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CHAPTER 2

Western Intruders

(Pre–1800)

Early Portuguese and Other European Visitors

Up until the time that the Dutch seriously interested themselves in Bali, which was at a very late date in their colonial history, Western contacts with the island were infrequent and transitory. The early Portuguese explorers, adventurers, merchants, missionaries, and conquerors, who reached Malacca in 1509 and the Moluccas in 1511, all but by-passed Bali in their eager rush to acquire riches, souls, and territory. So did the Spaniards. The Magellan expedition (1519–1522) sighted an island, probably Bali, which it identified as “Java Minor,” but apparently no one went ashore. Fernando Mendez Pinto, the great Portuguese navigator and Munchausen-like narrator, may have visited Bali briefly in about the year 1546, but the evidence is not clear. Various others of the pioneer Portuguese and Spanish no doubt sighted Bali if they did not actually explore it, and they made due notation of the island (under various names: Boly, Bale, Bally) on the early charts. Sir Francis Drake called briefly in 1580 and Thomas Cavendish perhaps visited Bali itself as well as its East Java dependency of Blambangan in 1585, but they left no written record.

The Portuguese were the first to entertain any designs upon Balinese trade and territory. The Malacca government fitted out a ship to dispatch to Bali in 1585 with soldiers and merchants, building materials and trade goods, the intent being to build a fort and to open a trading post. The ship foundered on the reef off Bukit and most of the ship’s company were drowned. Five survivors found their way to shore, where they were impressed into the service of the Dewa Agung, who treated them on the whole quite kindly, providing them with homes and wives, but refused to permit them to return to Malacca.

Houtman Expedition of 1597; Shore Party in Kuta and Gelgel

In 1597, twelve years after the ill-fated Portuguese enterprise, Cornelis de Houtman, the earliest of the Dutch explorers and traders in the East Indies, paid a visit. The record of his expedition—an official report and a detailed personal letter by one of the ship captains— constitutes the first substantial body of information about the island available to the Western world. Although its two-year voyage had been punctuated by mutiny, murder, piracy, brigandage, and such ill-natured haggling over prices of local produce that it failed ever to find cargo, the expedition’s conduct in Bali was almost blameless. Cornelis de Houtman, the braggart and scoundrel to whom the leadership had fallen after the mysterious demise en route of several predecessors, was so moved by the beauty and wealth of the island that he indulged in an unaccustomed but characteristically inappropriate flight of poetic fantasy and christened it Jonck Hollandt (Young Holland). It was a description so evocative of misapprehension as to lead later Dutchmen to fancy that in introducing Dutch civilization and commerce they were guiding the islanders toward their manifest destiny.

The three surviving ships of the expedition, the Hollandia, the Mau ritius, and the diminutive pinnace, the Duifje (Little Dove), with company of 89 men (out of the original 249), arrived by relays in Balinese waters—the Mauritius on December 25, the Hollandia on January 27, the Duifje shortly thereafter. The Mauritius anchored first off the coast of Djembrana, the Hollandia first at Kuta; the Duifje for a time shuttled in between; all three presently assembled in the safer waters of Padang Bai.

Four members of the Houtman company spent most of the period February 9–14 on shore, mainly in Kuta, but they made one trip to Gelgel and went on one expedition into the countryside, along with Balinese escorts, to hunt wild birds. They had been sent ashore to negotiate with the Balinese rulers for opening of trade, an enterprise which came to nothing since the Balinese could offer only a very limited quantity of spices and the Dutch, as usual, were too parsimonious in their bids for other goods. The four men on shore actually gave little thought to trade but occupied themselves in quite agreeable and informative intercourse with the hospitable Balinese. The rulers treated them as honored guests—also as prized hostages, Houtman himself having already seized three Balinese whom he was holding on shipboard—and made many occasions to elicit information about European life and customs. They were especially skillful about exacting gifts, most notably a chart of the world which the Dutch repeatedly promised and only belatedly delivered, declining, however, to sell the Dewa Agung the big ships’ guns which he was eager to buy.

Arnoudt Lintgens, Captain of the Hollandia, was the ranking member of the shore party. Emanuel Roodenburg, a sailor from Amsterdam, was the messenger between sea and shore and the carrier of Houtman’s gifts; Jan the Portuguese, a Mestizo “slave” who had come on board at Bantam as interpreter, participated in all the more significant encounters; and Jacob Claaszoon, an ordinary seaman from Delft, gained historical fame along with Roodenburg by jumping ship just as the expedition was about to set sail back to Holland.

