Look, I’m going to tell you a story, and it’s one of those
stories that sounds like it came straight out of some fever dream, the kind you
have when you’re sick with the flu and the Nyquil’s got you by the short hairs.
But it’s true—every damned word of it—and it happened a long time ago in a
place most Americans couldn’t find on a map if their lives depended on it.
History’s got this funny way of remembering the wrong
people, doesn’t it? You ask anyone about the Bugis-Makassar warriors—if they
even know who the hell they are—and they’ll rattle off Sultan Hasanuddin’s
name, maybe Arung Palakka if they’re feeling scholarly. But there were others.
Christ, were there others. Men whose deeds would make your grandfather’s war
stories sound like a Sunday school picnic.
This is a story about one of them.
The Kingdom That Fell
First, you need to understand what came before. The
Gowa-Tallo Sultanate—think of it as the big dog in the neighborhood, the bully
who’s been running the show since your daddy was in diapers—fell hard in 1667.
Arung Palakka, he was the one who brought it down, him and his Dutch buddies
from the VOC (that’s the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, but who gives a
shit about Dutch words?). They signed something called the Bongaya Treaty,
which is just a fancy way of saying Arung Palakka sold out to the white men in
exchange for a throne.
The Kingdom of Bone—Arung Palakka’s kingdom—became the new
center of power. Rismawidiawati wrote about it in 2013, dry academic stuff that
misses the blood and the screaming, but accurate enough. Bone was the new king
of the hill, and Arung Palakka sat at the top like a spider in the center of
its web.
But here’s the thing about power, the thing they never tell
you in those leather-bound history books: it’s never secure. Never. You can
have all the armies in the world, all the treaties signed in blood and ink, and
you still wake up at three in the morning wondering who’s going to put a knife
in your back. Arung Palakka knew this. He knew it in his bones (no pun
intended), which is why he couldn’t just rely on his Dutch friends. The Dutch
were about as trustworthy as a rattlesnake with a toothache.
So he did what powerful men have been doing since Cain and
Abel were scrapping in the dirt—he married his way to stability. Political
marriages, they call them. A nice, sanitized term for selling your daughters
like cattle to keep your enemies close and your family tree properly tangled.
He connected Bone’s royal bloodline to Gowa-Tallo, to Luwu, to all the
Bugis-Makassar kingdoms that mattered. And when Arung Palakka finally kicked
the bucket, his successors kept the tradition going like it was Holy Communion.
For a while, it worked. For a while.
But then came the turn of the century—1700, the dawn of a
new age—and with it, a shift in the wind. You could feel it if you were paying
attention, that electric tingle in the air that says something’s coming.
Something big.
The Boy from Peneki
His name was La Maddukelleng, though most people knew him as
Arung Singkang, and he was born around 1700 in a place called Peneki. That’s
what Jacobus Noorduyn figured out in 1972, after going through all the old
manuscripts, the Lontara’ Sukku’na Wajo’ and whatnot. La Maddukelleng
came from noble blood—the Peneki lineage of the Wajo Kingdom—but nobility in
those days didn’t mean you got to sit on your ass eating grapes. It meant you
had expectations hanging over your head like storm clouds.
The kid—and that’s what he was then, just a kid—served under
the ruler of Wajo, a man named Arung Matoa La Salewangeng To Tenrirua. Try
saying that three times fast, I dare you. Right after his circumcision (and
yeah, they did that back then, a real coming-of-age deal that makes your bar
mitzvah look like a tea party), young Arung Singkang got himself appointed as
the royal betel box bearer.
Now, that might sound like some bullshit ceremonial
position, like being the guy who holds the king’s umbrella, but in Bugis
society, proximity to power was power. The kid was in the room where it
happened, to quote a musical that wouldn’t exist for another three centuries.
The Cockfight
One day—and isn’t it always one day when these
stories start?—the King of Wajo attended an ear-piercing ceremony for a
princess over in Bone. Arung Singkang went along as his servant, probably bored
out of his skull at the thought of another royal ceremony, another day of
standing around while the big shots congratulated themselves on being big
shots.
They had a cockfight for entertainment. Of course they did.
That’s what you did at Bugis celebrations—you got some roosters, strapped
knives to their feet, and watched them tear each other apart while you drank
and placed bets. Good family fun.
But something went wrong. Something always goes wrong.
