In a grand marriage on the island of Kalimantan, brides and bridgrooms of great stature and beauty - including Alexander the Great and the son and daughters of King Jantam - were married. This wedding united two different and distant kingdoms - one of the East and one of the West.

Although Ferdinand Magellan is credited with being the first European captain to sail the Pacific Ocean (he did so in 1519), the Portuguese captain Antonio de Abreu had skirted that ocean’s western edge eight years earlier while exploring the Spice Islands, now part of Indonesia. If only briefly, Abreu had entered an ocean that no European had seen before. Seven years before Magellan named it Océano Pacífico, for its peaceful appearance, Vasco Núñez de Balboa had viewed the ocean from the Isthmus of Panama.

From Singapore to Panama, the Pacific stretches eight thousand miles. East of Singapore, where it is called the South China Sea, lies the vast island of Borneo. The southern two-thirds of this island of rain forests and rivers is part of Indonesia and is called Kalimantan. Little is known of the early history of Borneo, the third largest island on earth. Some of the oldest peoples have been discovered here—among them, the Penan, who marry their own mothers and sisters. One of the earliest transcriptions of the Indian language Sanskrit was found, surprisingly, on Borneo; it dates from about A.D. 400. The chronicles of Kutai describe an early sultanate that stretched from the center of the island to its eastern shores. Other writings tell of the mythical city of Kauripan on Java, one of the most glorious cities in all of Nusantara (the Sanskrit name for the Indonesian archipelago).

The lands of the Dyak peoples lay between the Mendawai and Kapuas rivers in south-central Borneo. The Dyaks were forged from a cluster of tribes including the maritime Sea Dyaks and the Ngaju Dyaks.