Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  Then, the bay was lovely with the towering sailing ships riding at anchor and small boats ferrying goods and people to the shore, and the settlement alive with excitement and bustle, dealing and partying. At other times of year there were only smaller vessels coming and going in the bay – country traders, Chinese junks and native prows with matting sails. The settlement relapsed into coastal trade, bureaucracy and backbiting, with the knowledge that if you felt bad this evening, you could be dead by tomorrow. Malaria, typhoid, cholera, dysentery. Depression, paranoia, despair.

  Raffles, Olivia and Maryanne reached Penang on 25 September 1805. A hundred years later Sir Frank Swettenham, a colonial administrator for over thirty years, recorded how a passenger was still struck, as his ship rounded the northern tip of the island, by ‘the extraordinary beauty of the scene to which he is introduced with almost startling suddenness.’ The prospect was of steep, deep-green forested hills rising almost from the water’s edge to a peak 2,500 feet high – Mount Ophir – and the coast of the mainland, Province Wellesley, a few miles away. On the sandy bays and rocky promontories of the island fishing nets were laid out to dry, and fishing-stakes stood in the shallow water. Drawing nearer, the lighthouse and the town on the shore came into focus. As the ship approached, it seemed to be running right up into Beach Street, the main street of Georgetown.

  Swettenham did not mention the long, low-walled Fort Cornwallis on the north-east tip of the island, at an angle to the open sea. Captain Francis Light’s Fort had been just a wooden stockade. The year before he died he rebuilt it in plastered brick, with two skins of wall and a moat. Ten years on, when Raffles arrived, it was in disrepair. Bengal never allocated enough money to make it good. It was never going to be effective for defence in spite of the cannon on its broad ramparts.

  Francis Light had been dead for a decade. He left a street named after himself and as his main heir his unofficial widow, Martina Rozells, with whom he had five children, and ‘who has co-habited with me since the year 1772’ as he stated in his Will. She was his nonya – Malay for ‘lady’, the familiar term for the female companions of Europeans.

  John Crawfurd, who came to Penang in 1809 as Assistant Surgeon in the hospital, and would have known Martina, said she was ‘a mestizo Portuguese of Siam’. Captain Light left her his land and houses, his plantations, pepper-gardens and animals, his bungalow in Georgetown, his furniture and plate. His property included a fine country house, Suffolk House, named after his birthplace in England. Martina and her children should rightly have inherited Suffolk House, but it was acquired from Light’s executors in 1805 by William Edward Phillips. (There was some funny business here.) Phillips had been in Penang since 1800, and had at various points been both Secretary to Government and Acting Lieutenant- Governor, as he would be again. Philip Dundas, arriving in Penang, gave Phillips back his former job of Collector of Customs and Land Revenues. Eleven years older than Raffles, Phillips became jealous of him and never liked him.

  Old-timers still talked about Light. He had run a country ship between India and the Malay Peninsula, he spoke colloquial Malay and mixed freely and comfortably with all ranks and all races. He believed in the strategic importance of Penang and ran the settlement as if he owned it. If Thomas Raffles were looking for an intriguing role model, though the term did not yet exist, it was Francis Light.

  Extending west from Fort Cornwallis was the padang, or esplanade, the open space for recreation and riding customary in British Indian settlements. Captain Light’s Government House, now the headquarters of Dundas’s administration, had a high double-arched entrance facing the town and a long verandah at the back looking on to the ocean. Georgetown was a small and simple place, with Light’s grid-pattern of streets stretching no more than half a mile inland. No one had a proper address. Advertisements for houses for sale in the Prince of Wales Island Gazette resorted to description, as for example: ‘That house, at the top of China Street, lately occupied by W. A. Clubley Esq.’ Anyone likely to buy a house would know which was Mr Clubley’s. Not until 1810 was it decreed that every house must have a number, displayed ‘on a painted board’.

  The houses for Europeans were normally single-storey wooden bungalows with slatted shutters to the windows and façades shaded by verandahs. The better houses were described as ‘well-raised’, with open, arcaded first floors and perhaps two floors above. Some were ‘packa’ or ‘pukka’ built i.e. from local bricks. The word just means ‘baked’. ‘Pukka’ was being used in British India to mean anything genuine or permanent – which was ironic, because the bricks crumbled in the heat. If roofs were tiled, it was a selling-point. Ordinarily, the bungalows were topped with atap (palm-leaf thatch).