One of the Bone participants—probably some entitled prick
who thought his kingdom’s power made him bulletproof—got disrespectful toward
Arung Singkang’s king. Maybe it was the drink talking, maybe it was deliberate
provocation, but the kid from Peneki wasn’t having it. Not for one goddamned
second.
Arung Singkang stabbed him.
Just like that. Steel sliding between ribs, the warm gush of
blood that’s darker than you think it’ll be, and suddenly everyone’s screaming
and the cockfight’s forgotten because now the humans are the ones tearing each
other apart. The Wajo attendees and the Bone crew went at it like it was the
end of the world, knives and fists and teeth, and when the dust settled, there
were bodies on both sides. Dead men with their eyes staring at nothing, their
last thoughts probably something stupid like I should’ve stayed home.
The Wajo group was outnumbered. They retreated, tails
between their legs, and headed back home. But you don’t just stab a Bone noble
and walk away. That’s not how it works. That’s never how it works.
Soon enough, envoys from Bone showed up at Wajo’s doorstep,
polite as funeral directors, demanding that the instigator be handed over for
punishment. For justice, they called it, though we all know what justice means
when the powerful demand it.
But the King of Wajo had grown fond of his betel box bearer.
Hell, maybe he even admired the kid’s balls, stabbing a man for his king’s
honor like some knight out of an old story. So the king lied through his teeth.
Told the Bone envoys that Arung Singkang had fled, disappeared like smoke,
couldn’t be found anywhere. Sorry, boys, nothing we can do.
Of course, the king knew Bone wouldn’t let it go. Bone couldn’t
let it go, not without looking weak. So he pulled Arung Singkang aside and told
him the truth: Run. Run far and run fast, because they’re coming for you,
and when they come, I won’t be able to protect you.
And run he did.
The Malay Seas
According to K.A. Wellen’s research from 2014 (and yeah, I’m
name-dropping sources because I’m not making this shit up), Arung Singkang got
himself onto a Bugis trading ship and sailed toward the Malay seas. This was a
time when Bugis sailors were scattered all over the South China Sea like seeds
in the wind, fighting for Malay rulers, playing kingmaker, getting themselves
killed in wars that weren’t their own.
The Wajo sailors generally threw in with a guy named Raja
Kecik of Siak. Meanwhile, another group—called the “Five Opu Brothers,” which
sounds like a kung fu movie—sided with the Sultan of Johor, who was Raja Kecik’s
rival. It was complicated political bullshit, the kind where you need a
flowchart to keep track of who’s stabbing who in the back.
Arung Singkang had a brother named Daeng Matekko. Had, past
tense, because Daeng Matekko got himself killed by Johor forces while fighting
for Raja Kecik. And that’s when things got personal.
You know that feeling when someone takes something from you,
something you can never get back, and suddenly nothing else matters except
making them pay? That’s what Arung Singkang felt. That cold, black rage that
sits in your chest like a tumor, feeding on everything good inside you until
there’s nothing left but the need for revenge.
He and the other Wajo sailors attacked Johor. They didn’t
just attack it—they conquered it, burned it, made it scream. And they won.
Victory made Arung Singkang a celebrity among the Bugis. A
warrior-hero, the kind of man songs get written about. But he didn’t stay in
the Malay seas to bask in his glory. No, he returned to the Makassar Strait,
that narrow stretch of water between Sulawesi and Borneo, and he started
building something new.
The Pirate King
He gathered ships. Not just any ships, but warships, fast
and deadly, crewed by men who’d follow him into Hell if he asked nicely. He
based himself among the small islands of the strait, striking at targets of
opportunity like a shark circling wounded prey.
The Dutch VOC—those same bastards who’d helped Arung Palakka
destroy Gowa-Tallo—had cargo ships moving in and out of Makassar, fat and slow
and filled with riches. Arung Singkang hit them again and again, taking their
goods, killing their crews, disappearing back into the islands before they
could mount a proper defense.
The VOC gave him a title: the Pirate King. They meant
it as an insult, a way to delegitimize him, make him sound like a common
criminal instead of what he really was—a warrior-prince striking back at the
foreign invaders who’d subjugated his people.
But Arung Singkang? He wore that title like a crown.
During his pirate years, he formed a relationship with the
Sultan of Paser, down in southeastern Borneo (what we’d call East Kalimantan
today). The Sultan trusted him, which was either very wise or very stupid
depending on how you look at it. Trusted him so much that he made Arung
Singkang his son-in-law, marrying him to his daughter.
