Slaves and Slave Trade in the Timor Area: Between Indigenous Structures and External Impact

Abstract:This study rethinks the patterns of slave-holding and slave trade that can be discerned in small-scale societies in the Timor region of the Indonesian archipelago, especially Timor, the Solor and Alor Islands, Rote, and Savu. It studies how European powers—the Dutch and the Portuguese—influenced the trade in enslaved human beings and how this was balanced by slaving conducted by Asian forces. The study is based in large part on archival sources from the VOC period, together with published Portuguese sources. Data on these issues provides some basis for comparisons with other, better documented cases of slavery and slaving in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. This contributes to an understanding of how local systems of slavery interacted with the transregional systems represented by external groups.

the locals and also with the people of Pandai on Pantar Island opposite Alor. Their attempt to sell their prisoners or barter them for goods was unsuccessful, and, after a while, the pirates therefore set their course for Seram. There, the Letinese fishermen finally found their chance to escape the fate of the slave market. As the pirates met a ship from the VOC (Dutch East India Company) stronghold Banda, their captives managed to flee and seek asylum with the Banda sailors. The pirates were apparently unable or unwilling to confront the Bandanese openly, and so the Letinese were brought to the Banda Islands, where they provided a lively account of their ordeal to the VOC authorities. 1 The account offers a rare glimpse of slaving activities in the eastern regions of the East Indies, even more precious since it was narrated by indigenous victims. While the research of James Warren, Barbara Andaya, and others have greatly clarified how the slave trade was embedded in economic structures in the western and northwestern parts of maritime Southeast Asia, much less has been done with regard to the vast areas to the east of Bali. 2 Although we would have liked to have heard more details about the experiences of the Letinese fishermen, the account highlights a number of interesting features. As demonstrated by Roy Ellen, the East Seramese established an early modern commercial network based on their position close to Papua and the various centers of Maluku; they were enterprising seafarers on the route to Aru, Kei, Timor, Sumbawa, Lombok, Bali, and even the coast of Java. 3 Though sometimes suppressed by the VOC, the small negeris of East Seram and adjacent islands led a stubbornly independent life under their own chiefs (known by the Malay term raja). The Timor area was poorly monitored by the Dutch (in Kupang) and Portuguese (in Lifau and Dili) and was an attractive place for raiding. Religion was a marker of some consequence, since the East Seramese were Muslims, while people on Leti, Moa, Timor, and Wetar adhered to ancestral religions or sometimes Christianity, making slaving somewhat less objectionable. The Alor and Pandai princedoms were Muslim, at least in name, and consequently had a degree of affinity with the East Seramese, although they were nominally attached to the VOC and monitored by the Dutch post in Kupang. 4 Finally, piracy was not necessarily seen as a dishonorable pursuit in a maritime world where violence tended to be endemic. 5 Our example, occurring after almost three centuries of European interference, hints at important networks normally hidden from the European gaze, in which trading routes were also used as itineraries of slave raids. All this prompts a number of questions as to the nature of slavery and slave trade in the Timor region (in the first hand, Timor, the Solor and Alor Islands, Rote, and Savu; in the second hand, Sumba, Flores, and the Southwest Islands). The present study will rethink the patterns of slave-holding and slave trade that can be discerned in these small-scale societies. How did the European powers, the Dutch and the Portuguese, influence the trade in human flesh and blood in the region? And how was this balanced by slaving conducted by Asian external forces, as in the example above? Furthermore, we may ask how local systems of slavery interacted with the transregional systems represented by external groups. The study is based in large part on archival sources from the VOC period, together with published Portuguese sources. The limitations of such sources are obvious, since Europeans normally only noted down matters of direct concern to their own positions. Their understanding of indigenous social and economic structures was patchy and biased, and the very conditions under which the archives were compiled speak volumes about colonial processes. 6 Nevertheless, European sources are virtually the only written ones available for large regions of eastern Indonesia. In spite of the inevitable stereotyping of the other, based on religious and ethnic criteria, the production of written documents such as reports, logs, economic ledgers, and legal records was quite comprehensive. 7 Conditions in the colonial contact zones were recorded in great detail on the basis of information often provided by trusted local informants. A critical reading of the sources may therefore elucidate regional patterns of slave acquisition in the intersection between European and indigenous demand. This, in turn, provides a basis for comparisons with other and better documented cases of slavery and slaving, in Southeast Asia and beyond. 8

Rethinking Slavery in the Indian Ocean World
