Moving toward Timor: Early trade, missions, and Portuguese governance

In Chinese sources, Timor was a destination in the lucrative sandalwood trade from before the thirteenth century. The island's economic potential drew Portuguese attention soon after their 1511 capture of Malacca.Footnote ⁹ From the early 1500s, the nascent Portuguese colonial administration in Asia was loosely coordinated in Goa through what became the Estado da Índia's ‘informal’ empire a century later.Footnote ¹⁰ Around ports throughout Southeast Asia, there was frequent intersection among the Portuguese-related entities, who came on the scene in roughly this order: a network of private traders and others with Portuguese connections, Catholic church missions operating under the patronage of the Portuguese Crown, and then the colonial efforts administered by the Viceroy of Goa.Footnote ¹¹ The Portuguese considered the Timor-Solor region to be under their purview from the 1540s with some thin administrative representation from the beginning of the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹²

The extent and duration of the Portuguese presence on Timor grew gradually during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Documented Portuguese trade occurred on Timor from the early 1520s, and some traders were established residents on the nearby, more easily reached island of Solor that served as a sandalwood trade hub from the 1550s;Footnote ¹³ Portuguese involvement increased following their conquest of Macau in 1555. Dominicans made periodic visits to Timor from their Church base on Solor; there are reports of baptisms on Timor in 1556.Footnote ¹⁴ The occasional and seasonal monsoon-determined forays to Timor developed into more regular visits of merchants and missionaries after the Portuguese built a fort on Solor in the mid-1560s, increasing Solor's profile as a regional base. This Portuguese-affiliated community of Solor produced the mestiço society that eventually served to anchor the Catholic-Portuguese identity in Oecusse. From the children of Portuguese-born (referred to as White Portuguese) and local parents emerged a group that came to be known as the Topasses, which was a diverse assortment of mestiço Eurasians and individuals from other Portuguese possessions.Footnote ¹⁵

After the establishment of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) in 1602, Dutch presence in the region and competition for control of the spice trade routes greatly intensified. When the Portuguese fort and base on Solor fell to the Dutch in 1613, the Topasses community relocated to Larantuca on eastern Flores; the majority of the 1,500 Portuguese-connected residents who moved were indigenous or mestiço.Footnote ¹⁶ By the 1620s, the Topasses dominated the sandalwood trade in Lifau and throughout western Timor, using their dual intermediary position to secure the valuable wood through barter with indigenous polities, and then to sell to ships coming from areas including Macau, Manila, and Malacca.Footnote ¹⁷ As the Estado da Índia was further weakened and lost trade routes and territory to the Dutch, including the critical Portuguese loss of Malacca in 1641, during the 1650s more of the Catholic mestiço Topasses moved their primary base from Larantuca to the coastal settlement of Lifau in present-day Oecusse.Footnote ¹⁸ The well-established Topasses families of da Costa and Hornay continued as a formidable force in Oecusse, as well as other coastal areas of Timor and multiple locations in the surrounding archipelago: they maintained alliance to the Portuguese king, but refused colonial administration, even as they also slowed expansion by the Dutch on the island.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1653, the VOC established a Dutch settlement in Kupang on Timor's southwestern tip, but made slow and few inroads in a region already dominated by the Topasses, who repelled Dutch forces sent from Batavia in the latter 1650s.Footnote ²⁰

Political and economic alliances converged to make Lifau one of the most prominent commercial centres on Timor during the second half of the seventeenth century,Footnote ²¹ and the first permanent Portuguese settlement on Timor.Footnote ²² Since sandalwood sources were in Timor's mountainous interior and not on the coast, the Larantuqueiros established trade relationships with native groups to procure and to supply the wood. Lifau grew and soon became a central port for commercial, ecclesiastical, and administrative activities on the island. The Portuguese accordingly increased their colonial presence in Timor, assigning a capitão-mor (captain major) representative to live part-time in Lifau from the 1650s. However, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Viceroy in Goa was unable to place colonial officials permanently on Larantuca or Timor, as the da Costa and Hornay families resisted governance by the outside; together, they ensured that no Goa-appointed official actually held a position of power on Timor during those decades.Footnote ²³ Between 1664 and 1702, Oecusse leadership was occupied by António Hornay, Mateus da Costa, Francisco Hornay, and Domingos da Costa, with brief appointments of others punctuating their periods of rule. Through this period, these families continued to control most of the sandalwood trade from Timor through the port at Lifau.Footnote ²⁴

The first Portuguese governor was appointed by Goa to Lifau in 1696, but he and his successor were expelled by the Topasses. Only from 1702 was there a governor actually resident in Lifau — and only then was this presence accepted at the urging of the newly arrived, eloquent nominal Bishop of Malacca who was revered, at that point, among leaders on Timor.Footnote ²⁵ The Portuguese hoped that from a centre in Lifau they could regulate the power of the Topasses and make them dependent on Portuguese rule.Footnote ²⁶ There were at least thirty-one individuals who governed Portuguese Timor through twenty-six political transitions from 1696 to 1769, the years that the Portuguese colonial presence was based in Lifau.Footnote ²⁷ This period was characterised by successive political crises in which the Topasses, Portuguese governors and others, Dutch forces, and indigenous polities were involved in struggles best described as a shifting ‘factionalism’ as foreign and indigenous leaders frequently reconfigured alliances in vying for control over western Timor.Footnote ²⁸

Da Costa–Hornay: Becoming Portuguese and indigenous Timorese

As localised Eurasian intermediaries, the Topasses played critical roles as leaders in rooting an enduring Portuguese affinity in the Oecusse-Ambeno region, while deflecting colonial rule. Although they had volatile relationships to Portuguese rule, their continued linkages to the colonial government were critical in the persistence of Oecusse as a distinct region ultimately aligned with Portuguese colonial endeavours and resistant to incorporation by Dutch interests. The two families da Costa and Hornay had dramatic, extended interaction including early rivalry and sometimes collaboration over political and economic control of Timor.

