16 minute read
An Englishman goes Makassan
G E P ‘Pat’ Collins 1904–1991
Whatever happened to this Oxford drop-out after he ran away to the East, found love and a passion for ‘native’ sailing, became a best-selling author and built his dream boat – a Makassan prahu? Museum honorary research associate Jeffrey Mellefont pieces together a forgotten life.
THE MAKASSANS OF THE INDONESIAN ISLAND called Sulawesi are of special interest in the study of Australia’s pre-colonial contact history. They were a ship-building, seafaring and trading people who had centuries-old, commercial and cultural relations with Aboriginal societies during annual fishing voyages to Australia’s northern coasts. Their chief catch was trepang, edible sea slugs that abounded in the shallows of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. Starting long before British settlement, Makassans dried and smoked the trepang on Australian beaches, sailed home on the monsoon winds and traded them on to China where they were a prized delicacy believed also to be an aphrodisiac. This story of cooperation between Indigenous communities and seafarers from the Indonesian archipelago is the first that visitors encounter in the museum’s exhibition Under Southern Skies. 1
When I first began researching Indonesia’s diverse, unique but little-recorded maritime traditions, 40 years ago, information was hard to come by. But in the State Library of New South Wales I encountered two remarkable books published in the 1930s about the Makassan clans of South Sulawesi and their distinctive sail-trading craft, or prahus. East Monsoon (1936)2 and Makassar Sailing (1937)3 were written by a young English adventurer who had lived and sailed with the fierce Makassans of the remote and arid south-western peninsula of Sulawesi – the island widely known as the Celebes during colonial times, when the Dutch ruled the East Indies.
In East Monsoon the author, George Ernest Patrick Collins, relates his experiences voyaging as a guest on a Sulawesi trading prahu called a palari pinisi in the Makassan language. He relishes the utterly spartan life under sail with no engine, no safety or navigational equipment and no comforts, living on rice and dried fish cooked in a kerosene tin over a wood fire. The book introduces the Makassans’ seamanship and Muslim culture as Collins negotiates to have them build him a palari pinisi of his own. The subsequent volume, Makassar Sailing, details life in this traditional Islamic boat-building society: its stories and folklore; religion, magic and superstition; piracy, warfare and conflict. It’s a district where Dutch colonial authority scarcely extends. We read of Collins’s trials there, dealing with malaria and dysentery epidemics, plus with wily, sometimes cheating and uncooperative, boat-builders. He records the communal ceremonies of building and launching prahus and the ancient, pre-Islamic spells and rituals that were essential for a ship’s welfare.
The 1930s fleet of trading palari pinisi running under dry-season skies. Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections These were shipwrights who had never seen a plan, sculpting their prahus by eye to proportions based on the human body
Collins was a superb photographer, capturing the essence of these Muslim sailors and their seamanship
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This was a time when the English-speaking world knew little about the many diverse cultures of the Netherlands East Indies beyond Java, and next to nothing about maritime Makassans. Such information, where it existed at all, was in Dutch-language field reports and journals. Collins, a sympathetic and involved observer of his Makassan hosts, was a keen amateur ethnographer. As well, he was a superb photographer, capturing the essence of these people, their seamanship and the timeless cycles of their seasonal, monsoon-wind trading voyages. For a long time, these two handsome, richly illustrated hardcover books were the only detailed, English-language studies of this maritime culture that once played a significant role in Australian history.4 Makassar Sailing includes Collins’s own design drawings of the local trading boat that he ordered, with the yacht-like coach house he added for improved accommodation. These were shipwrights who had never seen a plan, sculpting their prahus by eye to proportions based on the human body. At last his boat was launched, costing a total of 590 Guilders or £80 fully rigged – a bargain price, in his era, for a ‘yacht’ 53 feet (16.2 metres) overall length and built of solid teak. He called it Bintang, which means ‘star’.5 But the two-book series ends with that launching, so that generations of readers and researchers have wondered whatever became of Collins and Bintang. They disappeared from sight. Why nothing more about his voyages from this prolific writer? Did misadventure befall his ship? Library catalogues revealed one earlier book by Collins, a novel published in 1934 called Twin Flower: a Story of Bali. 6 It’s more of a rambling travelogue than a novel, with its long expositions of Balinese village life and customs. Curiously, it’s illustrated by many of Collins’ accomplished, National Geographic-style photos, some of which depict its supposedly fictional Balinese characters. This leads readers to suspect that it is autobiographical ... but where did the fiction end and real life start?