Lintgens, Roodenburg, and Jan the Portuguese were guests of the Kijloer, the chief official of the Conick, that is, the Dewa Agung. Both the Dewa Agung and the Kijloer were then in residence in Kuta, where they were readying an expeditionary force of 20,000 men to send to the relief of their Javanese dependency, Blambangan, which was under siege by the Susuhunan of Mataram.

The Dewa Agung, whom Lintgens described as a tall, dark, stout, vigorous man of about forty, astounded the Dutch with his wealth, power, and magnificence. He lived ordinarily in a huge palace in the walled town of Gelgel, surrounded by his harem of 200 wives, his troupe of 50 misshapen dwarfs (their bodies deliberately deformed to resemble the grotesque figures of kris hilts) and his many noblemen, who ruled in his name over the 300,000 persons who then populated the island. His state kris, said Lintgens, was especially notable for the splendor of its jewels and the weight (two pounds) of its intricately wrought golden hilt. The handle of his state parasol was equally showy, and in his palace were to be found many other krises, lances, parasols, vessels of gold and silver, and miscellaneous treasures such as would be the envy of any king in Europe. When the Dewa Agung ventured outside his palace, he was accompanied by a procession of scores of lance and banner bearers and rode either in a palanquin or in a cart drawn by two white oxen which he himself drove. He held the love and respect of his people and his courtiers and was famous for the clemency of his rule, having only recently, it was said, spared certain conspirators who had plotted against his life, commuting their sentence from execution to exile on a nearby islet.

Audience with Dewa Agung and Lesson in Geography

Once it was determined that the visitors would bear gifts and exactly what those gifts would be, the Kijloer escorted the three—Lintgens, Roodenburg, and Jan the Portuguese—to an audience with the Dewa Agung in his Kuta palace, where all of the high nobility had assembled as witnesses. The Dewa Agung was delighted with the gifts: a large gilt-framed mirror, a print of a ship resembling the Mauritius (which he had viewed from the shore), several lengths of plain colored velvet (not as fine as the flowered velvet which had already been presented to the Kijloer, of which the Dewa Agung was jealous), six pieces-of-eight (the “coins of the Dutch”), a rifle, and the much coveted chart. The rifle had to be demonstrated at once, much to the satisfaction of all of the court; but it was the chart which was the real sensation. The Dewa Agung, reported Lintgens, regarded it as evidence of the “subtilty of our nation;” when he found a globe pictured in one corner he was even more astonished and insisted that the Dutch must bring him one on their next visit. He himself proposed to write a letter of appreciation to the Dutch King and to send him a kris and a dwarf, none of which are mentioned again in the records.

The Dewa Agung called at once for a lesson in world geography, and Lintgens was happy to oblige. The lesson started with the islands of Southeast Asia, the Dewa Agung expressing great disappointment to find that Bali “showed so small.” Next came the Empire of the “Great Turk,” which mightily impressed him. Finally came the European continent, Lintgens being required very clearly to explain about the Netherlands and the port of Amsterdam and then the route by which the expedition had traveled to the East. Upon being queried by the Dewa Agung which was the larger, China or Holland, Lint-gens replied by tracing boundaries of the Netherlands so imaginative as to include Scandinavia, Austria, and a generous portion of Imperial Russia.

The audience developed into a prolonged interview in which the Dewa Agung demanded detailed information about the King of Holland (Prince Maurits), his age (30), his marital status (single, much to the King’s amazement), his armies (50,000 foot soldiers, 30,000 cavalry, and 150 pieces of heavy artillery), his commerce (700 large ships a day visiting Amsterdam), the Dutch climate (with elucidation of the strange phenomenon of ice), and much, much else, including personal information about his immediate callers and other members of the expedition, the nature of the vessels and their guns. Since, said the Kijloer, the Dewa Agung made a point of surrounding himself with foreigners and requiring all newcomers to visit him and perhaps also to remain in Gelgel, he was especially pleased to learn that the expedition had brought with it two young boys from “St. Louwerens Island,” whom, said Lintgens, he might see if he wished.

