The Malay Peninsula appeared in maps drawn by Ptolemy (87–150
B.C.), who tried to make sense in Alexandria of travelers’ tales
of eastern lands, but no archipelago geographers are known.
Instead, European cartographers preserved the knowledge of
Indonesian sailors, captains, traders, pilgrims, and adventurers
in maps drawn, with increasing degrees of accuracy, in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, a portfolio of
twenty-six maps drawn by the Portuguese cartographer Francisco
Rodrigues was based in part on a voyage he made in 1511 from
Melaka to Java, Bali, Sumbawa, Timor, Banda, Seram, and Flores.
The maps also include Brunei and the spice islands, which
Rodrigues did not visit but knew of from Indonesian seafarers.
Many European creators of maps did not themselves ever see the
lands whose shapes they attempted to define. Captains,
merchants, naturalists, explorers, and missionaries came to
them, and philosophers and scientists met at their workshops in
Venice, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to anal