Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  Raffles had to believe that the ryotwari system was working, and needed to make the Company believe it. As he wrote to Minto in February 1814, ‘in its success or otherwise I am willing to stand or fall.’ He never claimed to have brought the whole island into the system, only Bantam, Cheribon and the Eastern Districts – but this entailed, he was to claim in The History of Java, ‘a population of a million and a half of cultivators,’ and this ‘not only without disturbance and opposition, but to the satisfaction of all classes of the natives, and to the manifest increase of the public revenue derivable from land.’ In his journeys through the island he had been ‘a pleased spectator’ of the system’s beneficial tendency, ‘and of the security and satisfaction it universally diffused.’

  Java had, in theory, to pay for itself. It could not. Raffles could have made a success of Java if the Company had been behind him, and prepared to invest. There was not nearly enough silver coin in circulation. Daendels in 1810 farmed the right to tax three districts of Eastern Java to a group of Chinese merchants, the exchange being financed by the issue of a whole lot more paper money in the form of bonds known as ‘Probolingo paper’ after one of the Chinese-run districts.

  The Chinese were to pay for their ‘tax farms’ by buying up, twice a year, a hefty amount of Probolingo paper. Daendels published a general rule that the paper money must be regarded as the equivalent in silver. So when the time came for the Chinese tax-farmers to pay their first dues, they craftily paid not in specie, as expected, but in the paper money – ‘toilet paper’ as Emily Hahn put it.

  When Raffles arrived, Probolingo paper was worth 66 per cent of its face value, and continued to depreciate. The lack of silver currency remained chronic. Raffles, already funded from Bengal, dared not keep drawing on the Supreme Government in Bengal for more money – partly, as he explained to Elton Hamond, because of ‘the assurances I had given of the capability of the island to maintain itself.’ Yet there was still ‘a total want of demand for the produce of the colony’ apart from coffee, and the war with America had put a stop to that trade. The coffee was ‘literally rotting in the stores.’

  Daendels had sold off some public lands to raise hard cash. Raffles did the same on a larger scale in late 1812. He announced in the Gazette the outright sale to private persons of choice public lands ‘in the Batavian Regency, and around Samarang and Surabaya’ for the benefit of Government, by public auction or previous private contract. Payment was to be in silver or ‘credit paper’. The increase to the Treasury would hopefully enable him to withdraw Probolingo paper from circulation.

  Three commissioners were appointed to determine the value of the lands – Muntinghe, Cranssen and, for the Batavia region, the Resident for Buitenzorg, Thomas McQuoid, the old friend of Raffles from Penang days. He was also Malay Translator to Government, Inspector of Coffee Culture throughout the island, and ‘farmer’ of some bird’s nest rocks. Each of these positions brought with it an allowance. Raffles would later argue that the shortage of civil servants made such pluralities unavoidable. The favouritism afforded to McQuoid did not pass unnoticed.

  Offers to purchase by private contract were made to Government through the Secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor, who was at that point C.G.Blagrave. Thus Blagrave was privy to all transactions, which had consequences. Raffles’ Council of Three, which included Colonel Gillespie, had agreed with the decision to sell off land – Gillespie only after some demurral. Raffles did not seek permission from Calcutta in advance.

  The sales were completed within three months. It was said that the auctions were not well organised, and that certain investors seemed to be given preferential treatment with lots being valued too low, while being too large in acreage to give much chance to small investors. The fine estates thus acquired produced a new class of European landed gentry. Muntinghe, retiring from Council, bought his estate by private contract.

  Raffles himself went into partnership with Nicholas Engelhard to buy at public auction four lots, mainly coffee plantations, in the Regency of Cianjur, about fifty miles south-east of Buitenzorg. It was not made public that Raffles was personally involved, but Gillespie knew (and forced up the bidding) and so of course did Secretary Blagrave. Raffles later said that he let himself be persuaded by Engelhard into participating, on the grounds that if the Lieutenant-Governor himself were involved the sales would not be repudiated by the Supreme Government or any future administration.

