An account of trade patterns in the Banda Sea in 1797, from an unpublished manuscript in the India office library

How a travelling society totalizes itself: Hybrid polities and values in Maluku, Eastern Indonesia

“…This area was also the first refuge for the indigenous Bandanese who escaped the Dutch (Van der Chijs, 1886: 162). Europeans in Banda were visited yearly by boats from Eastern Seram as well as the Kei Islands, another site of new Bandanese settlements (Miller, 1980: 51). For more than a century after their exile from their ancestral home, the Bandanese operated a long-distance trade network with access to nutmeg, tree resins, sea cucumbers and other global commodities produced in remote eastern islands and the New Guinea coast (Swadling et al., 1996; Goodman, 2006).…”

Preliminary notes on Bandanese; Language maintenance and change in Kei

“…For example, in March 1978 Ali Rumra (of Banda Elat) wrote the following note seeking assistance for the researcher (Collins) The claim that the texts were authored before the ancestors left Banda in the early 17th century is made by informants and in some of the texts themselves. Trading contacts between Banda and Kei continued throughout the colonial period (Meilink-Roelofsz 1962:94); see also Miller's study of trade in the Banda Sea in 1797 (Miller 1980). The song traditions suggest that the Bandanese themselves were sailing to Banda from Kei at an early period.…”