Suchergebnisse

Denys Lombard
Following the expedition of the brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier from Dieppe to Sumatra in 1529, it was not until a little over sixty years later that a new expedition from Britanny was sent to the East Indies. One of the ships was shipwrecked off the Maldives (and thanks to one of the survivors, Pyrard de Laval, we have an excellent account of Male, capital of the Maldives, and India). The other vessel would make it to Aceh and, thanks to François Martin de Vitré, we have an interesting account of the trip. First published in 1604, his memoir was republished only one time in 1609. It is accompanied by a Malay-French dictionary (the first of its kind ...), a description of the diverse plants and animals encountered along the way, as well as «observations on scurvy». The most interesting part of Fr. Martin's account is that which he tells us about the of society Aceh itself, such as the fact that at this time many of the inhabitants were still «pagan» (i.e. Hindus), that Turkish brokers travelled there frequently and that we owe the introduction of firearm techniques to Aceh «to the Chinese» ...

It is truly not easy to write a "well integrated" history of Southeast Asia. If today, anybody feels such a necessity, the procedure is far from obvious, and thus the utility of using a special issue such as the present one to take stock of the situation is quite evident. The main difficulty is in fact to transcend the heaviness of regional, colonial and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space.