The da Costa–Hornay dominance on Timor expanded in western Timor through multiple means, including marriage alliances, trade networks, and an affiliation with Catholic missionary endeavours. Military conquests also played a role, and Timorese kingdoms were often caught between their interactions with the Topasses and declaring loyalty to one of the colonial authorities. In 1642, Larantuqueiros, accompanied by Dominicans and Portuguese soldiers, marched through Timor to the traditional centre of Wehali in south-central Timor and destroyed it.Footnote ²⁹ James Fox posits that many indigenous kingdoms shifted their allegiance to the Larantuqueiros at that point (perhaps out of fear rather than affinity), strengthening the Topasses' control of trade and leaving little room for any colonial government.Footnote ³⁰ Following this show of might that furthered their command of the sandalwood trade throughout Timor's interior, the Topasses also established themselves in the interior Noimuti town and continued to use Lifau as their primary port.Footnote ³¹ Their maintenance of a residence in the highlands and regular forays throughout Timor's mountainous interior, at a time when both Portuguese and Dutch representatives usually stayed within easy reach of the coast, enabled them to interact with the multiple interior indigenous polities in ways that neither colonial power could accomplish directly.

Examining the Topasses' backgrounds makes evident that this group chose to adopt and to assume a Portuguese identity, making their enduring affinity all the more remarkable.Footnote ³² Boxer describes the Larantuqueiro Topasses as the descendants of Jan (Joao) de Hornay (Hornai), a Dutch defector who converted to Catholicism and married a local woman from the Portuguese settlement, and of the part-European Mateus da Costa, who married a daughter of a native Timorese king.Footnote ³³ Differing from other sources suggesting that da Costa was Portuguese, Hägerdal cites a Dutch source asserting that he was a Papanger, with parentage from the island of Luzon.Footnote ³⁴

The characteristics of the mestiço Topasses leadership that would sustain sufficient, if sporadic Portuguese allegiance for Oecusse to remain part of the Catholic-Portuguese project on Timor were becoming established on Solor by the early seventeenth century. These elements followed the community to Larantuca and then to Lifau (and beyond) on Timor. Among this Eurasian community, assimilation to Portuguese ways conferred higher status, and consisted primarily of speaking Portuguese, as well as adopting Christianity (symbolised by baptism) and European dress; the Topasses were noted for their conspicuously decorated Portuguese-style hats.Footnote ³⁶ In addition to the trade advantages of using Portuguese, some may have believed that a Lusified identity would attract official support of the Crown and the power or recognition it might confer.Footnote ³⁷ As Topasses took on leadership roles in economic and governance arenas over the following decades, their ability to bridge the indigenous and colonial worlds was advantageous. The families also became sufficiently localised to strategically intermarry with ruling families on Timor, importantly including the Ambeno kingdom, with its centre near Lifau. In these ways, the Topasses ‘continued to play a crucial intermediary role between the white Portuguese and the local communities, thereby assuring Portuguese success in maintaining a foothold in eastern Timor while the remainder of the eastern archipelago ultimately succumbed to the Dutch’.Footnote ³⁸

As the Dutch expanded eastward from their settlement on Timor's southwestern tip, Oecusse remained under Portuguese influence due to the persistent and exclusionary dominance of the da Costa–Hornay leadership. In 1759, a Portuguese interim governor allowed Lifau to pass to the Dutch, but Francisco Hornay and others killed the would-be governors who came to rule, effectively returning Lifau to Portuguese rule under a new governor.Footnote ³⁹ Colonial loyalty was short-lived, however, as the da Costa–Hornay ‘chiefs of Okussi’ were among those implicated in the poisoning death of the new governor in 1765,Footnote ⁴⁰ to be succeeded by Francisco Hornay, who now vowed to expel the Portuguese.Footnote ⁴¹ In 1768, the da Costa and Hornay Topasses set aside a split of loyalties to join forces against White Portuguese rule by a new governor.

In a final effort to gain control of Lifau, Francisco Hornay surrounded the Portuguese, who received aid from Manatuto in eastern Timor, the only area with intact ties to the Portuguese.Footnote ⁴² The beleaguered Portuguese had been faced with rebellions on many sides, inadequate defences for their settlement, Dutch-instigated revolts, and they were out of funds, food, and weapons to sustain Lifau's 1,200 inhabitants. In August 1769, the Portuguese governor burned the settlement, and the people fled Lifau by boat, abandoning their base at Lifau to found a new capital in Dili, where it remains to this day.Footnote ⁴³ Later, governor Castro wrote that abandoning Lifau was a necessary, if desperate act, that lowered the Portuguese in the eyes of the native people, but was ultimately advantageous for the future of the colony because of Lifau's poor harbour.Footnote ⁴⁴ To the Portuguese, the da Costa–Hornay leaders were of variable loyalty at best, and rebellious instigators at regular intervals. They accepted neither Dutch nor Portuguese rule; after the families' persistent rebellion achieved Portuguese administrative flight in 1769, the two families continued to control the greatly diminished sandalwood trade, and only renewed ties with Dili in 1785.

