A Brief History of Phinisi Rigged Schooners....Part 1

Sailing the Asian Seas - Phinisi Schooners

Phinisi Schooners are beautiful sailing vessels, and also very efficient.

Since the earliest times of human settlement of Indonesia, her seas have been the natural lanes of migration, communication and commerce. Not surprisingly, today’s inhabitants of the Archipelago inherit the perhaps most sophisticated maritime tradition 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 of the Archipelago.'

Traditionally, an Indonesian ship or boat is classified in two ways, i.e. by a term for her rigging and sails and a different name for shape and type of the hull. Thus, differences in naming traditional craft, which are obvious for an Indonesian sailor or boat-builder, can be a bit of tricky for the layman.

Indonesia’s indigenous type of rigging is the layar (‘sail’) tanjaq. It’s perhaps oldest representations are seen in several carvings on the walls of the famous 9th century temple of Borobudur, and Chinese, Arab and European sources since the earliest times of foreign contact speak of the peculiar rectangular tanjaq as the typical sails of the ‘Islands Below the Wind’. During the last decades several expeditions with tanjaq-rigged boats have proved their abilities - the most recent one a voyage of a replica of a ‘Borobudur’-ship along historic routes of Indian Ocean trade from Indonesia to Madagascar and Ghana in 2003/4. Today, this type of sail is in use on some smaller fishing craft only.


The best-known type of vessel rigged with tanjaq was the South-Sulawesian padewakang, widely employed for far-distance trading and fishing until the early days of the 20th century. Padewakang were the biggest craft of the trading and war fleets of the famed South-Sulawesian kingdoms, used by Mandar, Makassar and Bugis traders and warriors for hundreds of years in their plying the seas between western Newguinea, the southern parts of the Philippines, and the Malayan peninsula. Between the end of the 16th to the early 20th centuries they routinely sailed for the coasts of northern Australian in search of tripang, beche-de-mer, and in a Dutch publication of the last century there even is found a drawing of a padewakang under full sail which is undertitled ‘a Sulawesi pirate vessel in the Persian Gulf’.

During the last century Sulawesian sailors began to combine the big rectangular sails of the tanjaq-rig with fore-and-aft type of sails which they saw on the European and American gaff-rigged ships then venturing into the Archipelago. It took about 50 years, until these trials bore the pinisiq-rigging which for the better part of the next century became the typical sail of South-Sulawesi’s perahu.

More details on the history of Phinisi Schooners Tomorrow....


-Similan Diving