A Malay tradition
Fr. R. Cardon, a Missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions, published this article in 1940 to investigate a Malay oral tradition concerning Bukit Greja (“Church Hill”) near Malacca Pindah, arguing that the site corresponds to the Portuguese hermitage of Nossa Senhora da Esperanca described by Eredia around 1600, and that the village name “Malacca Pindah” (“Removal of Malacca”) commemorates the flight of Catholic refugees there following Dutch persecution of the faith in the 1660s.
Summary
Cardon’s central task is to reconcile a local Malay tradition—recorded by V. E. Dias in 1939—according to which Portuguese Christians, priests, and sacred vessels arrived at the foot of Bukit Greja “more than two hundred years ago” and built a chapel on the hilltop, with the documentary record of Portuguese and Dutch Malacca. He first establishes the historical geography of the Portuguese river settlements, demonstrating through Eredia’s Declaracam and map, Diogo do Couto’s narrative of the 1586 punitive expedition under Diogo de Azambuja, and Barreto de Resende’s Livro do Estado that Nossa Senhora da Esperanca lay on the Malacca river (Sungei Batang Malacca) near Pengkalan Naning, not on the Sungei Baru as Mills had previously supposed. He identifies the surrounding toponyms on Eredia’s map with their modern equivalents—Alor Gajah, Belimbing, Beringin, Lendu, Sungei Bulo, Lubok Kepong, and Sungei Kepong—to fix the settlement’s position.
The second half of the article traces the fate of the Catholic community under Dutch rule. After the 1641 conquest, the Dutch initially tolerated Catholic worship under Governor de Vlaming van Oudtshoorn, as attested by Father Alexandre de Rhodes’s 1646 visit, but this was reversed by his 12 June 1646 proclamation and then by Balthazar Bort’s more severe edict of 15 January 1666, which declared all marriages celebrated by Catholic priests null and void. Cardon argues that it was this escalation of persecution that prompted the Malaccan Catholics to revive the old site of Our Lady of Hope at Bukit Greja, among the Menangkabau Malays who were by then hostile to the Dutch and thus offered a degree of protection. The stone church with a tile roof described in the Malay tradition was, in his view, a later reconstruction by the refugees, not the original palm-leaf-roofed hermitage of Eredia’s time.
Finally, Cardon addresses and rejects the theory, advanced by Munshi Abdullah and Father Favre, that the Jakun (Orang Bukit) aborigines near Malacca are descendants of Portuguese. He shows that the “portraits of their ancestors” the Jakuns identified on the Old Gate were actually the Dutch East India Company’s coat-of-arms added after 1669, that the few Portuguese words in Jakun speech are insufficient evidence, and that the hazy Christian-sounding beliefs recorded by Borie among the Mantras are better explained by prolonged contact with Muslim Malays—Raja Brahil being the Archangel Gabriel (Jibrail) and the invoked “Nabi Isa” being the Islamic prophet Jesus, not the Christian Christ.
Key Findings
- Eredia’s map and text place Nossa Senhora da Esperanca on the Malacca river, surrounded by localities identifiable as modern Alor Gajah, Belimbing, Beringin, Lendu, Kampong Sungei Bulo, Lubok Kepong, and Sungei Kepong; Cardon argues this corresponds to Bukit Greja, eight miles from Tampin station, correcting Mills’s placement at the 18th mile on the Malacca–Lubok China Road (pp. 113–114).
- Diogo de Azambuja’s 1586 expedition against the rebellious Menangkabaus of Naning comprised 100 Portuguese, 600 natives, and 400 muskets; the force suffered only three killed and four wounded, and burned the village of ‘Nau and its neighbouring kampongs (pp. 110–112).
- The Temenggong of Naning, a Portuguese casado appointed for life by the Viceroy of India, received as remuneration a fixed quantity of betel worth 1,000 cruzados annually, plus 1½ pounds of rice and one cruzado per prahu from each Menangkabau trader, and a share of freights, fowls, and cattle (p. 119).
- Governor Balthazar Bort’s proclamation of 15 January 1666 declared “nul and void all marriages celebrated by the Popish priesthood” and imposed penalties more severe than de Vlaming’s 1646 edict; Bort himself admitted in 1678 that priests continued to celebrate Mass “in remote places both in the jungle and elsewhere” (pp. 130–131).
- The 15 August 1641 covenant between the Dutch and the Naning chiefs contained 23 articles; Article 19 permitted free Malacca Christians to settle in Naning for agriculture or betel planting provided they paid taxes, and Article 22 forbade any trading intercourse with foreign nations under pain of “forfeiting life and goods” (p. 123).
- The Semelai tribe of Pahang retained a monetary counting system using Portuguese-derived terms—kupang, mos (dollar), pahak (4 mos), and rial (Portuguese real)—which Cardon, citing H. D. Collings of the Raffles Museum, interprets as evidence of former commercial contact with Portuguese traders at Malacca (pp. 144–145).
Conclusion
Cardon’s definitive historical takeaway is twofold: Bukit Greja is the authentic site of the Portuguese hermitage of Our Lady of Hope, and the “Malacca Pindah” tradition records not a Portuguese military or colonial event but the clandestine resettlement of persecuted Catholic refugees there after 1666; simultaneously, the widely accepted theory of Portuguese descent among the Malacca Jakuns is a myth with no anthropological, linguistic, or religious substantiation.
Context
- The article draws on Portuguese sources (Eredia’s Declaracam, Diogo do Couto’s Lusiada, Bocarro’s Década 13, Barreto de Resende’s Livro do Estado, the Documentos Remettidos da Índia), Dutch sources (Schouten’s report, Bort’s 1678 Report, Leupe’s translation of VOC archives), and Jesuit mission records (de Rhodes’s Voyages, Premare’s letter of 1698), alongside Malay oral tradition and 19th-century ethnographic accounts by Favre, Borie, and Munshi Abdullah.
- Historiographically, the article contributes to the revision of the geographical identification of Portuguese river settlements in the Malacca hinterland and offers a critical rebuttal of the Jakun-Portuguese descent theory that had been accepted in Malaccan popular historiography since the 1840s.