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CHAPTER 3

Recruitment, Trade, and Travel

(1800–1830)

Distant Effects of Napoleonic Wars

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Bali remained relatively unaffected by the Western influences which were already transforming much of the Indonesian archipelago. Bali’s sixteenth century Hindu civilization was still inviolate to any serious religious, commercial, or political infiltration either by Muslims or by Christians. In the early decades of the century, however, there came intimations of what by mid-century amounted to the breaching of all the island’s defenses. What happened in Bali was a remote, tragic, and elsewhere almost unnoticed side-effect of the Napoleonic Wars.

The early triumphs of Napoleon occasioned the fall of the Netherlands, the extension of French influence not only into Holland itself but also into the Dutch possessions overseas, and a challenge to English power everywhere in the world. The English determined to protect themselves in India by seizing Java, thinking to foil Napoleon’s design of converting the Dutch colony into a base of Asian military operations of his own. This Java enterprise, in which the English succeeded brilliantly, several times focused incidental English and Dutch attention upon Bali. It served ever so slightly but significantly to illuminate and therefore to diminish the obscurity by which the island had previously been sheltered. Coming events were foreshadowed when the French–Dutch defenders of Java and the English challengers began to compete for Balinese allies in the forthcoming battle. The subsequent loss of Java to the English (1811) was a critical set-back to French interests in Asia and a far from unimportant episode in the defeat of Napoleon’s ambition to dominate the world. The eventual restoration of Java to the Dutch (1816) revived their own determination to dominate the whole of the Indies, inclusive of Bali, where their failure as yet to establish themselves very securely exposed them to the possibility of being forestalled by their presumed English ally. It is doubtful whether Napoleon himself had ever heard of Bali and the Balinese never identified him as their antipodal demon, but it may still be said, without doing grave damage to historicity, that Bali’s relatively serene isolation from the much troubled international scene was one of the casualties of Napoleon’s campaigns.

Daendels’ Design for Recruitment; van der Wahl’s Visit

Napoleon quite clearly signaled his own intentions with regard to Java by sending out French civilian and military personnel who quickly infiltrated the colonial administration. Napoleon himself picked a new Dutch Governor-General, Marshal Willem Daendels, appropriately known as the “Iron Marshal” and almost equally hated by the Dutch and the Indonesians. On behalf of the French, Daendels undertook enormously costly defense works which resulted in the swift completion of a military highway stretching the length of Java, the strengthening of many military garrisons, and the deaths of thousands of Javanese conscripted for corvée. Napoleon sent French troops under French commanders to reinforce the long neglected and badly demoralized Dutch garrisons which were stationed in all the important settlements. Daendels himself devised a scheme to import Balinese manpower to support the European troops. He commissioned a certain Captain van der Wahl of the Dragoons as his special agent to negotiate with the Balinese radjas.

Captain van der Wahl arrived in Bali in 1808 with instructions, it seems, merely to arrange with the radjas for recruitment (presumably by purchase) of Balinese soldiers and workers (i.e. slaves) for service with the joint Dutch–French forces. The doughty captain brilliantly over-fulfilled his mission. He succeeded in negotiating a very curious treaty of friendship and alliance with the Radja of Badung, who, as will be noted later, was always the most susceptible of all the radjas of the time to European blandishments. In return for the promise of military aid against his enemies, both domestic and foreign, and in return also for recognition as Susuhunan (Emperor) of Bali—a dignity which attached traditionally to the Dewa Agung, the Radja of Klungkung—the Radja of Badung placed himself and his realm under the personal protection of Marshal Daendels and the personal direction of Captain van der Wahl. At the same time the Radja designated van der Wahl as his private representative for dealing with foreigners, handling commerce, and working administrative reforms. The terms of the treaty reward word-by-word reading as an exercise of self-projection into the psychology of early Western negotiations with Balinese royalty:

Treaty of Friendship between Sri Paducca Goesti Moerah Made Pamatjoetan, Radja of Bali Badong and Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl, Commissioner of Willem Daendels, Marshal of Holland, Privy Counselor of the Foreign Service, Holder of the Great Cross of the Order of the Dutch Kingdom, High Officer of the Legion of Honor of the French Kingdom, Governor-General of the Indies and Commander-in-Chief of the King’s Army and Navy therein.

