The Dutch claimed New Guinea territory defined by an arbitrary longitude line.

Evidence

Modern Indonesia offers us a fine, painful example of this process. In 1828 the first fever-ridden Dutch settlement was made on the island of New Guinea. Although the settlement had to be abandoned in 1836, the Dutch Crown proclaimed sovereignty over that part of the island lying west of 141 degrees longitude (an invisible line which corresponded to nothing on the ground, but boxed in Conrad’s diminishing white spaces), with the exception of some coastal stretches regarded as under the sovereignty of the Sultan of Tidore. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 665

Categorization

• SHARE: A great tidbit for anyone into the absurdity of colonial boundary-making: a sovereignty claim based on a line corresponding to nothing on the ground, with a bizarre coastal exception for the Sultan of Tidore.