Kajoe garoe — Malay kayu garu, English agarwood, eaglewood, or aloeswood — is the fragrant heartwood of the Aquilaria tree, prized from antiquity as incense and perfume-base, that was one of the principal trade-goods of the Atjehnese sphere and the gift accompanying the king of Batu’s appeal to Pero de Faria of Malacca in 1539. It is, with kapoer baroer and minjak tanah, one of the three trade-goods whose names underlie the bedekte taal register of Malay-Javanese historical geography.
The 1539 embassy
Pinto, at the opening of his account of the Atjeh-Aru war, records that the embassy of the king of Batu to Pero de Faria in 1539 — offering to recognise the King of Portugal as suzerain in exchange for protection against Atjeh — was accompanied by a rich gift of kamfer and kajoe garoe (eaglewood). The gift was, in the political economy of the early-sixteenth-century Sumatran west coast, the standard token of submission: the king of Batu offered the two most valuable products of his country in exchange for Portuguese aid against the Atjehnese sultan’s expansion.
Decoding and the Xarnauz record
The same kajoe garoe, De Roo de la Faille notes, underlies the Xarnauz record of the Roteiro of Vasco da Gama — the “land of Christians and the king is Christian” whose king “has 400 elephants of war. In the land is much benzoin and there is aloës won”. The “Christians” De Roo de la Faille decodes as keris-tijang “kris-bearers”; the elephants as the elephant-land of the Sumatran east coast; the benzoin as loban djawi (“Javanese incense”); and the aloës as the kajoe garoe of the Atjehnese sphere. The three trade-goods — kajoe garoe, benzoin, and war-elephants — together fix the Xarnauz of the Roteiro as the Aru-Taroema-Astina complex at the bay of Aroe.
Significance
For AcehWiki, kajoe garoe is one of the three trade-goods whose names underlie the bedekte taal register of Malay-Javanese historical geography — the eaglewood of the Atjehnese sphere that accompanied the king of Batu’s 1539 embassy to Malacca, and that the Roteiro of Vasco da Gama records as one of the products of the Aru-Astina complex. Its role in the political economy of the early-sixteenth-century Sumatran coast also fixes it as a standard token of submission in the Atjeh-Aru war period.
See Also
- Kapoer baroer
- Minjak tanah
- Batu
- Pasaman
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Aceh Sultanate
- Xarnauz
- Astina
- Bedekte taal
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 7-8.