(1.) Sri Paducca Goesti Moerah Made Pamatjoetan, Radja of Bali Badong in consideration of the trust and fatherly concern which the Dutch Government has constantly manifested in him as a friend and associate, and also in consideration of the high qualities and honorable sentiments of His Excellency Herman Willem Daendels, Marshal of Holland and concurrently Governor-General of the Indies, joins himself and his entire kingdom with the Dutch Government, seeking not only that he himself be taken under His Excellency’s personal protection but also his children, in life and death to be regarded as friends and kinsmen of His Excellency the Marshal and Governor-General, who accepts him and his into his most estimable fatherly protection.

(2.) Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl undertakes that in half a month after the signing of this treaty Sri Paducca G.M.M. Pamatjoetan, Radja Bali Badong shall be proclaimed as Susuhunan of all Bali, the act to be signed by His Excellency the Marshal and Governor-General over the Great Seal.

(3.) Sri Paducca G.M.M.P., Radja of Bali Badong authorizes Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl to build houses, forts, and batteries, to land cannons and troops of such kind and number as His Excellency the Marshal and Governor-General may see fit.

(4.) Sri Paducca G.M.M.P., Radja of Bali Badong, as of now places under Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl all Chinese and other foreign residents with the power of administering them for their own well-being.

(5.) Sri Paducca G.M.M.P. shall receive from the Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl all that he has need of from Batavia and Semarang, paying for it the price set by the aforesaid Captain.

(6.) Sri Paducca G.M.M.P. requests the aforesaid Captain to assume responsibility for the increase of the kingdom’s revenues and the improvement of its internal policy.

(7.) Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl undertakes in the name of His Excellency the Marshal and Governor-General to protect Sri Paducca G.M.M.P., Radja of Bali Badong against his foreign and domestic enemies.

(Translated from the Dutch text as published in Annex C of Dr. E. Utrecht’s Sedjarah Hukum, etc., pp. 306–307.)

Had this quite outrageous agreement ever been implemented, the Island of Bali would have been converted into a fiefdom of the Iron Marshal with the dubious Captain of the Dragoons as regent. But Daendels was recalled and replaced shortly thereafter, the Captain vanished, the English conquered and ruled the Indies, and it served everyone’s purposes to forget this improbable arrangement. Nor did the Dutch choose to revive it when Napoleon was overthrown and the English handed back their empire in order to bolster the post-Napoleonic Dutch-English alliance, in which the Dutch, without the Indies, would have been a crippled and crippling partner.

English Occupation; Raffles and Crawfurd

Whether or not he was aware of Daendels’ overtures to the Balinese, and in all probability he was, Sir Stamford Raffles, the mastermind of the English invasion and the Lieutenant Governor-General of the occupation (1811–1816), entered into preliminary personal correspondence with certain of the Balinese radjas to entice them to favor the English side in the coming conflict. The radjas were at first disposed to be receptive to English advances. They sent a certain Njoman Bagus of Buleleng to meet with Raffles in Malacca, where he was induced to accept the rank of major in the invasion forces. After dispatching and perhaps forgetting Njoman Bagus, who never reappears in the records, the radjas remained aloof from the campaign and from the occupation. Bali itself fell just outside the sphere of English administration and the far-reaching changes which Raffles introduced affected it only indirectly. But one of Raffles’ most important reforms, the abolition of slavery and hence of the traffic in slaves between Bali and Java, threatened to deprive the radjas of an important source of revenue. The Radjas of Buleleng and Karangasem, motivated apparently by indignation at the loss of a slave market, in February, 1814, mounted one of their periodic little military expeditions against Blambangan, where they clashed with British Sepoys. Small bands of armed Balinese in fact roved into other parts of East Java, occasioning no little consternation. In May, therefore, Raffles sent Major General Nightingale to Bali with a small contingent of troops to make a show of force and to receive prompt assurances, which nobody took very seriously, of Balinese “submission.” The English stationed no garrison in Bali, however, and made no further attempt to impose their control.

