The lane with trailing branches strewn,
The grace his wife so nobly shares.
Unites them as the sun and moon.
At sea off the coast of Borneo, Raffles assured Wallich that all his arrangements were ‘approved by Bengal.’ As for Farquhar, ‘It would make your hair stand on end were I to mention half of what took place…they have shocked every reasonable man in Singapore… with the exception of his immediate family, no one seems to have the least feeling for him.’ That was wrong, even though the European merchants who were Raffles’ friends shared his views. Raffles underestimated Farquhar’s popularity, and the reasons for it.
‘I give you this parish news,’ Raffles continued to Wallich, so he might know ‘that however annoyed I have been for a time, the close of my administration at Singapore has been just what I wished.’ On the way to Bencoolen, the ship was stopping off at Java for a week as the Captain had goods to land there. The Dutch ‘will be a little astonished but I cannot help it.’
When the Hero of Malown anchored off Batavia, Raffles sent Nilson Hull ashore with two letters to deliver. One was a courtesy note to Governor van der Capellen, who replied brusquely that he was unable to welcome Sir Stamford in Batavia. Raffles himself had never intended to disembark, but was anxious for the pregnant Sophia to have a few days on dry land. The second letter Hull delivered was to Thomas McQuoid, who was making his living – just – as a private trader in Batavia. Because of ‘the delicate state of Lady R.’s health,’ might the McQuoids put her up for a few days? And ‘as a first requisition, I beg of you to send us off a loaf of Bread without delay.’ He wrote again, once the Hero was continuing on its way, to thank the McQuoids for their kindness. They had given him such a ‘feeling of happiness and comfort’ on Sophia’s behalf.
Because, owing to shock and grief, her milk had dried up when Ella was a new baby, they were anxious about feeding the next one. As the Hero traversed the Java Sea, he wrote again to Wallich: ‘Lady Raffles will be infinitely obliged by your sending her by the first opportunity two glass sucking bottles for infants – they are obtained at the chemists and you will easily know what she means. She knows no one to whom she could make such a request but yourself.’ The baby was expected in October, and they hoped to sail for England the following January, ‘so we must look forward to the necessity of bringing up the child by hand’ i.e. by bottle.
The Hero of Malown reached Bencoolen on 17 July, and they moved back into their own house, Pematang Balam. They were now desperate to hear of a ship to take them back to England, There was nothing scheduled before the end of the year, when the Fame was expected.
Sophia’s baby was born prematurely, on 19 September. It was a girl, and they called her Flora. She seemed healthy, and Sophia appeared to have recovered – and then developed a high fever. She did not lose all her vitality, writing on 3 October to ‘My dearest Maryanne’ to reassure her about the wellbeing of Charley Boy: ‘I have crept out of bed before anyone is up.’ But on 1 November Raffles told Wallich that ‘it was only last night that we were forced to apply thirty leeches, and have recourse to warm baths and laudanum, to keep down inflammation.’ For a while, he despaired of Sophia’s life. He himself was ‘still subject to the same attacks which so often and so completely overpowered me at Singapore.’
In mid-November, Sophia was still ‘confined to her couch,’ he wrote to Thomas Murdoch, saying that if he reached England alive, ‘I am certain that no inducement shall ever lead me to revisit India.’ Towards the end of November four of his Bencoolen friends died, including Captain Francis Salmond, ‘as dear and intimate with us as our own family… Charley’s “funny man”.’ Raffles found that he himself (‘my only friend Sir Stamford Raffles’), had been appointed Salmond’s sole executor. ‘How is it,’ Raffles asked Wallich, ‘that those we love and esteem…are thus carried off, while the vile and worthless remain?’
Then, on 28 November, baby Flora died. Raffles told McQuoid that Sophia was still in bed recovering from ‘one of those dreadful fevers which are the scourge of this land…when the dear Babe which had hitherto been most promising and thriving was carried off in a few hours.’ He wrote to Peter Auber at India House that the loss of a child only a few months old was normally ‘one of those things that might soon be got over’ – but this loss, of their fourth and only remaining child in the East, ‘has revived all former afflictions and has been almost too much for us.’ Their spirits were ‘completely broken’, and still they could not get away from Bencoolen, detained for want of a ship. ‘How often do we wish the Fame had come out direct’ – she was on some circuitous itinerary – ‘we might have [been] saved this last misfortune – but we have neither seen nor heard of her…Either I must go to England, or by remaining in India die.’
