Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  Urgent discussions at Fort William in Calcutta between Lord Minto, General Sir Samuel Auchtermuty (a loyalist American, in command of the British troops), Admiral Drury and Raffles, concerned the route that the invasion force should take from Malacca to Java. With such a large fleet, there would be difficulties in passing through the narrow passages between islands of the Archipelago. Since progress was entirely dependent upon strong currents and the shifting monsoon winds, a straight run was out of the question.

  The most direct route was via the narrow straits between Banca and Sumatra, but by mid-June – the earliest the expedition could leave – the wind direction would make this impossible. To choose that way would mean delaying several months for a change of wind. Another idea was to go east from the southern end of the Strait of Malacca, cross open water to the south-west coast of Borneo, then navigate the Carimata (Karimata) Strait, getting the benefit of prevailing breezes, and cross back again towards Batavia. This was considered dangerous and impracticable.

  Yet another possibility was to go with the wind all the way round the north coast of Borneo, and work south through the Straits of Macassar, where they would pick up the eastern monsoon to bring them back along the coast of Java. This was very long. They might not make it to Java before the rainy season began in October, and the health of the armed forces, compromised by a long voyage, might not withstand being continuously wet.

  Captain George Elliot wrote in his memoirs that Raffles ‘knew nothing of winds and monsoons in the Eastern seas, and never pretended to know; nor did he know what route it was proposed to take till he was desired as interpreter at my request to obtain information… as to the winds on the west coast of Borneo at that season, in which he totally failed.’ It is true that Raffles did not know much about ‘winds and monsoons’, nor pretend to, which is precisely why he sent off Captain Greig in the brig Minto, to survey the southwest passage through the Carimata Strait and test its practicality.

  Greig’s report was positive, and Raffles was strongly of the opinion that this was the right way to go. The difficulties, he wrote to Minto, were ‘magnified by ignorance’, and there was no reasonable doubt that ‘the S.W. passage may be effected by the fleet sailing in divisions, in the space of a month or six weeks at farthest.’ As his widow wrote in her Memoir, ‘he did not hesitate to stake his reputation’ on the point.

  When his despatch reached Calcutta, Minto’s Military Secretary, Captain William Taylor, noted how highly Minto rated Raffles’ judgment, ‘and rightly so, though to my mind he is inclined to be a trifle self-opinionated.’ Minto wrote to Raffles in March 1811: ‘It is proposed to style you Secretary to the Governor-General when we come together… I hope you do not doubt the prospective interest I have always taken, and do not cease to take, in your personal views and welfare. I have not spoken distinctly on that subject, only because it has been from circumstances impossible for me to pledge myself to the fulfilment of my own wishes, and, I may add, intentions, if practicable.’

  He had a ‘very strong desire’ upon another point, upon which if he had his way ‘the utmost will be done to make the best attainable situation worthy of your services, and of the high esteem I profess, with the greatest sincerity, of your person.’ This was a vague hint, but Raffles’ anxieties may have been assuaged.

  Minto was doing everything he could for Raffles. The Council at Calcutta wrote to the Secret Committee in London on 27 April 1811: ‘Your Honourable Committee will probably concur in opinion with us that Mr Raffles has manifested a considerable degree of industry, judgment and ability, in carrying into effect the very delicate and important objects of his Mission, and that the information he has acquired…warrants an expectation of the successful issue of the enterprise against the enemy’s possessions in the Eastern Islands.’

  Minto sailed from Calcutta in the Modeste, captained by his son George Elliot, on 9 May, along with his younger son John Elliot as his private secretary. The entourage included Hugh Hope (a Company civil servant, scion of another grand Scots family) as his Deputy Secretary, and Captain William Taylor as his Military Secretary. Taylor was a cousin of the Mintos, and close to the second of the Mintos’ three daughters, Anna Maria. Taylor wrote regularly to Anna Maria Minto, and sent her copies of his journal throughout the Java campaign, which he made on his ‘copying machine’, using ‘carbonic paper’, much chuffed by this modern technology.