Entertainment by Kijloer; Interview with Portuguese Merchant

Before and after the audience with the Dewa Agung and a subsequent visit to Gelgel, Lintgens, Roodenburg, and Jan the Portuguese were entertained in the splendid Kuta and Gelgel palaces of the Kijloer, who served lavish feasts (one being brought in by twelve of the Dewa Agung’s wives) and was fully as curious as was the Dewa Agung himself with regard to European customs, including the system of justice and the punishments meted out to thieves and murderers. The Kijloer informed his guests about previous European visitors—the English (presumably Sir Francis Drake), and the Portuguese. One morning he suddenly produced for their inspection Pedro de Noronha, a merchant from Malacca who had been in the service of the Dewa Agung ever since the shipwreck of 1585. Pedro told them something of his life story, inquired about conditions in Portugal, and allowed that although he had been eager at first to return to Malacca he was now quite content to remain in Bali together with his Balinese wife and their two children. He had been forbidden, nevertheless, to establish any contact with the Houtman expedition until the Kijloer himself introduced him.

For reasons which the record does not make clear, Cornelis Houtman himself seems to have gone ashore only once, a few days before setting sail again for Holland. There he met with the brother of the Dewa Agung, engaging in desultory conversation and the consumption of fruits and sweets while his Balinese hostages were being brought ashore so that Lintgens and his companions would be permitted to go back on shipboard.

Desertion of Roodenburg, Claaszoon, and Jan the Portuguese

The Houtman expedition departed from Bali on February 20, without Roodenburg and Claaszoon, who had vanished. They had remained ashore to enter the service of the Dewa Agung, perhaps of their own volition, perhaps not, most probably quite willing to be induced to forgo the rigors of the voyage back to wet, cold, gloomy, little Holland in preference for the pleasures of equatorial Bali. In any event, they both settled in Gelgel, took Balinese wives, learned the Balinese language, and attended upon the Dewa Agung. When the next Dutch expedition appeared, that of Jacob van Heemskerck in 1601, Roodenburg joined it as interpreter and translator, also as general informant and advisor. According to vague contemporary accounts, Heemskerck appears to have shown his appreciation for Roodenburg’s services (and unspecified services of Claaszoon) by “buying them free.” Roodenburg (but not Claaszoon) subsequently reappeared in Holland as a humble clerk in an Amsterdam office, an unlikely sequel to his Bali idyll.

Heemskerck Expedition of 1601; Roodenburg as Interpreter; Dewa Agung’s Letter to Prince Maurits

The Heemskerck expedition left no such detailed records as those of its predecessor, but Heemskerck himself was a more perceptive and sympathetic visitor than Houtman and served as his own ambassador. He carried a letter from Prince Maurits which he presented in person to the Dewa Agung together with the usual presents, thus eliciting a gracious letter of acknowledgment from “den conick van Bali” to “den conick van Hollandt.” The Dewa Agung advised the King of Holland that he was pleased to comply with his request for permission to open trade and stated, further, apparently in reply to a suggestion of political relationship, that he concurred that Holland and Bali should “be one.” Heemskerck (or Eemskerck) promptly dispatched the original letter in Balinese together with the Dutch translation by Roodenburg (or Rodenburch) back to Holland as evidence of the success of his mission. The somewhat obscure text of the translation read as follows:

7 July 1601

God Be Praised

The King of Bali sends the King of Holland his greetings. Your Admiral Cornelis van Eemskerck has come to me, bringing me a letter from Your Highness and requesting that I should permit Hollanders to trade here as freely as the Balinese themselves, wherefore I grant permission for all whom You send to trade as freely as my own people may when they visit Holland and for Bali and Holland to be one.

This is a copy of the King’s letter, which was given to me in the Balinese language and which Emanuel Rodenburch has translated into Dutch. There was no signature. It will also be sent from me to you.

Cornells van Eemskerck

The Radja also presented van Heemskerck with a typical token of royal favor—a beautiful Balinese female slave. Van Heemskerck seemed unaccountably indisposed to accept, at least until Roodenburg explained that to decline would be impolitic. Neither van Heemskerck nor his successors proved reluctant to accept the Radja’s far from naive consent to reciprocal trading conditions as a charter for one-way trade or his offhand endorsement of Dutch hopes for unity as acknowledgment of an alliance. Although nothing much came of the contact for almost two and one half centuries, it was on the basis of this document that the Dutch assured themselves that they had special rights in the island.

