A new spider of the genus Liphistius
Tom Harrisson’s 1976 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 49) argues that the ethnonyms “Ngaju” and “Bajau” (with their numerous historical variants) refer to the same or closely related populations, and that their modern separation into distinct ethnic categories is an artificial product of colonial classification. Drawing on early European voyage accounts, colonial-era ethnographic reports, and Bajau oral tradition, Harrisson contends that these peoples constituted a single fluid “nation” spanning inland, agricultural, and maritime roles across Borneo, the Sulu Sea, and beyond, whose apparent fragmentation is a recent historical phenomenon.
Summary
Harrisson’s central problem is the apparent disconnect between the Ngaju, a well-known inland people of central Kalimantan, and the Bajau, the famous sea nomads of the Sulu Sea and northern Borneo. He demonstrates that early European sources, particularly Daniel Beeckman’s 1718 account of a voyage to Borneo, used the term “Byajo” (and variants such as Beaju, Biajo, Beadje, Viadje) to describe the inland inhabitants of the Barito region — the very people later known as Ngaju. Yet in the same period, segments of these “Byajo” were also encountered at sea in large prows along the southwest Bornean coast, where they were described as pirates. Harrisson argues this dual presence — inland and maritime — was not contradictory but reflected the normal fluidity of these populations, who moved between terrestrial and maritime roles according to season, opportunity, and political circumstance.
The article extends this argument through several case studies. The Orang Laut of Trang (southwest Thailand), documented by Annandale and Robinson in 1901–2, are shown to have had terrestrial roots, maintaining cliff cemeteries and farming rice and coconuts on small islands before their purely aquatic phase. In Sabah, the Bajau who were expert coastal fishermen in the mid-nineteenth century (recorded by St. John and Pretyman) had, by the 1970s, become the dominant rice-farming and horse-owning population in the Kinabalu foothills around Kota Belud. Harrisson also draws on Clifford Sather’s 1975 publication of a Bajau Laut narrative from Semporna — the tale of the culture hero Pitun Depah — in which the hero demonstrates complete mastery of rice cultivation despite the Bajau Laut being “not a rice-cultivating people.” Harrisson reads this as a symbolic expression of an ancient ambivalence between sea and land, indicating that the Bajau once practised agriculture with the same competence as fishing.
The broader argument is that the advent of Islam along coastlines in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, followed by European colonial centralisation of trade from the sixteenth century onward, progressively separated lowland Muslim coastal populations from “inland pagans” and froze formerly fluid populations into fixed categories. The steam and diesel ship finalised this process at sea. Harrisson warns against the over-simplification that results when educated observers classify pre-literate peoples into rigid racial or ethnic boxes, arguing that the Ngaju-Bajau record is a prime example of how such classification has obscured the true historical complexity of the region’s populations.
Key Findings
- Beeckman’s 1718 account (p. 43) describes the inland “Byajo” as “much taller and stronger bodied Men than the Banjareens, fierce, warlike and barbarous,” with distinctive ear-plugging and gold-tooth customs, while noting they lived “in Clans by themselves, without Kings, or any Form of Government” (p. 44).
- The first recorded encounter with a “Byajo” boat at sea occurred in 1714, when three large prows were sighted off the southwest Bornean coast; the Europeans initially mistook them for Banjareens before recognising them “by their Dress and Language” (p. 4).
- The Banjareens actively prevented European contact with the inland Byajo, purchasing their produce (gold dust, diamonds, rattans, bezoar) and reselling it at a markup, while inventing “frightful Stories” of the Byajo’s “Barbarity and Cruelty” to deter direct trade (p. 4).
- The Orang Laut Kappir of Trang were “practically lived in their boats until within the last decade” of the early 1900s, and had previously maintained two cliff cemeteries at the mouth of the Chau Mai River, one in a limestone cave containing coffins of “rudely hollowed logs” (p. 63).
- As of 1975, the largest single group of Bajau in Sabah were “skilled rice-farmers and horsemen” who had spread inland up the Tempassuk River to dominate the foothills of Mount Kinabalu around Kota Belud, having been “expert coastal fishermen” less than a century earlier (p. 7).
- The Bajau Laut of Semporna traditionally celebrate a festival every year for the new rice harvest “even though they do not have one,” a practice Sather (1975:34) noted with puzzlement but which Harrisson interprets as evidence of ancient agricultural competence (p. 11).
Conclusion
Harrisson’s definitive takeaway is that the modern ethnic categories applied to the peoples of the Sulu Sea, northern Borneo, and central Kalimantan are historically artificial constructs, imposed by the sequential processes of Islamic coastal consolidation and European colonial administration. The underlying human reality was one of fluid, multi-modal populations who moved between sea, forest, and field according to circumstance. He calls for further research into Bajau and related oral traditions as the “only form of native history available to cover the whole picture and period,” warning that without such work, scholars risk “classifying human reality out of recognition.”
Context
- The article draws on primary sources including Beeckman’s 1718 A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo (copy in Sarawak Museum Reference Library), Annandale and Robinson’s 1903 Fasciculi Malayensis account (National Library, Singapore), St. John’s 1862 Life in the Forests of the Far East, and Sather’s 1975 Brunei Museum Journal publication of a Bajau Laut narrative.
- Harrisson’s contribution is historiographical: he challenges the prevailing anthropological tendency (exemplified by Sopher’s 1965 monograph) to treat sea nomads as a discrete, specialised maritime category, and instead proposes a diachronic model in which land-sea fluidity is the norm and specialisation is the recent exception.