Raffles of Java, 1781-1826

Singapore has obscured the real greatness of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. The hotel, the quay, the square, the museum, the college, the light-house and the monument are all reminders that it was he who in 1819 selected this site of the ancient Malayan city of Singapore as a British settlement. But Raffles’ principal field of activity as scientist, governor, historian and humanitarian was in Java. It was Java that absorbed the liveliest and the most ambitious years of his short life —he was only forty-five when he died at Hendon in 1826. Java inspired him to become the first modern colonial governor. He was also the first European to appreciate and to describe the aesthetic values of Javanese civilization.

Raffles was an unconventional employee of the East India Company at a time when Napoleon Bonaparte was thinking of making Java one of the strategic bases for his intended attack upon India. A year after Raffles arrived in Penang as Assistant-Secretary to the then newly-appointed Government, Napoleon sent the Dutch Marshal Daendels to Java with instructions to strengthen the defences and to train Dutch colonial troops. For in 1806 Napoleon had put his brother, Louis, on the throne of Holland and planned to use Dutch possessions in Asia to help overthrow the British Empire. The Royal Navy was alive to. these plans, and in 1806 three of Nelson’s Captains destroyed the Dutch fleet in Batavia Harbour; by 1808 the Moluccas had been occupied. As Naval Agent for His Majesty’s Fleet at Penang, Raffles followed these naval events with close attention. He was already deeply interested in the study of the Malayan Archipelago which was to absorb his attention for the rest of his life. Within a few years his intimacy with their language, his natural gift for friendly relations with the Malays, and his prodigious energy had established his reputation as a scholar. His first essay on The Malayan Nation and their Maritime Institutions made a great impression on the Asiatic Society in Calcutta.

In June 1810, Raffles, with customary initiative and self-confidence, sailed from Penang to Calcutta in a “small and frail vessel” to put his special knowledge at the disposal of his chief, Lord Minto, Governor-General of India. The timing was perfect. Napoleon had now annexed the Netherlands to the French Empire, deposing King Louis. In Batavia, Marshal Daendels had hoisted the French flag. Lord Minto had taken steps to seal the western entry to the Indian Ocean by sending expeditions to the islands of Bourbon (now Reunion) and Mauritius. To the east, Java was next on his time-table, and Raffles had all the knowledge and experience necessary for the task. So four months after he had left Penang, Raffles returned as “Agent to the Governor-General with the Malay States,” appointed by Lord Minto to prepare the way for a military expedition to Java.

He took with him a stock of guns, clocks, satin cloth and many knick-knacks as presents for Malay and Javanese princes, and elaborately decorated writing-paper for correspondence with them. He selected Malacca as his headquarters. One of his Malay translators wrote a personal description of life at this very unusual Government office; the vast store Raffles collected of Malay books, manuscripts and poems so that “the histories stored up in Malacca were nearly exhausted”; the collection of snakes and centipedes, flies, grasshoppers, moths, flowers, fungi, corals and shells and even a young tiger and an orang-outang. For Raffles was not only engaged in highly confidential work, but also engrossed in scientific and literary research.

“Mr. Raffles,” Abdulla wrote, “took great interest in looking into the origin of nations, and their manners and customs of olden times, examining what would elucidate the same. He was especially quick in the uptake of Malay with its variations. He delighted to use the proper idioms as the natives do ... (he) loved always to be on good terms with the Malays—the poorest could speak to him; and while all the great folks in Malacca came to speak to him daily, whether Malays or Europeans, yet they could not find out his object of coming there—his ulterior intentions.”

In the library of the old India Office in Whitehall translations can still be seen which Raffles made in his own handwriting of letters he sent secretly to the Rajahs of Java and of other islands. One such letter reads:

The Governor-General at Bengal having heard with much concern of the misfortune to which the Rajahs of Java have been subjected by the tyrannical conduct of the General and of the Dutch inhabitants, and of the sorrow that has been occasioned in consequence throughout all Java, is desirous of intimating that the English Company think of adopting measures for retrieving the island of Java from the authority of the Dutch and French. But in the first place, the English Company are desirous of concerting with the Rajahs of Java, in order to ascertain who are the true friends of the English King and who are still desirous of remaining under Dutch influence... . When the English arrive at Java and destroy the Dutch, how great will the country of Java become, and how rich every Rajah, from the great trade and the number of ships that will arrive and sail to all parts of the world ...

