Some of the most remarkable conquests of the sea are obscured if we compartmentalize maritime history into separate studies of the five oceans. The antiquity and range of Austronesian voyaging constitutes an outstanding example. Only recently have Western scholars acknowledged that the Austronesians succeeded in mastering significant technological challenges and sailed upwind across the Pacific as far as Easter Island. Furthermore, linguistic and DNA evidence has only now been gathered to show that members of the Austronesian group which produced the largest political units, the Javanese, actually sailed north, to Japan, where they completely transformed Jomon hunter-gatherer society by introducing wet-rice agriculture, metallurgy, textiles, a sophisticated architecture and a social hierarchy.
This paper looks at Indonesian navigation of yet another ocean, the Indian. Indonesian sailors had apparently reached Africa around 200 A.D. Even more remarkably, the language, Malagasy, of the remote island of Madagascar belongs with the East Barito languages of Kalimantan. Recent studies confirm this Indonesian affinity. The question then becomes how and why a group not otherwise known to be seafarers came to travel so far and settle in such a remote place when there are no other Indonesian settlements en route. The paper will explore various scenarios in order to make sense of these data.