Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  Around the year 800 AD, Borobudur, a great hill, was entirely enveloped in stone, forming a stepped pyramid with rising terraces carved with vigorous reliefs and topped by a divine cluster of Buddhas. It is one of the largest Buddhist monuments ever known. After Islam was imposed on Java by the end of the sixteenth century, Borobudur was abandoned. Its carvings were cracked by earthquakes and blurred by volcanic ash. Local people carried away stones for their own use. Under Mackenzie, two hundred coolies worked for six weeks, carting away tons of accumulated earth and clearing the fierce jungle vegetation growing around and through the vast high rock.

  Many of the 500 heavy stone heads of the Buddha had fallen off, and two of these, plus a stone harpy and many other fragments, were taken away for or by Raffles. They were the jewels of his collection. But during the time of the monumental investigations he was under stress, and this bad time leaked into The History of Java. While passionately alive to the significance of the great architectural vestiges, he did not find effective ways of writing about them. Captain Baker’s report on the ruined temples was eloquent and poetic, and Raffles transcribed into The History of Java Baker’s account of how the devastation caused the visitor to reflect ‘that while these noble monuments of the ancient splendour of religion and the arts are submitting, with sullen slowness, to the destructive hand of time and nature, the art which raised them has perished before them, and the faith which they were to honour now has no other honour in the land.’

  Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ was written in 1817 and, throughout Raffles’ lifetime, toppled images elicited meditations on the transitory nature of power. Those uncovered in Java quickly became tourist attractions. The Gazette in August 1814 carried an anonymous rhapsody about a cluster of dilapidated temples in East Java, evidence of ‘former grandeur and magnificence.’ This party brought a picnic: ‘An immense slab of granite served us for a table, and limbs of mutilated Gods and Goddesses were our chairs.’

  Ethnologists and students of world music also owe a debt to Raffles. All the time he was in Java he was amassing objects and artefacts, from the ceremonial to the everyday.

  A gamelan orchestra is an ensemble of wood and metal instruments – gongs, cymbals, drums, one-octave xylophones, bamboo flutes, a fiddle. Raffles acquired two complete sets, the frames decorated with carved snakes and birds painted red, black and gold. He also had a small model set made. Dr Joseph Arnold, a Royal Navy surgeon in Java from 1815, recorded that gamelan music accompanied life at Buitenzorg, playing ‘almost the whole day beginning before day light and playing till ten at night. Eight or ten persons are employed in it. It sounds at a distance something like bells.’

  Raffles also collected hundreds of used puppets from the theatre of shadows, a pre-Islamic entertainment which still survives. All the puppet characters are manipulated by a single person with the aid of attached sticks. Sitting cross-legged, he improvises the story, does the voices, sings, and directs the accompanying gamelan in night-long performances of legendary conflicts between good and evil – versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

  With their exaggeratedly stylised outlines, the wayang kulit (‘leather shadows’) which Raffles collected are works of art, made from buffalo hide stretched to translucency, gilded and painted – even though only their silhouettes, projected on to white cloth from a lamp behind the puppeteer, were normally seen. Raffles also collected wayang klitik puppets, crafted from thin flat sheets of wood; and brightly painted wooden doll-puppets (wayang golek). He did not want the puppets or the gamelan ensembles – or the hundreds of other artefacts that he amassed – for himself, nor for gain. He collected for cultural propaganda to prove back in England that Java had been, and could be again, a great and civilised country.

  Raffles floated the idea of establishing a British presence all over the Archipelago and as far as the Philippines – ‘altogether chimerical and impracticable’ in the opinion of William Petrie, the current Governor of Penang. Lord Moira was equally dismissive: ‘How can it be just or expedient?’ Raffles’ main target beyond the Archipelago was Japan. He made up his mind that, unlike the Chinese, the Japanese were ‘just like us,’ telling the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences: ‘They are represented to be a nervous, vigorous people, whose bodily and mental powers assimilate much nearer to those of Europe than what is attributed to Asiatics in general.’