By the time Lord Minto arrived in Malacca at the end of May 1811, this “very clever, able, active and judicious man, perfectly versed in the Malay language and manners,” as he described Raffles in a letter to Lady Minto, had prepared the fullest documentation on the views of the Rajahs of Java, of Sumatra and of Bali; on the Dutch forces and their position; on possible landing places on the South Coast of Java; on the traffic in slaves; on Borneo and Celebes; on the most suitable route for the expedition, and an eloquent assessment of the advantages of possessing Java. His plans even included an appeal to the soldiers to treat Malays with all respect and consideration.

On June 18th, 1811, Lord Minto and Raffles embarked in the Modeste at Malacca, and on August 4th troops disembarked at a small town, Chillinching, in Batavia Bay. In letters to his wife Lord Minto described the almost unopposed landing. He wrote about “the exemplary behaviour of the troops, who paid their way and did not even kiss an old woman without her consent”; about the peasants “living quietly in their own houses and carrying on their usual occupation with as little annoyance, apprehension, or even notice of an invading army in the midst of them, as if we were all their near relations on a visit,” and the “trees laden with coconuts and plantains, acres of onions, cabbage and many tempting things, not one taken, nor the slightest offence to a single inhabitant.”

The campaign went quickly and successfully, and the final capitulation of Java was signed on September 18th, 1811. “An empire,” Lord Minto said in his despatch to the Court of the Directors of the East India Company, had been “added to the dominion of the British Crown, and converted from a seat of hostile machination and commercial competition into an augmentation of British power and prosperity.” Although Lord Castlereagh’s instructions were merely to “subdue the Dutch Government, to destroy the fortifications, to distribute the ordnances, arms and military stores amongst the native chiefs and inhabitants, and then to retire from the country,” Lord Minto decided to provide for the permanent occupation of Java, and “as an acknowledgement of the services he had rendered, and in consideration of his peculiar fitness for the office” he appointed Thomas Stamford Raffles as Lieutenant-Governor of the Island of Java and its Dependencies.

At the age of thirty Raffles became responsible for the welfare of six and a half million people. Lord Minto stayed with him for five weeks, establishing the new form of Government. He appointed a Council to assist Raffles; Col. Gillespie, the military hero of the campaign and two progressive Dutch officials, Muntinghe and Crassen. The Dutch themselves offered little opposition to their new rulers; “the late members of the Council,” Raffles wrote to Lord Minto the following January, “came forward in a body; and after taking the oaths before me, I am sorry to add, got most jovially tipsy at my house in company with the new Councillors.” Among the local Sultans there was a natural resistance to Western rule, however humanitarian its policy and however much it differed from that of the Dutch. Raffles sent an expedition against the Sultan of Palembang in Sumatra. The two most powerful rulers in Java, the Susuhunan of Solo and the Sultan of Djogjakarta, overcame their traditional animosities and led a movement aimed at expelling all Europeans from Java once and for all. After failing to persuade the Sultan of Djogjakarta to negotiate,. Raffles sent an expedition against the town in June, 1812. By its success, as he reported to Lord Minto, “European power is for the first time paramount in Java.”

The most outstanding characteristic of the young Governor was his attitude to the people he was appointed to govern. He had a genuine respect for their languages, their literature and their architecture. More than a century after his death, when the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society presented his bust to the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Batavia (now Djakarta), the Director of the Archaeological Survey, Dr. Bosch, said of Raffles:—

To him falls the honour of being the first European to open his eyes both to the scientific and to the aesthetic importance of the relics of the past, and we owe it to his tremendous energy, unwearied interest and burning enthusiasm that part of the foundations upon which Javanese civilization rests were laid bare.

Raffles, who had left school at the age of fourteen, and had had no scientific training, revived the then moribund Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences and made it a centre of original research. He brought over from India the Director of the Archaeological Survey, who made a careful study of ancient Hindu temples and discovered the ruins of Borobodur hidden for centuries under a mountain of black lava. The prominent botanist and zoologist, Dr. Horsfield, worked closely with him. He maintained a continuous correspondence with the historian of Sumatra, Mr. William Marsden, discussing a multitude of linguistic problems and keeping him informed of his latest discoveries in the epic literature of the islands and the customs of the people.

The Governor of Java was a humanitarian as well as a self-trained scientist, linguist and historian, “perhaps,” as Professor G. M. Trevelyan suggests, “the first European who successfully brought modern humanitarian and scientific methods to bear on the improvement of the natives and their lot.” He, and his chief, Lord Minto, were both as much opposed to slavery as Mr. Wilberforce and his friends of the anti-slavery movement, which had been at its height when Raffles was a clerk in the East India Company’s office. As an administrator, Raffles was far ahead of his time. He sincerely believed that Java should be ruled for the benefit of the Javanese, and his aim was to replace the island’s feudal system by one which gave more power to the people. The basis of his administration was the village, the headman being elected by the inhabitants. Existing Javanese rulers were recognized as “Regents” and British officials, called Residents, were attached to them as “advisers.” Raffles’s judicial system was also based on the village, and for most disputes the elected head-man, helped by the village priest and elders, could take decisions. Circuit Judges, on the Indian model, dealt with criminal and major cases. Customary punishments by torture or mutilation were abolished.

