In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  * * *

  The swimming pool at Ancol was full to bursting of Chinese, undergarments frowsily retained under frumpy swimming costumes. Indeed, we and the staff were the only people not Chinese. No, wait, there was a little boy and girl, very dark, very Javanese. The boy had mastered the trick of floating, perfectly still, face down with his arms limp. It made the lifeguards uneasy.

  Beni and Rudi demonstrated their proficiency at diving, swimming fancy strokes, lifesaving each other. The girls withdrew under the shade of a pavilion, disdaining the water.

  ‘They are afraid for their hair,’ explained Agus, proudly. ‘They are MPs’ daughters.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Tomorrow is Independence Day. They have to go to Freedom Palace to be received by the President, so they have had their hair done.’

  ‘Oh.’ Hugh Hope, Raffles’ Civil Commissioner, had lived next door to the State Palace, but that was not perhaps to the point. I forbore to mention it.

  * * *

  In a warehouse in north London the ethnography department of the British Museum has a storehouse. It is a lending library for the world’s museums. Beside a fetid, English canal, in a building worthy of Tanjung Priok, stands a monument to the ingenuity of the human spirit, a vast collection of material culture from city, swamp and jungle – carvings, textiles, forgotten or still-potent gods, weapons of war, everything that man has wreaked or wrought. Much of it is stored in wooden boxes known as ‘coffins’, fumigated in poison gas to destroy insect life, then cosseted in controlled humidity and temperature to resist the ravages of time and lay down a deposit that can be mined by generations yet unborn. Scholars from around the world come here to reconstruct the past, plan the future, pin down the elusive present. Conservationists move among the objects, dusting with brushes, mending, resetting, tending the wounded. A museum is in essence a time-machine where clocks are stopped and the moment is eternal as in Heaven and the writings of anthropologists.

  At the end of one rack is an unremarkable plywood ‘coffin’ with an 1859 registration number, the date when it entered the museum’s collection. To anyone who has worked on the material culture of Asia that means one thing only – ‘Raffles Collection’. Inside is a white nest of tissue paper with lumps like in school semolina pudding. You open them to find hooped and stirruped devices of brass with heavy iron threads and bolts, instruments of torture made for the crushing and smashing of Indonesian feet and hands, carefully preserved from rust and decay. They are quite small, for the hands and feet were small. Torture was a regular part of the Dutch judicial process. It was the very first thing Minto and Raffles abolished. Torture having been stopped, its instruments were packed up and shipped far away. That unremarkable box is a memorial to their humanity.

  * * *

  ‘The Chinese are of a very lustful temper. They are accused of the most detestable violations of the laws of nature; and it is even said, that they keep swine in their houses, for purposes the most shameful and repugnant.’

  – J. Stockdale, Sketches Civil and Military (1812)

  * * *

  The little Javanese boy and his sister came over. He shook hands in a matter-of-fact, man-to-man way and introduced himself as Marwan.

  ‘You will want to go and see the graveyard,’ he said. ‘It is full of Dutch.’

  ‘I’m not Dutch, but why are they buried here?’

  ‘They were killed in the fighting.’

  ‘The fighting with the English?’

  He looked at me as if I were mad. ‘English? No, the Japanese. My dad says they were killed by the Japanese. Look,’ he said changing tack, ‘I need to borrow an adult to take us on the water-slide. I’m eight and she’s six. They won’t let us on alone. I can’t ask the Chinese.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re not Indonesian.’

  ‘I’m not Indonesian either.’

  ‘You’re a white man, a bule, that’s different.’

  ‘But they were born here. Chinese have been here for hundreds of years. Why aren’t they Indonesian?’

  Marwan thought about it. ‘My dad says they take all the money from the Indonesians so we are poor and they are rich. That’s why they are bad.’ Inspiration suddenly struck and he gave one of those dynamite smiles that rock you on your heels with their innocence and openness. ‘Yes,’ he said triumphantly, ‘they are Indonesians, bad Indonesians.’

