by John Keay
In this connexion it is significant that as Dalrymple sailed from Madras he was accompanied by Draper who was on his way home, via Canton, after the Madras siege. As a result of this voyage Draper became aware of the unsatisfactory state of affairs at Canton and interested in the idea of gaining a foothold in the Philippines. And it was almost certainly as a result of conversations with Dalrymple that the instructions for the Manila Expedition would include that mention of a permanent settlement in Mindanao.
But by then Dalrymple had forestalled it. In 1759, aboard the schooner Cuddalore, the antiquarian-turned-sailor explored to the north of Luzon. Returning to Macao in time to witness Flint’s disgrace, he next year ranged along the opposite shore of the South China Sea surveying the coast of Hainan island and calling at Tourane (Da Nang) in Annam. By the end of the year he was back at Canton offering the Cuddalore’s services as scout, and his own as pilot, to a fleet of Indiamen embarking on the Eastern Passage. It was rumoured that the French fleet which had earlier surprised Benkulen was lurking in the Malacca Straits.
With the idea of at last sizing up Sulu, he conducted his convoy down the west coast of the Philippines to Mindanao where, in spite of the Cuddalore’s crew taking continuous soundings, one of the ships ran aground. Undeterred by her loss, the five remaining vessels gingerly felt their way through the maze of reef-ringed islands as far as Jolo, the largest and the home of the Sultan of Sulu. Delighted with his Promised Land, Dalrymple had time only for a quick survey and a provisional trading agreement with the Sultan. He then led his convoy through the Macassar Straits and out into the Indian Ocean between Sumbawa and Flores.
Dalrymple accompanied them no further and, after surveying this extremity of the Indonesian archipelago, returned to the Sulu Sea. He spent most of 1761 there and in the Philippines where his surveys included Manila Bay (although there is no evidence that they were available to the next year’s expedition). By early 1762 he was back in Madras after a three-year absence.
Nothing if not wildly enthusiastic, Dalrymple now lobbied for a permanent settlement within the Sultan of Sulu’s watery domain. This was something which, like the Negrais plan, the Madras Council felt obliged to refer to London; but in the meantime they sent Dalrymple back to Sulu to open trade with the Sultan and select a site for the settlement. Accompanied this time by the young James Rennel, later Surveyor-General of Bengal, Dalrymple explored the coast of north Borneo (Sabah), over which the Sultan of Sulu claimed sovereignty, and eventually lit upon the island of Balambangan in the strait of Balabac between Borneo and Palawan (now in the Philippines). The Sultan officially ceded it in September 1762, just as Draper was landing his troops on what is now Manila’s corniche. In January 1763 Dalrymple went ashore to take formal possession.
Balambangan thus became the Company’s first non-Indian acquisition since Negrais and, save for Pulo Condore, the first ever in the South China Sea. In many ways its situation resembled that of another still uncharted island, Singapore. Each commanded one of the few points of entry into the South China Sea, each stood at the junction of two distinct trading zones, the one operated by Chinese junks and the other by Bugis and Malay prahus, and each consequently was a haunt of pirates. In one sense Balambangan appeared the more promising, being considerably nearer to both the Chinese seaboard and the eastern archipelago with its spices. Anticipating Singapore, Dalrymple envisaged his island being colonized by Chinese living under British protection, and like Singapore he urged that, at least to begin with, it should be a free port, its trade open to all free of duty. He even anticipated its becoming a centre to which the trade of Japan, Korea, New Holland (Australia), and the south Pacific would be drawn.
It was not, of course, to be. No forest of masts would ever clog Balambangan’s beckoning harbour, no colonial skyline ever usurp its dense canopy. The place is today indistinguishable from all the other coral and coconut paradises which dot the Sulu Sea. But if the cloak of obscurity was never to be lifted, it was not for want of special pleading, perseverance, even pugnacity on the part of its promoter. For most of the next decade Dalrymple would be poised to embark at a moment’s notice for his beloved Balambangan. The Company’s directors, although dilatory and divided in what was proving to be their most turbulent decade ever, did eventually sanction the scheme. And the Government, whose approval for snatching what Dalrymple called ‘so rich a jewel’ from under the noses of the Dutch and Spanish was deemed necessary, did eventually endorse it. But by then, 1770, Dalrymple had put himself out of the running as a founding father.