The Fame was a Company ship, specially chartered for them. Raffles in his misery was lambasting Peter Auber for not organizing a direct sailing to Bencoolen from England. He wrote again on 4 January 1824: ‘We have entered the new year, and as yet no accounts of the Fame.’ Every day’s delay was dangerous for Sophia ‘and night and day we cannot help regretting that you have not ensured a ship on the strength of my letters to you – I relied exclusively on what you would do.’
Sophia, broken-hearted and ill as she was, was more controlled, writing to Maryanne the previous day: ‘Before I begin my own sad story I must speak of dear Charles.’ He was no trouble, ‘a delightful Boy,’ who slept on her bed with her for two hours every day, and ‘has never had an hour’s illness.’ Only then did she write about her fresh grief, and her joy and regret at leaving Bencoolen – regret, because in Bencoolen the spirits of ‘my dear departed children’ seemed always to be hovering, just out of sight, ‘blooming and smiling as if in life.’ She was hardly able to hold up her head. ‘The loss of my dear Baby – so glowing with health and strength’ had rekindled the earlier sorrows; and the leeches, and the inevitable ‘salivation’ had reduced her system. ‘I am more like the shadow of an earthly being than anything possessing life.’ Her whole aim was ‘acquiescence’. She had a gold chain bracelet made, from which hung five small gold lockets containing a scrap of hair from each of her children, with their names and dates inscribed on the reverse. Only Ella’s did not have the date of death as well as of birth.
Since the Fame did not appear, and the Borneo had put in at Bencoolen on its way to England, Raffles decided to take the opportunity of sailing with her. The accommodation on the Borneo, he told McQuoid, was ‘wretched, but I now incline to cut and run at all costs.’ The day the loading was completed, the Fame finally turned up. The boxes were removed from the Borneo and loaded on to the Fame.
It is worth noting, while the labourers are manhandling the wooden chests from one ship to another, that the little Borneo reached England safely and without incident.
Everything seemed suddenly hopeful. In his last letter to Maryanne, Raffles told her the Fame would be ready to sail within a week. Charley Boy, who was ‘all and everything that we or you could wish,’ was kitted out for the voyage with ‘a Fur Cap and Blue Cloth Jacket trimmed with lace and ornamented with gilt buttons with a pair of Dutch Trousers.’ He and Sophia were also in charge of David Scott, the little son of a Singapore merchant friend, and they had a medical man with them, Dr B. Bell. The Fame was ‘a nice little ship with excellent accommodation and room for all my plants Tigers Bears Monkeys etc of which I can assure you I have no small family. We shall have a second Noah’s Ark, and I only wish I could loose a little dove by the way who might light on your little island and restore you to peace and harmony.’
For in Singapore the Flints, predictably, already had issues with John Crawfurd. Raffles conceded to Maryanne that ‘I never placed much confidence in his judgment or experience…He is however no longer under my direct authority and I cannot interfere at present to any great extent.’ (Crawfurd was not under Raffles’ authority in any way at all.) ‘Above all things, I beseech you not to let Flint have any personal Quarrel or discu
ssion with him… You may be certain that it will end in Flint’s discomfiture, however right he may be.’
He would be more useful to them in London, he said and, expansive in relief at his imminent departure, expressed a wish that ‘you should all consider yourselves as still under my protection. I have not deserted Singapore and never will, and perhaps one day when you least expect it, better luck may happen to the place than any of you dream of.’
Shortly before they sailed, Raffles wrote to the Court of Directors about his personal finances. The Company were looking for a refund of his salary as Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen for the years 1816 to 1818, when he was in England. He quoted back to them the letter from Lord Minto authorising him to claim the allowances ‘from the date at which I shall cease to draw those of Lieut-Governor of Java,’ and hoped for a favourable decision.
