now bears his name.
Photographer Mike Severns, who runs a dive operation in Maui with his wife, marine biologist Pauline Fiene-Severns, provided us with some of his very fine work from North Sulawesi. Mike's most recent book of photographs, Sulawesi Seas, co-authored with Pauline, has garnered widespread praise from both journalists and fellow professionals.
Rudie Kuiter is an experienced underwater photographer and the author of one of the best fish identification guides to the region: Tropical Reef-Fishes of the Western Pacific. Rudie provided an essay on discovering new species and a series of very interesting photographs.
Mark V. Erdmann, a coral reef ecologist who has conducted research in Indonesia for four years, provided the section on South Sulawesi. Mark's primary concern is marine conservation and development, and he has authored several articles on destructive fishing techniques in the archipelago.
Janet Boileau and Debe Campbell, both free-lance writers living in Jakarta, wrote the Java section, and Debe helped update the practical section for Bali.
Andy Udayana, a student at the National Tourism University in Bali also helped update the practical section for Bali.
Lastly, I wrote some of the marine life and background sections, and updated the volume for this printing.
— David Pickell
San Francisco 1998
Two snappers, Macolor macularis, and a cloud of peach anthias and lyretail anthias, Pseudanthias dispar and P. squammipinnis, at Mike's Point, on the northwest corner of Bunaken Island in Sulawesi. This site was named after the photographer. Photograph by Mike Severns.
Introducing the Indonesian Islands
The islands of Indonesia spread in a wide arc, more than 5,000 kilometers long, from mainland Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea. Dotted with volcanoes, covered with thick tropical vegetation and bright green rice fields, and surrounded by coral reefs, the Indonesian archipelago is one of the world's most beautiful places.
The most reliable figure offered for the number of islands in Indonesia is 17, 508, including rocks and sandbanks exposed by the tides. Some 6,000 of these are important enough to have names, and perhaps 1,000 are inhabited.
Indonesia is the largest archipelagic nation in the world, with at least 80,000 kilometers of coastline. Some estimates run as high as 200,000 kilometers, but even the lower figure makes Indonesia's coastline longer than that of any other nation. The territorial waters of Indonesia include 3.1 million square kilometers of tropical seas.
Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest country, with 204 million inhabitants. Most are Muslims, but there are significant Christian and Hindu minorities. Racially the majority of Indonesians are Malayo-Polynesian, with Chinese and Papuan minorities. The capital and largest city is Jakarta.
The Indonesian language is a variant of Malay, which, in this nation of hundreds of languages, has long served as the lingua franca of trade.
Seafaring Empires
Indonesians refer to their country as tanah air kita—"our land and water"—and have always considered the seas as an integral part of their country. The ancestors of the great majority of Indonesians—the Austronesians—arrived in the archipelago by boat. The invention of the outriggered canoe some 5,000 years ago was as essential a development to seafarers as the wheel was to land-locked people.
Many of Indonesia's 17, 508 islands are graced with beautiful, palm-lined beaches. This is the south coast of Bali.
Spreading first from the Asian mainland to Taiwan, and then— about 3,000 B.C.—through the Philippines and into the larger islands of western Indonesia, the Austronesians brought with them rice and domesticated animals, and thrived on the rich volcanic soil of the Sunda Islands.
But seafaring skills were not forgotten. Starting in the 4th century, Indonesians from south Kalimantan (Borneo) sailed across the Indian Ocean to settle in uninhabited Madagascar, just off the coast of Africa.
The first great Indonesian empire, the Buddhist Srivijaya, was a maritime empire based around the port of Palembang in southeast Sumatra. The Srivijaya controlled the Straits of Malacca, the key to the crucial China-India trade route, from the 7th to the 13th centuries.
Influences from the Asian subcontinent continued to reach the archipelago, which became increasingly Indianized in culture and religion.
From A.D. 1294 to the 15th century, most of western Indonesia was controlled by the powerful East Java kingdom of Majapahit, the most famous of the archipelago's ancient kingdoms. Majapahit is thought to have exacted tribute from islands as far away as New Guinea.
A fisherman tries his luck off the dock at Ampenan, Lombok.
Islam and the Europeans
Beginning in the mid-13th century, Indonesian traders and rulers began converting to Islam, for both political and religious reasons. The biggest boost to Islamization of the archipelago came with the conversion of the ruler of Malacca, which sat in a very strategic position on the strait between Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia.
Most of these conversions were peaceful—the Sufi doctrine offering a theologically smooth transition for the Hinduized kingdoms—but Majapahit, past its prime, fell by force to the neighboring Islamic kingdom of Demak in the early 16th century.
This was also about the time the Portuguese, seeking spices, arrived in the archipelago, conquering Malacca in 1511. Soon after, the Spanish and English also sought Indonesia's valuable spices, but it was a century later that Holland, newly independent of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled from Spain, succeeded in controlling the market in cloves, nutmeg and pepper. During much of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch East India Company held a virtual monopoly.
The company went broke in 1799, and in the 19th century, the Dutch concentrated their colonial efforts on Java, leading to a huge increase in the population of this island.
During World War II, the Japanese quickly swept through the Dutch Indies, evicting the colonialists in 1942. At the end of the war, Indonesian nationalist leaders declared independence—on August 17, 1945—but it took four more years to oust the Dutch. Irian Jaya, the western part of New Guinea, was transferred to Indonesia in the 1960s; the former Portuguese colony of East Timor was annexed in 1976.
Lush Islands
The "Ring of Fire" runs through Sumatra, Java, the Lesser Sundas, and then up through the Moluccas. These islands are marked by jagged volcanoes, and the rich, black soil that produces the great rice crops of Java and Bali. Some of the islands—for example, Timor, Seram and Biak—are formed of uplifted coral limestone. Here the soil is poor, and some areas—particularly parts of Timor—exhibit dry grassland that is more reminiscent of Australia than the tropics.
Two seasons of wind sweep through Indonesia each year. The northwest monsoon, usually starting (depending on the area) between late October and late November and ending between March and April, brings rain and wind. The southeast monsoon,