In early 1815 Raffles himself paid a visit of a few days’ duration and exhibited his usual energy in collecting data for his historical and cultural studies. His administrative subordinate and literary rival, John Crawfurd, had visited the island somewhat earlier and had engaged in similar activities. In their published works, which included sections on Bali, neither Crawfurd nor Raffles, unfortunately, attained his usual standard of accuracy and perceptiveness. Both restricted themselves mainly to comment on Hinduism on the basis of observations made, apparently, not in Bali but in India.

Dutch Demarches of 1817, 1824, 1826; Kuta Post

In 1817, over Raffles’ vigorous protest and obstruction, the Dutch regained control of the Indies. One of their first moves was to dispatch a mission to Bali to establish formal relations with the radjas. Their most immediate and compelling consideration was the well-founded suspicion that Raffles was casting about for some new island to colonize. Raffles eventually chose Singapore; but by then the Dutch had already made what they regarded as a successful preemptive move to reserve Bali for themselves. They had drawn up certain “contract concepts” which they interpreted to signify sweeping concessions on the part of the radjas, who had merely discussed but had not accepted the Dutch proposals.

The contract concepts of 1817 were the work primarily of H. A. van der Broek, a revenue officer who was named special commissioner. Van der Broek arrived in Bali in mid-1817, accompanied by Heer Roos as his aide and by Lt. Lotze heading a party of twenty well-armed soldiers. He had been provided with impressive credentials authorizing him to negotiate formal agreements with the radjas.

The van der Broek visitation was not altogether unsolicited. Gusti Gde Karangasem, Radja of Buleleng, had himself sent a mission to Batavia seeking aid for relief of famine and intimating interest also in arms. The shortage of food and weapons in Buleleng was occasioned, it seems, by British interference with the slave trade, from which much of the Radja’s income was derived, and the Radja had been experiencing certain economic and political difficulties in consequence. The Dutch, happy for once to repair an English oversight, shipped off a modest quantity of rice, receiving in return the gift of three slave girls, whom they generously freed. They then decided that the time was appropriate for an official mission.

The van der Broek visit was not a success. He arrived in Bali just as war broke out between Buleleng and Karangasem, a war in which Klungkung and Mengwi supported the latter and the other southern states the former. He found the radjas unresponsive to his suggestion of political alliance and most of them unwilling even to receive him in audience. He attributed their hostility not to any recent experience with Daendels’ Captain of the Dragoons or his own evasiveness about military aid but rather to defamatory reports which, he believed, the English had spread and were in fact still inspiring. Eventually van der Broek prevailed upon the Radja of Badung to intercede with his peers in Mengwi and Gianjar to join him in hearing what the Dutch wished to propose. In 1818 the southern radjas themselves sent a mission to Batavia, under escort of Heer Roos, to confer with the Governor-General. Van der Broek remained in Bali, where his stay was made most uncomfortable by reason of various petty annoyances, one of them the interception of supply shipments meant for himself and Lt. Lotze’s soldiers. The atmosphere, in fact, was distinctly unfriendly. Nevertheless, as a result of various obscure maneuvers both in Batavia and in Bali, the Dutch drew up two somewhat different but very formalistic sets of contract concepts. They assumed that selected paragraphs would be incorporated, with, or preferably without alteration, into the series of treaties which they envisioned with the individual states.

The treaties did not materialize, for the radjas reverted to their non-cooperative stance. Nevertheless, the rejected contract concepts achieved a sort of quasi-validity in the minds of their Dutch authors. Nothing much resulted from this diplomatic exercise other than the demonstration that Western and Eastern concepts of appropriate treaty provisions were all but irreconcilable and that Western concepts would probably prevail. The radjas were interested in occasional military aid against Lombok, Mataram, and one another; the Dutch wanted to assert sovereignty and to assure themselves that Balinese political and commercial contacts with the outside world would remain in all perpetuity under their own exclusive control. Neither side quite understood what the other was driving at save that it was altogether unacceptable.

