A Brief History of Phinisi Rigged Schooners....Part 2

Sailing the Asian Seas - Phinisi Schooners - Part 2

As the story goes, the first pinisiq (pronounced ‘peeneeseek’) was built in the 1840's by a certain French or German beachcomber in Trengganu, Malaysia, who had settled and married a local girl there. When one day the raja, Sultan Baginda Omar, asked the long-nose to help in building a boat that would resemble the most modern western vessels, a royal schooner was built; boat and builder -by the name of Martin Perrot- were seen and met by an English captain in 1846.

Following Malay traditions, this vessel became the prototype for a new class of vessels called pinas, probably after the word pinasse, which in the French and German of the time referred to a medium-sized sailing boat.


However, it certainly was not only this one vessel, which became the prototype of the pinisiq. Already since the early 18th century, the Dutch East-India trading company VOC had started constructing European style vessels for her inter Asian trade in Javanese shipyards, thus continuously introducing new constructional methods and rigs, including the Dutch version of the then new fore-and-aft sails. Throughout the 19th century the colonial navies and European as well as Arab, Indian and Chinese trading firms operated an ever increasing number of Western schooners in their ventures all over the islands; but, though reports from as early as the 1830ies mention perahu, i.e. locally build vessels, “schooner rigged with cloth sails”, being employed by ‘pirates’ operating in the Straits of Malacca, it still took several decades until the Archipelago’s typical schooner fully developed - even after the royal pinas of Trenggangu, Apparently, the competition by fore-and-aft rigged traders from English Singapore and Dutch Java who were able to outsail the monsoon-bound traditional Indonesian craft was felt more and more severely during the second half of the 19th century; hence, the adoption of their rig proved a necessity for indigenous inter-island trade. During these decades of evolution, the Indonesian sailors and boat-builders changed some of the features of the originally western schooner: I.e., the gaffs of a pinisiq are fixed onto the mast, so that the gaff isn’t pulled up to the crosstrees as on the Western version, but the sail is pulled out running along the gaff like a curtain. By the way, the first genuine South-Sulawesian pinisiq was built for a Biran captain by people of Ara around 1900.

More details tomorrow...


-Similan Diving