  He was guided by the report of Dr Donald Ainslie, Chief Surgeon in Batavia, whom he sent in summer 1813 on a mission to Nagasaki with two vessels, accompanied by Willem Wardenaar, a former factor at the long-established Dutch factory at Nagasaki. The Dutch and their warehouses were strictly confined to Deshima, a man-made, walled, offshore island. Raffles’ reasoning was that, since the British controlled Java and the Dutch factory on Deshima island traded in and out of Java, Deshima was one of Java’s dependencies.

  He instructed Ainslie to ‘take possession of the Dutch factory’ and negotiate a trade agreement with the Japanese. The vessels sailed under Dutch flags so as to deceive the Japanese. Then Raffles’ letter was produced, demanding that the Director hand over the factory to Wardenaar in the name of the British Lieutenant-Governor of Java. These isolated Dutch had never even heard of Raffles. The demand was flatly refused.

  Raffles had furnished Ainslie with presents for the Emperor of Japan – including plants, sheep, birds, wine decanters, a clock, ground-up Egyptian mummy and a live white elephant from Siam. The gifts were accepted – all except the clock, which was engraved with barbaric symbols – and the elephant. She could not be lowered on to a boat, and in any case she would have sunk it. The Japanese came out to stare at her and draw her, but she never disembarked. She was the original ‘white elephant’.

  Raffles was not giving up. In his Minute to Bengal of 11 February 1814, he wrote that the expedition had ‘paved the way to further and more decisive attempts, with every prospect of success.’ Although Dr Ainslie had not been made welcome, ‘an unusual favour on the part of the Emperor’ was his acceptance of the presents, apart from the elephant. The Japanese character ‘has been misrepresented…they are a race of people remarkable for frankness of manner and disposition, for intelligent enquiry and freedom from prejudice,’ in a climate where ‘European manufactures are almost a necessary comfort…the consumption of woollens and hardware might be rendered almost unlimited.’ The Company could supplant the commerce between China and Japan, and keep the Dutch out. ‘If the attempt be not made while we have possession of Java the opportunity lost may never be regained.’

  ‘My idea’, he wrote, was for Dr Ainslie to go again to Japan, taking a letter to the Emperor from the Prince Regent; he helpfully enclosed a draft. Equally helpfully, he enclosed a long list of ‘suitable’ presents for the Emperor, enough to stock a sizeable warehouse. ‘My idea’ got nowhere. No goods were sent from London, and Moira poured icy water on the project.

  The upper echelons of the Dutch in Batavia, clannish and interrelated, allied themselves conspicuously with the Lieutenant-Governor and his wife. Piet Couperus, from one of the eminent Dutch families, christened his son Jacob Thomas Raffles; one of his sisters, Jacobina Maria Tulloch, called her son Stamford William Raffles; another sister, Gesina, called her daughter Olivia. Raffles and Olivia were godparents to all three babies. Gesina was Mrs Timmerman Thyssen, and there were great celebrations when one of Timmerman Thyssen’s ships, the Pekin, was renamed the Governor Raffles. Mrs Raffles was not at the Timmerman Thyssen’s ball that evening. The Gazette regretted that ‘indisposition continues to deprive us of her presence at Batavia, and that some time will yet elapse before we can have the happiness of her fascinating company.’

  Raffles in July 1814 hosted a dinner for Vice-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood on the last night of his tour of Java. The Admiral’s party included Captain Basil Hall, who got on particularly well with Raffles. They never knew each other well, but kept in respectful touch. Raffles’ dinner was followed by a ball and supper given, again, by the Timmerman Thyssens. ‘We we
re sorry to hear that the Lady Governess was unable to favour the company with her presence from indisposition.’

  On 14 October 1814 Olivia was well enough to go to an entertainment with dancing given specifically for her by the Nightingalls. That was her last public appearance. On 21 November Raffles wrote to a friend in England: ‘Olivia is far from well but in good spirits.’ The new Military Bachelors’ Theatre opened on Friday 25 November with George Colman’s 1802 comedy The Poor Gentleman. The Lieutenant-Governor and the Lady Governess were not present.

  The next day, Saturday 26 November 1814, at Buitenzorg, Olivia died.