The Fame, that ‘nice little ship’, with all Raffles’ collections safely stowed – 135 hefty crates, apart from the live creatures – set sail in the early morning of 2 February 1824 with a favourable wind. His cargo took up much of the ship, and there was a load of saltpetre in the hold. This was, Raffles said, one of the happiest days of his life. ‘We were, perhaps, too happy.’
That evening, fifty miles south-west of Bencoolen, the Fame caught fire. The alarm was given at about twenty past eight, and within less than ten minutes the ship was ablaze.
‘Sophia had just gone to bed, and I had thrown off half my clothes, when a cry of fire, fire! roused us from our calm content, and in five minutes the whole ship was in flames!’ A steward had gone below with a naked light to draw brandy from a cask, which caught fire, starting the inferno. Raffles wrote a vivid account of the catastrophe, and later published a version of it as a pamphlet. Sophia wrote her own account to Maryanne, and between the two one gets a graphic impression of their ordeal. This is Sophia:
I had just laid my head down on my pillow and Tom was in his little dressing cabin when the cry of Fire made me rush to the door – where I saw a man spring up the hatchway covered with flame – Tom flew to see what was the matter – and “Fire – Water – Water” resounded thro’ the Ship – the next minute Tom returned to say it was all over, we must perish – the next cry was “Lady Raffles to the Boats” – I had only time to throw on my pelisse (she had ‘nothing but a wrapper,’ wrote Raffles, ‘neither shoes nor stockings’), wrap Charles in a shawl, and get David Scott whose cabin was in flames when he was dragged out of bed – and we got into the boat – the flames bursting thro’ our windows as we descended the ship’s side, and the whole vessel a sheet of flame – the rest of the party left the other side of the ship and in ten minutes every soul had quitted her – there was not even time to get a drop of water, or refreshment of any kind – fortunately the Captain seized a compass and this was everything to us.
The live animals and birds were not saved, but by half-past eight, according to Raffles, everyone was off the ship and into boats, and less than ten minutes afterwards the Fame was ‘one grand mass of fire.’ She blazed until around midnight, when the saltpetre exploded, ‘and sent up one of the most splendid and brilliant flames that ever was seen, illuminating the horizon in every direction, to an extent of not less than fifty miles, and casting that kind of blue light over us, which is of all others the most horrible.’ Finally they lost sight of the ship as she went down in a cloud of smoke.
Then their boat was adrift in the dark ocean. ‘Fortunately the sea was smooth,’ wrote Sophia, and ‘the Boys slept soundly.’ Raffles’ account adds the detail that neither Nilson Hull nor Dr Bell had saved their coats; but the tail of his own coat, plus a pocket-handkerchief, ‘served to keep Sophia’s feet warm, and we made breeches for the children with our neckcloths.’ The crew ‘rowed manfully’, back in the direction of the Sumatran coast. As Sophia said, if they had not had the compass, and if the disaster had happened the following night, when they were further out to sea, they could not possibly have survived.
Morning came. ‘I felt perfectly convinced,’ wrote Raffles, ‘we were unable to undergo starvation and exposure to sun and weather many days’ – they had no food and no water – ‘and aware of the rapidity of the currents, I feared we might fall to the southward of the port.’ Then they saw Rat Island, and knew they were on course for Bencoolen.
This last stretch was the worst, especially for Sophia: ‘The sun was on the meridian and I felt nearly exhausted for we had nothing to shelter us from its rays and the boat was so small we could only take care of the children.’ A ship standing in Bencoolen roads came out to rescue them and take them back into port. ‘By this time,’ wrote Raffles, ‘Sophia was quite exhausted, and fainting continually.’ They were on dry land by two o’clock in the afternoon. ‘If any proof had been wanting, that my administration had been satisfactory, we had it unequivocally from all; there was not a dry eye…’
They were driven straight back to their old house, were all four in bed within an hour of landing, and slept through until the next morning.
They had lost everything except their lives. ‘All our plate,’ Raffles wrote to Maryanne on 8 February, ‘including that from Java – all Sophia’s jewels without exception – all our gold work – my valuable collections of all kinds;’ all his papers, correspondence, notes, memos, the records of his administration of Java, ‘all my beautiful drawings – in short the cream and best of everything I had collected and attained during my residence in India – all – all has gone.’ They had no clothes at all, and were ‘engaged in renewing our Wardrobe, no easy matter in such a place as this – poor Sophia’s laces! No finery now, we are glad to get hopsacks to cover our nakedness.’ They were very weak. Raffles underwent ‘a severe salivation’ during February, and Sophia a less severe one; the infernal mercury treatment in which doctors placed such confidence left them weaker than they had been before.