In order to understand how systems of slavery worked in the Timor area, one needs to consider a number of larger patterns affecting maritime Asia. The enormous scope and economic impact of the transatlantic slave trade had turned the attention of historians away from Asia until relatively recently. This historiographical void has partly been redeemed, since the 1980s, with new and innovative uses of available sources. A simple survey of human societies indicates that slavery (in an inclusive sense of the term) has been a reality in almost all major cultures since the Neolithic revolution, but the lack of textual sources makes it difficult to study its extent in the Indian Ocean world before the early modern era. 9 For more recent times, however, a body of mainly European sources has enabled scholars to explore the trade and transportation of slaves and the use of slave labor in dynamic economic production. 10 General surveys of Southeast Asian slavery by scholars such as Anthony Reid reveal a few general features. 11 One is that the distinction between slave and free was not absolute; there were degrees of dependency. Thus, James Warren has pointed out how nonfree persons in the Sulu Zone were not solely defined as property but had a social status dependent on several factors, so that there existed a continuum of status and privileges. 12 Another is that slave communities were not racially defined to the same extent as in the Atlantic world; blackness was not particularly associated with slavery, although the supply of Papuan and East Indonesian slaves made for tendencies in that direction. A third feature, shared with the Indian Ocean world in general, is that slaves were often used for household chores and town-based work, rather than as plantation labor-again with important exceptions. In the conventional view, this situation is completely at variance with the Americas, where sugar production is estimated to have been the most important factor driving the importation of slaves. 13 Moreover, the work tasks assigned to slaves of particular ethnic backgrounds in European possessions in the Indian Ocean world are signs that Europeans took over practices of local slave systems, once again in contrast to the Americas. 14 On the other hand, the apparent dissimilarities between the two oceanic systems should not hide that there were similarities, which have only recently been uncovered. Scholars such as Richard Allen have argued that the number of chattel slaves brought across the Indian Ocean world was larger than often presumed; according to the latest estimates between 660,000 and 1,135,000 people were brought to the various VOC settlements on European or Asian keels in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 15 Taken together, slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean world might have amounted to quantities that were not much inferior to those seen in the Atlantic. Moreover, similar to the Atlantic world, trade in slaves seems to have been regarded as an entirely natural and even commendable human activity. To quote a premodern Tai chronicle from an area where Europeans were never seen: The land was peaceful, the Tai [of Sipsong Panna] were engaged in trade freely, slaves could be sold and bought without restrictions, many merchants came here to do business, people lived and worked happily. 16 An important distinction has been made between "open" and "closed" systems of slavery; the former is associated with intimate, household-oriented labor in which slaves tend to merge into majority society over time. By contrast, the closed system tends to perpetuate the status of the slave as property, for example via racial classification. 17 The open system is often associated with indigenous Indian Ocean societies, although cases of closed types are not lacking. While useful, the two should be seen more as ideal types in a Weberian sense than absolute historical categories. It is also essential to look at the interaction between the two, not least when external slavers meet local societies.

The Price of Political Fragmentation
While some of the patterns of slave acquisition and employment typical of Southeast Asia are valid for eastern Indonesia, this calls for some qualification.
A number of geographical and social features gave enslavement and employment in productive labor some peculiar features. In the first place, the stretch of islands to the east of Sumbawa was politically fragmented into a large number of small chiefdoms and princedoms with populations of a few thousand souls or even less. There seems to have been about seventy to a hundred separate princedoms on Timor itself, depending on the sources one prefers. 18 Some areas of nearby Flores, Sumba, Wetar, etc. were stateless. The Portuguese were present since the sixteenth century and established important bases in Larantuka in Flores (1613) and Lifau in Timor (late 1650s), while a permanent Dutch presence dates from 1646 in Solor and from 1653 in Kupang. 19 These early colonial groups created extensive political networks, anchored through contracts and deeds of vassalage, but were not able to create safe conditions. On the contrary, the Portuguese-Dutch rivalry was a frequent rationale for raiding among their respective allies. In this fragmented world, slave raiders like the East Seramese of our initial example had plenty of opportunities to act with impunity. 20 This was accentuated by the lack of seafaring skills among most peoples of the Timor area, the major exception being the Muslim Solorese. Timorese communities tended to be located in relative safety uphill. To quote the Spanish missionary Juan de la Camara, "they never unite the one with the other, but are always warring among themselves. And because of that, all their settlements are at the heights of the mountains which serve as fortifications given them by nature, since they do not know how to fortify themselves on the plain." 21 While some early sources depict Timorese warriors as redoubtable fighters, others, on the contrary, describe them as easily defeated by small but resolute adversaries, especially those with firearms. 22 From a strategic point of view, Timor and surrounding islands were therefore highly vulnerable to raiding by seaborne and well-armed visitors.