The book’s protagonist, an Englishman called Garland, declares himself from the first page to be one of those outcast colonialists who rejects the conventions and racial prejudices of his fellows and is happy to ‘go native’. We first meet him in Singapore, about to embark for Bali on board a cockroach-infested Sulawesi sail-trading prahu whose nakhoda (captain) is an old friend. In Bali, Garland mixes with both simple fishermen and aristocrats of the north-eastern kingdom of Karangasem, while learning how to sail the fishermen’s jukung – the lateen-sail, outrigger fishing dugouts that can still be found there today, 90 years later. The tide-ripped waters of the strait between Bali and the neighbouring island Lombok are his training ground. The peculiarities of English culture are contrasted with Balinese traditions in lengthy dialogues between Garland and his native friends (speaking together in the East Indies traders’ and sailors’ language, Malay). Just when the ‘novel’ seems close to ending, still searching for a plot, it introduces a sensational cross-cultural affair between Garland and a young Balinese girl called Mas (‘Gold’). This would have been confronting for many English readers of the period ... as would Collins’s photo of Mas, showing her topless.
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03 01 At sea on the trading palari pinisi Mula-Mulai Muslim seafarers can perform their obligatory daily prayers anywhere, kneeling in the approximate direction of Mecca. Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections 02 A study in Makassan seamanship; backing the mizzen to help push the bows through the wind while tacking. G E P Collins photograph published in East Monsoon 1936
03 Galley in a kerosene tin, the cook blowing the wood fire embers. Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections
01 G E P Collins’s cruising ‘yacht’ Bintang was based on the seven-sail Makassan palari pinisi trading ketch, with some minimal accommodations added. Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections 02 Collins’s Makassan crew toast their voyage. They feature individually, by name and nature, in Komodo: Dragon Island: centre, wearing the hat, is boatswain and chief steward Hoedoe. Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections
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Mas is an outcast too, banished from a royal Balinese family since she has a twin brother. In many Indonesian societies such a birth is feared as an incestuous disaster, threatening the natural order of things. Exiled into a Lombok fishing community, Mas is also a skilled jukung sailor. Garland woos her afloat and they have a sailing honeymoon round Lombok’s gorgeous coastline. It doesn’t end well, with a sudden, shocking, tragic fate for Mas and her royal twin brother Rai. Garland gets off quite lightly and shrugs it all off as native adat, or custom. The timing of Twin Flower, published in 1934, was perfect. A craze for exotic, bare-breasted Bali, the ‘Island of the Gods’, was stirred in the 1920s–30s by a series of celebrity visitors including anthropologist Margaret Mead, actor Charlie Chaplin, and some high-profile film-makers, artists and musicians. The novel sold very well and helped to finance Collins’s Makassan prahu-building venture in Sulawesi – as well as boosting sales of East Monsoon and Makassar Sailing when they appeared soon after. Twin Flower threw some light on Collins’s previous East Indies travels and his intense interests in local people and their sailing traditions – quite unusual in the colonial context where ‘natives’ and their activities were generally considered inferior. But the fate of the man and his Makassan prahu Bintang remained a mystery. Until an email from Belgium crossed my desk at the Australian National Maritime Museum some 70 years later. The letter was from a Dutchman called Rudi van Reijsen, who said he was Collins’s nephew. He had inherited all his late uncle’s archives, which included a manuscript written by Collins in the late 1930s about his voyages on Bintang, as well as many unpublished photographs. In 2003 Mr van Reijsen self-published the posthumous manuscript, with a selection of photographs, in a limited, 330-page paperback edition of 100 copies. Its title was Komodo: Dragon Island.