Perhaps the most remarkable innovations of the Raffles administration were in the financial and economic field. A disciple of Adam Smith, he was strongly opposed to the Dutch system of monopoly. He introduced free trade into Java, put a duty of 3 per cent on the principal exports and a duty of 6 per cent on imports. A new revenue department was created and official customs-houses established; at the same time the Dutch system of farming out the collection of duties was abolished. Raffles held extremely optimistic views of the potentialities of the rich islands he governed and of the benefits that two-way trade would bestow on both Britain and Java.

His policy on land rents was also highly enlightened. Raffles put an end to the Dutch system of forced labour and of “Contingents and Forced Deliveries” which involved the compulsory cultivation of coffee or other crops, their sale to the Government at an arbitrary rate, and a payment in kind to local rulers. Raffles believed that the willing support of the peasants was essential for good government. This meant that they must have a direct interest in their land. Regents were no longer allowed to control the land on which the cultivators worked. They were compensated by special rights and responsibilities, but their lands were now to be administered by the State. Land-rent was reckoned at the value in cash of two-fifths of the gross produce of the land. The assessment was made by special Collectors, and the collection of rent by the village head-men supervised by the Divisional Officer. But neither Divisional Officer nor Regent was allowed to take part in revenue administration. Raffles had worked out this system of land rents after a great deal of personal investigation in different parts of the island. Before it could be thoroughly put to the test of time, a convention was signed by Lord Castlereagh and the Dutch representative at the Congress of Vienna, binding Great Britain to hand back to Holland all the possessions she had held in the East on January 1st, 1803.

Raffles left Java for ever on March 25th, 1816, and five months later his successor handed back the island to the Dutch. In less than five years Raffles had made the British interregnum a turning-point in Dutch colonial administration, for they adopted, with certain changes, his village system and his methods of raising land revenue. “A modern colonial administration,” one Dutch historian wrote, “was forced on us from outside.” And another, a century later, described Raffles as “an inspiration to the carrying into execution of a disinterested administration, a governing of Java for the Javanese.”

On his way back to England, Raffles interviewed Napoleon on St. Helena. Had Raffles accompanied the expedition to Java? Napoleon asked. Who commanded it? How had the King of Java behaved? Were the spice plantations of the Moluccas doing well, and were they also to be handed back to the Dutch? When Raffles arrived in London in July 1816, he took a house (23 Berners Street) and furnished it with the many gifts of sculpture, paintings and handicrafts he had received in Java; he visited aunts and uncles, took the waters at Cheltenham where he met his second wife, and then settled down to arrange the material he had accumulated during his eleven years abroad. A Minute of the East India Company Meeting on November 13th, 1816, records a letter from Raffles to the effect that he had decided to publish an account of Java,

“but as the expense of engraving the various remains of Architectural grandeur which it is necessary to introduce will be great, and not feeling that he can make his own means available to the extent necessary to complete the undertaking, he submits the same to the liberal consideration of the Court.”

The Minute concludes:—

RESOLVED That Mr. Raffles be presented with the sum of Three Hundred guineas towards defraying the expense of the said book, and that on its publication 40 copies of the same at six guineas each copy be taken for the use of the Company.

The Court of Directors received The History of Java on May 28th, 1817. While it is true that an editorial blue-pencil could have improved the style of the writing and the shape of the book, it is also true that The History of Java is a remarkable production. In two volumes, beautifully illustrated with engravings and many line drawings, it describes in great detail the history, the economy, the dance, music and literature of Java. It includes the first translation ever made into English of the Javanese national poem “The Brata Yudha” or “The Holy War.” Raffles translated it, and his cousin, Dr. Thomas Raffles, a Dissenting Minister and a poet, agreed to render some of it into metre after the style of Macpherson’s Ossian. The passionate interest Raffles had always shown in linguistics is illustrated in The History of Java, which includes a small dictionary of English words with their equivalents in nine Indonesian languages. He had good reviews, especially in The Edinburgh Review. And he was publicly recognized at a Levee at Carlton House on May 29th, 1817. On his approach, the Prince Regent, to whom The History of Java was dedicated, thanked Raffles for the entertainment and the information he had personally derived “from the perusal of the greater part of the volumes,” and expressed “the high sense he entertained of the eminent services he had rendered to his country by his conduct in the government of Java.” The Prince spoke for nearly twenty minutes and then made Raffles a Knight. He was now Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, F.R.S., since two months earlier the Royal Society had elected him a Fellow. His certificate, signed by the famous surgeon Sir Everard Home, and the historian of Sumatra, William Marsden, and others, described him as a “gentleman well versed in several branches of science.”