  Scenes of Old Batavia

  ‘Batavia shines in the natural neatness of the Dutch. The streets are wide, not paved, but the roads formed of very fine gravel, and excellent. From the town, the roads run along canals, or streams of water, in some places quick and almost lively, mostly, however, slow, dull and always yellow.’

  – Lord Minto

  ‘In June 1775, C. P. Thurberg dined with a party of fifteen, on the eve of his departure for Japan. On his return at the beginning of 1777, he found that eleven of the fifteen were dead. Von Wollzagen found in 1792 that all his friends had died within a period of sixteen months. Of one hundred and fifty soldiers who arrived with the ship Morgenstern in 1770, only fifteen were alive four months later. Dysentery, typhus, typhoid and malaria were the principal diseases.’

  – E. Hahn, Raffles of Singapore

  A sign by the road says ‘We are turning Jakarta into a tourist city – beautiful, clean, peaceful and cool.’ They have a long way to go. It’s ugly, filthy, noisy, hot and a surprisingly good place to live.

  Morning comes early to the city, the imams starting up about five, calling out pious words into the world. By six the food-stalls are open, frying noodles and rice, the hiss of fat blending with that of the mosque loudspeakers. The poverty is to be seen in the boys dodging between the cars and selling single cigarettes to drivers stuck in traffic jams. There is a well-organized distribution network. One day the children sell iced water, the next face flannels, the next flashing yo-yos. The lives of the middle class are lived to the music of those anxious to serve their every need. From morning to night, there is an endless procession of street-traders past the house – brushes, chairs, mirrors, portraits of the President – all are for sale. The range of food alone is astonishing. People want to wash your car and mend your saucepans, sell you fake Cartier watches and clothes with designer labels. When Agus loses a key to a suitcase, a man comes to the gate and just looks at the lock, works out in his head what the key would look like and carves one out of metal with a file. It works first try. It seems that there is nothing Indonesians cannot make or mend.

  * * *

  ‘… All the mischievous, deteriorating and grievous maxims of a narrow, monopolising and harsh policy are in full force and vigour in every department of affairs …While we are here, let us do as much good as we can.’

  – Lord Minto

  Trade was to be the key to the prosperity of Britain’s new colony. Both Raffles and Minto had imbibed the spirit of free trade and enterprise at the breast – as it were – of Adam Smith. The Dutch colony had been run on the contrary assumption of monopoly.

  The Dutch had been concerned to acquire spices and coffee at the lowest prices possible and sell them to Europe at the highest they could command. To do this they used forced labour and forced deliveries, imposed prices and ruthlessly destroyed any surplus or interlopers who could undermine their control of the market. On one occasion this had required nothing less than genocide. They had not baulked at genocide.

  Apart from controlling deliveries of tropical produce, the Dutch had little interest in the administration or welfare of Java and were content simply to manipulate local rulers.

  The British were in a different position. They had powerful manufacturing industries that needed raw materials and foreign buyers. The increasing wealth of foreign dependencies would create a natural market for Britain’s manufactured goods and cargoes for the outward journey. It was in Britain’s interest to promote freedom of trade and wealth among its subjects. Yet the East India Company, too, was narrowly monopo
listic, allowing its employees a free hand in local or ‘country’ trade as long as the long-distance trade with China was kept its exclusive preserve. One day the contradiction between these principles would become intolerable, but for the moment Raffles was happy to pocket up the Dutch monopoly while freeing local trade through a complete revision of the customs regulations. It was not until he saw the British being excluded from the Indies by an increasingly aggressive Dutch Empire that he would fully espouse free trade in the interests of Singapore.