No doubt temperament had a lot to do with it. He had insisted on dictating his own terms of employment, including a handsome remuneration for life and absolute command of the whole project; and when these terms had been rejected, he had preferred to retaliate rather than compromise. He was an obstinate man. If Balambangan might have been as successful as the Singapore of Stamford Raffles, its method of government would have been more like the Sarawak of the autocratic Raja Brooke. On his last visit, an unchronicled and roundabout tour en route to London in 1763-4, there had been rumours that he was about to go it alone. Word had reached Madras that he had shipped 2000 Chinese from Manila to Balambangan, had recruited 120 soldiers, and was stockpiling ammunition and even artillery. This intriguing report may have been purely malicious but, in the later negotiations in London, Dalrymple made it clear that he expected to make the island his home and to stay there for life ‘laying the foundation of a great and permanent extension of the Company’s commerce’.
By 1772, when at long last the Balambangan settlement did go ahead, Dalrymple was somewhat inured to disappointment. Although strongly recommended by the Royal Society as the ideal man to lead the 1768 scientific expedition to the south Pacific, he had been passed over in favour of the Admiralty’s candidate, one Captain James Cook. He would never again visit the East. But as the Company’s and eventually the Admiralty’s first Hydrographer, as the editor and author of innumerable works on the history, commerce and navigation of practically all the real (and some imaginary) landfalls east of India, and as an indefatigable promoter of trade throughout the Pacific basin, he would sail vicariously through an endless tropical archipelago for the rest of his long and contentious life.
Deprived of his guidance, he was probably unsurprised that the Balambangan settlement proved a short-lived and abject fiasco. The man chosen to take his place, one of Benkulen’s ever venal factors, plumbed new depths of embezzlement and was soon driven back to sea by the outraged Suluans. His proceedings, according to the Court of Directors, ‘exhibited a scene of irregularity, duplicity, and presumption not to be equalled upon the records of the Company’ – which, if true, was saying something.
More notable were the exploits of Captain Thomas Forrest, one of Balambangan’s pioneers, who in furtherance of Dalrymple’s plan to attract not only the trade of China but also that of the eastern archipelago, set off from Balambangan for the Spice Islands in 1774. To avoid arousing Dutch suspicions, Forrest emulated David Middleton’s example at Ceram by sailing in a native prahu, renamed the Tartar, with just two English companions. Cramped quarters were no novelty to the eighteenth-century seaman but in the ten-ton Tartar there can scarcely have been room to sling the hammocks. Nevertheless, in this unlikely craft, Forrest and his men pushed further east than any of his Company predecessors. In Geelvinks Bay on the north coast of New Guinea (Irian Jaya) he found one of the few nutmeg forests outside of the Banda Islands and Dutch control; further west he explored the Gilolo Passage between New Guinea and the Moluccas; then on to Mindanao, where the Sultan gave him the pick of the off-shore domains as a possible British base, to Borneo where the Balambangan settlers had removed after losing their island, and so to the Malay peninsula where at Kedah the sixteen-month, 4000-mile odyssey ended when his companions refused to serve any longer. One sympathizes with them on learning that, when sold, the Tartar fetched £9 7s 6d.
Forrest published an account of this voyage and of a subsequ
ent exploration of the Mergui Archipelago. A version of the latter was also put out by Dalrymple whose copious publications testify to the remarkable upsurge of commercial exploration after the Seven Years War. Included are voyages to many of the Indonesian islands and still further afield to the Chagos and the Cocos (both in the Indian Ocean), the Marianas (in the Pacific) and Timor. Forrest figures prominently in these itineraries, as does Walter Alves who had witnessed the destruction of Negrais in 1759. Five years later Alves apparently explored the north coast of Mindanao as captain of the London and in 1765 he was among ‘the islands on the Coast of China’. On 12 February, in what seems to have been one of the earliest mentions of the place, he hauled to the north of the island he called ‘Heong Kong’. ‘The tide being done, [I] anchored in six fathoms, mud, distant from Heong Kong about a mile, Lantao peak bearing west 8 degrees south.’ For some reason Dalrymple took exception to this. In a footnote he insisted that ‘what he [Alves] calls Heong Kong is Fanchin-chow’. Not for the first time, Dalrymple’s protest fell on deaf ears.