  Archibald Seton, designated as the next Governor of Penang, was also on the Modeste. So was John Leyden, who had persuaded Minto to let him accompany the expedition on account of his expertise in Malay. Leyden’s garrulity in the narrow confines of the frigate tested even Minto’s amused tolerance, and Captain Taylor found unbearable the ‘incessant clack kept up by Leyden in the cabin from breakfast to bedtime in the shrillest voice that can well be imagined. If he ceases for an instant, Mr Seton asks a question that sets him off again.’ Steps were taken. ‘Lord M. having borne with patience for some time the clack I have complained of spoke out at last, the morning is to be quiet now. From dinner till bed time L. may talk as much as he pleases, which [for] him amounts to as much as he can.’

  While the Modeste was at sea it was learned that Raffles’ friend Admiral Drury, sailing on the Illustrious, had dropped dead, and Commodore W.R.Broughton had taken over as commander of the naval forces. He was considered inadequate to the task, and before the invasion was replaced by Rear Admiral Sir Robert Stopford, one of Nelson’s captains. The Modeste reached Penang in the first week of May 1811, and remained for a few days. Archibald Seton was formally signed in as Governor of Penang, though he remained part of the mission to Java. Governor Bruce had died in December 1810, since when W.E. Phillips was Acting Governor in Penang. Raffles had to tell Phillips the secret reason for his sojourn in Malacca, which he had previously, perfectly properly, confided only to Governor Bruce. Phillips was peeved that he had not been informed before.

  In Penang Minto and his party added to their stores a load of buffalo meat – the beef of the East Indies – sent as a compliment by the Rajah of Kedah on the mainland. Just as the Modeste was preparing to leave for Malacca but still at anchor, reported Captain Taylor, ‘a couple of prows passed us, one with a yellow flag at each masthead, and a yellow ensign.’ They heard from the shore that this was the Rajah himself paying a courtesy visit to the Governor-General. ‘On this hint we got under weigh forthwith and left His Majesty in the lurch.’

  Raffles had particularly impressed upon Minto the importance of making an ally of the well-disposed Rajah of Kedah, and of securing from him as much territory as possible on the mainland of the Malayan Peninsula. Minto’s failure to take the point provoked the nearest thing to a reproach that Raffles ever addressed to his admired superior: ‘From the shortness of your Lordship’s stay at Penang, the Rajah was disappointed in procuring the expected interview, which I am informed he regrets, not only as a serious mortification, but as an absolute misfortune.’

  On 18 May, Minto and the black-painted Modeste appeared in the bay before Malacca, to be welcomed by marching soldiers, thundering cavalry, bands playing, flags flying, and crowds of local inhabitants. Raffles and Farquhar went out to the Modeste in a pinnace to escort the Governor-General ashore while all the ships in the roads fired their guns. Young Abdullah was dazzled by all this ceremony, and then amazed by the unpretentiousness of the Governor-General of Bengal when he finally disembarked: ‘The man I saw looked like this. He had passed middle age. His body was thin, his manner mild, his face gentle. I should not have supposed him capable of lifting even a twenty-five-pound weight, so fragile was his build. I noticed that he wore a tunic of black cloth, black trousers, and nothing else worthy of mention.’ The rows of troops presented arms and Lord Minto mounted the steps into Government House with Raffles at his side – no longer Agent, but Secretary to the Governor-General.

  Because of the presence of the Governor-General this small Presidency was, temporarily, the seat of the Supreme Government of India. Easy-g
oing Malacca was transformed by encampments of troops along the shore, the fleet at anchor out at sea and more ships arriving every day, until the roads were, as the munshi Abdullah put it, so full ‘that the masts of the vessels looked like the poles of a fence.’

  Minto and his entourage were based at Government House, which was blocked off from the sea breezes by the Hill, so ‘suffocation is our portion.’ But Captain George Elliot had been allocated a one-room bungalow on the airy top of the Hill, and on its verandah ‘he and I are at present, writing love-letters to our absent wives.’ The remains of the Fort lay around the foot of the Hill, now ‘little better than a heap of rubbish’. Minto judged the destruction as ‘a most useless piece of gratuitous mischief.’