  Olivia’s body was taken to Batavia and buried in the Tanah Abang cemetery close to John Leyden. The Gazette noted ‘the numerous assemblage of persons of both sexes’ who attended, and how their ‘unaffected grief’ reflected the respect and affection in which she was held.

  A sour note was struck by Caroline Currie, wife of an army Assistant Surgeon, in a letter to her sister in Scotland retailing the second-hand gossip of the Cantonment. Mrs Currie did not go to the funeral, ‘and I am very glad I did not, as I am told they all made themselves ridiculous by weeping aloud when the Corpse was taken from the Government House and when it was put into the grave and all this for a woman whom some of them had only seen once or twice. I had seen her two or three times, she called here and I returned her visit but I never was in her house except at a ball when she was not present… People who knew her seemed to like her very much and said she was a very good hearted woman but she had one great failing and that was being too fond of a glass of Brandy and when she had taken too much of it and got her Aid De Camps [sic] around her, I am told that no modest woman could sit in her company.’

  Olivia, ‘my Olivia’ as Raffles called her, was the kind of woman whom the prim and proper always disapprove of. Raffles loved her and her infinite variety. He had a large chest-tomb erected over her grave, inscribed with lines from her own poem ‘Forget-me-Not’:

  Oh thou who ne’er my constant heart

  One moment hath forgot

  Tho’ fate severe hath bid us part

  Yet still forget me not.

  She wrote this for John Leyden. Whether Raffles intended the inscription to reflect the union of the three cannot be known. He did not have Maryanne with him for comfort. She and Flint had sailed for England the previous autumn. Even Travers was away. Raffles had a graceful classical temple built in Olivia’s memory in the grounds of Buitenzorg, visible from the house across the lake.

  Olivia Raffles left her mark in Batavia. There were few British wives in Batavia, but almost no Dutch ones. The Dutch had over many decades consorted with concubines and slaves, resulting in a swelling population of Eurasians. The wives spoke Malay with interminglings of Portuguese, and they were not educated. The necessity for schooling for girls was a regular topic in the Gazette.

  The British officer class accepted the customs of the indigenous population, but from their Dutch colleagues they expected similar domestic conventions to their own. They criticised in the columns of the Gazette the airless rooms of the long-established Dutch, their perpetual smoking, their maltreatment of slaves, and above all the segregation of their women. Olivia and Raffles would not accept the traditional seclusion of Eurasian wives. As Jean Gilman Taylor wrote, they ‘trampled notions of propriety in the relations between men and women that were fundamental to Mestizo society.’

  Olivia never offered betel to visiting ladies at her drawing-rooms, which was seen as uncivil, and she banned spittoons in Government House. She required the ladies to sit on chairs, and to eat with a knife and fork. In sarong and kebaya, they looked to the condescending British as if they had come out in their underwear. Minto, when in Java, only discerned their high status by standing behind them ‘for at the back of the head a little circle of hair is gathered into a small crown, and on this are deposited diamonds, rubies, and precious stones often of very great value.’

  The unfortunate ladies made an effort. As the Gazette sanctimoniously noticed on 2 May 1812: ‘At the entertainments recently given at Batavia, it was remarked how great an improvement in respect to the attire of the Dutch ladies, since the British authority has been established. The Cabya appears more generally disused and the more elegant English costume adopted. We congratulate our friends on the amelioration of the public taste, because we see in it the dawn of still greater and more important improvements.’

  There is no evidence that Raffles gave a damn about the dress code, but he and Olivia were an equal partnership. It was remarkable that she was at his side on the ceremonious visits to Surakarta and Yogyakarta in 1813, so that not only the Susuhunan but his Empress too had to meet and greet them. At the ball that evening, Olivia had danced a few steps with the Susuhunan and Raffles with the Empress. They both visited an interior room to meet their daughters and female relations. It was the same at Yogyakarta. Raffles on his own would never have been invited into the women’s quarters, and the Empress could never before have danced with an unrelated man, and in public.

  It was all unprecedented. Raffles and Olivia were not in Java long enough to effect permanent changes, for good or ill. Those that did last were trivial. After the British left, the regulation that bare feet were unacceptable on public occasions remained in force; and Olivia’s fashion of wearing white muslin gowns with short puffed sleeves prevailed well after it was abandoned in Europe.