After 1769, Oecusse largely drops out of the written record as communication by sea was often impossible, and Portuguese state involvement in the region declined relative to other areas.Footnote ⁴⁵ The same could be said for the Dutch. After a crushing 1656 defeat, the wary Dutch position on Timor was one of avoiding confrontation with the Topasses until about 1800; the Topasses had also tried to eliminate the Dutch in Kupang in 1735, 1745, and 1749.Footnote ⁴⁶ After the Portuguese flight to Dili in 1769, ‘Francisco de Hornay offered the Dutch East India Company the possession of Lifao, an offer that was officially considered and declined’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This left the local rulers, who opposed colonial governance by either European power, politically and economically in charge of the autonomous region, with relatively little oversight or interference from colonial authorities for nearly a century. Portuguese control over Oecusse remained tenuous, but neither did the region become incorporated into the Dutch sphere.

For the Topasses, the loss of their special position as intermediaries between colonial administrators and indigenous polities precipitated important political shifts. After the Portuguese left Lifau, the ruling da Costa or Hornay came to be referred to as king of Oecusse, in a move toward alignment and inclusion within indigenous structures.Footnote ⁴⁸ Their economic and military dominance shrank in political and geographic scope, and with no need to distinguish them from the Portuguese administrators in the region, the term Topasses vanished from use. The Oecusse kings gained some legitimacy within the customary hierarchies, largely due to their families' strategic intermarriage, and they were attributed some forms of recognition that paralleled those of indigenous kingdoms, including forms of tribute and the right to command the harvest of sandalwood through designated ritual authorities.Footnote ⁴⁹ Importantly, the Larantuqueiro lineages maintained their special status through two other means: continued close alignment with the Catholic Church, and deliberate efforts to maintain relationships with governing powers. We now examine each of these factors in turn.

Tensions and interactions of Church and governance

Colonial contemporaries and modern historians agree that religion was an essential element of Portuguese persistence on Timor. Thoroughgoing incorporation of Catholic symbols and religious forms into indigenous religious practice reinforced a regional Catholic identity in Oecusse-Ambeno, taking form in individual and collective religious practices.Footnote ⁵⁰ Institutionally, the Catholic Church plays a critical role in Oecusse-Ambeno history, and in modern usage the region's special status is often credited to Lifau as being the place to first receive Catholicism on Timor. The arrival and early spread of the Catholic Church not only occurred alongside early developments in Oecusse-Ambeno's trade and governance, but at points Church figures were directly, and controversially, involved in trade and political administration. A later Timor governor commented that the conquest of Timor was a work of the religious orders and Timor was governed by the head of the mission, with the first separation of spiritual and temporal matters occurring only when Lifau became the seat of government in 1701.Footnote ⁵¹ Given the centrality of Catholicism in the Portuguese identity adopted by the Topasses, the indigenous polities' choices of alliance and allegiance in the early colonial period discussed above were always overlaid with religious implications. Colonial accounts are replete with examples of how syncretic forms of Catholicism and traditional religion were deployed by all actors in the struggle to control western Timor.

Due to Timor's remote location and scant numbers of Church workers available, the Dominicans and traders operated on Solor and Timor for centuries with scant oversight from their political and religious authorities in Flores, Goa, Malacca, or Macau. Priests were involved in sandalwood and beeswax trade alongside Church activities, and at various points became involved in civil rule of settlements as well.Footnote ⁵² While Church growth was slow, early allegiance from Lifau rulers was influential in making Oecusse an economic centre and maintaining Portuguese linkages and influence. In 1641, the Queen of Mena (just east of Oecusse) and the native Ambeno ruler were baptised into Catholicism.Footnote ⁵³ Baptism made them subject to the king of Portugal; the rapid conversions were more political than religious, deemed nominal in spiritual sincerity by some.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hägerdal notes that over the course of the 1600s, local leaders

With very small numbers of Church workers, a great deal depended on the character, policies, and relationships of an individual priest; some were revered by the local population, while others were reviled, and still others' reputations alternated between the two. In 1670, the Lifau leaders killed the region's only Dominican, a zealous priest who insisted on Christian burial practices for the king;Footnote ⁵⁶ following this incident, the new Ambeno king asked the Dutch for support and protection, which was refused.Footnote ⁵⁷ For the next century, there was not more than a single priest present in Lifau. Many sources indicate some Church role in Oecusse political intrigues in the following decades: the Oecusse-Ambeno kingdoms participated in anti-Dutch alliances that involved relics of the Catholic Church from the earliest Lifau Fathers, and multiple sources suggest the involvement of Church and Oecusse kings in several assassinations.Footnote ⁵⁸

