Old Malacca: Tranqueira and Gajah Berang
Father R. Cardon of the Paris Foreign Missions Society published this article in the JMBRAS in 1948, tracing the etymology and military history of two adjacent place names in pre-modern Malacca—Tranqueira and Gajah Berang—through Portuguese primary sources and surviving Dutch administrative records. His central thesis is that “Tranqueira” was a standard Portuguese military term for a defensive palisade or entrenchment, not a personal name as local oral tradition had come to believe, and that the Gajah Berang district preserves the memory of a maddened elephant recorded by the contemporary chronicler Gaspar Correia.
Summary
The article begins from a footnote added by D.F.A. Hervey in 1883 to a translation of Dutch records from the Malacca Government Office. Hervey recorded two competing local explanations for the name “Tranqueira”—one attributing it to a Portuguese man of note, the other to a fierce elephant at Gajah Berang—and noted that the word “means an obstacle.” Cardon seizes on this to argue that the local tradition had lost the original Portuguese military meaning of the term. He establishes that a tranqueira was an entrenchment of wooden posts driven into the ground, sometimes with pits bristling with pointed sticks or caltrops in front, a fortification system very much in use among the peoples of the East.
Cardon then traces the Tranqueira’s evolution through the Portuguese period. Initially a wooden palisade raised by the Kling merchants around their quarter in the northern suburb of Upeh, it was later rebuilt as a taipa (rammed earth) wall after the devastating Achinese attacks of the 1530s. The wall protected the commercial district but proved inadequate against large-scale sieges, and the native population regularly abandoned it to take refuge within the main Fortress. Cardon follows the Tranqueira through successive sieges—Achinese, Javanese, Johore—until its probable destruction during the Dutch capture of 1641, after which the Dutch governor Bort found the northern suburb “completely open” and had to construct new defences from scratch.
The second half of the article addresses the Gajah Berang. Cardon identifies the district as the site of the wilderness where, according to Gaspar Correia’s Lendas, a maddened elephant belonging to the exiled King Mahmud roamed for approximately a decade before peacefully entering the town in 1526. He argues that Hervey’s footnote, recording the 1880s oral tradition, confirms that the Gajah Berang name derives from this animal and that the two place names had become conflated in popular memory. The article closes with biographical notes on Correia, the only contemporary chronicler to commit the elephant story to writing, and on Francisco d’Andrada, who later borrowed the account for his chronicle of King John III.
Key Findings
- The Tranqueira was first mentioned by Portuguese historians in 1525; Cardon proposes 1520 as the likely date of its initial construction as a wooden palisade by the Kling merchants of Kampong Kling (p. 3).
- Following the Achinese attack of 1536–37, D. Estevao da Gama ordered the wooden palisade replaced with a taipa wall of earth and pebbles, completed within thirty days; its walls were at least man-high and in places two to three times taller (pp. 5–6).
- Godinho de Eredia’s 1613 description records the Tranqueira as comprising a stone bastion on the beach, an earth wall running 60 fathoms east past the service gate, then at an obtuse angle south-east to the gate of Kampong China on the river (p. 10).
- Schouten’s post-1641 report describes the northern suburb’s wall as 2½ fathoms high and 1 fathom thick, with a stone gate at the extreme north; he noted “there is hardly a house standing” (p. 9).
- Governor Bort’s 1677 report confirms the Tranqueira was no longer serviceable: the northern suburb “lay completely open” and required entirely new defences, including barricaded streets and a new breastwork of fired bricks (p. 9).
- The Gajah Berang episode is dated to 1526, during Pero Mascarenhas’s preparation of an expedition against King Mahmud at Bintang; the elephant, maddened and roaming the forest for about ten years, entered the town and lay down motionless before the Famosa gate before being led to the stable (pp. 12–13).
Conclusion
Cardon’s definitive takeaway is that the Tranqueira was a conventional Portuguese military outwork—a palisade later upgraded to an earth wall—that protected the commercial northern suburb of Malacca from the 1520s until its destruction in 1641, and that the Gajah Berang name preserves the memory of a specific documented animal. The article demonstrates how the loss of Portuguese linguistic knowledge among the Malaccan population over three centuries reduced a precise military term to a vague folk etymology, and how Hervey’s 1883 footnote, though itself confused, inadvertently preserved the last trace of the original meaning.
Context
- Primary sources consulted include Gaspar Correia’s Lendas dos Feitos da India (unpublished until 1858–1864), Castanheda’s Historia do Descobrimento e Conquista da India, Couto’s De Asia, Godinho de Eredia’s Declaracam de Malacca (1613), and Dutch records (Bort’s 1677 report, Schouten’s visit report, Leupe’s translation of the 1641 siege account).
- Historiographically, the article contributes to the physical and military topography of Portuguese Malacca by identifying the Tranqueira’s location and structural evolution, and by linking the Gajah Berang place name to a specific documented event in Correia’s chronicle.