The internal conditions on Timor are as important to note. Although the VOC and the Portuguese exercised suzerainty over Timor and some of the surrounding islands and were regarded as protectors, this did not translate into stable political systems. The innumerable petty princedoms have been at odds with each other frequently since the beginning of recorded history in the seventeenth century, not to mention all the conflicts within the princedoms. The early modern European sources tell of some major military expeditions across the island (always involving Europeans or Eurasians), but for the most part, it was a matter of low-scale and often endemic violence conducted by raiding parties. Headhunting was a major driver of this raiding; humans of both sexes and all ages could be deprived of their heads. The collection of heads had important ritual ramifications and was instrumental in building up political realms. 23 However, slaves-known as ate, ata, or atan-were likewise taken. Numerous Dutch reports highlight the extreme violence associated with the raids. A few examples may suffice. In 1682, Timorese troops were used by the VOC to defeat rebels on Rote. On one single occasion, headhunters brought some hundred severed "rebel" heads to the allied camp. In the course of the campaign the auxiliaries received forty-four prisoners, who likely ended up as slaves; the Dutch secured 197 men, women, and children for themselves. 24 In 1767, a party of Timorese allied to the VOC went out to fight enemies in the mountainous Amfoan; after a while they came back with fifteen severed heads and four prisoners, who were bestowed to the VOC as a gift. 25 It is not for nothing that slaves captured in war were known in Tetun as ulun-houris, "living heads," implying that they owed their lives to their captors. 26 This waste of human life in a region with low population density is in fact an interesting paradox, which may partly be explained by competition for scarce resources. Early missionary and colonial sources tell of slaves as local commodities on Timor and Flores alongside beeswax and sandalwood. 27 A French travel account from 1772 mentions that raiders who conquered villages used to spare attractive women, whom they brought along as slaves. 28 Later anthropological data suggests that raiders tended to slay the adult population during the sack of a settlement but spared the young boys and girls who were used for various household tasks-collecting wood, preparing food, drawing water, and so on. 29 The slave-like status of some households and individuals persisted until at least the twentieth century and was only slowly eroded after the introduction of colonial control and Christian missionizing. 30 An early example of this raiding business comes from adjacent Savu, where the first detailed report from 1648 relates that the coastal elite sent foot soldiers and horsemen to the hostile interior to capture inhabitants who were then turned into slaves. 31 Savunese tradition as recorded by a nineteenthcentury missionary mentions that a secondary population on the island had once exterminated the settlements of the autochthonous inhabitants and enslaved the survivors and later sold them to external buyers. 32 At the same time, much of the slave raiding was carried out by external Asian, European, and Eurasian groups, as will be seen below.

Enslavement as Legal Action
While warfare and raiding provided much of the slave labor, the quite detailed source material from Kupang, a VOC post founded in 1653 and situated in the immediate vicinity of five autonomous allies, provides additional insight. Reports, dagregisters (logs), and court records inform us about other sources of slave status, namely debt and legal verdicts. According to Reid, debts were by far the most important cause of bondage and enslavement in Southeast Asia, 33 but in the Timorese case, this needs to be qualified. The Kupang records mention this way into slavery as indirect, via the debts of the elite. Naturally, this material is mostly concerned with transactions involving Europeans, but even so, it makes for interesting reading. In a case from the 1750s, the local raja of Amabi owed the Dutch burgher David Schrijver some slaves. When he was slow to deliver, Schrijver went on his own accord to the village Bikolen, which belonged to the raja's brother-in-law, the fettor (regent) Willem. While Willem was busy cutting sandalwood for the VOC far away, Schrijver appropriated twelve villagers and brought them along. When Willem came back from the forest he hastened to Kupang to get them back but found to his regret that Schrijver had already departed to Batavia to sell them as slaves. 34 While the methods of the Dutchman were later condemned as illegal, nobody seems to have questioned the practice of local lords providing manpower to liquidate a debt; on the contrary, the incident had its root in an acknowledged agreement between the burgher and the raja. Likewise, the all-important bride price (belis, barlaque) also created serf-like bonds, since a nobleman could give away children of subjects as part of the bride-price. 