  Another Dutchman, Andries de Wilde was put in charge of managing the Cianjur estates and received one-sixth of a share; McQuoid was allotted another sixth. Raffles put in half the total cost, 58,000 Spanish dollars, all of which he had to borrow from his friend William Robinson. It was recorded that the land sales had raised enough to cover all the paper money in circulation, which was therefore withdrawn for all official transactions.

  To make up for the withdrawal of the depreciated paper, Raffles issued Treasury notes at six per cent and authorised the Lombard Bank to issue promissory notes to be accepted as legal tender, payable in nine months on the security of personal property. There was a hopeless confusion of currencies. An attempt was made to pin down the values of Spanish dollars and ducatoons in relation to the ‘Java silver rupee’, which Raffles wanted to establish as the standard. It was illegal to take Spanish dollars off the island. Stivers, tin doits, and lumps of copper were also legal tender on the island. It was crisis management. The quantity of silver, as Raffles confessed to Elton Hamond just before the land-sales, was ‘daily becoming less. Gold has disappeared altogether; and copper is the only metal in general use among the population.’

  Raffles assured Elton Hamond that ‘our proceedings in this, as well as in every other measure, have met the approbation of the Supreme Government.’

  That was an overstatement. Lord Minto was being recalled and leaving India. His letter to Raffles of November 1813 was long, kind, and candid. He asked that what he had to say be accepted as ‘the friendly suggestions of the deep and lively interest I can never cease to take in all that concerns your public trust, and your personal reputation and welfare. In this I may be less careful than I might otherwise be, to separate my public from my private sentiments in this letter.’

  He acknowledged Raffles’ unimpeachable motives for selling off land, given the urgency of the financial situation. ‘At the same time…’ Then came his list of qualifications. An ‘extensive alienation of the public domains’ was too important a measure to be taken ‘during a provisional Government, the duration of which is more than precarious,’ and ‘without the sanction of the Supreme Government.’ Although he, Minto, was a believer in privatisation (‘in the transfer of public territory to the management of individual industry’), such a change should not have been brought about suddenly, since Java contained ‘neither capital nor capitalists enough’ to establish a fair valuation of the land. Minto would have been inclined to ‘small and partial sales of land’ on short leases, not in perpetuity.

  He warned Raffles that there was disagreement ‘at home’ on the question of ‘permanent settlements’ and that he had to expect ‘such measures, unsupported by particular exigency, being disapproved, and, indeed, disavowed and annulled by the authorities in England.’ Much would depend on the attitude of his successor as Governor-General, Lord Moira.

  Raffles could not afford to keep Daendels’ roads in repair, so he banned them to heavy wheeled vehicles and buffalo carts, which must trundle on the ‘ordinary and long-established cart roads.’ He imposed a tax on horses and carriages, and tolls on roads, bridges and ferries. He farmed out licences for vegetable shops, slaughterhouses, candle-manufacture. He set up a lottery to build a new road from Batavia to Cheribon, and another for road improvements between Batavia and Samarang.

  Salaries of public officers were reduced. He made cuts in his civil service, commending those ‘who have necessarily been removed from official employment’ on account of ‘the internal resources of the Company (confined as they are by the actual
state of exterior commerce at the present moment) and in consideration of the harm done to the Colony if an expenditure were permitted beyond its means.’ He hoped ‘the exigencies of the public service will be an additional inducement and spur to their exertions.’

  Their exertions went towards seeking to augment their incomes by other means. Captain Travers, who was already Town Major, Commandant of Batavia, and one of Raffles’ ADCs, was appointed Assistant Commissary General for the drawing of the lotteries. Fewer civil servants meant plurality of offices. Raffles looked after those he thought of as his ‘family’.

  He did everything else he could think of to save money, reduce waste, and raise cash just to pay for his administration. Duty was levied on imported opium. Port duties had to be collected in cash, not paper. He introduced a capitation tax on the Chinese. He charged the Accountant’s Department with ‘more regular examination and control of contingent civil charges,’ i.e. expenses. Warehouse-keepers and storekeepers must submit accounts to the Commercial Committee, and ‘indents for every description of Civil and Marine stores throughout the island, excepting Teak Timber, require in the first instance the signature of the Lieutenant-Governor.’ Week after week throughout 1813 the Gazette announced new cuts, new taxes, new regulations.