  There was one fatal flaw in all this. It was Raffles’ misfortune that he had no market. The continent of Europe was blockaded by British ships, for the Napoleonic Wars were in full swing. The only remaining outlet was closed when hostilities began between Britain and America in 1812; but even before that there had been no vessels to carry produce. The Spice Islands, though now British, were not under Raffles’ control. Forced deliveries were still extracted from the inhabitants and used to supply markets directly. Previously all spices had passed via Java. The Jakarta warehouses, now cut off from world trade, were packed with rotting cloves, nutmeg and coffee. Storage costs were just another drain on finances. The destruction of crops caused by the invasion had been a blessing. Raffles had taken over the colony at the very moment when it could not conceivably do anything but lose money.

  * * *

  Money was at the bottom of another of Raffles’ problems. The Dutch authorities had issued paper money like confetti. No one trusted it: trade was being strangled by the lack of coinage. To raise more money, in 1810 the Dutch had started selling provinces to the Chinese. One of the conditions of sale had been that the Chinese should also buy up 50,000 of the new paper notes every six months and so introduce them into circulation, forcing them on a reluctant public. This became known as Probolingo currency. The public resisted accepting the valueless Probolingo money, and the Dutch had been obliged to pass a law imposing the severest penalties on anyone refusing it.

  When the Chinese purchase of 50,000 Probolingo notes fell due, they joyfully paid for them in other worthless Probolingo notes, citing the government regulations that made it a crime to refuse them. The Dutch were furious.

  * * *

  It should not be thought that Raffles at this time did nothing but work. That taste he had acquired for society, coupled with a sense of his social duty as ‘the Honourable, the Lieutenant-Governor’, led him to revolutionize Batavian notions of hospitality. The night before Minto’s return to India there was a great ball at Government House, already decorated by the French for the celebration of Napoleon’s birthday but usurped by the British for their own festivity. Even the vanquished General Janssens was invited. The Dutch were shocked at the levity of the British. Raffles is said to have been borne round the room in a chair to general acclamation. One of the English innovations was drinking toasts to music, and a subversive humour matched music and text. The toast ‘The Queen and Royal Family’ was drunk to the tune ‘Merrily Danced the Quaker’s Wife and Merrily Danced the Quaker’. When it came to the toast ‘The Company’, they drank it to ‘Money in Both Pockets’.

  * * *

  ‘Today an average international gathering in the Far East would probably greet with amused incredulity the statement that a British government, of all groups, should have had a lightening, gay effect upon any society whatever, but so it was in 1811. In those days and by comparison with the slow Dutch, the British looked like tearing, merry madcaps.’

  – E. Hahn, Raffles of Singapore

  ‘It is impossible to give you anything like an adequate notion of the total absence of beauty in so crowded a hall. There never is a dozen women assembled in Europe without a few attractions amongst them. Here there was no difference, except in some few varieties of ugliness and ordinariness of dress and manner. The Dutch did not encourage, nor indeed allow freely, European women to go out to their colonies in India. The consequence has been, that the men lived with native women, whose daughters, gradually borrowing something from their father’s [sic] side, and becoming a mixed breed, are now the ladies of rank and fashion in Java. The young ladies have learnt the European fashions of dress, and their carriage and manner are something like our own of an ordinary class. Their education is almost wholly neglected; or rather no means exists here to provide for it. They are attended from their cradles by numerous slaves, by whom they are trained in helplessness and laziness; and from such companions and governesses, you may conceive how much accomplishment and refinement in manner or opinions they are likely to acquire.’

  – Lord Minto

  ‘In Batavia everybody drank a bottle of wine a day as a matter of course, quite apart from the beer, sake, spirits and so on which were consumed on the side. Heavy drinking was customary at parties. Visitors were given a toast with each glass of wine, principally no doubt to compensate for the lack of intelligent conversation. Official parties were punctuated with a numerous and official toast list, sometimes accompanied by cannon shots and three cheers. The widow of Governor-General van der Parra, about 1780, who according to contemporary witnesses was an exceptionally sober and straitlaced man, died long after her husband but still left forty-five hundred bottles of wine and over ten thousand bottles of beer.’

  – E. Hahn, Raffles of Singapore

  ‘There will be games,’ said Agus, ‘and a whist-drive. People will eat dry crackers hung from ropes without using their hands. There will be races with balloons and water.’