35 The deep material poverty of the Timorese commoners, and their inclusion in a strongly hierarchical social system, may normally have impeded monetary debt relations among all but the elite. Nevertheless, there are hints from the Portuguese sphere that debt slavery was a reality. The Instructions of the Count of Sarzedas, a verbose memorandum from 1811, states that the slaves constituted the fourth estate after the lords, commoners, and foreigners, being prisoners of war, their families, "or those who do not pay fines imposed as punishment for committed transgressions." 36 In latecolonial East Timor, moreover, children were sometimes turned over to rulers if the parents were unable to pay the taxes demanded by the Portuguese authorities. 37 Colonial records also indicate that alleged criminals could be sentenced to slavery. In fact, this was true even for members of the elite. In a case from 1774, two temukungs (chiefs) called Nai Laka and Anthonie Bani were sentenced to slavery by the regents of Sonba'i. The exact nature of their crimes is not described ("rascally abuses"), but since the two persons were Christians, the regents handed them over to the VOC with the request that they be forced to leave Timor. 38 Dutch as well as Portuguese writers argued that Timorese rulers often acted in an arbitrary way. A raja could accuse a subject of witchcraft, stealth, or adultery on loose grounds, enslave him and his family, and confiscate his belongings. In more complicated cases, the accused would be handed over to the Dutch or Portuguese or exported overseas. As in our example from 1774, the elite preferred to have them out of the way. 39 Given the highly volatile conditions in the region, the lives of the enslaved must often have been full of dramatic twists of fate. The great variation in political status, ethnicity, and religion from place to place, and the small dimensions of local societies, meant that members of one and the same family could fare very differently. Many life stories are hidden in the archival bundles of the VOC, usually brief and lacking in empathy but still hinting at the traumas involved. In a legal case from 1732, a woman from the Muslim whaling village Lamakera on Solor was converted to Reformed Christianity in 1716 and received the name Margaretha Louis. She married a Muslim man called Kaya in her second marriage and had a son with him. Now Kaya himself began to lean toward the Christian faith and requested baptism. This was entirely unacceptable to the Solorese elite, and Kaya was sold to a Timorese regent of Sonba'i as punishment. The life of the Solorese family was further complicated when his wife Margaretha had a voluntary or involuntary relationship, first with the heathen raja Buni of Kupang and then with a Kupangese Christian called Paulus, who was married to her own sister and had children with both of them. As is common with these detailed but still patchy sources, we do not know how Kaya's miseries ended. 40 The story illustrates the ups and downs in a society that was both hierarchical and small-scale: while one family member was demoted to the lowest rung of society, another one was the mistress of a raja.
Another testimony of the twists of fate is found in legal proceedings from 1756, in which an indigenous person gave witness of abuses in Kupang. In the 1740s, a certain slave had escaped from the late opperhoofd (headman) Meulenbeek. 41 He subsequently lived for a long time in the household of a free man in Sonba'i, whose VOC-allied inhabitants did not care to turn him back to the Dutch. The ex-slave participated in the war that the VOC and their clients fought against the Topasses, the Portuguese mestizo population of Timor, in the mid-eighteenth century. During plundering raids, he obtained gold, silver, and buffaloes and became wealthy by Timorese standards. His host however became envious and cunningly tried to appropriate the riches of the ex-slave. When unsuccessful in this, he sought help from the influential but covetous burgher David Schrijver, already mentioned in a previous case, who immediately declared himself to be the rightful owner of the slave. Not only did Schrijver take hold of the slave, but he also appropriated his goods and the population of the negory (settlement)-not exactly what the Timorese host had anticipated. The population was exported and sold as slaves in Batavia-all except two who were ransomed by a Timorese man of standing against two other slaves. 42 A former slave could therefore obtain a certain status in indigenous societies but was still vulnerable due to his former position. We do not know how matters ended for the slave; if the persons taken by Schrijver were declared manumitted, he would have obtained free status for the second time (or even third, if he was born free).