One of the most important political figures in early Portuguese governance was the Dominican Father Manuel de Santo António, who was born in Goa and arrived in Timor as a missionary in 1697. He was based in Lifau from 1702 to 1722, and twice served as governor of Portuguese Timor during these years.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his early years in Lifau, the Father did much to further the Portuguese colonial cause, sometimes using the ecclesiastical tools of excommunication or threats thereof to achieve his ends. He facilitated the acceptance of the first Portuguese-appointed governor to take up his position in Lifau; introduced an enduring administrative structure to the new colony;Footnote ⁶⁰ and smoothed relations with indigenous and Topasses leaders in critical situations. In his later years, however, his political demands — perhaps related to enforcing compliance with acceptable Christian behaviour among Timorese kings and others — triggered conflicts among indigenous polities, both colonial powers, and the Topasses that resulted in mass migration, massacres, and famine in West Timor.Footnote ⁶¹ Following these uprisings of 1720, the Dominican mission in Noimuti declined as well, leaving no priests by the end of the century — and there were only a few clerics in Portuguese Timor in 1811.Footnote ⁶² A subsequent Bishop of Malacca founded Timor's first seminary in Lifau in the 1730s, but it faltered due to local strife and regional warfare, lack of support sent from the central authorities, and, ‘more than all this, the discord between military and religious authorities for temporal power’.Footnote ⁶³

Although the Catholic Church had a foothold in the region, sporadic and thin Church presence yielded few converts; census figures indicate a gradual, localised, and coastal increase in church membership, until a rapid increase largely during the mid-twentieth century. The religious orders were expelled from Timor briefly in 1834.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the 1860s, Father Barreto, Superior of the Oecusse mission, was known to teach many native people to read and write, and also to travel to the interior and to conduct baptisms there.Footnote ⁶⁵ Church estimates from 1882 indicate that Oecusse-Ambeno was 12 per cent Catholic.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Church reported a strong movement of conversion after the Japanese Occupation of the Second World War, and in 1954 identified 39 per cent of the Oecusse population as Catholic.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1956 when the Catholic Church published the first catechism in the local language, Oecusse had 3 priests, 6 Dominican nuns, and 41 indigenous catechists, with two Church schools educating 86 male and 88 female students.Footnote ⁶⁸ Between 1941 and 1972, under the leadership of one priest, Norberto Parada, the Catholic population increased to 19,000, about 76 per cent of the population,Footnote ⁶⁹ which was far higher than in the eastern portion of Portuguese Timor at that time. Parada made concerted efforts to reach mountain-dwellers in the 1950s, in a period when the subdistrict administrator only travelled throughout the region with a team of armed guards.Footnote ⁷⁰ During this time, lowland Catholics also moved to highland regions around Oecusse to serve as long-term local Church workers. The Catholic population further increased rapidly under Indonesian occupation, in Oecusse as throughout Timor, as the population was pressed to adopt one of the nationally accepted great religions.

The blending of Catholic and indigenous ritual and symbolism was (and is) evident in many forms, including patterns and objects of tribute/offering, forms of invocation, reconciliation ceremonies, veneration of sacred objects, interaction with the spirit world, and the conflation of Church saints and one's own ancestors.Footnote ⁷¹ Throughout Oecusse, the combination of Catholicism with traditional beliefs and customary practices that honour local authorities proved a potent combination that merged allegiance in spiritual, political and economic realms of life. The Topasses legacy still figures largely in Oecusse's religious and political landscape, and vestiges of these lineages' dominance in an earlier era are still visible. Centuries-old practices of bringing tributes of beeswax and homegrown cotton thread wicks to local authorities continue to this day.Footnote ⁷² The da Costa lineage remains prominent in Oecusse's political and ritual life. In Oecusse, it is said that the Hornay lineage disappeared due to having no further descendants,Footnote ⁷³ but the Hornay legacy is still acknowledged.Footnote ⁷⁴ At the Good Friday celebrations in Oecusse town, three tall bamboo poles (um-uma) decorated with flowers and beeswax candles are erected to three lineages honoured as kings of Oecusse: Costa in front (north, beachside) of the coastal church, with one pillar each to the native Ambeno kingdom and Hornay authorities behind the church, monitored by different groups of villages responsible for each pillar. Individuals assigned to this duty through customary affiliations construct and maintain the poles and candles throughout the night.Footnote ⁷⁵ The easy incorporation of Catholic forms into existing practices served as anchors in which political hierarchies maintained the region's Portuguese affinity through multiple waves of political change.

Cultivating linkage and loyalty: Vows of vassalage and fighting forces

From the early eighteenth century, the Portuguese sought to bring the renegade figures under their control by conferring titles on them, as with the ‘tenente general rei of Okussi’ (lieutenant general king) for Francisco Hornay while the Portuguese capital was in Lifau — the same individual who drove out the Portuguese governor in 1726.Footnote ⁷⁶ This practice was linked to soliciting vows of vassalage from local authorities, a means to bring wayward leaders into the colonial fold, granting military rank titles and royal objects in exchange for vows of loyalty, tribute and trade access, and a supply of labour for warfare and other colonial tasks. For Oecusse as throughout Timor, the colonial government forged vassalage agreements that were repeatedly disregarded in new rebellions.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, participation in this practice indicated that the Oecusse-based indigenous and Topasses leaders did recognise Dili as a centre of governance over Oecusse as well. This also indicates a degree of assent and intentionality on the part of Oecusse leaders to remain aligned with the centre of Portuguese authority.

