The man
who loved Java
On 2
February 1824, Sir Stamford Raffles, his sick wife Sophia and their son Charles
left Bengkulu (then known as Bencoolen) on board the Fame. They had been waiting months for a passage
to Britain and had booked on another ship, the Borneo.
Then the Fame
arrived and the impatient family’s goods were transferred. The former
Lieutenant Governor of Java thought this was one of the happiest days of his
life. He wrote presciently: ‘We were,
perhaps, too happy.’
That evening
a steward ignorant of chemistry went into the hold to uncork a brandy
cask. He was carrying a candle. Also on
board was a load of saltpetre, an essential ingredient in gunpowder.
The ship
was about 50 miles off the coast of Sumatra.
All made the boats before the Fame was ripped apart, but the
story doesn’t have a happy ending.
Also in the
hold was what Raffles described as ‘the cream and best of everything I had collected
learnt and attained.’
According to Victoria
Glendinning’s Raffles and the Golden Opportunity the collection included 300 bound volumes and many
unbound, shadow puppets and craft, even a gamelan orchestra.
All Raffles’ notes,
maps, drawings, plants and stuffed animals were also lost. Fortunately his History
of Java had already been published.
The value (in today’s
currency) was US$4 million, but the loss to Indonesian history and appreciation
of the archipelago was immense. Raffles
collected ‘for cultural propaganda to prove back in England that Java had been,
and could be again, a great and civilised country’.
Lesser men would have
dissolved in despair. The family was
already grieving from the earlier death of yet another child, and the Fame
fire would have suggested a curse. But
Raffles set about drawing the map of Sumatra that had been lost with the ship
to the admiration of Sophia.
When he eventually
managed to sail Raffles wrote: ‘Perhaps I was too much attached to the things
of this world. The lot of man is a mixture of good and evil, and we must be
content with it – and at all events we know that all worketh for good in the
end.’
Are these the words of a
devious wrongdoer? Raffles was admired,
but also mauled by critics during his brief lifetime – he died aged 45 of a
brain seizure. Many were driven by
jealousy of a former clerk with limited education and contacts who became a
star administrator and founder of Singapore.
It didn’t help that he
was English, small, had no military experience, was a faithful lover, keenly
interested in other cultures and the environment, and ‘physically fragile’ –
hardly the sort of man who’d appeal to the Scottish and Irish warriors
subservient to his civilian rule.
The British invaded Java
in 1811 during the Napoleonic Wars and held the Dutch colonies till 1816.
Raffles and his boss
Lord Minto understood their interregnum would be brief should peace break out
in Europe. Reforms had to be swift.
‘While we are here let us do as much good as we can,’ he said.
The new Lieutenant
Governor agreed. His motives were not religious – he had little time for
missionaries and was ‘vituperative’ about the Dutch administration. Raffles set
up a committee with the instructions to ‘consider the inhabitants without
reference to bare mercantile profits.’
Comments Glendinning:
‘But the relationship between the common good and the profit-making purpose of
the (East India) Company answerable to shareholders, was uncomfortable.’
Raffles’ committee
recommended the abolition of ‘all kinds of servitude’ and a major shake-up of
the taxation system. He ‘sought to promote the value and beauty of the
indigenous culture and its pre-Islamic Hindu heritage’.
Once the bloody work had
been done and the Dutch suppressed, Raffles set about his benign
dictatorship.
In this biography he
comes across as a free trader, a visionary reformer ahead of his time who loved
Java and its people, particularly villagers, supporting them against claims of
indolence. Inevitably he attracted haters.
But they were up against
Raffles’ determined widow Sophia, his second wife. His first, Olivia, famous for reversing the Dutch policy of
excluding Eurasian wives from functions, died in 1814. Sophia bore Raffles five
children but only one survived to adulthood and then died unmarried.
Sophia wrote a biography
of her husband celebrating his public service.
Yet Raffles died in debt to the East India Company, undermining his
detractors’ allegations of corruption.
This is Glendinning’s
eighth biography, written in her early 70s. She writes with clarity,
impartiality and controlled enthusiasm.
There have been many
biographies of Raffles, some hagiographic. This isn’t, but that doesn’t mean
it’s hostile. ‘Raffles’ story, in a
work of fiction, would strain credulity,’ she writes. ‘His good fortune and his ill fortune were both of an extreme
kind. He became the entrepreneur of his
own ideals and an utopian imperialist.’
She described writing
the biography as ‘an act of concentration in both senses. There are a great
many strange characters churning around in this book, and a great many
clamouring outside it.’
So she’s set up a
website www.rafflesbook.co.uk
including titbits, links and an events diary celebrating the life of an
extraordinary Englishman, famous for founding Singapore, but fascinated by
Java, an island he served briefly – but well.
Raffles and the Golden
Opportunity
Victoria Glendinning
Profile Books 2012
350 pages
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