Word: borobudur
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...years ago, a quiet young Englishman named Philip Beale visited Java and fell in love with a ship. To be precise, it was a picture of a ship, a sculptural relief of a jaunty schooner, its bow thrust upward by a swell, carved some 1,200 years ago at Borobudur, the magnificent Buddhist monument not far from Yogyakarta. Roaming across the Indonesian islands on a grant to study traditional ships, Beale had read that sailors from the Malay Archipelago regularly crossed the Indian Ocean, and even established colonies in East Africa, centuries before Borobudur was built. As he gazed...
...Such grandiose fancies are usually discarded when the footloose dreamer returns home, where the demands of "real" life make themselves known. Yet for two decades, Beale inwardly nourished his obsession, and now it has taken on hardwood reality: Beale's reconstruction of the eighth century Indonesian schooner depicted at Borobudur is now under sail in the Indian Ocean, on its way to Africa, manned by a multinational crew. The 19-meter-long ship is retracing the route of its ancient prototypes, which are believed to have formed the earliest transoceanic sailing fleet in history...
...Beale's preparation for his epic voyage was a bit peculiar: he spent most of his time after that fateful visit to Borobudur toiling in the City of London as an investment-fund manager. Although he had previously spent two years in the Royal Navy, he himself admits that he's not much of a seaman. He's no scholar of ancient shipping and had spent little time in Indonesia before he started building his ship...
...Beale's amateur fascination with such questions might never have been satisfied if two years ago he had not met Nick Burningham, a maritime-heritage consultant who specializes in replicas of early Southeast Asian ships. Beale commissioned Burningham to create a design based upon the sculpture at Borobudur and then hired Assad Abdullah, an Indonesian with 30 years experience as a shipwright, to build the vessel...
...Burningham has built several replica ships, but the Borobudur, he says, was "my greatest challenge, the most speculative reconstruction I've ever worked on." In addition to the handful of ship carvings at Borobudur and a few vaguely analogous shipwrecks, he was also guided by Assad's instincts and experience. Burningham built a model based upon historical estimates of load and the limits of materials available at the time, then gave it to Assad to construct on the Indonesian island of Pagerungan Kecil. "He not only built from the model," says Burningham, "he also interpreted...