A few years later, in 1824, the Governor-General tried again. This time he chose as his agent not a Dutch official but an Arab merchant from Surabaya, a far-roving trader named Pangeran Said Hassan al Habeschi, who knew from long experience how to deal with Asian royalty from Bengal to the Molukkas. Habeschi visited the Balinese radjas and reported back to his principals that, save only in Badung, not even the promise of great profit would elicit any interest in a treaty. If Pangeran Hassan failed to achieve his major purpose, he returned good value for the Dutch outlay upon his rather expensive travel arrangements by bringing back important intelligence relating to a second subject in which they were very much interested: the size and strength and hideouts of the pirate bands which then infested the waters of East Java, Bali, and Lombok. Hassan reported that he had counted ninety pirate perahu manned by conglomerate crews of ruffians from Celebes, Borneo, and the Sulus, who found aid and comfort in Balinese port towns to which they retreated when Dutch marine pursuit became too hot. He suggested that the Dutch could deal definitively with these vicious sea rovers only by asserting effective control over the whole of Bali and Lombok. For the time being the Dutch contented themselves with sending warships to harass the pirate fleet, also to reconnoiter and map the Bali coast—first the frigate Komet in 1825, than the schooner Iris in 1827. They succeeded so well that in 1828 some 300 pirates abandoned Bali to reestablish themselves in the little archipelago of Pulau Laut about halfway between Singapore and Borneo, where they became the concern primarily of the British.

In 1826 Batavia sent yet another Dutch agent, a Captain J. S. Wetters, who managed that year to negotiate a simple agreement whereby the Radja of Badung permitted the recruitment of soldiers, at a royalty of five guilders per head, and the opening of trade. Wetters himself settled briefly at Badung’s leading port town of Kuta, not far from the palace of the Radja. Thus began the modern Dutch presence in the island and the emergence of Kuta to compete in trade with the northern port of Buleleng.

The Kuta post did not prosper. Its main purpose was the recruitment of a proposed total of 1,000 Balinese on five-year contracts to serve in the colonial army. Most, if not all of the recruits, it is to be presumed, would be purchased as slaves and would earn their freedom after five years of military service. At just this time, however, the Dutch wound up their long but intermittent war against the Mataram Empire and decided that they no longer required so many more Balinese. The Kuta post, which therefore purchased few slaves, seems also to have sold little merchandise. For these and other reasons, relations between the Dutch and the Balinese were strained by mutual suspicion and at times overt animosity. Wetters’ successor, Pierre Dubois, who managed the post from 1827 to 1831 with one Dutch sergeant and a few soldiers as his companions and guards, reported despondently that Kuta attracted few European traders (a total of exactly three during the entire period) and kept petitioning the government to close it down. To support his case he reported incident after incident of actual or threatened robbery, arson, murder, and plunder, and almost daily scenes of amok. Dubois regarded the local ruler, Gusti Ngurah Ktut, the nephew of the Radja of Badung, with a combination of apprehension and contempt. He charged him with all manner of villainy, of which, by report other than that of Dubois, he seems in fact to have been guilty. The local population, according to Dubois, consisted mainly of criminals and ruffians. It seemed to be a matter mainly of chance, however, whether the incautious visitor would be done in by violence or by pestilence, for the location was as insalubrious as its inhabitants were unsavory. Before he conclusively established his point that European survival was unlikely, Pierre Dubois himself was transferred. In 1831 Batavia notified the Radja that it was closing its Kuta station, requesting that its properties be reserved for discretionary Dutch use thereafter, a request which seems to have been ignored.

Visit of Dr. Medhurst and His Report

Despite early Dutch failures it was now apparent that Bali could not much longer expect to remain isolated from Western impact. Dutchmen and other Westerners were visiting the island in ever increasing numbers and reports were beginning to circulate in the outside world. One report in particular attracted much attention and realerted the nervous Dutch to the danger that if they themselves did not soon take Bali the British could be expected to do so. It was a study prepared by Dr. Medhurst, a much traveled English medical missionary from Malacca, who spent three months (late 1829 to early 1830) in Bali in company with a Reverend Tomlin studying the northern regions, especially the radjadom of Buleleng, which, as noted above, was the traditional center of foreign contact and trade.

