Tag: Pigafetta

Burung Roc 4

~ The Koboi Project

In this late career engraving by Dutch painter Johannes Stradanus (1523-1605) commerating Ferdinand Maggellen’s discovery of the passage around the globe, there is a representation of the ‘Roc.’ In his essay analysing this complex collection of realistic, emblematical, and mythological representations, Rudolph Wittkover makes two references that locate the abode of the creature in what must be the South China Sea. He notes that Maggellen’s companion and chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, locates its home in the “Chinese Seas”. Indeed, as the ship in the illustration, is coming out of the Magellen Straits and facing the open Pacific Ocean, the South China Sea might be located in the North Westerly direction from whence the Roc could be interpreted as approaching the scene. Wittkover also cites the Maghrebi explorer and scholar, Ibn Batuta, who tells how, again, in the Chinese Seas, a massive form that he and his fellows thought was a flying mountain, turned out to be the Roc. These accounts tie in with the notion that the Roc nests in the Pokok Pauh Janggi at the center of the Pusat Tasek, located somewhere in the South China Sea.

https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/stable/pdf/750014.pdf

Dari Pusat Tasek 14

~ The Koboi Project ~ Leave a comment

So where is the mythical Pusat Tasek Pauh Janggi located? I have found two possible locations so far; one from Pigafetta’s notes, is somewhere north or south the island of Borneo and the other, from the Perak establishment (pertabalan) myth of the Perak Sultanate, somewhere off the mouth of the Perak River. Now from that masterful, yet woefully ‘ortentalist’ (in Edward Said’s meaning of ‘Orientalism’ ), storyteller Rudyard Kipling’s, Just So Stories, I have found that there is also a way to conceive of a congruence or conflation of these locations.

In his tale of how the crab came to have pincers and live in holes in the sand titled The Crab That Played With The Sea he tells also of the cause of the tides and the currents and their primordial connection with the Pusat Tasik Pauh Janggi. While this tale is most interesting for its domestication and massification of colonial ethnography in the public discourse of Empire, I find its placement of the Tusat Tasek its greatest draw in the context of my present Dari Pusat Tasek project.

As the Elder Magician, the Son of Adam and his young daughter go in search of Pau Amma, the giant crab –

“they pushed out on the Perak river. Then the sea began to run back and back, and the canoe was sucked out of the mouth of the Perak river, past Selangor, past Malacca, past Singapore, out and out to the Island of Bingtang, as though it had been pulled by a string … So he took the paddle; but there was no need to paddle, for the water flowed steadily past all the islands till they came to the place called Pusat Tasek—the Heart of the Sea—where the great hollow is that leads down to the heart of the world, and in that hollow grows the Wonderful Tree, Pauh Janggi ..“

So it seems that in the space and time of mythology, and, in fact, of voyages in general, movement on a given course implies no necessary limit on the distance travelled, such that “off the mouth of the Perak River” can mean “North or South of Borneo Island”, of course!