Pinisi: Indonesia’s Art of Shipbuilding

Horst H. Liebner – Maresearch Indonesia

Since the earliest times of human settlement of Indonesia, her seas have been the natural
lanes of migration, communication and commerce. Not surprisingly, the Archipelago’s
inhabitants inherit the perhaps most sophisticated maritime traditions of our World ; and, it
was this bequest of seafaring and trade that unified the immense diversity of people and
customs of more than 17.000 islands into a cultural zone once known as the Malay World
which mellowed into the modern nation of Indonesia. The vehicles of these developments
were the perahu, the countless types of indigenous sailing vessels.

Traditionally, an Indonesian ship or boat is classified in two ways, i.e., by a term for her rig and
sails and a different name for shape and type of the hull; hence, differences in naming
traditional craft which are obvious for an Indonesian sailor or boat-builder can be tricky for
the layman. ‘Pinisi’ (pronounced ‘peeneeseek’), the word that nowadays epitomises
Indonesian perahu-shipping, thus literally refers to the vessel’s rigging only, i.e., a sailplan of
seven to eight sails that recalls the western schooner-ketch. Yet, a pinisi’s hull –be it a palari,
an old-fashioned salompong, or a western style lambo– would be constructed according to
millennia-old traditions that contravene western ship-building concepts: It is not assembled
around a framework ‘covered’ with planks, but build as a ‘shell of planks’ connected to one
another with wooden dowels inserted into their edges, into which frames and other
strengthenings are fitted only after the hull is nearly finished. One could call it a hybrid vessel
– were it not for various differences in the arrangement of the sails (here, e.g., the mainsails
are ‘pulled out’ like curtains along spars that are fixed onto the masts, and not, as on a western
schooner, ‘raised’ together with the gaffs) and the harmony of hull, steering device –two long-
rudder blades attached to a sophisticated construction on the aft-ship, and not the single
central one on western ships– and sail plan that marked the pinisi as a type of her own. [1]
The ‘romantic’ version of the advent of the pinisi takes us back to the 1840s. According to
Malay traditions, around then the modern-minded ruler of Terengganu, Sultan Baginda Omar,
asked a certain European who had settled and married a local girl there, to help building a
boat that would resemble the most modern western ships; accordingly, a royal schooner was
built, soon to become the prototype for a new class of sailing vessels called pinas. Boat and
reputed builder – a French or German beachcomber by the name of Martin Perrot– were, in
fact, seen and met by a British naval officer captain in 1846, and it is speculated that pinas
derives from the word pinasse, which in the French and German of the time referred to a
medium-sized sailing ship.
However, it almost certainly was not only this one vessel that became the prototype of the
pinisi. Already since the early 18 th century, the Dutch East-India Company constructed
European-style bottoms for her inter-Asian trade in Javanese shipyards, thus continuously