Dr. Medhurst’s report was published originally in certain English missionary journals and then reprinted (anonymously) in Singapore, first in the Singapore Chronicle (June 1830), later in J. H. Moor’s famous compilation, Notices of the Indian Archipelago (1837). It was also translated into Dutch and republished in the Netherlands. Dr. Medhurst attempted, within the brief scope of his essay and the limits of available information, to do for Bali what Raffles had recently done for Java and other English writers were occasionally doing for other little-known lands. He adopted the classical approach of the generalist, dealing with matters of geographical, historical, ethnographical, and commercial interest and introducing such particulars as he had been able to assemble from local sources. His historical sketch focused mainly upon the family of the ruling Radja of Buleleng, in whom all Western visitors, naturally, were very much interested. Dr. Medhurst portrays this young gentleman, the twenty-year old Gedemgoorah Ratna Ningrat, as a princeling so sunken in torpor and licentiousness as to seem little better than an imbecile. Unattractive as he was, he seems to have been preferable as a ruler to various of his uncles and cousins who were his immediate predecessors. One uncle, Gusti Moorah Gde Karang (the ruler who asserted Karangasem hegemony), had been murdered twelve years earlier by his own rebellious subjects, who found his conduct too distasteful even to recall. One cousin, Dewa Pahang, had occupied himself principally in quarreling and battling with another uncle, Gusti Moorah Lanang, the Radja of Karangasem.

Royal Family of Buleleng; Its Blood Feuds

Dr. Medhurst’s report is perhaps a bit over-ornamented with picturesque detail obligingly furnished by fanciful Balinese informants. But if it does not reveal exactly what it was that had happened quite recently in northern Bali, it does show what perceptive foreign visitors were quite prepared to believe had happened. The blood feud between Dewa Pahang and Gusti Moorah Lanang, according to Dr. Medhurst, lasted for years and resulted in widespread disorders which had seriously affected the entire northern region. Dewa Pahang, a high-spirited youth of vulgar tastes, became so enraged that he took a great oath to drain and drink his uncle’s blood, reserving a small part of it for his beautiful young sister to employ, more delicately, for washing her lovely hair. Gusti Moorah Lanang, not to be up-staged, vowed to cut off his nephew’s head, slice his body into small pieces, send these morsels as admonitory gifts to neighboring royalty, then to build a temple of thanksgiving to be ornamented with the bones and skins of his nephew’s retainers.

The fortunes of war first favored Dewa Pahang until, in dalliance between battles, he committed incest with his sister; the balance then shifted toward Moorah Lanang. In the course of a particularly audacious campaign, Moorah Lanang captured his unfilial nephew and proceeded, while professing grief at having to fulfill so impetuous a vow, to detach the head and to mince up the body to provide mementos for friends and relations. He then set out to accumulate the bones and skins necessary for his memorial monument. But Gusti Moorah Lanang’s soldiers began to fear for their own hides and bones and many of them deserted. With his still loyal companions, Moorah Lanang retired into a nearby forest, where he made a sacrificial offering to the gods of fifteen plump infants upon whose roasted remains he and his party banqueted. This gruesome ceremony was so repugnant to others of his countrymen that the Radja found it advisable to flee to Lombok. He did not actively object when his nephew, Anak Agung Madi, was elevated to the throne of Buleleng or when the new radja was deposed by his unhappy subjects and replaced by his nearly catatonic brother, the above-mentioned Gedemgoorah Ratna Ningrat. Such was the gist of Dr. Medhurst’s gory account, which the present writer has made no effort to reconcile, in the spelling of proper names, for instance, or other more significant detail, with less excruciating chronicles.

Dr. Medhurst did not acquire, or he did not choose to report any such intimate details with regard to the other royal courts. But he did mention, for instance, that the little radjadom of Gianjar (population about 10,000) was at war with Klungkung (population about 50,000) and that travel into and through the south, which he would have liked to visit, was therefore cut off. He was able, nevertheless, to accumulate a remarkable amount of information concerning geography, agriculture, and trade, and he gave genuine insight into manners and customs. He reported, for instance, on the large mountain lakes, the ingenious system of irrigation, the network of roads and trails, the bountiful produce of the land, the imports and exports, and the system of administration and taxation. The revenues of the Radja of Buleleng, he said, included the following items: annual customs duties equivalent in value to 4,000 Indian rupees; a tax of two rupees per acre on rice lands; a fine of one rupee to 200 rupees levied upon bridegrooms for engaging in the traditional practice of kidnapping their brides (usually with the bride’s consent and collusion); the proceeds of the sale of personal property, including female members of the family, of subjects who died without male heirs; and the proceeds from sale as slaves of all indigent persons.

