ABSTRACT
Editors of early modern cosmographic literature often found it necessary to point out that, in comparison to India and China, the region now termed Southeast Asia was largely unknown. In the 1657 edition of his Cosmographie the English cosmographer Peter Heylyn introduced the region declaring that he could not ‘be so exact and punctual as before’, as these lands were ‘not so well known to the Greeks or Romans as the others
were, by reason of remoteness of their situation; nor so well discovered at the present’ (Heylyn 1657: 905). As modern scholars have shown, classical as well as biblical references would hold their grip on Europe’s knowledge of Asia until the 18th century (Marshall and Williams 1982) and more than any other part of the ‘East-Indies’ the Malay world was perceived as the home of the ancient ‘wonders of the East’, a land of curious beings and marvellous flora and fauna. This image was sustained by Dutch reluctance to allow publications on their possessions in the East, which meant that early modern European compilers of knowledge had to lean on outdated travel literature, describing a multitude of small kingdoms and trading ports peopled by multi-ethnic trading communities. It was clear that the region did not easily lend itself to being compressed and generalised, in the way China and India did.