  Young bachelors shared rented lodgings. An advertisement in the Gazette offered a ‘snug little cottage’ furnished for four persons with ’4 bedsteads, one dining table, one card table, 6 chairs, 5 cooking pots, 6 wine glasses, 6 tumblers, a set of coffee and tea things, a tureen, 5 dishes, 8 flat and 4 soup plates, with a cruet stand, a water jar and buckets.’ Quoits and skittles were thrown in. The water jar and buckets were for toilet requirements, performed in a lean-to structure alongside, half-open to the air. To wash or cool yourself, you sluiced your body with water from the big jar with a dipper. Servants prepared food in a detached hut on the other side.

  Raffles and Olivia were renting a Government bungalow. The object of bringing Maryanne out to East India – to find a husband – was speedily achieved. Among the new officials who sailed to Penang with them was a young man called Quintin Dick Thompson, appointed to the posts of Sub-Warehousekeeper and Deputy Paymaster. He and Maryanne reached a romantic understanding during the voyage and were married within a week of their arrival in Penang.

  Before another month was out, Raffles and Olivia had acquired a new and extraordinary friend. John Leyden, poet and scholar, arrived in Penang with three servants, knowing no one and in bad health. Still cold-shouldered by the Dundas ladies in Georgetown, Olivia and Raffles welcomed a kindred spirit. With Maryanne married, Leyden joined the couple in the bungalow.

  Leyden came from Teviotdale in the Scottish border country, as did Lord Minto, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1807 – but Minto came from a great house and Leyden from a shepherd’s cottage. This was never to bother Leyden, whose lack of conventional respect for anyone at all could make him come across as cocky and presumptuous. His home-language was ‘broad Scots’ – a dialect, not just a regional accent. His voice was loud and grating, and he talked non-stop. He had studied divinity at Edinburgh University, and obtained a medical degree from St Andrew’s; he collaborated with Walter Scott in collecting ballads, and had edited and contributed to Scots periodicals. He had arrived in Madras in 1803 to take up the post of Assistant Surgeon in the Company’s hospital. Meanwhile the volume of verse for which he is known in his own country, Scenes of Infancy: Descriptive of Teviotdale, was published in Edinburgh.

  Leyden had a phenomenal aptitude for languages. When laid low by his frequent illnesses, he would set himself to learn a new one: Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindustani – allegedly seventeen in all – with the aid of dictionaries, before he even left Scotland. His idea in coming to Penang was to master Malay while picking up more South Asian languages along the way. He could ‘grasp’ a new language with rapidity, even if he was unable to speak it fluently. He relied for his studies partly upon munshis – native speakers, employed as translators. Lord Minto thought that his facility was ‘more like the ancient gift of tongues than the slow acquisitions of ordinary men.’ It was not only languages that interested Leyden, but the history and cultures of the peoples who spoke them, and he collected Indian manuscripts. His behaviours and characteristics match those identified by Asperger in 1944.

  Leyden’s influence on Raffles was enormous. Raffles had come to grips with Malay, but had never met anyone passionately dedicated to linguistic scholarship, or to publishing his researches with an ambition to gain the highest reputation. Leyden
held Government posts in order to live, but his own work was much more than a hobby. For Raffles, who had painfully little formal education, Leyden’s erudition, his encyclopaedic general knowledge, and his willingness to share it – or his inability to refrain from sharing it – were overwhelmingly stimulating.

  Raffles accordingly set his own sights higher. They worked together, Leyden finding Malay ‘childishly easy’. The friendship was deeply personal. Raffles later wrote that Leyden was ‘my dearest friend, and I may truly say that while I looked up to him with all the admiration and respect which his wonderful talents and glowing virtues were calculated to command from all who knew him, I felt towards him the most brotherly affection.’