7 He contacted our museum to ask if we wished to buy a copy and you can imagine how quickly I ordered some. Van Reijsen’s uncle, it transpires, had hired a crew of six Makassans and sailed Bintang to the islands of the Komodo dragon. The crew included a cook and enough hands to man the oars, his engineless prahu’s only auxiliary power if the wind failed or currents were contrary in these difficult, reef-strewn waters. Collins had initially aimed for the Moluccas further to the east: the original Spice Islands, source of the precious cloves and nutmeg that had first lured Europeans to the Indies. But the famed wind of his earlier book title, the East Monsoon, was blowing hard and it forced them south to Sumbawa, hundreds of kilometres across the Flores Sea. With difficulty they reached the island of Komodo where the eponymous dragons lived. There Collins spent six months studying and photographing Varanus komodoensis (called ‘ora’ in the local language), with the same passionate curiosity that he had applied to his Makassan hosts in Sulawesi. The large carnivores were little-known at that time, and Collins disproved some wildly inaccurate published reports that the dragons were seven metres long and ran on their hind legs like a Tyrannosaurus rex. Nonetheless they grew to nearly four metres and could prey on careless villagers as well as their usual diet of wild pigs and deer. Collins used the rotting carcases of chickens and goats to lure the dragons within camera range.
G E P ‘Pat’ Collins was an unusual enthusiast for the sailing traditions, cultures and people of the East Indies
Living on Bintang and mixing with local Bajau seagypsies, and Manggarai hunters from the nearby large island of Flores, he explored the Komodo archipelago with his customary relish. The harsh life and poor nutrition he endured in this remote, dry, rugged ‘paradise’ led to illness and infection that put him in hospital in the Dutch regional outpost of Ruteng, Flores, in 1937. There he met a Warner Brothers team hoping to film this ‘lost world of prehistoric creatures’, and he ferried them to Komodo on Bintang. Komodo: Dragon Island paints an unvarnished picture of Collins. He was a lively writer but one who had benefited greatly from the highly professional editors of his London and New York publishers in the 1930s. The manuscript finally published by his nephew is unedited, preserving all the idiosyncrasies and excesses of its often quixotic author. In a foreword, nephew Rudi van Reijsen wrote a brief biography of the man he called his ‘favourite uncle’. It answered many of the questions about Collins’s life that I had harboured for decades. In 2016 I was able to visit the elderly Mr van Reijsen at his home in Brussels, to find out even more about his uncle.
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George Ernest Patrick Collins was born in India on 17 April 1904, but was sent to England as an infant and brought up by a relative. In an introduction to his final book, ‘Pat’ (as he called himself) describes a childhood obsession with ancient ships and the tropics: Caravels off palm-fringed shores, in a picture book given to me on my fourth birthday, made me want one of those old sailing ships … When I read about ancient Greek, Roman and Carthaginian ships they displaced the caravels. The tropical attraction grew stronger as I learned about Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago. Collins read Greek, Latin and Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford, in 1923–26, but perhaps distracted by his obsessions he failed his final exams, so he couldn’t get a foreign service job. Instead he joined the Blue Funnel Shipping Company and was posted to Penang and Singapore as a shipping agent. He learned to speak Malay, met South Sulawesi sailors trading to Singapore and fell in love with their prahus, which had double side-rudders like ancient Greco-Roman ships and high sterns like old Portuguese caravels.
02 01 The autobiographical novel Twin Flower: A story of Bali (1934) has photographs of its supposedly ‘fictional’ characters including this one of the protagonist’s romantic interest, the Balinese exile Mas. Image G E P Collins 02 Pat Collins and his wife Lida van Reijsen in the USA in the 1940s. Photographer unknown
In 1929 he resigned his desk job and took passage from Singapore to Bali on a Makassan-built trading ketch or palari pinisi, just like Garland in the ‘novel’ Twin Flower that followed. Whether Collins actually had an affair with the Balinese girl in the book’s photo, his nephew Rudi van Reijsen couldn’t tell me. He did explain that after the Komodo adventure, his Uncle Pat had sailed Bintang back to the port of Makassar and laid the vessel up on a beach. In 1940 Collins married a Dutch airline employee, Lida van Reijsen, in Batavia (Jakarta) where he found work in the British Consul-General’s information bureau. In February 1942 the couple barely escaped the invading Japanese with their lives, as evacuating ships were bombed. They reached the United States via Australia and New Zealand. As an expert on the East Indies, Collins worked for the US Offices of War Information and Strategic Services, aiding Allied plans to retake the islands. In wartime USA, Collins lectured about his Indonesian experiences. An article he wrote for the January 1945 edition of National Geographic, called ‘Seafarers of South Celebes’, earned him a tidy US$500 – several times more than he had spent on building and crewing his prahu Bintang. After the war Collins didn’t return to the East Indies, which was briefly re-occupied by the Dutch until international recognition of Indonesian independence in 1949. He had received news about Bintang from the Dutch harbourmaster of Makassar, who wrote: ‘... on account of bombing and machine gunning [during Allied air strikes], the hull of the vessel is a total loss and not worth repairing’. It seems likely that World War II and subsequent post-colonial conflicts were the reason why this prolific writer’s Komodo: Dragon Island went unpublished during his lifetime. His London publisher probably received the manuscript about the time that war with Hitler was declared. After the war, Indonesian struggles against the Dutch and the turmoil of Indonesia’s early decades of independence made the story of a young English vagabond’s curious adventures in a pre-war Dutch colony somewhat dated or irrelevant.