When the Sultan died—and Noorduyn’s 1972 research lays this
out pretty clearly—Arung Singkang’s wife was appointed sultanah. But let’s not
kid ourselves. She might have had the title, but Arung Singkang held the reins.
He was the one calling the shots, the one with the power.
And he was just getting started.
The Return
Armed with a kingdom—or at least the practical control of
one—Arung Singkang did what he’d probably been dreaming about since he fled
Wajo all those years ago: he went home. Not to hide, not to beg forgiveness,
but to liberate his homeland from Bone’s oppressive rule.
In 1736, he assembled a fleet of forty warships. Forty. Let
that sink in. The Pirate King was bringing an armada, Bugis and Paser forces
combined, and they were coming for blood.
They landed in Majene and hit Bone’s vassals first—Balanipa
and Tanete—before sweeping into Mandar territory. Seventy-five days of
conquest, of burning and killing and taking spoils of war, and Bone’s
subordinate lands fell like dominoes. It must have been something to see, that
wave of vengeance rolling across the landscape, unstoppable as a tsunami.
Finally, Arung Singkang’s forces reached Singkang. There, at
a tellumpoccoe council—a Bugis alliance assembly—he was declared
innocent of the bloody cockfight that had started it all decades earlier. The
stabbing that had made him a fugitive was retroactively justified. He was
vindicated, made clean, his honor restored.
But Arung Singkang wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.
The Assault on Makassar
In February 1739, he led an allied army toward Makassar
itself, aiming to attack the Dutch fortress. This was the big one, the shot at
the colonial power that had been pulling strings in Sulawesi for decades.
They succeeded in retaking Gowa—the old sultanate, defeated
and humiliated by Arung Palakka and the VOC seventy years earlier. For a
moment, it must have felt like history was finally being corrected, like the
natural order was being restored.
But the VOC fortress was another matter. Arung Singkang’s
forces assaulted it four times, four separate attempts to crack that colonial
nut, and every time they were repelled. On July 20, 1739, the final assault
failed catastrophically. His troops were crushed, broken, sent running back
from the fortress walls with their dead piled up like cordwood.
It was a devastating defeat. The kind that ends careers,
ends legends, ends lives.
But here’s the thing about legends: they don’t die easy.
The Last Stand
When the VOC launched a counterattack in January 1741,
thinking they’d finally put down the Pirate King for good, Arung Singkang
repelled them. Bloodied, battered, but not broken, he and his forces sent the
Dutch packing.
After that failed VOC attempt, something remarkable
happened: Wajo remained largely beyond Dutch control for nearly a century and a
half. A hundred and fifty years. That’s how long Arung Singkang’s rebellion
echoed through history, how long the Kingdom of Wajo stayed free because one
man refused to bow.
Epilogue: The Nature of Legends
So what do we make of La Maddukelleng, Arung Singkang, the
Pirate King of the Makassar Strait? What do we make of a man who started as a
betel box bearer and ended as a liberator, who was called both hero and
criminal depending on who was telling the story?
I’ll tell you what I think, for what it’s worth: I think he
was as human as any of us. Flawed, angry, driven by pride and vengeance and
love for his homeland. I think he made terrible choices and brilliant ones,
sometimes in the same breath. I think he killed men who probably deserved it
and some who probably didn’t, and I think he went to sleep at night—when he
slept at all—hearing the screams of the dying and the crack of his brother’s
skull splitting open under a Johor blade.
I think he was a monster. I think he was a hero.
I think, maybe, he was both.
Because that’s what legends are, really. They’re not the
sanitized stories we tell children, the neat narratives with clear heroes and
villains. They’re messy and complicated and full of blood and shit and terror,
and the people at their centers are never quite what we want them to be.
But they echo. God, how they echo.
Somewhere in the Makassar Strait, in the waters where Arung
Singkang once sailed his pirate fleet, the waves still remember. They remember
the Pirate King who came home, who fought the foreign invaders, who refused to
kneel.
They remember, even if we don’t.
And on certain nights, when the moon is dark and the wind
carries salt spray across the old trade routes, you can almost hear it: the
creak of wooden hulls, the snap of canvas sails, the war cries of men who
followed one fugitive from Peneki into battle after battle after battle.
History has a long memory.
Sometimes, it even tells the truth.
—The End—
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