Bali’s important products, according to Dr. Medhurst, were rice, cotton, corn, tobacco, salt, cattle, pigs, fowl, fruits, and vegetables, all of which were abundantly available for export. The island conducted a flourishing trade with Java, Sumatra, Ambon, and other islands. Most of the traders were transient or resident Buginese, Arabs, and Chinese, but Europeans also participated occasionally. The major items of export were cattle, beef, salt, cotton, cotton thread, and goods imported from the east for re-export. The imports were textiles, porcelain, iron, and opium, of which Buleleng took 20 chests annually from Singapore. Bali’s most noteworthy manufactures were hand loomed textiles, kris blades of superior style and quality, and gun barrels skillfully bored by hand. In the local market one could purchase rice at the equivalent of one rupee per pikul (132 pounds), fine fat cattle for four rupees each, sturdy little ponies for 15–20 rupees, and coconuts at the rate of one rupee per hundred. The actual currency of the market was not rupees but Chinese “cash,” the rate of exchange being one to six hundred. A man could live very, very comfortably in Bali, Dr. Medhurst said, on an income of fifteen rupees per month.

In his account of the Balinese people and their customs, Dr. Medhurst made special mention of the male’s predilection for cockfighting, drinking, and gambling, while allowing women to perform the manual labor. He described the improvidence and extravagance of the islanders as contrasted with the prudent accumulation of wealth by the Chinese and Arabs, who generally found it wise to resettle elsewhere when their properties attracted very great interest on the part of the rulers. He deplored the arrogance and ofttimes, he said, the rudeness of the Balinese, at least of the northerners, in dealing with foreigners, and the swiftness of their being moved to passion or violence. He gave some description of the Balinese costume—generally scanty and coarse, he said—and of the homes, palaces, and temples, all of which he deemed dilapidated and in none of which did he appear to observe any evidence of sophisticated art or architecture. He reported on the elaborate cremation ceremonies which the islanders were given to staging for the radjas, and the spectacular more or less voluntary practice of suttee on the part of the radjas’ widows. But his account of the Balinese religion was so inadequate as to indicate that he was virtually unaware of the major role of religious ceremonial in daily life. Or perhaps he was merely indisposed to discourage his missionary associates by reporting the degree of commitment of the Balinese to their Hindu practices. His report led in fact to the assignment of an English missionary, a Rev. Ennis, who arrived in Buleleng in 1838 but remained only a very short time and apparently exerted no influence.

The major shortcoming of Dr. Medhurst’s admirable pioneering study is his failure to describe or apparently to appreciate the peculiar beauty and vitality of the Balinese culture and the special charm of the Balinese way of life. He depicts Bali as an island of great plenty, suffering occasionally from earthquake or volcanic eruption but not from famine or pestilence, experiencing misrule but not repression, offering opportunity to Western enterprise, including, by implication but not by explicit reference, that of Christian missionaries. But he misses the magic. In pointing out this omission it must be reiterated that Dr. Medhurst was unable to visit the southern part of the island, where the splendors of the Balinese civilization are almost everywhere manifest, as is the marvelous accommodation of man to nature and to art. But the one place in the south where this phenomenon was least visible, the port town of Kuta, was the one spot which Dr. Medhurst particularly wished to visit. He would have liked to observe the activities of the Dutch agent whom he presumed to be no better than a slaver. It was Kuta that other Western visitors were already beginning to visit and describe. The very fact that early reports on Bali related mainly to the less attractive spots—Buleleng and Kuta—which the presence of foreigners did not necessarily enhance, may help to explain how Bali as a whole continued in the first few decades of the nineteenth century to enjoy its relatively serene detachment.