  Leyden was older than Raffles and younger than Olivia. He fell for her, and she established with him a sentimental, poetical attachment, as with Thomas Moore. Olivia and Leyden, like Moore, were both inclined to emotional extravagance, publically enacted; the intensity of intimacy was thereby diffused, both parties enjoying the display. Raffles understood his wife, and Leyden too. The imagery between the three is steadfastly fraternal. Leyden’s long ‘Dirge of the Departed Year: to Olivia’ appeared in the Prince of Wales Island Gazette on 22 March 1806, after he left Penang:

  …Olivia! ah! Forgive the bard

  If sprightly tones alone are dear:

  His notes are sad, for he has heard

  The footsteps of the parting year.

  The bard’s notes are sad because he is missing the friends of his youth and knows he is ‘foredoom’d to seek an early tomb’. He is cheered by the beautiful places he has seen:

  …But chief that in this eastern isle,

  Girt by the green and glistering wave,

  Olivia’s kind endearing smile

  Seemed to recall me from the grave.

  Olivia! I shall think of thee: –

  And bless thy steps, departed year!

  Each morn or evening spent with thee

  Fancy shall mid the wilds restore

  In all their charms, and they shall be

  Sweet days that shall return no more.

  Still mays’t thou live in bliss secure,

  Beneath that friend’s protecting care,

  And may his cherished life endure

  Long, long thy holy love to share.

  The last four lines, of course, are referring to her husband. After three months in Penang, Leyden sailed for Calcutta to pursue his Oriental studies. The surviving letters from Leyden to Olivia are so mannered and facetious that they do not bear much quotation. He wrote on 6 March 1806, having reached Calcutta, hoping that his ‘dear quondam patient’ had complied with his medical advice. He could not close his letter without telling ‘my dear amiable Olivia again how much I love her. Don’t start now at the term for I repeat it. I love you with a true brotherly affection… Therefore my dear good matronly sister let me hear often from you.’

  Leyden’s own indispositions, when not ‘intermittent fever’ i.e. malaria, affected the ‘liver and bowels’. Olivia’s illnesses were described by Raffles as liver trouble. Hepatitis was common among Europeans in the Indies. Both amoebic dysentery, caught from unclean food and unwashed hands, and malaria, endemic in the tropics, can also affect the liver. Raffles wrote to Leyden in May 1806: ‘My dear Olivia I regret to say is far from well – a desperate attack of the liver has reduced her to a mere skeleton – in consequence of a fall in dancing she ruptured some of the blood vessels in or near the liver which occasioned a violent hemorrage [sic].’ Convalescing, she wrote poetry. The Prince of Wales Island Gazette became the vehicle for her verses, and on 5 July 1806 her sixteen-quatrain poem addressed to a departed friend – i.e. Leyden – appeared under the title ‘Forget Me Not!’, and signed ‘Psyche’.

  There was not a lot to do in Georgetown for young Company officials and officers in their spare time. The Prince of Wales Island Club met monthly at the Commercial Hotel on Bishop Street; Thomas McQuoid, the Police Magistrate, who was to be a longtime friend of Raffles, was its first President. ‘The whist parties,’ reported the Gazette in October 1806, ‘which have lately been formed have tended much to dissipate the ennui which long since has pervaded the settlement.’ The following month a subscription dance was held at the Navy House ‘numerously attended and graced by the presence of all the youth, beauty and elegance of the settlement, enriched by the new arrivals.’

  The most lavish host in town was the rich merchant Syed Hussein, a contender, with his son, for the throne of Acheen (Aceh), a prosperous and cosmopolitan port of 30,000 inhabitants strategically positioned on the north-west coast of Sumatra at the head of the Malacca Strait. The actual Sultan since 1802, the insecure and not very bright Johor Alum, had great respect for the British, which was not properly reciprocated – a bad mistake – even though he offered a base in Acheen in exchange for military aid against his enemies.

  Dundas’s predecessor had shilly-shallied over supporting John Alum, as did Dundas. Hereditary monarchy in the East Indies was rarely simple. Monarchs had more than one wife and family, plus children with other women; brothers contested brothers and half-brothers, nephews contested uncles and vice versa, and blood was shed. Yet securing a foothold in Acheen was scheduled as an integral part of a rolling programme complementing the upgrading of Penang. The succession issue in Acheen mattered, a running sore in which Raffles became injudiciously involved.