V.O.C. Factory and Free Burghers from Batavia

The Netherlands (or United) East India Company, known in the East as the V.O.C. (Vereenegde Oost-Indische Compagnie), manifested little interest in Bali even though it took vigorous and often violent measures to establish itself firmly in the Moluccas, Java, and Sumatra. It does seem to have opened some sort of trading post in about the year 1620, but there is very little indication of subsequent activities or of any continuing European presence. The first merchant, Hans van Meldert, was instructed to purchase “rice, beasts, provisions, and women,” but he aroused such suspicion and hostility on the part of the radjas that he was very soon recalled, having acquired, it seems, as the total result of his enterprise only one consignment of fourteen female slaves. For the next two centuries, Balinese commerce was mainly in the hands of Chinese, Arab, Bugis, and occasional Dutch private traders. These latter were the Batavian “free burghers” who came to be tolerated on the fringes of the Company’s Batavia Castle and were permitted to deal in goods which the V.O.C. itself found either profitless or objectionable, although it did at times quietly and indirectly participate. In the case of Bali this meant mainly slaves and opium.

Trade in Slaves and Opium; Missions of Oosterwijk and Bacharach

The very skimpy records of Dutch contacts with Bali during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries relate mainly to the appearance in Batavia and in Bali of various slavers and opium-runners, the acts of mutiny, piracy, and treachery which their activities provoked, and the inconsecutive and ineffectual efforts of the V.O.C. officials either to ban or control and restrict the trade. Other records refer to the rapidly growing Balinese community in Batavia itself—by the end of the eighteenth century a total of about 1,000 Balinese members of the Dutch colonial army, some 1,500 free Balinese residents, and very numerous Balinese slaves. This entire community traced its origins either to slaves sold as soldiers, who earned their freedom after five to ten years of faithful service, or household slaves, who were commonly freed by their masters or declared free upon the death of their masters, open sale generally being prohibited. The free Balinese population of Batavia was fourth in size of all the racial sectors, the first being the Mardyckers (Portuguese who lived like Malays), second the Dutch, and third the Chinese. The total population of the city was then about 30,000, half slave and half free.

Balinese Community in Batavia; Senopati; Balinese–Javanese Wars

The most famous member of the Balinese community in Batavia was Senopati, a Balinese in fact only by association, a folk hero of the late seventeenth century whose history is half legendary. Senopati seems by birth to have been a Javanese prince, but he fled to Bali in early youth to escape from the cruelty of his uncle, the Susuhunan. Settling in Djembrana, he became the foster son of the Chinese sjahbandar (harbor master). Later, in a spirit of pure adventure, he permitted himself to be sold as a slave and shipped to Java. In the course of the voyage he earned the admiration and gratitude of the slaver by fighting off pirates, but upon reaching Batavia he consented nevertheless to be sold into the family of a wealthy Dutch merchant. He served his Dutch master faithfully up until the time that he fell into a complicated set of difficulties by reason of rejecting the amorous advances of the daughter of a Dutch general. Entering the Dutch army he fought bravely in the colonial wars until he became so outraged by the arrogance of the Dutch that he raised an insurrection against them. Eventually he founded his own kingdom in East Java in rivalry to the Susuhunan.

The story of the Balinese trade in slaves and opium was punctuated with romantic episodes such as those associated with Senopati and others which are merely squalid. It is one with regard to which the records are far from numerous or detailed, but it warrants effort at explanation. The Balinese radjas enjoyed and exercised the traditional right to enslave and to sell as slaves all such persons as would constitute an encumbrance or an embarrassment to the state. This general category included criminals, castaways, outcasts, orphans, drifters, debtors, and even the widows and children of men who died without leaving enough property for their support. It was regarded as both the right and the duty of the radjas to make sure that such persons did not impose a burden upon society but rather contributed to it, and when Western reformers later interfered with the system the Balinese neither understood nor approved. Balinese slaves, furthermore, were highly prized both in Bali and overseas. Balinese male slaves were famous for their manual skills and their courage, the females for their beauty and artistic attainments. The price of a healthy young slave was about 100–150 rijksdaalder at home and five to ten times that amount in overseas markets. The Dutch themselves wanted Balinese slaves both as recruits for their colonial army and as household servants in Batavia. But the biggest market of all was in French Mauritius, to which as many as 500 slaves would be sent by a single ship. The slavers often found it most convenient and profitable to make payment with opium, a commodity which found ready market among Balinese royalty and even more especially among Javanese, Bugis, and Chinese smugglers, who distributed it throughout the archipelago in defiance of Dutch attempts to enforce a monopoly. The island of Bali, of course, had more to sell than slaves and wanted to buy other goods as well as opium, especially arms; but the slave–opium link-up was extremely important to development of its commerce. The first commercial center was the northern port of Buleleng. Here the radjas recognized the advantages of foreign contact and a small resident community of Chinese, Arab, and Bugis merchants facilitated it.