  The most severe charges on the treasury came from the Army. Not only did the troops and their officers have to be paid in silver, but the Commander of the Forces, Colonel Gillespie, was insistent about the needs of his men. In October 1812, repairs and alterations to the barracks of the Javanese Corps and the construction of new barracks were authorised – the timber required to be furnished by the Timber Storekeeper, Raffles’ brother-in-law William Flint, who made something out of it.

  Raffles thought there were too many troops on the island, and wished to drive the establishment down. Gillespie would not tolerate any reduction in the number of his men, nor in their supplies. Under ‘General Orders’, the Gazette for 10 November 1812 announced: ‘Difficulties having arisen in the operation of the General Order of the 26th September last, regulating rations to be issued to European troops, the Lieutenant-Governor is pleased to rescind that order, and to direct that the European troops be placed on the full rations as they existed previously.’ Captain Travers noted the growing rift between Raffles and Gillespie; it ‘must be attended by serious consequences to one or other.’

  By December, with army pay and allowances already two months in arrears, Raffles announced ‘the necessity of establishing some regular mode of examination of Military Extraordinary Disbursements’ and appointed a Committee of Military Accounts. Work on the construction of the arsenal at Surabaya must stop. The Pay-master of the 78th Regiment at Surabaya inserted advertisements in the Gazette for ‘the sum of £500 sterling for which bills will be issued’ – loans, to pay his men, and a reproach to Government. In the same issue a sale of horses of the Horse Artillery and Hussars at the cavalry stables at Ryswick was ordered by the Lieutenant-Governor in Council.

  Raffles and Major-General Gillespie – as he became from the end of 1812 – grew more and more infuriated with each other. In every row, both were right and both were wrong. Gillespie’s biographer Major William Thorn wrote that Gillespie felt he was ‘thwarted and misrepresented’ where it was ‘reasonable to have expected cordial support and liberal confidence.’ His opinions were disregarded. There was no ‘congeniality of sentiment’. Improvements to his troops’ bad living conditions were ‘obstinately rejected’. He encountered nothing but ‘provoking slights’ and ‘petulant opposition’.

  Major-General Gillespie was of the opinion, like military men before and since, that diplomacy only got you so far and that force of arms was the one language everyone understood: ‘Whenever the natives shall begin to lose their reverence for English arms, our superiority will quickly sink into contempt.’ There was no security for colonists ‘without a judicious disposition of military force.’

  Raffles had plenty of other priorities. He was a supporter of vaccination against smallpox, and had local people trained to administer the vaccine. A passionate supporter of the abolition of slavery, he had to work within the Act of 1807, which had abolished the trade but not slavery itself, throughout the British Empire. There were more than 27,000 imported slaves in Java when he arrived. He banned the importation of any more and came down hard on transgressors. He banned the cruel punishments to which slaves were legally subject, and emancipated them up to the point of ruling that they were not their masters’ personal property. This led to a comically tetchy correspondence in the Gazette from gentlemen flabbergasted to find that their domestic slaves were free to leave, causing considerable inconvenience in the home. British law could not extend over the entrenched practices of the Dutch or the Muslims. Even British officers and civil servants – Travers and Gillespie to name but two – had slaves. Raffles did what he could, but within the law the problem was intractable.

  There had been a Batavian Society of Arts and Science in Batavia, established by the Dutch in 1778 but long in abeyance. Raffles resurrected it, with himself as President, H.W. Muntinghe as Vice-President, and the ‘Arts’ component less prominent than the ‘Science’.

  If there was one product of the Eastern Isles which never failed to fascinate Europeans, including the members of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, it was the Upas Tree (Antiaris toxicaria), a tall tree of the mulberry family which grows in isolation. ‘Upas’ is the Javanese word for poison. The lethal substance is the milky gum that oozes from the bark when pierced. It is applied subcutaneously, administered by a prick from a spear-head, dart or reed dipped in the gum. William Marsden wrote about it, and possessed a sample.