There are nevertheless also stories of remarkable upward mobility, similar to the Mamluks of the Islamic world: thus the Solorese ruler Poro (1686-88, 1700-3) was originally a house slave who served under the reigning queen; in fact, he enjoyed enough prestige to start a subdynasty in Menanga on Solor, which much later revolted against the Dutch presence on the island. 43 The oldest account about the founder of the Amanuban princedom alleges that he was an escaped Rotenese slave boy who won recognition as ruler through trickery. 44

External Influences
The unique resource of sandalwood was the main reason for European (and other external) interference on Timor. However, beeswax and slaves shared second-best place in the list of commercial attractions. Slaves occur again and again in the early Dutch sources, from the very first recorded hearsay account of Timor in 1602, according to which the locals would barter them against iron, steel, coral, copper gongs, and Balinese and other cloths and textiles. 45 In fact, this trade is mentioned already in Duarte Barbosa's pioneer account from 1516, which adds that ships from Malacca and Java came to purchase slaves, beeswax, honey, and a little pepper, apart from the precious sandalwood that went to Malabar, Vijayanagar, and Cambay. 46 In other words, the slave trade had a long tradition before there was any significant European impact. While it was not the motor of the Timor trade, slavery was involved in a system of economic relations that radiated from the Southeast Asian commercial hub in Malacca and involved parts of India. From other sources it appears that traders from as far away as China were well aware of the resources of Timor, although the pre-Portuguese sandalwood trade was probably of very limited volume. 47 This is not the place to relate the development of early European colonialism in detail. As is well known, the Portuguese settled on Solor in the 1550s and enjoyed comfortable access to Timor until they lost it to the VOC in 1613. The Dutch as well as the Portuguese were permanently established on the Timorese mainland in the 1650s and would remain there until 1942. In neither case were there purely European establishments: the whites who came to Timor were few in number and regularly intermarried with local women. In particular, the ethnically mixed Black Portuguese or Topasses stood out as a belligerent community that subordinated much of present-day Timor-Leste after 1668 and guarded its autonomy against control by the colonial center in Goa. 48 Interestingly, this Christian population was partly of slave descent. The unsettled conditions and frequent acts of resistance against the Dutch and Portuguese facilitated the capture of slaves, sometimes in considerable numbers. One of the early Topass leaders, António Hornay (c. 1630-1693), was the son of a VOC renegade and the former slave of the Dominican padres. 49 His rival, Matheus da Costa (d. 1672), was reportedly a Papanger, thus of Filipino descent and quite possibly the offspring of enslaved persons transferred to the Spanish possessions in North Maluku. 50 His son, in turn, Domingos da Costa (d. 1722), was the son of a concubine, presumably with an unfree or bonded status. 51 The material is not sufficient to survey the marriage patterns of the Topasses, but there is no reason to believe that their lower ranks would have avoided wives and concubines of slave origin. For example, a Christianized Chinese who lived in the Topass enclave in the mid-eighteenth century kept a Timorese slave woman as concubine and sired three acknowledged sons with her. 52 Likewise the Dutch soldiers and burghers in Kupang would often marry local women from Kupang, Savu, or Rote; the latter were particularly preferred. Some of these wives were evidently slaves taken in the intermittent conflicts besetting Rote. The marriage pattern in Kupang is known in some detail from a preserved register of baptisms that includes the names of both parents. A great many children were born from non-Christian mothers, concubines who were likely unfree servants. In some other cases, slave children were adopted by their Dutch owners. 53 However, local wives of Europeans and Eurasians were not necessarily low-born, since there are instances of daughters of rulers and regents marrying Portuguese or Dutch people. In sum, the Timorese materials indicate a considerable fluctuation between free and unfree status, in indigenous as well as colonial milieus. In that respect the situation was somewhat similar to ancient Rome, where, as is well known, large numbers of slaves of all social backgrounds were acquired through warfare and legal decisions but manumission was common and enabled some ex-slaves to reach a certain social position.

Slaving under European Flag
The peculiar economic conditions in the Timor area have been noted. Valuable natural products and minerals were scarce and the soil was unsuited to cash crops (although coffee made the day in the nineteenth century). With the availability of stable trans-regional shipping, human cargoes were therefore a tempting option. Procurement of slaves and items such as beeswax intersected during trading expeditions. The documents again and again testify to the covetous attitude of the Dutch and the Portuguese in acquiring slaves. The local prices of slaves were eagerly noted down in the early scouting reports, as a part of the larger strategy of the VOC hub in Batavia. The numbers exported varied greatly but would at best be a three-digit number. 54 A statistical series for slave exports from Kupang remains to be established, but a recent statistical study of fifty-four years during the eighteenth century indicates that Timor in fact was the second largest provider of slaves in the VOC realm, after Makassar: 2,098 slaves were exported from Dutch Timor to other VOC strongholds, out of a total of 9,534, making an average of thirty-nine per year. 55 Still, the available data shows that there was no stable market; supply depended on petty warfare involving VOC allies. In 1766, a year marked by a few minor conflicts in the region, the Kupang authorities asked Batavia for three or four thousand rijksdaalders to purchase slaves, which probably meant something like one hundred individuals. 