1 - Chelingue, Kattumaram, and the close view of the coast: Jacob Haafner's Coromandel journeys

This paper presents an archipelagic reading of the journeys up and down the Coromandel Coast made by Dutch adventurer and writer Jacob Haafner (1754-1809), paying particular attention to the small local boats he transcribed as ‘chelingue’ and ‘kattumaram’ in the five Dutch-language travel narratives that he produced on his definitive return to Amsterdam from the Indies in 1786. I will analyse the function and imagining of these small local vessels, through which Haafner accessed coastal points quickly and efficiently, as sites of transculturating and creolising experiences for him. I will also argue that the epistemic potential of the boats exist in productive tension with the longer routes and larger spaces of the European vessels of the high seas on which Haafner made the overarching journeys that took him across three continents (Europe, Africa, and Asia) and two oceans (the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean). Through the dialogic relationship between the coastline-hugging Asian boats, and the coastline-crossing European ships, I reveal an archipelagic mode of apprehending Haafner’s travels and extrapolate thereby some broader ideas about knowledge-making through seafaring vessels as and on the oceanic crossroads. In particular, I will pay attention to Haafner’s crossing of the Palk Strait in small boats and what this journey means for differently-scaled circuits of archipelagicity linking points on the Coromandel Coast, sites on India and present-day Sri Lanka, and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean port cities that Haafner had to traverse in order to enter and move around the Bay of Bengal.