The Case for a Maritime Perspective on Southeast Asia

On early European maps of what is now called Southeast Asia, the sea lies in the foreground, its whales and mermaids, waves and ships precisely drawn and prominent. To a modern reader looking back through centuries, with hindsight, such maps may illustrate ignorance, science lapsing into art, the greater scale ofsea features compared to those on land a straightforward function of the ocean's being a larger, blanker slate on which to draw. Yet the aquatic monster big enough to swallow Singapore, the headlands and inlets of Java's northern coast a finely charted fringe setting off the vagueness of a hinterland marked incognita — these anomalies-in-retrospect are altogether faithful to the thoroughly seagoing way in which the West first gained acquaintance with the region.