56 While a number of slaves stayed in Kupang as the property of the company itself or of individual burghers and soldiers, most of them were exported. Keeping large slave populations in the colonial contact zones in Timor itself was presumably not economically viable; moreover, slaves were prone to escape and could become a security concern. 57 Java and, in particular, Batavia was an obvious destination: when the populations of the Javanese ports grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (especially after 1680), so did the need for unfree manpower. Almost half the population of Batavia in 1673 was enslaved. 58 A second aim was to use slaves from the region for the industrial works of the VOC. The mining of gold in West Sumatra was important after the VOC acquired suzerainty there in 1664. Since the local Minangkabaus shunned the hard work of mining for wages, slaves were imported from other parts of the East Indies. Thus, hundreds of Savunese were sent there in the 1670s, causing local dissatisfaction. The VOC repeatedly nagged their allies on Savu to deliver slaves in accordance with previous agreements, which at length provoked a Savunese rebellion in the 1670s that could only be subdued with utmost effort. 59 The mining director De Graeff issued a request via Batavia in 1678, specifically asking for 150 "good Kaffer, Solorese or Timorese slaves." 60 A third aim was to use the local supply of manpower for Dutch plantations, more specifically the nutmeg perken in the Banda Islands. Having been depopulated by the VOC holocaust in 1621, the Bandas became an important stronghold of the company in Maluku and the only place where the cultivation of the profitable nutmeg was permitted. Slaves were brought in from as far as India. 61 According to a document from 1769, Timorese slaves were sent to the Banda Islands on Batavia's orders, but they were not appreciated by the Dutch planters, who refused to pay even the original price for them. The VOC authorities eventually put a halt to the Timor-Banda slave route. 62 Mining and plantation work suggest that adult males were required in the first hand, but in fact it seems that the majority of people offered for sale by locals were often female. 63 One reason is presumably that females and children were more likely to survive attacks on settlements by headhunting parties.
Some of the Timorese slaves therefore suffered fates similar to their brethren in the Americas; it should be recalled, however, that European plantations in Asia as well the Americas were relatively small or medium-sized up to the second half of the eighteenth century. Most of the enslaved Timorese were probably used as personal servants and farmhands or in smaller workshops, rather than in depersonalized protoindustrial or large-scale agricultural work. This goes for exported slaves as well as those who remained in the region. A report from the early nineteenth century says that the possession of slaves was absolutely vital for the maintenance of the Christian inhabitants of Kupang, seldom rich themselves, who used their slaves in jobs such as selling things on the market. 64 It is also clear that the possession of many slaves gave their owner status-the Dutch opperhoofden of Kupang could possess hundreds, much more than was probably required for their household. 65 Still there are many stories of poor or even atrocious treatment of slaves hidden in the archival records. The enterprising but corrupt VOC opperhoofd Daniel van der Burgh used approximately sixty company slaves to work on the construction of a private residence in about 1750. As it turned out, he forced the construction with such haste that most of the slaves succumbed, worn out by exhaustion and beatings, "to the great detriment of the Noble Company." 66 The poor conditions can best be seen from the very numerous attempts to escape. Runaway slaves are a main theme in the VOC records, but it also appears that there were escapees from the Portuguese sphere and from the autonomous princedoms. Severe beatings seem to have been the normal punishment for those caught, but grave offenders were broken on the wheel in the European tradition of a "complicated death penalty." 67 This is, of course, closely reminiscent of the treatment of black slaves in many places in the Americas and indicates a will to deter other slaves from following suit by making an example.
Other hardships followed from the transport of the slaves to new milieus. The sea route from Kupang to Batavia took many weeks to complete and conditions on board-trying even for VOC employees-made for numerous deaths. A VOC resolution from 1769 commented on the miserable state of 142 slaves who had recently been brought over from Timor to Batavia, "which poor situation was possibly caused by the fatigue and discomfort which the slaves had to endure during a long journey on small ships, on which the proper maintenance of sea travel were hardly found." 68 Survival rates were occasionally as bad as on transatlantic slave ships, or even worse; of 367 slaves transported to Batavia in 1676, sixty-four died en route, and a hundred more soon after arrival. 69 Those who actually ended up in Batavia tended to die of smallpox, to which peoples of eastern Indonesia seem to have had very limited resistance. This was such a problem that the VOC decreed that no Timorese who had not already survived the disease were to be exported. 70 Still, Batavia complained in 1753 that Timor gave little economic advantage to the company, not least since the Timorese slaves were almost "worthless." They did not adapt well to the city life of Batavia and tended to die off quickly. 71 If such statements are to be taken literally, the prospects of the exported slaves might have been no better than those of the victims of the transatlantic trade.