To most people in the London of 1817, Raffles and the Javanese Prince, who accompanied him, were their first personal contacts with Java. Raffles presented Javanese carvings to Princess Charlotte and to the Duchess of Somerset, and discussed problems of scientific interest with their husbands. When the two most famous artists of the day painted him, the background was Javanese. One, by G. F. Joseph, is in the National Gallery and frequently reproduced. The second, less austere, almost poetic, was painted by James Lonsdale; it is scarcely known. After being exhibited in the 1818 show of the Royal Academy, it remained in the possession of the Somerset family, until it was sold for twenty guineas at Christies in 1925. It shows Raffles posed with his arm resting on a volume of his History of Java.

Before leaving London to become Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen in Sumatra, which had remained in British possession, Raffles wrote a remarkable state paper for Canning, then President of the Board of Control. In it he pleaded the case for British influence in the Malayan Archipelago. Bencoolen and Penang, he argued, were “too remote from the scene” for the protection of commerce “and more especially for an entrepot for our merchandise.” He suggested Bangka Island, which the Dutch might sell, or Bintang, or somewhere on the West Coast of Borneo. These suggestions won no support because British policy after 1815 was concerned with establishing good relations with the Dutch.

At first Bencoolen, and its Fort Marlborough, seemed a dreary place to Raffles. “From what I have seen of Sumatra,” he wrote in almost his first letter home, “I would not give one Java for a thousand such islands.” His Directors in London, having failed to establish the settlement as a trading centre from which to combat Dutch monopoly, had no further interest in it. The Company’s best sources of profit were gaming and cock-fighting farms; they owned African slaves and slave-trading flourished along the coast. With his usual verve Raffles plunged into this situation; he abolished the farms; he freed the slaves, and he set up a school for the children of slave parents. In a request to Wilberforce to take Bencoolen under his wing, he described the “aptness and capacity in the children to receive instruction, and the unexpected talent displayed by some of them.” He found Sumatra richly rewarding in its natural history and social anthropology, and he was soon thinking of Bencoolen, not as a dreary place, but as a field for British colonization and as a centre from which to compete with the Dutch.

Still unreconciled to British policy in returning Java and the other islands to the Dutch, he once again sailed to Calcutta, this time to plead his case with the new Governor-General, Lord Hastings. The Dutch, he argued in October 1818, “possess the only passes through which ships must sail into the Malayan Archipelago—the Straits of Sunda and of Malacca, whilst the British had not now an inch of ground to stand upon between the Cape of Good Hope and China.” Lord Hastings listened, although he was well aware that the Company in London thought of Raffles as an irritatingly energetic Governor against whom the Dutch frequently made protests. But for the second time in his life Raffles left Calcutta with instructions that coincided with his deepest ambitions; this time to secure “the establishment of a station beyond Malacca, such as may command the southern aspect of these straits.” Afterwards Lord Hastings had second thoughts, but before his revised instructions “to desist from the attempt to found” a British settlement reached Raffles, the British flag was already planted in the ancient Malayan city of Singapura, known to Raffles through his Malayan studies. “It will soon rise in importance,” he wrote to a friend, “and with this single station alone I would undertake to counteract all the plans of Mynheer; it breaks the spell; and they are no longer the exclusive sovereigns of the Eastern Seas.” The Secret Committee, the new Council of the East India Company in London, denounced Raffles in the strongest terms and described Singapore as a post that could only be retained at the risk of war. They decided, however, to await Lord Hastings’ explanation “before retaining or relinquishing Sir Stamford Raffles’ acquisition of Singapore.” Individual directors supported him; Charles Grant, for example, told the House of Lords in June 1820, of “the value in a moral, political and commercial view, of a British establishment in the locality of Singapore, under the auspices of the Company.” Raffles spent little time in Singapore, less than two years altogether. During the first three years of its existence he was in Bencoolen, cultivating pepper, collecting thousands of plants and birds and animals and geological specimens. “I have turned farmer,” he wrote, “and as President of the Agricultural Society, find more satisfaction than is to be derived from all the success that could attend a political life ... Since the establishment of the factory of Singapore, I have bid adieu to all political responsibility.” In October, 1822, he returned to his “political child,” as he described Singapore. For the next six months he planned the city; the roads; the administrative quarter; a large area for the settlement of Chinese, since he presumed “that they will always form by far the largest portion of the community”; local laws and regulations; and the port, open to ships of all nations “free of duty, equally and alike to all.” The project which gave him most personal joy was the Malay College. “Education,” he said in a prophetic Minute read to the leading inhabitants of Singapore on April ist, 1823, “must keep pace with commerce in order that its benefits may be ensured and its evils avoided.” He envisaged a centre where the Malays could advance in their own language, and others could study the Malay race in all its aspects.