  Raffles asked Dr Horsfield for a full report on the Upas Tree, which he submitted to the Society in March 1812. Being, as Marsden tactfully put it, ‘at such a distance from the grand marts of scientific information,’ Horsfield had nothing very new to report; Continental and British naturalists had recently published responsible experiments and descriptions.

  Tall tales of the poison’s potency had been around since Raffles’ infancy. The fantastical account by N.P. Foersch, a German surgeon in Samarang in the 1770s, was published in the London Magazine in 1783 complete with gruesome accounts of the victims’ death-throes. It was fatal, he said, to stand to the windward of the Upas Tree, which killed all animal life within fifteen metres. The poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin claimed to have seen thirteen of the Sultan’s concubines in Surakarta, accused of infidelity, drop dead within sixteen minutes after their breasts were pierced by poisoned lancets, and wrote in his extraordinary poem The Botanic Garden (1791):

  Fierce in dread silence on the blasted heath

  Fell UPAS sits, the HYDRA-TREE of death.

  John Joseph Stockdale reprinted Foersch’s account in his Island of Java, an opportunistic compilation published in London the year of the invasion. On 24 October 1812, the Java Government Gazette carried anonymous ‘Stanzas to the Memory of John Leyden’:

  A sadder strain a breast should melt

  Far, far beyond Malaya’s sea

  The pride of Western Isles has felt

  The foul breath of the Upas Tree.

  That last and memorable line is so far-fetched as to be figurative. When Raffles, with Olivia, was again visiting Dr Horsfield in Surakarta in December 1813, they witnessed, as the Gazette reported, ‘the surprising effects of the Poison extracted from the Oopas Tree, as it operated on a fowl and a dog, the first of which was destroyed in less than two minutes, and the latter in about eight.’ The mythology of the Upas Tree outlived Raffles. Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) makes dark reference to it.

  The Harmonie Club was another old Dutch social club, revived by Daendels in a new building in Weltesvreden, which he left unfinished. Raffles agreed to have the project completed, and the result was a ‘superb new building’ with ‘an Arched Ball Room’ good for ‘the conveyance of musical sounds’. The Harmonie, which Raffles hoped would fos
ter harmony between the British and the Dutch, became a staple of the stuffier end of Batavian social life: ladies were admitted only for periodical dances and suppers. This, like the new premises of the Society for Arts and Science, was funded by nonexistent Government money, as was the projected 250-seat Military Bachelors’ Theatre at Weltesvreden. To justify the expenditure, Raffles was banking on his impressive success in developing the civilised amenities of Batavia.

  He never skimped on gubernatorial entertainments, dinners and balls. Olivia, at least in public, was nice to Gillespie. At a ball on 23 January 1813, reported the Gazette, ‘Major-General Gillespie opened the dancing with the Lady Governess, who we were happy to observe, appeared to enjoy the dance with her usual grace and spirit.’ About four hundred people sat down to supper. ‘The bottle circulated with spirit and good humour.’ Gillespie proposed toasts to ‘the Governor and the Island of Java’ and to ‘Mrs Raffles and the Ladies of Java.’ The Lieutenant-Governor proposed the toasts to ‘Major-General Gillespie and the Army of Java,’ ‘the Land we live in,’ and ‘the Ladies of Batavia.’ As at all such parties, each toast was accompanied by a short loud burst of suitable popular music from a military band – in this case, ‘The British Grenadiers’ for Gillespie, ‘Tight Little Island’ for Mr Raffles, and ‘Off She Goes’ for Mrs Raffles.

  Yet in April 1813 Captain Travers noted that ‘the unhappy differences between our Chiefs seemed rather to increase than diminish.’ Every day brought ‘some new point of contention.’ In June, at the annual ball in celebration of the King’s Birthday, the dancing was again opened by ‘our amiable Lady Governess’ and Major-General Gillespie. ‘Such a pair were not certainly in the room,’ observed the fascinated Travers. What he called ‘the apparent cordiality’ – a subversive attraction? – between the dancing partners had its effect. Raffles called on Gillespie the next morning ‘and everything seemed settled to keep up appearances better in future.’