Patterns of Asiatic Slaving in the Timor Area
Still, as we have seen, the acquirement and export of slaves was not merely a European or Eurasian affair. While the company or the Portuguese appropriated slaves in connection with conflicts, most of them were apparently acquired by local populations, whether captured in raids or sentenced to lose their personal freedom. Before the onset of effective European power there were also Asian powers taking part in this pursuit. A Makassarese fleet ravaged the coasts of Timor in 1641 and reportedly took thousands of prisoners, although this was a rather singular event. 72 However, the diaspora of Bugis and Makassar people after the Dutch advance in South Sulawesi in 1667-69 affected the Timor region to the highest degree. 73 The Dutch reports of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries increasingly complain about Makassarese activities in the region, which were not endorsed by the VOC and were difficult for the Dutch to prevent. The small and poorly manned European posts were not able to patrol the sea roads apart from a few strategic key points (such as the waters outside Kupang and Solor), which left much room for skilled sailors such as those from South Sulawesi and Seram. The consequences can be seen, for example, on Sumba, which did not have any European presence before 1860. The stateless nature of Sumbanese society made it a free-for-all, with consequences until fairly modern times. 74 The sea routes that operated beyond colonial control can only be partly reconstructed, for the simple reason that our contemporary sources are largely European. What little there is indicates that Asian groups increasingly explored the possibilities of acquiring slaves and combined it with other pursuits, such as the collection of trepang (sea cucumber), beeswax, and karet (sea turtle shells), as seen in a VOC report from 1737: The [Makassarese] use to travel to the Papuan Islands and also those around Banda every third or fourth year in order to find and boil trepang and obtain massoi. 75 Not so long ago, the Bandanese submitted several complaints about the Makassarese to the government. However, the Makassarese of old used this [pursuit] for their profit. They now arrive in such force in order not to be attacked and captured by the cruising pancalangs 76 and sloops of the Company in these eastern regions. In the time of the eastern winds they stay below the east coast of Timor where sometimes trepang may be found, staying until they are ready to deal with the further region. However, how much [i.e., little] these Makassarese should be trusted, and how they commit great robberies of humans on various islands under the pretext of looking for trepang, is seen from time to time, and therefore carefulness is a good thing. 77 The Makassarese also took in cargoes of slaves under more peaceful forms, through barter trade; a French account from 1772 asserts that large Makassarese ships approached Timor about every second year, bringing cloth, gunpowder, muskets, sabres, Chinese wares, and arrack, bartering it for slaves, beeswax, and sandalwood. The seafarers were fiercely independent protagonists who tried to best the Europeans wherever they could. 78 Along an evolving system of routes with South Sulawesi and East Seram as important nodes, Flores, Sumba, Timor, and adjacent islands would have offered enticing conditions, as places where the VOC had little or nothing to say and Portuguese influence was often informal at best. Thus, the Bajau people, who are found in many parts of Indonesia and had a base off the Flores coast, carried out slaving activities in the Timor area around 1725 and were actually caught by the Kupang authorities. The seventeen men and eighteen women and children in the group were declared slaves themselves, and their property was auctioned off: six boats, thirty-two fishing nets, two lances, and three keris, hinting at an interesting mixture between fishing, slaving, and family life. 79

A Slow Ending
On the preceding pages I have sketched a few characteristics of the types of slavery and slave trade that flourished in the Timor area in the early modern era, up to around 1800. The abolition of unfree labor nominally follows the general lines of the colonial entities in the course of the nineteenth century. Thus, the Dutch colonial state, successor to the defunct VOC, abolished the slave trade in 1818 and slavery as such in 1859-60. 80 The Portuguese authorities were somewhat tardier but also abolished slavery in 1869. 81 In fact, these decrees tended to become dead letters at places where colonial control was weak or the colonial authorities found reason to let practical concerns come before ideals. In 1836, it was still a common crime in Dutch Timor that people were robbed and sold as slaves in the Timorese inland against sandalwood and beeswax. The Kupang authorities could do little about the trade, since it was too widely disseminated, and it was difficult to make the slaves bear witness. 82 There was even some export to other regions of Indonesia, Bali being mentioned as a destination for slaves originally from places like Sumba and Ende as late as 1876. 83 Colonial complicity (and corruption) is highlighted by a case in 1879 that suggests a little slave-based economic system of exchange across the Savu Sea. Internal small-scale warfare on nominally Dutch Alor yielded prisoners who were brought over the strait to Liquiçá in Portuguese Timor, initially via Muslim Solorese people. The local Portuguese commander received three guilders for each imported slave, allowing them to be sold to the highest bidder. If no price could be obtained in the coastal kampung, the slaves were brought to the inland. Women and children walked unbound, while the men had ropes around their necks. 84 Apparently, it was only with the onset of an implemented type of colonial control that slavery was pushed back in the early twentieth century. It nevertheless seems that the colonial bureaucrats looked the other way on places like Solor and Sumba, where slave status persisted long after Indonesian independence and may still survive on the last-mentioned island. 85

