In the 1990s, I flew to East Indonesia, to the Tanimbar archipelago in south-east Maluku, to try to make myself an anthropologist. For the previous two years, I had read everything I could get hold of about Tanimbar: travel accounts, academic papers, reports written by missionaries, obscure anthropological monographs. There wasn't much to read; this was part of the appeal: Tanimbar seemed always on the periphery, a corner of the world perpetually on the fringes of great events.

What I did read allowed me to piece together a picture of life in the place that later became my home. From anthropologist Susan McKinnon, who carried out fieldwork in Tanimbar in the late 1980s, I learned of the Tanimbarese adventurer So’u Melatunan, who travelled through the world of the colonial Dutch powers, bringing back valuables, riches and stories. From McKinnon, also, I learned how warfare was a ‘persistent fact of life’ in the Tanimbar islands, as if there were something about Tanimbar that was, and had always been, war-like. It was a picture corroborated by the travel narratives of the nineteenth-century travellers Henry and Anna Forbes and by their tales of intervillage warfare, headhunting and violence. So when, in her elegant account of her stay in Tanimbar, Anna Forbes concluded the Tanimbarese were ‘a rude people subjected to no restraint’, I took the war-like nature of the Tanimbarese for granted. Even after I returned home, after I started to weave stories of my own about Tanimbar, I worked on the assumption that this is just how things were, and it was how they always had been. But more recently, I have started to wonder. What if this tale of the war-like Tanimbarese is more complex than it first seems? What if, like everything else, violence has a history? What if I, and everybody else, had got Tanimbar wrong?

What follows is a story of getting things wrong. It is a story about Henry and Anna Forbes. It is a story about So’u Melatunan, whose own tale was darker than I ever imagined. And it is a story about how I – a rude person, subjected to little restraint – played my own small part in this history of violence.