Following the colonial government's 1769 relocation from Lifau to Dili, a new governor appointed in 1785 named Oecusse's Pedro — successor to Francisco — Hornay tenente general and after 1790, an Oecusse priest swayed Hornay and his brother-in-law, the Ambeno king, to make vows of loyalty on a trip to Dili and to supply fighters against another rebellious, independent kingdom.Footnote ⁷⁸ However, this loyalty was short-lived as the Oecusse-Ambeno kings were soon said to be on the verge of revolt themselves.Footnote ⁷⁹ The late nineteenth century saw renewed efforts to win over and achieve fidelity of the local leaders that included vassalage agreements, although one officer lamented that a regulo's declaration did not obligate the people in any way.Footnote ⁸⁰

A century later, once again Church intervention prompted vows of loyalty to Portugal. The kingdom (reino) of Ambeno and the kingdom of Okusse made separate pledges of allegiance to the King of Portugal, recorded in two documents that recount the ‘terms of vassalage’ during representatives' August 1879 visit to Dili.Footnote ⁸¹ The Timor governor explained that these kingdoms last offered their pledges in 1861; the kingdoms' willingness to offer the 1879 pledge is credited to the work of Father Xavier,Footnote ⁸² who ‘has achieved the most brilliant results for morality and public order’ by guiding them into obedience to the authorities.Footnote ⁸³ Two princes (principaes) of Oecusse, Domingos da Costa and Alexandre Hornay dos Santos Cruz, representing the king (rei) of Oecusse made the vow of vassalage, and the document was signed by forty-nine provincial government, church, and Oecusse-Ambeno figures assigned military titles, including five princes of Ambeno.Footnote ⁸⁴ A simultaneous vow was made by the head of the kingdom of Ambeno, Pedro Paulo dos Santos Cruz, designated as coronel rei (of lower rank than the rei of Oecusse); this document is signed by fifty-two individuals, including the same five princes of Ambeno, but no named representatives of Oecusse. The distinction between a rei of Okusse and a coronel rei of Ambeno implies a Portuguese-recognised, or perhaps Portuguese-imagined, nested hierarchy between Oecusse and Ambeno, which by this time the Portuguese in Dili address as two indigenous kingdoms among the many involved in the vassalage system.

Many Portuguese considered Oecusse a possession of dubious loyalty and a bureaucratic inconvenience,Footnote ⁸⁵ and they called for its exchange for some suitable portion of Dutch claims. Territorial exchanges were regionally common among colonisers;Footnote ⁸⁶ the Portuguese had once anticipated exchanging their possessions on Timor for African islands.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet, at critical points Oecusse remained Portuguese not only because of its historic value and occasional loyalty pledges of local authorities, but because the Oecusse leadership contributed troops to the Portuguese cause. Governor Celestino da Silva (1894–1908) wanted to swap Oecusse, Ambeno, and Noimuti for Atapupu on Timor's north coast to form a geographically contiguous claim; however, this did not occur as these kingdoms contributed so many forces to the Portuguese side during the 1896 conflicts and in other wars around the time the Dutch–Portuguese border definition was underway.Footnote ⁸⁸

Contributing to Portuguese pacification efforts in eastern Timor, the Oecusse– Ambeno leaders proved their strategic utility to Portugal at a critical time.Footnote ⁸⁹ Okussi and Ambeno sent 860 auxiliary forces, under the command of Brigadier and regulo D. Bernardo of Ambeno, to combat rebellions in south-central Timor.Footnote ⁹⁰ The chefe of Okussi, D. Antonio dos Santos Cruz, was seriously injured in battle. The Okussi–Ambeno troops were said to be brave, valiant, and tireless in battle, if less disciplined that their eastern counterparts; their leader D. Bernardo was recognised for bravery and loyalty. Others receiving special distinction included a prince of Okussi, José Antonio da Costa (son of the regulo D. Domingos) and the brothers of the Ambeno regulo, who is named here as D. Antonio dos Santos Cruz.Footnote ⁹¹

Colonial border definition: Creating the enclave

Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Portuguese and Dutch claims were a collage of enclaves across the island. Indigenous political landscapes bore little resemblance to today's neatly bounded cartographic geographies. Colonial claims consisted of shifting trade and military alliances with indigenous kingdoms, and neither colonial power had substantive physical presence in the interior. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, colonial interests of that time were primarily concerned with access to extractable resources and control over the populations that oversaw those resources or could serve as labour to further the colonial cause; early colonisers were less concerned with control over land itself.Footnote ⁹² The unit of later colonial interest shifted from diffuse-edged kingdoms and individual leaders who vowed to rally their people for the colonial cause, toward more standardised administrative structures and the fixed boundaries of nation-states. With the rise of mapping technologies and new forms of governance in Europe, colonisers sought to apply these principles and modernising techniques in their overseas claims.Footnote ⁹³ As colonial interest turned from control of peoples to control of territories, the effort to eliminate apparent blank spaces, overlaps, and other geographic anomalies — such as enclaves — began with processes of border demarcation across Asia.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Dutch and Portuguese undertook protracted colonial border definition for nearly a century.Footnote ⁹⁵

