Going Ashore in the Anambas Islands: Accounts by Hyacinthe de Bougainville and Cyrille Laplace in 1825 and 1831

The Anambas Islands are a small archipelago consisting of six islands located around 150 miles east of the city of Pekan on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula at roughly the same latitude as Kuala Lumpur. Today they constitute the Anambas Regency (Kabupaten Kepulauan Anambas), part of the Indonesian province of Kepulauan Riau. These accounts describe visits by French ships in the mid-1920s and in 1830, when the British settlement in Singapore was new and there was no Dutch presence. Residents of the islands traded with Johor and clearly were aware of European activity in the region. In an indication of political sensitivity, Bougainville covered the names of his ships and flew no flag.