Collins had a post-war career in various United Nations agencies, becoming an expert on aquaculture for developing countries. He and his wife Lida had no children, retiring to Florida, where Collins died in 1991 at the age of 87. His widow, the youngest sister of Rudi van Reijsen’s father, died in 2000.
Collins spent six months studying and photographing Komodo dragons Varanus komodoensis with passionate curiosity
Baits of rotting carcases lured Komodo dragons into camera range. Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections
G E P ‘Pat’ Collins was an unusual, quirky ‘colonial’ for his time, an enthusiast for the sailing traditions, cultures and islands of what we now call Indonesia – then the East Indies or Malay Archipelago. He’s been something of an inspiration to me, in that respect. I have often visited the boat-building beaches of South Sulawesi where Collins’s prahu Bintang was made, including on several Australian National Maritime Museum tours where I introduced Members to the Makassans.8 Their shipwright traditions are still thriving, hand-building prahus of solid teak or ironwood beneath the coconut palms. Indeed, much larger, modernised, motorised versions of Collins’s palari pinisi are built there today as tourist charter or dive boats. It was my good fortune to meet Rudi van Reijsen just a few years before he died, aged 91. I was eager to see what other unpublished Collins photographs there might be; some of them appear here, for the first time. Not long before my visit, Mr van Reijsen had donated Collins’s entire archive – negatives, prints, manuscripts, field notes and correspondence – to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, a noted research centre for Dutch colonial history and Indonesian ethnography. Fortunately for me he had kept digital scans of the photographs, which he shared with me. The archive will become a rich record of pre-war maritime Indonesia when, in due course, it has been catalogued by the University of Leiden and made available to researchers.
1 Makassans as well as Bugis, Butonese, Mandar and Bajau (Sea-Gypsy) people took part, trading trepang through the major Sulawesi seaport Makassar. These related seafarers, all from Sulawesi, are grouped under the Anglicised term ‘Macassans’ in the seminal study, The Voyage to Marege by Campbell MacKnight, 1976 Melbourne University Press. 2 G E P Collins, East Monsoon, 1936 Jonathan Cape, London; 1937 Charles Scribner Sons, New York. All the Collins books are available in the museum’s Vaughan Evans Library. 3 G E P Collins, Makassar Sailing, 1937 Jonathan Cape, London; 1992 Oxford University Press, Singapore 4 Annual Makassan fishing voyages to Australia were banned by Australian customs and immigration officials in 1906. Collins would have met living veterans of these voyages, 30 years later. 5 Collins’s prahu was based on the principal Makassan trading ship of the 20th century, with its Dutch-style gaff rig. A model of their earlier ships, which had no such Western influence, appears in the exhibition Under Southern Skies. See the author’s essay on the evolution of Makassan prahus at sea.museum/2018/01/24/unesco-heritage-lists-indonesianwooden-boat-building/ 6 G E P Collins, Twin Flower: a Story of Bali, 1934 Jonathan Cape, London; 1992 Oxford University Press, Singapore 7 G E P Collins, Komodo: Dragon Island, 2003 Editions Clepsydre, Brussels: limited edition of 100
8 See Jeffrey Mellefont, ‘Members in Makassar’, Signals No. 108 September–November 2014 pp16–21
Jeffrey Mellefont was the founding editor of Signals 1989–2013. In retirement he continues to research, write and lecture on the history and seafaring traditions of Australia’s archipelagic neighbour, Indonesia.
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