Pinisi

Pinisi-rigged ships were mainly built by the Konjo-speaking people of Ara, a village in the district of Bontobahari, Bulukumba regency, South Sulawesi, and widely used by Buginese and Makassarese seafarers as a cargo vessel.

In the years before the eventual disappearance of wind-powered transport in course of the motorization of Indonesia's traditional trading fleet in the 1970/80s, vessels using a pinisi rig were the largest Indonesian sailing ships.

Being the best-known Indonesian sailing-vessel, 'pinisi' became the tagline for the 2017 inscription of "The Art of Boatbuilding in South Sulawesi" in the UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

[1] The earliest mention, in both foreign and indigenous sources, of the term 'pinisi' that clearly refers to a type of sailing vessel from Sulawesi is found in a 1917 article in the Dutch periodical Coloniale Studiën: "... a small schooner rigged in European manner.

[3] Until the mid-20th century, the Sulawesi sailors themselves referred to their ships by the term palari, the type of hull most suited for the driving forces of the pinisi rig.

[4] There is wide range of local traditions claiming a much earlier origin for both the word 'pinisi' and the type of ship thus called, many of which, however, can only be traced back to the last two to three decades.

The shipwrights of Ara and Lemo-Lemo, the second boatbuilding centre of the region, relate their proficiency in naval architecture (and, depending on source, creation of the first pinisi[5]) to Sawerigading, one of main protagonists in the Bugis epic Sureq Galigo: To avoid the incestuous relation impending when he fell in love with his twin sister, Sawerigading is given a magically built ship to sail to a place where a girl looking like her is said to dwell; when he breaks his promise to never return, the vessel sinks; its keel, frames, planks and masts, washed on the shores off the three villages, were reassembled by the local people, who thus learned how to build and sail ships.

[6] It is of note that in the actual epic Sawerigading returns to his homelands, to, together with his new-found wife, eventually become the ruler of the underworld, and that the term 'pinisi' does not show up in any of the accessible manuscripts of the story.

[7] The names of the boats and ships contained in the manuscripts are waka(q), wakka(q), wakang, wangkang, padewakang, joncongeng, banawa, pelapangkuru, binannong, pangati, and lopi.

These include that, e.g., a ruler of the Makassan polity of Talloq, I Mangnginyarrang Daéng Makkiyo, named thus one of his boats, allegedly combining the two words "picuru" (meaning "good example") and "binisi" (a type of small, agile and tough fish on the surface of the water and not affected by currents and waves).

[19] However, at around the same time, Dutch sources began to note a new type of locally employed sailing vessel registered by harbourmasters in the western part of the Malay Archipelago as 'penisch', 'pinisch', or 'phinis'(!

Main and mizzen sails, the canvas with the largest driving force, are run along the lower part of that jackstay, and set and taken in, somewhat like curtains, by a halliard, a downhaul and a number of brails.

In the early 1970s thousands of pinisi-palari ships measuring up to 200 tonnes of cargo, the world's largest commercial sailing fleet at the time, had contacted all corners of the Indonesian seas and became the trading backbone of the people.