A few months later the London was ‘pirated’ and Alves killed off the coast of Borneo where further attempts were being made to open trade at Bandjarmasin (the New Company had briefly operated from there at the turn of the century). Pasir on the east coast of Borneo was another favoured spot. These, and similar initiatives in Bali and at the eastern extremity of Java, were mounted from Benkulen which, following its capitulation to the French, had been reoccupied. But the reoccupation was supposed to be only temporary. The Sumatran councillors were under orders either to make Benkulen pay by developing a profitable sideline in the exchange of Bengal opium for contraband spices, or else to remove somewhere where they could. Various incentives were offered to assist in these developments, and during the late 1760s Benkulen witnessed scenes of unprecedented activity as a variety of Company and private vessels plied between its harbourless coast and such ports further east as were not under Dutch surveillance.
The Dutch of course protested and hastily bore down on any local potentate willing to indulge the British. Somewhat lamely the Company responded by insisting on its right to free navigation throughout the archipelago. But navigation was no guarantee of trade and this did not solve the problem of Benkulen. In the 1770s an alternative solution was suggested involving removal to Aceh or one of the ports on the Malay peninsula. Significantly, the new initiative was prompted by precisely the arguments advanced in favour of Balambangan.
vi
But Benkulen’s customary deficit was as nothing compared to the anxieties created by the booming China trade. Adumbrated by Dalrymple in a succession of publications, these anxieties centred not only on its vulnerability – to Chinese restrictions and exactions and to European competition and interruption – but even more critically on problems of its finance.
English woollens had met with no greater demand in Canton than they had in India. It was hoped that by opening trade with the colder northern provinces either through Ningpo or through an off-shore development like Balambangan such a demand would be created; in the meantime Chinese tea was purchased almost entirely by the export of silver. As in the seventeenth century, English cloth weavers objected to this neglect of their product and they were supported by homespun economists ever eager to bemoan the drain of specie. Even the Company was uneasy. For at the very moment when Clive was reporting that the revenues in Bengal should obviate the need to export treasure for the India trade, treasure for the China trade was draining its resources as never before.
There was of course a simple solution – redirect the Indian surplus to finance the China deficit. But without the Company’s bullion shipments, Bengal was soon chronically short of specie. India’s only surplus was in kind, not cash, and although some Indian cottons and saltpetre could be sold at Canton, it was not until Canton relaxed its strict prohibition on the import of Bengal opium that this simple solution was possible.
Meanwhile Dalrymple had outlined an alternative as part of his master plan for Balambangan. He observed that China’s overseas trade traditionally hinged on the import of primary produce from south-east Asia and the archipelago. As well as pepper and spices it comprehended a pungent cornucopia of everything from tin ore to gold dust and animal skins, from sea-slugs to birds’ nests and sharks’ fins. Tearing a leaf this time not out of Saris’s journal but out of that of Peter Floris, he also observed the archipelago’s demand for Indian cottons and opium. The solution then was a three-way exchange – Indian produce for that of south-east Asia, south-east Asian produce for that of China.
Dalrymple expressed himself with clarity and cogency but in reality he was not so much formulating a new policy as rationalizing an existing state of affairs. Ever resourceful, the ‘country’ or ‘private’ trader had already moved in on the south-east Asian market.