‘Every exertion I had the power of making was required to collect a few comforts for those around me, for we were destitute of everything, I had not even a pair of stockings on… We have now covering,’ Sophia wrote to Maryanne on 22 March, ‘clothes I cannot call them.’ Unfortunately Charles’ English nurse had left when they sailed, to get married. Although Sophia had found a ‘very good Malay attendant,’ Charles ‘never leaves me and is very much attached to me.’ She was taking him to church, and keeping up his lessons and his nap routine. Raffles assured his mother that Charley treated the Fame catastrophe as a joke. But Sophia said he had ‘hesitations of speech’ and was ‘quite naughty’.
The strain of looking after him for Sophia, who admitted to having ‘very little strength,’ is obvious. She went on to urge Maryanne, even more desperately than usual, to make provision for the future and for her children’s education, even if it meant sacrificing her arrangements for their new house on the Hill. Her children had to be educated and ‘put out into the world… Let me hear that you are putting by half your income.’ But that was never the Flints’ way.
‘Tom,’ she wrote, had ‘submitted to the loss…the fruits of the labour of his whole life – with the most wonderful patience and good spirits – without a single murmur. I really could not withhold my admiration the day after our sad return on seeing him sit down with his usual energy and pleasure and perseverance’ – starting all over again on the great map of Sumatra he had made for William Marsden, which had gone down with the ship. ’He sent for the draftsmen and set them to work as if nothing had happened.’
In his own account of the fire, he lamented not only the loss of the map, and other treasures, but ‘all my splendid collections of drawings, upwards of two thousand in number – with all the valuable papers and notes of my friends Arnold and Jack; and to conclude, I will merely notice, that there was scarcely an unknown animal, bird, beast or fish, or an interesting plant, which we had not on board: a living tapir, a new species of tiger, splendid pheasants, etc, domesticated for the voyage.’
The Fame itself was insured. Raffles’ collections and personal property were not
. He wrote a report on the loss of the Fame to the Court of Directors, giving an account of the lost documentation of the Eastern Isles, which would have been of great value to the Company. ‘In a pecuniary point of view, my loss has not been less extensive.’ Much was of personal value ‘which no money can replace.’ Money could compensate for other losses: ‘It rests solely and exclusively with the Court, to consider in how far my claims, on account of services, may be strengthened by the severity of misfortune.’ On returning to Europe, ‘I shall throw myself on your Honourable Court, to enable me to end my days in honourable retirement.’
In the hope of compensation from the Company he appended an inventory of his and Sophia’s personal property:
Plate The Service of plate presented to Sir Stamford Raffles by the inhabitants of Java. First Cost £3000. Added to, £1,500. Private plate, another £1,500.
Jewels Diamonds presented to the Family of Sir S. Raffles by the Captors of Djojocarta £1,000. The sapphire and diamond ring presented by Princess Charlotte £1,000; another diamond ring, £500. Lady R’s family jewels, watches etc £3,500. Gold In dust and coinage of the country, of antiquarian significance £4,200.
He jotted down disparate things as he and Sophia thought of them: ‘China, Japan articles for presents and household, Malay manufactures, embroideries and cloths of all kinds and patterns intended as samples for British industries, likewise drugs, ivories. Lady R’s harp and music. Furniture etc. Shawls, muslins, curiosities. £2,000 of wines. Family table linens, Lady R’s wardrobe £1,600, Sir S. Raffles’ ditto £200.’ They had paid in advance £1,200 for their passage.
Raffles estimated the total loss at £29,180, ‘in 135 packages marked TSR and described in ship’s manifest entered at Bencoolen before sailing’. This sum did not include ‘the expenses of the drawings and other subjects of Natural History, books, sketches of costume and a variety of articles of very considerable cost and value.’ All gone, to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Raffles Page 30