  Meanwhile Syed Hussein, on behalf of himself and his son, ingratiated himself with the Penang Government. He gave an ‘elegant entertainment’ in Georgetown in October 1806 attended by Governor Dundas and his suite, and around sixty ladies and gentlemen of the settlement. Not only his ‘extensive premises’ on Beach Street but all the streets around were illuminated. The band from HMS Blenheim played appropriate airs to accompany each toast at the dinner, which was followed by fireworks, and dancing by ‘young and beautiful Nautch Girls’, whose style contrasted strongly – we are not told in what way – with the ‘females from the Malabar coast’ who performed after them. The European ladies being ‘inspired’ by these demonstrations, the ‘sprightly dance’ continued until two a.m.

  Olivia loved a party, and so did Raffles. But he had no problem with ennui in Penang because he did not have leisure as such. He pursued his studies purposefully after Leyden left. Leyden’s ambition was to equal the achievement of the polyglot prodigy Sir William Jones – a Company man, a judge of the Supreme Court in Bengal, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal – dead in his forties in 1794. Jones’ comparative philology challenged the Eurocentric assumption of the primacy of Graeco-Roman language and civilisation, linked Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and marked the beginning of modern Indology. If Francis Light was an exemplar of an independent adventurer, William Jones was an exemplar of an Oriental scholar.

  William Jones was a university-educated intellectual. He had Persian and Arabic before he ever went East. His range and depth serves to put Raffles’ achievements in context. Raffles’ passion for learning was lifelong and unfeigned, and could be turned to professional advantage. He began employing munshis, as Leyden did, to assist him as he began to translate Undang-undang Melaka, the ‘Malay Laws’, from old manuscripts. ‘Go on and prosper my dear fellow,’ wrote Leyden, ‘the work will not only be very desirable in a literary point of view, but will I should conceive do everything possible for your reputation at home.’

  Raffles sent a memo to Governor Dundas informing him that he now felt ‘competent not only to detect any error or misrepresentation made in translating or transcribing letters from the English into the Malayee’ [sic], but, when necessary, to translate or transcribe them himself. He was looking for Company funds to pay his four assistants, the munshis, in his translation, a work he believed would prove most useful to Government.

  Remarking that a Malay Translator to Government had not yet been appointed, he hoped that his name would be borne in mind, since he could also undertake to write ‘all letters in the Malayee language that may be deemed of a secr
et nature in my own hand,’ rendering it unnecessary for Government affairs to be ‘intrusted in the hands of a native.’ The matter of financial assistance was referred by Dundas to the Court of Directors in London with a strong recommendation as to Mr Raffles’ application and talent; he got his money, and some fine phrases of approbation from India House. In January 1807 the Gazette announced the appointment of ‘Mr Thomas Raffles to be Acting Malay Translator to Government.’

  Raffles would not have been able, then or ever, to translate literary Malay, or High Malay, without some assistance. Swettenham, echoing Leyden, observed that to learn enough to carry on a simple conversation is ‘an easy task’. This was Low Malay, or service Malay as the Dutch called it, or market Malay – a contact language, flexible and forgiving, already in use for administrative and commercial purposes throughout the Archipelago for a century, along with shreds of Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic and Chinese. (Wherever trade was, the Chinese were.) But to speak Malay well, wrote Swettenham, takes ‘years of study, and constant intercourse with the most cultivated Malays of the peninsula.’ High Malay idioms ‘have no counterpart in European tongues,’ and discourse is made subtle with riddles, parables and proverbs. But in Raffles’ time in Penang, when most of the English civil servants knew at most only a few hortatory phrases, Raffles’ level of comfortable fluency and competence, and his resulting ability to make friends with native speakers, was impressive.

  Someone whose level of competence was more impressive was William Marsden, Irish-born and in his fifties, former Company civil servant, and the distinguished author of The History of Sumatra. He was living in England and devoting himself to Oriental scholarship. He wrote to Governor Dundas with some queries about the system of chronological cycles used by the Malays, and about the Malay words for chess-pieces, and other matters. Dundas knew less than nothing about any of this, and passed the letter straight over to Raffles.