No aspect of the Company’s history so successfully evades analysis as private trade. By the eighteenth century the Honourable Company’s monopoly was enforced only over the ‘out and back’ carrying trade between Europe and the East. Within the East all trade, be it the river traffic of Bengal, the coastal traffic of the Malabar and Coromandel ports, or the oceanic intercourse between India, Arabia, Persia and China, was a legitimate field for private speculation. The life-blood of the Company’s major settlements, it engrossed the energies of all their inhabitants, be they European or Indian, civil or military, Company’s servants or ‘free merchants’.
It was this combination of a profusion of participants with an incredible diffusion of markets which made the trade so impossible to regulate – and which makes it so difficult to analyse. But it seems clear that whereas at the beginning of the century the long-distance trade was mainly between the Arabian Sea ports, by the 1760s it had swung decisively to the other side of India. As noticed, it was private trade that preceded the Company’s links with Burma, the Philippines and the archipelago. And the same was true of the Malay peninsula which had thus far been left entirely to the private trader.
‘Private’ shipping could be anything from a ten-ton prahu like the Tartar to a 500-ton Indiaman. It might be owned or chartered. The owners or charterers, who might or might not be responsible for its cargo, could be an informal partnership, an established syndicate, or a society with monopolistic tendencies not unlike those of the Honourable Company. The Benkulen factors, in their private capacity, operated as a ‘General Concern’; in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta the first ‘Agency Houses’ were taking shape.
One such was the firm of Jourdain, Sulivan and de Souza which in 1770 became ‘The Madras Association’. Based at Fort St George, it had built up a thriving trade with the Malay peninsula and Aceh by selling Indian cottons to the Malay and Bugis traders and buying from them produce suitable for the China trade. It had agents in Aceh (Sumatra) and Kedah (Malaya) who handled not only their own company’s trade but also that of other private traders from Bengal or elsewhere. In effect the firm was operating a local monopoly in these ports and as such its operations came to the attention of the Court of Directors in London. In 1772, on their orders, Madras dispatched an agent to the Sultan of Aceh with a view to planting a settlement and developing this trade for the Company’s benefit. The overture was rebuffed and a similar mission to both Kedah and the Rhio (Riau) islands, a mere twenty miles from modern Singapore, also failed.
Kedah and Rhio had been suggested by Captain Francis Light, one of the Madras Association’s employees who had originally come out to the East as an officer in the Royal Navy. As well as the commercial value of a base in the vicinity of the Malacca Strait, Light could clearly see its strategic importance as a half-way house for the China trade. Thus when Rhio dropped out of the reckoning, he was quick to come forward with alternative sites including the island of Penang. Meanwhile Forrest, who had also once served under Admiral Pocock, drew attention to the other strategic need, that for a safe haven during the monsoon in the Bay of Bengal. He rightly observed that nothing had been done about this since the Negrais
disaster, and the validity of his concern was painfully highlighted when in 1782 a French fleet again entered the Bay. After a succession of typically indecisive battles, the British fleet returned to Bombay to refit. Briefly the French had the run of the Bay and ‘nearly succeeded in blockading Calcutta’ (D. G. E. Hall).
As a result of this scare, further attempts were made to establish a Company presence in both Aceh and Rhio. The Dutch quickly preempted Rhio while Aceh guarded its independence as jealously as it had in the days of James Lancaster. Its Sultan, another Ala-uddin, nevertheless valued his European friends. When Forrest called there in accordance with instructions from Calcutta to make one last bid for a Company settlement, the Sultan conferred on him the Order of the Golden Sword and graciously accepted a copy of Voltaire’s works. It is not recorded whether Forrest knew that Lancaster’s crew had sung a psalm for the Sultan; but as if to repeat the courtesy, Forrest also presented Ala-uddin with a musical token, in this case a rendering of a traditional Malay verse ‘to the Comnti Vivace of the 3rd Sonata of Corelli’.
With Rhio and Aceh out of the running, that left Penang. Light was still on good terms with the Kedah Sultan who owned it and in 1786 the Sultan ceded the island to the Company. Light took possession, renaming it Prince of Wales Island. Thus, a whole generation of false starts and missed opportunities since Negrais, the Company again had a foothold in mainland south-east Asia.