Fixing inter-colonial boundaries required grappling with the complex geographies of indigenous polities. With the growing dominance of the VOC, Dutch presence continued to strengthen and expand throughout western Timor. In 1756, the Dutch East India Company had commissioned the Italian envoy Paravicini to secure a contract with the rulers on Timor and neighbouring islands, producing a document that outlined local political circumstances even as it ‘asserted Dutch claims to large areas of the island claimed by the Portuguese’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Portuguese claimed the Topasses-controlled area that extended far south of present-day Oecusse and through interior mountain ranges; figures from this period estimate the size of the Oecusse region at 2,461 km²,Footnote ⁹⁷ certainly not an accurate figure given the undefined border and lack of Portuguese knowledge about the interior, but still a number just over three times greater than the current size of the Oecusse enclave.Footnote ⁹⁸

The impetus to clarify colonial boundaries began soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, during which the British occupied Dutch possessions, including Kupang (1812–15). In that period, the Portuguese opportunistically claimed formerly Dutch Atapupu, located between Oecusse and Dili and home to a well-known port.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Dutch re-took Atapupu in 1818 and similar incidents occurred through the first half of the nineteenth century. But in 1847–48, native leaders on neighbouring Dutch–claimed islands (Pantar and Ombai/Alor)Footnote ¹⁰⁰ requested that the native ruler of Oecusse intervene in settling a conflict,Footnote ¹⁰¹ and the Oecusse ruler subsequently declared Portuguese authority over the region, in spite of official Portuguese rejection of this move from Dili.Footnote ¹⁰²

Such incidents, in which Oecusse and other indigenous leaders acted autonomously and without regard for nominal colonial land divisions or alliances, precipitated a push to regularise and to simplify colonial boundaries. In 1851, the Dili governor declined the Dutch offer to buy all Portuguese territories, but did accept a much-needed cash payment and several Dutch claims on Timor in exchange for Portuguese areas on Flores and Solor.Footnote ¹⁰³ In 1859, the European powers ratified a demarcation treaty ‘based on a division of native states whose mutual boundaries were not determined. The size of the different enclaves and exact boundary between East and West Timor came to rest on a variety of local traditional claims to territory’;Footnote ¹⁰⁴ the colonial agreement was in essence ‘a realignment of many of the same territories nominated in the [1756] Contract of Paravicini’, entities constantly rearranged through ritual warfare, seasonal raids, and migration.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although several substantial enclaves were swapped in this agreement, Dutch efforts to obtain the Oecusse–Ambeno region, including the Topasses' stronghold of Noimuti, proved unsuccessful.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, Oecusse's Portuguese status strengthened as the Dutch ceded the heavily forested western coast of Citrana to the Portuguese,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ having struck a Dutch alliance with the local ruler in 1817.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Colonial administrators sought to demarcate internal borders as well. Centuries of internal conquest, mass migrations, and colonial tribute systems overlaid customary hierarchies and allegiances to produce a rich array of noncontiguous holdings of various authorities. Internal enclaves abounded (and indeed, some persist inside Oecusse until today) because control, allegiance, and affinity in indigenous systems sometimes followed groups of people and did not always dissipate with spatial relocation; in other cases, internal enclaves were a product of colonial processes.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Colonial administrators sought to simplify and to streamline this internal condition by overlaying administrative divisions along with some rules for modern territorial management, such as which entities had the right to sell land — an action with little precedent in indigenous land systems.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Reflecting the ever-evolving colonial understanding and reality of the historically complex Oecusse (Topasses relict) and Ambeno (indigenous) polities, in 1883 an official with long experience in Timor described Oecusse and Ambeno as one kingdom with two parts.Footnote ¹¹¹

With the rise of Portuguese statecraft in the late 1800s, the two colonial powers on Timor again conspired to do away with the remaining contraband-ridden enclavesFootnote ¹¹² scattered across the island by exchanging territory to form contiguous areas.Footnote ¹¹³ In 1893, both European parties agreed to demarcation.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 1898, problems with fixing hard colonial borders on mutable traditional boundaries under nominal colonial rule surfaced during the initial border surveying.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In 1899, surveyors encountered local, armed opposition to defining Oecusse-Ambeno's eastern border (Tunbaba) by native groups on both sides enmeshed in a long-term conflict.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Then, the Oecusse ruler claimed Noimuti as joined to Oecusse by the Bikomi strip,Footnote ¹¹⁷ which was also claimed by an adjacent kingdom, bringing border definition in eastern and southern Oecusse to a halt.Footnote ¹¹⁸

In 1899 (as in 1817, 1847/8, 1851, 1859, and 1891), the Dutch again offered to purchase Oecusse, but were turned down.Footnote ¹¹⁹ A prime agenda item at a 1902 conference was Oecusse's eastern boundary, and expansive Portuguese claims caused the Dutch to threaten arbitration on the existence of Oecusse as an enclave, deemed unacceptable after the 1893 treaty. In a 1904 treaty, the Dutch kept the disputed Tunbaba region, and were to acquire both Noimuti and the Bikomi corridor once the Oecusse borders were surveyed, a process resumed in 1909 that again stalled when Dutch and Portuguese surveyors disagreed on which river constituted the border.Footnote ¹²⁰ In 1913, both sides agreed to allow the Permanent Court of Arbitration to settle the dispute over Oecusse's boundaries, with judgment issued in 1914 and finally ratified in The Hague in 1916. The Court had to rule on boundaries contested by native residents and colonial representatives alike, in the end upholding the border agreed to in 1899 that reflected a colonially-recognised partitioning of the Ambeno kingdom in 1859, based on the political geographies as set forth in Paravicini's 1756 document. Ironically (after a century of Luso–Dutch disagreements), the Court viewed native testimonies as so conflicting, and Timorese treatment of territorial boundaries as so mobile, that the outcome favoured existing divisions.Footnote ¹²¹ Years later, a military administrator noted that political borders were of little practical importance to the Oecusse residents, since in the delimitation the Portuguese had ceded to the Dutch some regions settled by friends and relatives of Oecusse people.Footnote ¹²²