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introducing new methods and rigs, including the Dutch version of the then new fore -and-aft
schooner sails. As a consequence, local boatyards started building a wide range of new, hybrid
types that combined local hulls and European sails; especially popular in the early 1800s was
the toop, a European-style hull with a new and much more manoeuvrable variation of the
traditional set of oblong tanja sails, the rig used by ‘Indonesians’ sailors since at least the 8 th
century, when the magnificent Borobudur was erected. [2]
When with the beginning 19th century the colonial navies and European as well as Arab, Indian
and Chinese trading firms operated an ever increasing number of Western (but more often
than not, locally built) schooners in their ventures all over the islands, the military and
commercial competition of such craft that were able to outsail the monsoon-bound traditional
Indonesian perahu was felt more and more severely; we thus find reports from as early as the
1830s about perahu, ‘schooner-rigged with cloth sails’, being employed by ‘pirates’ operating
in the Straits of Malacca, or hear of the Sultan of far-away Ternate having asked ‘some years
before 1850’ his shipbuilders to construct a brig, a two-masted European-type trader, and two
small schooners on the East-Indonesian island of Taliabu.
It, however, still took some time until the Archipelago’s typical schooner fully developed –
even after the royal pinas of Terengganu or the efforts of the Sultan of Ternate. By 1864 the
first pinas, pinisch, or pinies owned by local masters and traders appeared in the lists of vessels
registered in the western parts of the Dutch East Indies; as they were an apparent success,
pinas in the decades to come replaced all the various toop, sala-sala or padewakang noted in
the shipping news sections of the commercial papers of the time, incessantly spreading
further east throughout the Archipelago. In 1906 the word ‘pinas’ made it into the yearly
Dutch Encyclopedia of the East Indies; and a local tradition claims that in right that year
Sulawesian shipwrights from Ara launched the first pinisi for a captain of the neighbouring
village of Bira.
For centuries, boat-building had been the main occupation for a small cluster of villages along
Sulawesi’s arid southern coast. The master shipwrights of Lemo-Lemo and Ara are mentioned
in foreign sources since the 17th century, yet due to living far enough from the centres of might
were never much employed in colonial efforts. They thus constantly improved the age-old art
of indigenous ‘shell-first’ shipbuilding, where a hull would be constructed following a pre-
conceived pattern that delineates arrangements, lengths and forms of the many planks
needed to construct a hull, fixes the positions of even the last of the hundreds of dowels used
to fit the planks together, and précises the places were what kind of frame will be inserted.
The first pinisi reportedly were built on hulls constructed by a plan called tatta tallu, the
‘three-times-cut’,[3] that were enlarged by additional plank-strakes; the hulls with a ‘stepped
bow’ and overhanging aft deck resulting from this approach were called lopi (‘ship’)
salompong, and are, in more or less the same form, depicted on most drawings and pictures
of ships built in the area between the 1600s and the 1940s – the shipwrights apparently were
continuing a century-old tradition, here only modified by given the ships the ‘sharper’ form
that would turn her into a salompong palari, a ‘running’ salompong, that could better handle

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the driving power of the new sails. Somewhen in the late 1930s, it was the people of Ara who
eventually developed the genuine hull for a the pinisi: A new pattern, the ‘four-time-cut’,
resulted in the true palari, allowing for larger hulls with a more flexible plank-pattern that
avoided the salompong-‘step’ on the bows and better integrated the aft-deck and the various
beams necessary to attach the rudders.
Today, true pinisi are hard to find. Since the 1970s the once biggest fleet of sailing
merchantmen left on this World’s seas was motorised; soon, the pinisi’s sails became a
support for the engine, instead of the engine helping in driving a sailing vessel; then, with
increasingly bigger machines, the canvas was reduced in size; by the end of the 1980s, the
mizzen masts of the few remaining ships had been cut down, thus rescinding the very
definition of the ships’ name. Clearly, using many big sails does mean needing many hands,
and in modern times labour and wages became a more and more important factor in
seemingly traditional economics. Today, even the picturesque vessels available for holiday
charters that due to some obscure pronunciation issues are marketed as ‘phinisi’ carry masts
much too short to move them with sails alone. Next to none of all these ships still uses the
genuine palari – using an engine commands proper fastenings for its propeller-shaft and the
centre rudder that goes with it, a feature the traditional sailing hull does not provide. An
alternative became the lambo, a square-sterned hull that copies European examples,
developed in the 1930s for small, sloop-rigged (nade) traders that would carry a central
rudder. However, the approaches ruling the construction of a lambo –or, of necessity, any
other ‘new’ type of hull built in southern Sulawesi– are not overly different to those used to
build a palari or salompong: To achieve a technically sound structure, positions of dowels,
planks and frames have to be defined before the building process commences, and while form
and sizes may vary, the routines thereto applied employ the same concepts, terminology and
solutions.
Unquestionably, it is the complexity of these approaches that mark the Art of Indonesian
Shipbuilding, and their adaptability that helped these traditions to survive into our
computerised world. The biggest ships recently build in southern Sulawesi using such
techniques reached up to 1000 metric tons of cargo capacity and 50 meter length – while still
small pajala, net(jala)-fishing boats constructed according to the tatta tallu pattern were seen
on the leviathans’ sides. As demonstrated by comparable patterns for the positioning of
dowels and the arrangement of a hull’s planks observed on two recently found shipwrecks of
the 7th and the 9th centuries CE, such procedures in one way or other must have governed also
the construction of the ships depicted on the Borobudur: The construction of a seagoing vessel
has always involved highly specialised knowledge and sophisticated cognitive efforts, the very
substance of intangible heritage.