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The Forgotten Sea: How the Kings of the Sea Were Marooned on Their Own Islands
Paperback
ExplorationGeneral World HistorySoutheast Asian History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 8 2026
Pages: 422
Weight: 1.24
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In February 2004, a wooden ship with no nails in its hull and a sail of woven matting came ashore on a beach in Ghana, having crossed nine thousand miles of open ocean. It had been built from a blueprint carved in stone twelve hundred years earlier, on the walls of a temple in Java - and it proved a thing the world had forgotten: that the people of the Indonesian islands were once among the greatest mariners in human history.
The Forgotten Sea is the story of how that was true, how it was destroyed, and how it came to be forgotten. They settled an island off the coast of Africa a thousand years before the Europeans dared the open sea. They built ships larger than anything in Europe, threw back a Mongol invasion, and grew the spices that sent Columbus blundering into a new world. And then, in the space of a few centuries, a trading corporation broke them - with a genocide for a handful of nutmeg islands, a treaty that closed the ocean, and a system that bound a people of sailors to the soil. Their record rotted in the tropical damp or was carried off to foreign museums, until the descendants of navigators no longer knew they had ever ruled the sea.
Sweeping from the canoes that first crossed the open ocean to the migrant workers and rising cities of today, this is narrative history at its most vivid and most honest - careful to mark the line between what is legend and what is fact, and building to a single urgent question. A young nation now stands at the most consequential threshold in its history, with a closing window and the raw material of a golden century already in its hands. Whether it meets the coming tide as the kings of the sea its ancestors were, or as the cheap labour the colonists made of them, turns on one thing: whether it can remember who it was.
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