ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the Dutch East India Company establishment, and its first stone trading post in Java at Bantn, a famous pepper-trading kingdom in West Java, in 1603. It discusses the transliteration system, which is used in this article for the Javanese script is based upon the new official orthography for Malay and Indonesian. This is not entirely satisfactory, however, for representing Javanese script. But to have used this system here might have led to some confusion since, for instance, Malay di-or ada would have appeared as dhi-or adha. Upon investigation these proved to be original correspondence between the dignitaries of Bantn and the Dutch under Jan Pietersz. They are written not in Javanese but in Malay, five of the letters employing Javanese script and one Arabic script. The letters are of interest as evidence of the Bantn opinion of the Dutch and as early examples pasar Malay, the lingua franca of maritime South-East Asia.