The negotiations eventually met their objective of eliminating most colonial enclaves, leaving Oecusse–Ambeno as the only Portuguese territory in western Timor. Eastern Oecusse's formal colonial border remained contested once the rest of the zone had been demarcated in part because both the Dutch and Portuguese sought to control this sandalwood-rich area.Footnote ¹²³ Dutch surveyors took special note of sandalwood trees along the border in 1915, subsequently cut down by the colonial forestry unit in the 1930s.Footnote ¹²⁴ Even so, Portuguese insistence on retaining the enclave seemed far out of proportion to Oecusse's economic value in recent centuries. European disputes overlaid and reshaped, if not exacerbated, persistent indigenous land conflicts in a few border regions that recur to this day.Footnote ¹²⁵

The inconvenience of being an enclave, 1916–2016

Even after the formal border agreement in 1916 that set the Oecusse–Ambeno border at approximately its present boundary, colonial calls to trade Oecusse persisted. After four years in Oecusse, Tenente Coronel Correia suggested that the enclave be swapped for a more accessible portion of the island.Footnote ¹²⁶ Capitão Martinho, who served in Timor for twenty-five years,Footnote ¹²⁷ noted that Oecusse's economic value to the colony was null after the decimation of sandalwood stocks, even calling the enclave ‘a stumbling block for our administration’ that should be traded for the central portion of the island as part of colonial housekeeping.Footnote ¹²⁸ Nostalgically, he continued that Oecusse was nevertheless of political value for the Portuguese fondness toward Oecusse as the founding place of their presence on Timor.

Throughout the twentieth century, Oecusse remained a political enclave in part because powerful local leaders fostered a regional identity with ritual Catholicism and nostalgia for Portuguese heritage at its core, thus ensuring an arm's-length affiliation with a distant central government that permitted them to maintain their privileged autonomous positions. The good relations between the long-reigning Oecusse régulo Hugo da Costa and the Portuguese in the early twentieth century also contributed to Oecusse's continued inclusion in Portuguese Timor. Writers noted his allegiance with the Portuguese in the 1912 rebellion,Footnote ¹²⁹ praised his ability to continue to collect taxes even during the Japanese Occupation and to avoid privations during the Second World War,Footnote ¹³⁰ calling him ‘the always faithful régulo [who] knew how in this difficult moment to keep himself in his post, thanks to political dexterity and to the prestige he held among his people’.Footnote ¹³¹ The da Costa family was also credited with preserving Christian traditions alongside fidelity to Portugal in the enclave,Footnote ¹³² family responsibilities that continue to this day.

As an enclave, Oecusse's experience of the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999) was distinct from that of the eastern portion of Timor. Indonesian forces were present in the enclave before they entered the eastern body of East Timor, and raised the Indonesian flag in Oecusse's capital town one week before the massive invasion of Dili on 7 December 1975. Oecusse had no resident armed resistance forces, but did have an active clandestine resistance movement and the local population was subject to government surveillance, intimidation, and forced relocation as elsewhere in East Timor. Soon after East Timor came under Indonesian rule, there was pressure from Indonesian officials to eliminate the enclave, and for Oecusse to be administratively unified with the surrounding province of West Timor. Oecusse political leaders — some civil servants, active in the resistance movement, and with standing in the customary hierarchy — vigorously opposed this possibility on historical and religious grounds, and strategised to maintain Oecusse as an enclave of the new Indonesian province of East Timor (Timor Timur), reporting to Dili. According to one political leader in Oecusse, local leaders rapidly undertook the temporary multiplication of the administrative units in Oecusse, which permitted the district to qualify as a kabupaten (district) within East Timor. Once East Timor was incorporated into Indonesian national governance structures, Oecusse administrative divisions largely reverted to those in existence during the Portuguese era; Oecusse's 18 sucos (administrative villages) listed in 1952 became the 18 desas under Indonesian administration.Footnote ¹³³

A nationalistic identity affiliation with Catholicism and the supportive presence of the Church institution in Timor became important in East Timor during the years of Indonesian rule.Footnote ¹³⁴ The development of a strong, ritualistic Catholic identity among most Oecusse residents deepened under Indonesia, in part as a political stance against the Indonesian occupation which was associated with Indonesia's national Islamic majority religion. In 1997, rioting occurred when a food package sent to an Oecusse priest by Muslims celebrating Ramadan was found to contain leftover chicken bones. This offence was perceived as simultaneously religious and political, and precipitated widespread retaliation against Muslims living and working in Oecusse. After their shops and homes were destroyed, most Muslims left Oecusse and did not return.Footnote ¹³⁵ This strongly Catholic identity surfaced again in 2004, when there were local proposals to legally disallow Protestantism in the district and to require that civil servants be Catholic; this incident was coterminous with a broader national initiative of the Catholic Church to secure its influence within public education and other spheres.Footnote ¹³⁶ The 2010 census indicates 99.3 per cent of Oecusse inhabitants identify as Catholic (compared to 96.9 per cent nationwide).Footnote ¹³⁷

