Manuel Godinho de Erédia

Manuel Godinho de Erédia (1563–1623) was a Eurasian writer, cartographer, engineer and adventurer whose works remain among the most important primary sources for the economic and political geography of the Malay Peninsula and the Singapore Straits region in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. [1, pp. 1–2]

Life and Career

Erédia was the son of an Aragonese nobleman, João Eredia Aquaviva, who had established himself in the Portuguese colony of Melaka around 1540 and married a daughter of the king of Supa, one of the Bugis rulers on Sulawesi. [1, p. 3] At the age of twelve, Manuel was sent to Goa in India, where he joined the Society of Jesus before returning to secular life in 1580. [1, p. 3] He subsequently served as a teacher of mathematics and then joined the Portuguese state as a cosmographer. [1, p. 3] Commissioned by the captain of Melaka to explore the peninsula’s hinterland, Erédia undertook travels across the Malay Peninsula, the Singapore Straits and the Johor River in the early 1600s. [1, p. 3] Due to failing health, he returned to Goa around 1605–7, where he died in 1623. [1, p. 3]

His best-known work is the Declaracam de Malaca (c.1613), commonly translated as Description of Melaka, though the toponym ‘Melaka’ in this context refers to the entire Malay Peninsula. [1, p. 2] Other works include the Informacao da Aurea Quersoneso (c.1598–1600), a Summary of Trees (1612), and a Treatise on Ophir (1616). [1, p. 3]

The Miscellany Atlas

The Atlas Miscelanea (Miscellany Atlas, c.1616–22) is a collection of notes, sketches and maps—some unfinished—whose authorship was not established until Jorge Faro ascribed it to Erédia in 1955. [1, pp. 3–4] Previously exhibited by the Lisbon Geographic Society in 1903–04, it was then thought to date from the eighteenth century. [1, p. 3] The atlas belonged to a private collector, Dr C. M. Machado Figueiro, in Lisbon; its current whereabouts is unknown, and only grainy black-and-white photographs from the late 1950s survive, reproduced in volume IV of Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica. [1, p. 3]

The atlas contains three maps of particular significance: one of the Malay Peninsula, one of the Johor River, Singapore and the adjacent straits, and one of Sumatra. [1, p. 2] Borschberg argues that, taken together, these specimens are the most significant historic resource and trade maps of the Straits region for the period spanning the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. [1, p. 2]

Economic and Trade Networks

The maps function as economic documents, depicting resource extraction sites, riverine systems, overland trails and port settlements. [1, p. 2] The map of the Malay Peninsula reveals a denser network of overland trails along the eastern coast, with only one major route serving the west coast, and identifies north–south trading axes running from Phattalung on the Isthmus of Kra to the lower Johor River region. [1, pp. 4–6] Mineral deposits are marked with distinctive symbols: gold in the area corresponding to the modern Central Gold Belt, tin in Perak (yielding more than 300 bahar annually, approximately 54–60 metric tons), and copper and iron in the border regions of Pahang and Perak. [1, pp. 7–10]

The map of Singapore depicts the island within the greater Johor River estuary and names the settlement Xabandaria (Shahbandaria), after the shahbandar or ‘lord of the haven’ who administered the port. [1, pp. 12–14] The map of Sumatra delineates the territories of Aceh, the Minangkabau and the Batak Kingdom, with legends identifying gold, silver, pepper, camphor and minyak tanah (ground oil, a form of petroleum seep). [1, pp. 18–22]

When the maritime routes of the broadly contemporaneous Selden map (Bodleian Library, Oxford) are projected alongside Erédia’s riverine and overland networks onto a modern base map, the data show that routes converged near the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula between Singapore and Tioman, at Pahang, and around Patani, with the west coast and Portuguese Melaka featuring far fewer instances of route interfacing. [1, pp. 23–24]

Research and Documentation

Erédia’s Description of Melaka was first published in 1882 and subsequently reissued in an English translation by J. V. Mills in 1930, which has remained the standard reference for historians of the region. [1, p. 26] The Miscellany Atlas, by contrast, remained virtually unknown until Faro’s attribution in 1955 and was not subjected to systematic cartographic analysis until Borschberg’s 2019 article in the JMBRAS. [1, pp. 3–4]

MBRAS Sources

• P. Borschberg (2019). Three early 17th-century maps by Godinho de Erédia. JMBRAS 92(2): 1–28

References

1. P. Borschberg (2019). Three early 17th-century maps by Godinho de Erédia JMBRAS 92(2): 1–28.