When Raffles said goodbye to Singapore in June 1823, the European and Native Merchants presented an Address thanking him for his “unwearied zeal, vigilance and comprehensive views ... the liberality of principles, the operation of which has converted ... a haunt of pirates into the abode of enterprise, security and opulence.” Arriving in England at the end of August, he was a sick man, weakened by a tropical climate and almost continuous headaches. Broken-hearted by the loss of four of his five children from fever in Sumatra, he now learnt that his beloved mother had died while he was on his way home. He had lost all his possessions when the ship Fame caught fire a few hours after leaving Bencoolen; his notes for “a full and ample history” of Sumatra, Borneo, and other islands and of the establishment of Singapore, 3,000 drawings and a menagerie of animals and birds. He was still under a cloud with the East India Company. It treated him abominably; during his lifetime only a few individual Directors appreciated him and scarcely any Minister, with the exception of Canning, recognized his greatness, either as Lieutenant Governor-General or as the founder of Singapore.

Raffles lived for less than two years after his return to England. His views on British policy never changed. One morning when breakfasting with Wilberforce, a deputation from the Asiatic Society met him, by appointment, to thank him for his noble conduct in abolishing slavery in the islands he had governed. His cousin, Dr. Raffles, tells the story.

They were naturally anxious to obtain information from him concerning those islands, their people and their produce; and great was their astonishment when, kneeling before the maps placed against the back of a sofa, they bent over him as he pointed them out, and they listened to the interesting and astonishing details which he gave concerning them. There was Java, an island of rice; and Borneo, an island of gold; and Banca, an island of tin; and the Celebes, islands of spice—enough, as he said to supply the rest of the world for all ages, all recklessly abandoned to the Dutch by a Government that knew neither why nor what they were giving.

Freed from administrative work, Raffles was now able to indulge in interests which he had long cherished. First was the establishment of “a grand zoological collection in the metropolis, with a society for the introduction of living animals having the same relation to zoology as a science that the Horticultural Society does to botany.” The result was the creation of the Zoological Society of which he became the first President.

He was a member of the Linnaean Society and read papers describing his researches and discoveries in Java and Sumatra. The University of Edinburgh conferred the degree of LL.D. on him in June 1825.

To the end of his life he retained his interest in the abolition of slavery. A few weeks before he died he was present at the Annual Meeting of the African Institution and seconded the vote of thanks to the Chairman, the Duke of Gloucester. His twenty guineas, annually subscribed since 1819, continued to be paid after his death until the work of the Institution was merged into that of the newly formed Anti-Slavery Society. The visitor to Westminster Abbey will find the Raffles Monument by Chantrey side by side with those of Wilberforce and Thomas Fowell Buxton. The Abbey Muniments provide no clue as to who erected it, nor to the writer of the appreciative epitaph.

The visitor to the beautiful thirteenth-century St. Mary’s Church in Hendon will find three reminders that he died in this parish. The first one, erected by his family in 1887, is a simple slab in the wall, marking an approximate spot of the remains of this “Statesman, Administrator, and Naturalist, Founder of the Colony and City of Singapore.” The second is his coat-of-arms carved in the stone floor near the sanctuary steps. The third is a note on the new organ to the effect that in 1927 “additional stops were given by the Government of the Straits Settlement” in memory of Raffles.

The tribute to Raffles that I find particularly apt was one that was made to me three years ago in Java. Walking down the long main street of Djog jakarta that leads from the Sultan’s kraton to the rice fields surrounding the city, my companion called my attention to its name—Malioburo.

“This is in memory of your great Raffles,” he remarked. “The road was called Malioburo in Raffles’ time after John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, a name that sounds something like Malioburo to a Javanese ear. When we won our independence we changed most of the street names, which were named after famous Dutchmen. But we kept this one, because we consider Raffles a hero, and we know that he loved Java.”