  The Governor-General, with his entourage, paid a breakfast visit to Raffles and his ‘pretty numerous family’ at home. Reporting to his wife, Minto was positive about Olivia:

  Mrs Raffles, Olivia Mariamne, is a tall and rather showy person, with dark eyes.’ Her expression was ‘lively and spirituelle, and her conversation deserves the same epithets. Upon the whole, my expectations are more than answered, and I am very happy to see Raffles, who really is a very amiable as well as clever man, so happy in his interior… Raffles has three sisters here, all very fair, one extremely well-looking, and the other two not the contrary. Their manners are sensible and gentlemanlike. The beauty is married to Capt. Flint, a Post Captain in the Navy. Another sister is Mrs Loftie, lately married to a surgeon of that name. The third has not yet made her choice.

  The third was Harriet. The ‘beauty’, the widowed Maryanne, still only twenty-two, had remarried a couple of weeks before Minto’s arrival. Her new husband, thirty-year-old Captain Lawrence William Flint of the Royal Navy, commander of HMS Teignmouth, was a well-connected Scot – his elder brother was private secretary to the Duke of Wellington – and a plump young man, to judge from his portrait. Raffles always supported Flint – ‘as good and as honest a fellow as ever lived’ – though he turned out to be a trial owing to his extravagance and his quarrelsome nature.

  ‘After breakfast,’ recorded Taylor, Lord Minto accepted gifts – not only a baby orang- utan from the Rajah of Pontianak but ‘5 slave boys and two girls, none above 6 or 7 years old,’ from a Rajah of Bali. The children were emancipated from slavery immediately, which left them with the status of dependant orphans. ‘Next day they were all very merry and happy,’ wrote Minto. ‘George has taken one of the boys to serve him on board ship, and that boy has fallen on his legs. Mr Raffles will take care of one or two, and the rest have fallen to my lot. They will probably grow into very good servants. The girls will puzzle me most. I have some thought of baking them in a pie against the Queen’s birthday…’ All the children were staying for the time being with Raffles and Olivia, along with the three Raffles sisters, Maryanne’s children, and Leonora’s husband. Their house must have been rather crowded.

  On 7 June 1811, to celebrate the King’s birthday, Minto held at Government House a levee in the morning, then a dinner for gentlemen in the evening, followed by a ball. Malacca had never seen anything like it. For Minto, and for Raffles, the most important part of the day had come following the levee. Minto freed the nineteen Government slaves in Malacca – born into slavery to the Dutch East India Company and then to the British, with their children destined to be slaves too. He presented each with a certificate of their freedom and four Spanish dollars to keep them going until they found work, with the option of returning to their former state if they had difficulties.

  Earlier Minto had ordered the release of all those imprisoned for debt. Lieutenant-Colonel Farquhar unlocked the gates and the prisoners ran free, praising Allah and Lord Minto. He visited the terongko galep, the ‘dark dungeon’, and ordered it to be destroyed. Finding in the dungeon instruments of torture used by the Dutch, he had all the contraptions made of wood – racks, wheels and gallows – burned at the foot of the Hill, and ‘various iron articles for screwing thumbs, wrists, and ankles, and other contrivances of that diabolical sort, were carried out in a boat and sunk in deep water, never to rise or screw poor people’s bones and joints again.’

  Raffles took possession of a few of these iron torture instruments with their heavy screws. He kept them, and brought them back to England as reminders of abhorred practices.

  The invasion fleet, which would inevitably become scattered, agreed to rendezvous off Borneo. On 10 June, with convoys of ships now leaving continuously for Java, Raffles passed to Minto the last of his series of long reports – an overview of his previous memos on the peoples, laws, religions, products and governance of each of the countries of the Archipelago and beyond, including sanguine projections of enhanced contacts with Cochin China, Japan and China.

  Raffles had been trained all too well in composing ‘narratives’ in his years at India House. He laid out in his mega-letters ideas on how populations should be managed, based on assessments of their national characteristics. He always favoured the Malays. It would be important, he wrote, to keep down the Chinese, ‘in all ages equally supple, venal and crafty.’ (He changed his mind about the Chinese. They were indispensible.) The Arabs of the Archipelago were ‘mere drones’ and inculcators of religious bigotry. Americans were ‘commercial interlopers who will require our vigilant attention.’ Americans were ‘active and enterprising traders’ and wherever they went, ‘as fire-arms are in the highest request,’ they became arms-dealers.

