It has long been known that the Austronesian people, who ultimately hail from Taiwan, China, are the greatest sea-faring ethnicity in history: not only are Austronesian people dominant in south-east Asia and the Pacific, but they are also found in the island of Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa.

Whilst the Austronesian colonisation of Madagascar is a well-studied event, the circumstances and the intermediate steps that led a group of inhabitants of the inland part of Borneo to take the sea and settle in a faraway land are far from clear.

This lecture aims at elucidating a number of theories in regards to this poorly described page of history, and show that the Austronesian presence in the western part of the Indian Ocean was in all likelihood more extensive in past centuries than in present times.