The intermittent presence in Bali of certain Batavian merchants and the reports they brought back with regard to the wealth and power of the radjas several times stirred the V.O.C. to make overtures of alliance. In the year 1633 the Governor-General, Hendrick Brouwer, heard from the Batavian free burgher Jeuriaen Courten that the Dewa Agung was preparing a great military expedition against the Mataram Empire in Java, with which the Dutch themselves were at war. Brouwer determined to provide the Balinese with assistance in the expectation of so weakening Mataram’s power that the Dutch forces could win an easy victory. He therefore dispatched a special ambassador, Van Oosterwijk, to offer the Dewa Agung provisions for his troops and ships to transport them to East Java. The mission was accompanied by Justus Heurnius, a missionary on his way to Ambon, who later reported briefly, favorably, and quite inaccurately about the readiness of the Balinese to accept Christianity—a report that was filed away in church and state archives and forgotten, which was just as well. Van Oosterwijk, who remained in Bali only briefly, and Captain Jochem Roloffszoon van Deutecom, who was sent as his replacement, both failed to achieve their purpose. Certain of the Dutch in Batavia intimated that the Governor-General had been impulsive and gullible and his emissaries clumsy. In fact the visitors arrived at a most inauspicious time, just when the Dewa Agung and his court were altogether preoccupied with preparations for the cremation of a favorite wife and two royal princes. The emissaries had brought a fine Persian horse as a gift for the ruler and they hinted that a gift elephant might be delivered later, but nothing availed to gain them an audience. They had to content themselves with a bit of trading by which they acquired, among other things, 2,000 skeins of cotton, 460 pieces of woven textiles, and 1,200 measures of rice.

In 1639, when Mataram suddenly invaded Bali, the Dewa Agung appealed to Batavia for assistance; for reasons now unknown, the Dutch withheld their aid, but the Balinese themselves succeeded in repelling the enemy forces. In 1651, when the Dutch were momentarily at peace with Mataram, they sent another ambassador, Jacob Bacharach, with instructions to negotiate an alliance with the Dewa Agung just in case of future need. Again nothing came of the mission.

In the course of the next century there were frequent outbreaks of hostilities between the Dewa Agung and the Susuhunan, and both Bali and Mataram applied repeatedly for Dutch assistance. The Dutch never obliged—at least not openly. But in the years 1717–18, when Balinese troops were roaming East Java and Madura, causing great destruction and dismay throughout the region, the Dutch themselves launched little clean-up operations which helped to chase the intruders back home. If the Dutch refrained from intervening in the Balinese–Javanese wars, the English did not, or at least the Dutch believed that the English did not and that they were providing the radjas with arms. They were also selling opium and buying slaves; the northern Balinese port of Buleleng, according to vigilant informants of the Dutch, was becoming a hotbed of British–Balinese anti-Dutch intrigue.

The persistent intrusions of the English into Balinese waters caused the Dutch the most excruciating seizures of political and financial agony. The English, they were convinced, were seeking to colonize and would seize any opportunity which they themselves might overlook to establish some British monopoly of their own in competition with those of the V.O.C. The Dutch were forced therefore to live with the awful suspicion that the predatory English were about to pounce upon some new island, large or small, among the thousand islands known or unknown, which they themselves regarded as the indisputable patrimony of the Netherlands. They entertained the recurrent premonition that the choice would probably fall upon Bali, a rich and strategic little island which they had never yet really explored even though it lay only one nautical mile off the tip of their stronghold of Java. Dutch and English rivalry over Bali was indeed to play a part, even though a very minor part, in the great new English–Dutch conflict which preceded the actual opening of the island to massive Western impact. But that was an eventuality which somehow managed to postpone itself from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. During that interval, except for a few episodes such as those mentioned above, Bali enjoyed the priceless benefits of European neglect.