  In his peroration, he unfolded his vision: ‘The annexation of Java and the Eastern Isles to our Indian empire, opens to the English nation views of so enlarged a nature as seem equally to demand and justify a bolder policy…’ In ancient times the Rajahs and Sultans of Java had authority over their own domains, but there was one great King, the Bitara, above them all. The ancient rulers of Malacca had controlled much of the Malay Peninsula, and much of Sumatra, on the same terms. All the countries and peoples of the Archipelago ‘might easily be prevailed upon by suggestions to invest the Governor-General of India with the ancient title of Bitara,’ affording ‘a general right of superintendence over, and interference with, all the Malay states.’

  He signed off by evoking the ‘splendid prospect’ of ‘the total expulsion of the European enemy from the Eastern Seas, and [of] the justice, humanity and moderation of the British Government, as much exemplified in fostering and leading on new races of subjects and allies in the career of improvement, as [in] the undaunted courage and resolution of British soldiers in rescuing them from oppression.’

  Raffles’ dream is an exposition of British imperialism as it was later to be represented not only to the outside world but to the minds of Englishmen and women.

  The fleet comprised about a hundred vessels under sail: four battleships, fourteen frigates, seven sloops, eight Company cruisers, fifty-seven transports and several gunboats. The military strength had numbered 12,000 men, half of them Asian and half European. More than a thousand, most of them Indians, had to be left behind in Malacca because of sickness. John Leyden sailed with the interpreters and writers in Captain Greig’s Minto.

  Last to leave, on 18 June, was the group which included the Modeste, carrying Lord Minto, Raffles, and their staff. Raffles wanted to take young Abdullah with him, but when the day came his mother could not bear to let him go. So Raffles gave him a letter of recommendation and thirty dollars, and told him to go and say goodbye to Mrs Raffles – who gave him a piece of leaf-patterned muslin to make a jacket, and another ten dollars. ‘I went home feeling very sad, for I was very fond of Mr and Mrs Raffles, who were just like a father and a mother to me.’

  Modeste was a fast frigate and overtook most of the scattered fleet, which reassembled on 20 June to pass through the Straits of Singapore – with difficulty, since the weather was stormy. Here Minto and Raffles learned that Napoleon had replaced the rebarbative General Herman Willem Daendels in Java with General J.W. Janssens, another Dutchman in the service of the French. Living on the island of Singapore was the Teme
nggong, a hereditary ruler from Johore on the mainland, who later told how he watched the passing of this enormous fleet with astonishment, neither he nor Raffles yet knowing of each other’s existence.

  Having navigated the Singapore Straits, the expedition was in the clear, making directly for Borneo, where the fleet reassembled again at an uninhabited island off Borneo’s north-east point and took a week off for rest and recuperation. The Modeste was sent as a pilotfish down the west coast of Borneo, Captain George Elliot being requested by the cautious Commodore Broughton to reconnoitre a safe passage through shoals marked on the charts, ‘thinking very properly that I had better drowned than he,’ as Minto remarked. The south-west route through the Carimata Straits proved as navigable as Raffles had believed it would. He had predicted against opposition that the voyage could be done in six to ten weeks. He was right. It took seven weeks. On 6 July, at sea, he celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

  In a letter to his cousin the Rev. Thomas Raffles, written much later, Raffles said: ‘We had separated from the fleet for a few days, and it was only when we again joined them that we saw all the divisions united, at the close of one of the finest days I ever recollect, and this in sight of the land of promise.’ Lord Minto, while at Malacca, ‘had communicated his intention of appointing me to the governorship, in case of success.’ If all went well, Raffles would be Governor of Java. Exalted, he wrote from shipboard to his friend William Brown Ramsay:

  You always said I was a wild strange fellow, insatiable in ambition, though meek as a maiden; and perhaps there was more truth than otherwise in what you said; but withal, I will assure you this, that although from want of self-confidence and from natural shamefacedness (for I will not call it modesty or bashfulness) I am as unhappy at times as any poor wretch need be, I have times in which I am as happy as I think it possible for man to be; and it is one of these life-inspiring moments that I now propose passing with you à la distance … Adieu my dear Ramsay, for the present, my paper is out, and dinner is announced, so farewell – I will write to you more fully after we are settled. Conquer we must.