  Less than three months after the death of Olivia, the Gazette confirmed a report that Lord Minto had died.

  He suffered chronically from stranguary, a painful bladder condition. When he was in India and longing for home, he used to lie in bed travelling in his imagination from London, from landmark to familiar landmark, starting with the Red Lion at Barnet, all the way north to Minto. Now that the moment had come, he got as far as Barnet, but twenty miles on up the Great North Road, at Stevenage, during the night of 21 June 1814, he died.

  This was another personal loss for Raffles, and a professional one as well. He had been relying on Minto to justify his policies with the Court of Directors. William Ramsay, the Secretary of the Company and his first mentor, had died in January 1814; Raffles had lost his two strongest supporters and father-figures. To add to these sorrows, his great friend William Robinson unexpectedly died too. And he fell ill himself and was unable to attend the Harmonie Society Ball on 18 January 1815. The Gazette expressed the hope that ‘his health will soon be sufficiently re-established to admit of his presiding, where his example has always acted as a spur to happiness and conviviality.’

  Conviviality was the last thing he was capable of. Mercifully, news of yet another unexpected death came as a ray of light. Major-General Gillespie was dead.

  In the ongoing war between the Gurkhas and the British authority, Gillespie led an attack on the Nepalese hill fort of Kalunga. In late October 1814 his column, the guns mounted on elephants, stormed the Fort twice and was beaten off. Gillespie rode up to the head of his troops and impetuously urged them forward for a third time – and was shot through the heart from the Fort on 24 October, a month before the death of Olivia.

  His body was ‘laid in spirits’ like Raffles’ animal specimens, and taken to Meerut for burial. Lord Moira announced the erection of a cenotaph to his memory in Calcutta. In London, both Houses of Parliament voted a public monument to him. A young lady in India composed an ode:

  Gillespie’s gone! – yet still shall fame

  Immortalise the warrior’s name.

  Gillespie’s gone! Raffles was probably the only European on the planet to feel glad. Lord Moira shelved the problem of the charges against Raffles.

  Rather as he walked from London to Wales as a boy in order to make himself well, so in February 1815, accompanied by Dr Horsfield, Raffles climbed the 7,000-foot Gunong Gede, which reared up behind Buitenzorg. They took barometers to ascertain the height, and Raffles arranged for a memorial to Lord Minto to be placed on the summit.

  On 10 April the 9,000-foot Mount
Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, east of Bali, exploded in the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Seventy-two thousand people are said to have been killed by flying rocks and debris, the firestorm, and the subsequent whirlwind and tsunami. The ash cloud drifted across the globe, occluding the sun. The summer of 1815 in England was ‘the summer that never was’. Raffles was sufficiently revived by the phenomenon to send a vivid report, compiled from eye-witness accounts, to William Marsden and the Royal Society.

  He needed distraction, and went on a long tour of the whole island of Java. In a discourse to the Batavian Literary Society in September he told how he obtained on this tour ‘a more perfect acquaintance’ with the ruins of Prambanan and Borobodur, and showed the meeting drawings of Borobodur (probably Captain Baker’s) and ‘some detached pieces of sculpture’ which he had carried back. His party, which included Captain Baker, travelled rough, on horseback and in boats up the rivers, covering hundreds of miles. After seeing the volcanic Mount Bromo in east Java, they took ship along the coast for Banyuwangi on Java’s easternmost tip, but landed up by mistake on Bali’s north coast, in the Regency of Bliling (Bululeng).

  Raffles was predisposed in favour of Bali because it retained the Hindu religion and culture which in Java was suppressed by Islam. ‘My stay was too short to obtain any very detailed information… further than a collection of their different manuscripts.’ Though the Portuguese and the Dutch had hovered, Bali had never been colonised, and as a result the Balinese were undeferential. Raffles wrote about them in an appendix to The History of Java: ‘What they are now it is probable that the Javans once were, in national independence, as well as in religious and political institutions… On Java we find Hinduism only amid the ruins of temples, images and inscriptions; on Bali, in the laws, ideas and worship of the people.’