Violence, destruction, and displacement followed the 30 August 1999 referendum that ended the Indonesian occupation. Australian-led International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) forces intervened in Dili on 20 September, causing the Indonesia-sponsored militias to disband or to flee, with many leaving to join the Sakundar militia based in Oecusse. The militias operated unfettered in Oecusse for another month until INTERFET arrived on 23 October,Footnote ¹³⁸ only entering the district after a young man travelled from Oecusse to the eastern portion of the country by land with a letter from Oecusse leaders hidden in his sandal to request urgent assistance to the enclave.Footnote ¹³⁹ Because of the militias' extended period of systematic looting and leisurely removal of goods and materials from private homes, public buildings, farms, and even organised felling of teak plantations to take timber across the border into Indonesia, Oecusse's infrastructure was more materially devastated in 1999 than many other regions of the nation. Nearly all public buildings and an estimated 7,294 homes — approximately two-thirds of houses district-wide — were destroyed.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ During September to October 1999, over 95 per cent of the Oecusse population fled into surrounding Indonesian West Timor,Footnote ¹⁴¹ many taking refuge with extended family or with other households who accepted them in the time of crisis.

The new nation was under the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor from October 1999 until full political independence on 20 May 2002.Footnote ¹⁴² During this period, the economic disadvantage and political isolation of being an enclave began to acutely impact Oecusse for the first time. The post-independence development of a hard border (combined with security concerns) impeded the cross-border movement of people and goods, and brought significant economic and social hardship to the Oecusse people.Footnote ¹⁴³ The main land transportation route to the Oecusse highlands through West Timor was cut, and poor transportation and communication between Oecusse and the eastern districts resulted in periodic food shortages and chronic insecurity in supplies of basic products. A series of cargo ships and ferries provided service to Dili, with occasional suspension of service for a month or more due to high waves, lack of funds, mechanical problems, or loss of contract. A special border regime to simplify travel and trade relations with West Timor has long been a priority of officials and political representatives in Oecusse. The negative impacts of cut ties to West Timorese markets and persistent challenges of isolation are reflected in the relatively low development indicators that persist in Oecusse.

Long familiar with special status as an enclave, in recent years Oecusse has seen enacted the latest iteration of its administrative, legal, and economic distinction from the eastern portion of the nation. The 2002 Timor-Leste Constitution (Part 1, Section 5, Article 3) grants ‘special administrative and economic treatment’ to Oecusse-Ambeno, but the nature of the enclave's status continues to evolve and to be defined. With legislative establishment in mid-2014 and formal inauguration in January 2015, the enclave once again assumed a new political identity as Timor-Leste's first Special Economic Zone.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This status formalises a unique regional administration and legal regime, inaugurated in April 2015, envisioned to be more favourable for attracting massive foreign investment that (it is publicised) could convert Oecusse into an economic powerhouse for the nation, if private foreign investment is forthcoming.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Public services and the civil service have been excised from Dili-based oversight with the June 2015 appointment of seven Regional Secretaries to whom Oecusse civil servants now report. The regional authorities launched this initiative with an ironically historically-minded mandate for an ultra-modern vision: to pursue a suite of infrastructure mega-projects in preparation for the 500th anniversary celebration of the arrival that brought Catholicism and Portuguese governance to Timor island, at Lifau, in November 2015.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Conclusion: Isolation, opportunity, and vulnerability as an enclave

Regional governance in Oecusse-Ambeno has evolved dramatically over recent centuries. The present existence of the enclave is due to a long chain of historically traceable factors, and the key religious, political, and economic elements that background its current status were forged more than three hundred years ago on neighbouring islands. It is apparent that Oecusse's identity and political fate have been greatly influenced by outsiders and in-migrants at many critical points. Foreign traders who sought the island's sandalwood were followed by colonial interests in governance and Catholic mission; Eurasian intermediaries in trade and politics rose to positions of regional dominance; European courts made judgments on external boundaries; the independent government declared the enclave a Special Economic Zone designated as a destination for foreign investment. The influential da Costa– Hornay lineages connected the region to Portuguese rule in enduring ways, while also maintaining the enclave on the edge of the reach of the state. The enclave, notoriously hard to reach in the sixteenth century, rose to become an economic hub and briefly the Portuguese centre on Timor, only to fall back into political isolation for over two centuries. It is now once again hailed to be on its way to economic connectedness in a globalising world.

Geographic separation from the eastern body of the nation has provided both challenges and opportunities to the people and leaders of Oecusse-Ambeno, with important implications for two areas central to this article: regional governance and the fluctuating power of local authorities. With the exception of 1702 to 1769, Oecusse's political isolation and concomitant autonomy from central powers have been persistent, if not consistent, over the past five centuries. Its distinction has been shaped by religious identification; fostered by local leaders interested in controlling natural resources; challenged by colonial government seeking to extract tax and labour from the region; threatened by potential mergers with the Dutch/Indonesian surrounds; reinforced by central government neglect; and imposed by ambitious development planners. Separateness has allowed Oecusse-based leaders exceptional latitude in their choices to ally with other authorities or to resist full submission to a remote ruling administration. By default, design, and necessity, Oecusse leaders have long operated with significant autonomy from centralised governance. This has in turn contributed to a strong regional identity that is a distinctive feature of the enclave.