Timor in the Indian Ocean World
Gwyn Campbell has discussed a number of features of slavery in the Indian Ocean world that are important to bear in mind when we scrutinize the structures of Timorese unfree labor. 86 Compared with the slavery of the Americas, we discern a greater variety of tasks, a pattern seen in the multiple European uses of Timorese slaves in domestic agricultural work, port cities, mines, and plantations. The social world of ports such as Kupang may reinforce Richard Allen's point, that features of local slave institutions were adopted by Europeans (or Eurasians). 87 Another trait mentioned by Campbell is the variety of denominations for slaves depending on the circumstances of their work. In at least parts of Timor, there was a clear distinction between captured slaves (ulun-houris) and serf-like agricultural laborers (lutu-hum), and further distinctions existed in enclaves under European jurisdiction. 88 Furthermore, recent estimates of the great Western demand for slave labor in the Indian Ocean, with a seven-digit number bought or sold in the course of the early modern period, corresponds to the considerable efforts of the Dutch in the seventeenth century to identify slave markets in and around Timor. Such mapping is often stated to have been a prime concern in the VOC records. 89 The very high percentage of slaves in many communities in the Indian Ocean world certainly holds for Kupang and possibly the Portuguese ports. 90 Finally, the gendered characteristic observed by Campbell, in which the majority of slaves traded were female, was present in Timor, where most available slaves bought by Europeans appear to have been female. 91 When discussing the factors underpinning slavery and bondage in Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid mentions the relative scarcity of manpower in premodern society, which made control over humans vital for status and power; the estimating of a human in monetary terms as a consequence of the flourishing trade structures; and the lack of state intervention, which tied master and bonded together for protection and support. 92 These features are highly visible in the Timor area, where food production could not sustain large populations. Whatever data we possess from the early modern era indicates very low population density, with much below half a million inhabitants on Timor up to the nineteenth century. 93 It comes as no surprise that unfree manpower was so valued that the Europeans were sometimes unable to buy them for money and that the company deliveries of slaves to Batavia were usually restricted to less than a hundred individuals per year. Among local realms in Rote, Timor, etc., the value of slaves was sufficient to sometimes cause violent conflicts among the elite when ownership was in doubt. 94 In fact, VOC mediation in local disputes was often related to such issues.
The commercial structures predating the European impact also made for the commoditization of humans. Political fragmentation and petty warfare produced slaves, and the trading was subsequently underpinned by the presence of European powers, who sometimes took the role of slave raiders on a grand scale. Richard Allen, Matthias van Rossum, and others have demonstrated the huge demand for unfree human labor in the Indian Ocean world. As made clear by early scouting Dutch reports, slaves were carefully assessed in money or kind and actively exported from the Timor area to Java, Sumatra, South Sulawesi, or Banda on Dutch keels and were a component in the division of labor enforced by the early colonial presence. Though less well documented, similar patterns are discernible in the Portuguese (European or Eurasian) sphere. This was paralleled by "informal" systems carried out by Asian seafarers such as the Bugis-Makassar and East Seramese people. These are somewhat vaguely visible in the sources and do not amount to the routine practices documented by James Warren in the Sulu zone. Still their existence serves as a reminder that the contemporary European documents, however bulky, are too one-sided to draw a truly satisfactory image of this somber side of human relations. In a general sense, "open" systems of slavery interacted with "closed" ones through a variety of human relations.
Lastly, the small size of East Indonesian polities and their dependence on inherited hierarchies (such as precedence of clans) made for a situation in which slaves would stay close to their masters; alongside examples of brutal and violent treatment, we also find cases in which European, Eurasian, and indigenous males married slave women or kept them as concubines. In fact, the communities of the small colonial enclaves evidently had a degree of slave ancestry. As in many places in the Indian Ocean world, but unlike the Americas, slaves were not particularly associated with any singular racial group, and manumission and assimilation was a real option-in spite of lingering social memories of clans associated with slave status. Overall, we can discern a pattern similar to many other parts of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world in the same period, but with interesting variations.