hull. Thus, differences in
naming traditional craft, which are obvious for an
Indonesian sailor or boat-builder, can be a bit of
tricky for the layman.
Indonesia’s
indigenous type of rigging is the layar (‘sail’) tanjaq.
It’s perhaps oldest representations are seen in several
carvings on the walls of the famous 9th century temple
of Borobudur, and Chinese, Arab and European sources
since the earliest times of foreign contact speak of the
peculiar rectangular tanjaq as the typical sails of the
‘Islands Below the Wind’. During the last decades
several expeditions with tanjaq-rigged boats have proved
their abilities - the most recent one a voyage of a
replica of a ‘Borobudur’-ship along historic routes of
Indian Ocean trade from Indonesia to Madagascar and
Ghana in 2003/4. Today, this type of sail is in use on
some smaller fishing craft only.
The
 best-known
type of vessel rigged with tanjaq was the South-Sulawesian
padewakang, widely employed for far-distance trading and
fishing until the early days of the 20th century.
Padewakang were the biggest craft of the trading and war
fleets of the famed South-Sulawesian kingdoms, used by
Mandar, Makassar and Bugis traders and warriors for
hundreds of years in their plying the seas between
western Newguinea, the southern parts of the
Philippines, and the Malayan peninsula. Between the end
of the 16th to the early 20th centuries they routinely
sailed for the coasts of northern Australian in search
of tripang, beche-de-mer, and in a Dutch publication of
the last century there even is found a drawing of a
padewakang under full sail which is undertitled ‘a
Sulawesi pirate vessel in the Persian Gulf’.
During the
last century Sulawesian sailors began to combine the big
rectangular sails of the tanjaq-rig with fore-and-aft
type of sails which they saw on the European and
American gaff-rigged ships then venturing into the
Archipelago. It took about 50 years, until these trials
bore the pinisiq-rigging which for the better part of
the next century became the typical sail of South-Sulawesi’s
perahu.
As the
 story
goes, the first pinisiq (pronounced ‘peeneeseek’) was
built in the 1840ies by a certain French or German
beachcomber in Trengganu, Malaysia, who had settled and
married a local girl there. When one day the raja,
Sultan Baginda Omar, asked the long-nose to help in
building a boat that would resemble the most modern
western vessels, a royal schooner was built; boat and
builder -by the name of Martin Perrot- were seen and met
by an English captain in 1846. Following Malay
traditions, this vessel became the prototype for a new
class of vessels called pinas, probably after the word
pinasse, which in the French and German of the time
referred to a medium-sized sailing boat.
However,
 it
certainly was not only this one vessel, which became the
prototype of the pinisiq. Already since the early 18th
century, the Dutch East-India trading company VOC had
started constructing European style vessels for her
inter Asian trade in Javanese shipyards, thus
continuously introducing new constructional methods and
rigs, including the Dutch version of the then new
fore-and-aft sails. Throughout the 19th century the
colonial navies and European as well as Arab, Indian and
Chinese trading firms operated an ever increasing number
of Western schooners in their ventures all over the
islands; but, though reports from as early as the
1830ies mention perahu, i.e. locally build vessels,
“schooner rigged with cloth sails”, being employed by
‘pirates’ operating in the Straits of Malacca, it still
took several decades until the Archipelago’s typical
schooner fully developed - even after the royal pinas of
Trenggangu, Apparently, the competition by fore-and-aft
rigged traders from English Singapore and Dutch Java who
were able to outsail the monsoon-bound traditional
Indonesian craft was felt more.
and more
severely
 during
the second half of the 19th century; hence, the adoption
of their rig proved a necessity for indigenous
inter-island trade. During these decades of evolution,
the Indonesian sailors and boat-builders changed some of
the features of the originally western schooner: I.e.,
the gaffs of a pinisiq are fixed onto the mast, so that
the gaff isn’t pulled up to the crosstrees as on the
Western version, but the sail is pulled out running
along the gaff like a curtain. By the way, the first
genuine South-Sulawesian pinisiq was built for a Biran
captain by people of Ara around 1900.
The word
 pinisiq
does refer to the rigging only -i.e. seven to eight
sails, consisting of three foresails on a long bowsprit,
a mainsail and a mizzen on standing gaffs, two topsails
and a staysail on the mizzen-mast’s forestay- while the
different types of hulls bear their own names. In the
early years the schooner-ketch rigging was set on
padewakang hulls, but after some experience the
Sulawesian traders decided to use the sharp-bowed and
faster palari (derived from lari, ‘to run’) as being
much more fit for the driving power of the fore-and-aft
sails. Being genuine sailing ships, pinisiq were fitted
out with masts much taller than those you find installed
on the motorised vessels of today; the whole hull was
cargo space, and only a small cabin for the captain was
placed on the aft deck, while the crew slept on deck or
in the cargo-hold. The two long rudder blades fixed to
strong traverse thwarts projecting out on both sides of
the aft part, like those used on a padewakang, were
retained as a steering device.
During their
heyday in the 1970ies, several thousand of pinisiq, the
then biggest fleet of sailing traders in the world,
connected virtually all the islands of the archipelago,
and formed a major backbone of Indonesia’s economy.
However, just at the same time the government’s efforts
in motorisation did bring about some major changes.
Since the
1930ies more and more indigenous sailing craft adopted a
new kind of rigging, the layar nade, which had been
derived from cutters and sloops used by western pearlers
and small-scale tradesmen in Eastern Indonesia. Besides,
European hull-shapes more and more influenced
constructional features of Indonesian boats, and the
nade-rigged sailor per se, the Butonese lambo, uses a
centre rudder and stem and stern posts which are set in
an angle onto the keel - in contrast to the traditional
shape, where keel and stems form a continous curve.
Today there still are several hundred of lambo/nade
vessels trading between the small islands of the
Moluccas and the bigger ports in Java and Sulawesi.
When during
the 51970ies more and more palari-pinisiq were fitted
out with engines, hull and rigging of the traditional
Indonesian trader quickly changed: As the indigenous
hull designs didn’t proof fitting for installing a
motor, the lambo became the alternative. In the years to
follow loading capacities were continuously increased,
until today’s average perahu layar motor (PLM -
‘motorised sailing vessel’) can load up to 300ton.
Nearly all the hulls of the vessels you find in the busy
traditional harbours of Sunda Kelapa in Jakarta, Kali
Mas in Surabaya or Paotere in Makassar today are
modified lambo, though still retaining some of the
features of the original palari-hull like the additional
side-rudders.
As their sails
are just used for supporting the engine, the mizzen of
nearly all PLM was cut down: Using many sails does mean
needing many hands, and in modern times labour and wages
became a more and more important factor in even
seemingly traditional economics. Today, on bigger ships
a one-masted pinisiq-rig is used, while medium sized
vessels are fit out with nade-sails. However, as their
masts are much too short and the sail area is too small,
these boats cannot be moved with sails alone, but use
them in favourable winds only.
Still, pinisiq, more often (wrongly) spelt ‘phinisi’,
became the icon per se of Indonesia’s sailing
traditions, and today often enough is used for any kind
of local-build wooden vessel. And, since about 1995 the
pinisiq saw some revival as a charmingly Indonesian
charter boat employed in the growing marine tourism
between the Islands Below the Wind: At present a fleet
of some 50 traditionally build vessels -some rigged as
Indonesian schooners, others as cutters, sloops or
ketches- serve a wide variety of routes and targets.
Though better part of these vessels are actually modern
motor-sailors turned into small floating hotels, in
today's ever changing world they at least help a tad in
preserving some fragments of one of our Planet’s salient
maritime traditions.
By
Horst Liebner*
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