  ‘I know,’ I said smugly. Earlier that morning I had won the men’s race round the block carrying a bucket of water on my head. One is ill-prepared at my age to discover such unsuspected abilities.

  ‘In the main streets there is a big march-past but here, in the back streets, the people have their own way of celebrating independence. Do you know about pinang?’

  ‘It is an island,’ I said. ‘In Malaysia. Raffles was there, he …’

  ‘No,’ said Agus firmly, ‘pohon pinang, areca tree; it is a special tree like your Christmas tree I saw when I was in London. I will take you there.’

  We set off through the narrow streets. A whole boiling village life teemed behind the city facades. People called out greetings and introduced their children. Officious men were pinning up bunting. Another wearing a peaked cap was drawing lines for the races on the street with all the aplomb of someone on official business. In the distance we could hear screams and cheers, a wail of despair, a crash, more cheers.

  One bank of the canal was covered with laughing spectators in their best clothes. On the other, the young bloods of the area had gathered, flexing their muscles. In between flowed the canal, its waters deep and heavy with pollution, swirling with scum and debris. In the water, they had set up a vertical pole some twenty feet high, covered with grease. From the top hung desirable prizes – clothes, saucepans, most alluring of all a chiming clock.

  ‘Pohon pinang,’ said Agus, pointing, ‘the areca tree.’

  The only way to gain access was an oiled bamboo pole leading from the far bank like a gangplank. A line of soaked, wretched figures, their teeth chattering, testified to the difficulty of getting across. As we watched one boy missed his footing on the slippery bamboo, teetered deliciously on the brink, eyes agog, arms flailing, then slowly, inexorably, tumbled head-first into the water. The crowd hooted and cheered. There is great satisfaction in the white-linened contemplation of the filth and discomfort of others.

  At the height of it all the clock chimed ‘East is East and West is West and the wrong one I have chose …’ The crowd joined in, la-la-ing happily.

  * * *

  Raffles was now on a slippery slope. He had taken over responsibility for the Probolingo currency. To pay for that failed land sale, he was obliged to sell off more government land and have a lottery. To encourage the Dutch and British to make friends, he kept open table. To pay for that, he had to appropriate the money from the government monopoly of edible birds’ nests. He would never get clear of the chaos of Java’s finances.


  Yet in his first year Raffles brought out the new set of trade regulations, set up a programme to research the natural resources of the island, reformed the legal system, instituted health care, suppressed piracy, began a complete reform of land-tenure and the basis of taxation and completed a successful military campaign against the native rulers. In spare moments he founded a newspaper and revived the Batavia Academy of Arts and Sciences. When one speaks of Raffles doing all this, it is scarcely a figure of speech. There were almost no competent British officials. Much of the work he simply did himself; for the rest, he had to rely on the army, especially the surgeons. They, at least, could read and write. Many of the Dutch officials, corrupt and disaffected though they might be, had to be left in their positions. This sometimes led to problems. There is a, possibly apocryphal, story of Raffles writing a terse letter to one Dutchman pointing out that his assistant was hopelessly corrupt and must be immediately suspended. The Dutchman, whose command of English was wobbly, looked up the word in his dictionary, took the assistant outside and hanged him.

  * * *

  ‘The cannon is worshipped by barren women who come and sit astride it to be cured.’ What? No, surely that was Padang, or was it Malacca? I whirled round to look at the speaker. The man was small, ferrety. The English was slick and shallow, the moustache that of a second-hand car dealer. He was clearly a tourist guide. We were in the old town square of Batavia. Here the British troops had been plied with drink by agents of the French while a Chinese tried to fire the magazine. As if in emulation, a stall-holder waved a can of Coca-Cola from across the road.

  ‘The end of the cannon is in the form of a clenched fist. In Indonesia that is a gesture that means …’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ The universal symbolism of cannon had been appreciated by someone. As subtitle, they had scrawled the word ‘Seks’ on it in chalk.