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CHAPTER 4

Monopoly and Sovereignty,

Plunder and Salvage

(1830–1845)

Dutch Alarm Regarding Western Interlopers

Dr. Medhurst’s illuminating report on conditions in Bali in the year 1830 commanded a remarkably widespread audience for an article published originally in obscure ecclesiastical journals which one might expect to be read only by village clergymen. Bali was already becoming known, however, to the international world of traders and travelers, among them the ships’ companies of English and American whalers which were beginning to frequent waters adjacent to Bali and sometimes sent parties ashore to purchase provisions in the port towns or to hunt deer and banteng (wild cattle) in the mountains. The recently established English colony of Singapore, which most of these voyagers eventually visited and from which no few of them came, was especially curious about its not so distant neighbor, hence the quick Singapore reprints of the Medhurst report.

Enterprising individuals from Singapore were making tentative efforts to establish themselves elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago than just Batavia and Surabaya, where certain English merchants had managed to stay in business even after Raffles handed Java back to the Dutch. The Singapore concern of Dalmeida and Company, of which the proprietors were Portuguese by origin, was especially active; it sent its ships frequently to Bali and may have had a resident European or Eurasian agent for a time in nearby Lombok. The Batavia- and Surabaya-based firm of Morgan, King and Company, the enterprise of a pair of not very reputable English traders from Bengal, also seems to have traded extensively throughout the eastern islands. George Peacock King, one of the partners, did regular business both in Bali and in Lombok and may have established his own trading post in Bali as early as 1831. There were others as well, but one of the most aggressive of all Western traders in Asian waters at the time was a Scottish sea captain, John Burd, who affiliated himself with the Danish East India Company to trade under the Danish flag in Singapore, Macao, Canton, Batavia and wherever else profit offered.

John Burd and Mads Lange in Lombok

Captain John Burd recruited an especially energetic and promising young Dane, Mads Lange (b. 1807–d. 1856) of Rudkobing as one of his ship’s officers and presently made him a business partner. Lange sailed with or for Burd on several voyages to the East and persuaded his three younger brothers, Hans, Karl Emilius, and Hans Henrick, to join him. In late 1833 Captain Burd set out on the heavily armed 800-ton merchant vessel de Zuid on a voyage to China and the Indies with Mads Lange as First Officer and the three other Lange brothers as members of the ship’s company. In early 1834 de Zuid visited Lombok, and probably also Bali. It was decided that Mads Lange would establish a permanent trading post ashore in Lombok as the focus for region-wide commerce which John Burd would develop. The pair would build up a shipping fleet of their own, captained by themselves, the three younger brothers, and other willing adventurers.

The enterprise was an instant success. Lombok was a happy choice as a commercial center. It was strategically located on the direct sea route between Singapore and Australia which was beginning to carry a very heavy traffic. It was rich in rice and other local produce for which there was great regional demand. It was also a convenient provisioning and servicing center for the many ships’ captains who preferred, if possible, to avoid the heavy charges and suspicious scrutiny of the Dutch in such ports as Batavia and Surabaya. Mads Lange established cordial relations with the Radja, accepted service as his sjahbandar (harbor master) for the port town of Ampenan, built a factory (trading post), set up a shipyard, and very soon became a man of such wealth and influence that he inevitably became known as “the White Radja of Ampenan.”

Pak Djembrok’s Espionage Report

The Dutch, naturally, were far from pleased with this development. A Javanese spy named Pak Djembrok, who was then in the employ of Rollin Couquerque, the Resident of Besuki, East Java, in 1836 brought in a detailed and disturbing report. Between May 20 and December 27, 1835, Pak Djembrok had observed the arrival in Ampenan of fifteen European vessels—nine three-masters, three brigs, and three schooners—of which three flew the French flag and the others the English or the Dutch, some of those which flew the Dutch flag being English-owned vessels from Singapore. These ships brought in large cargoes, inclusive, said Pak Djembrok, of arms, ammunition, and opium. At Tandjung Karang, a point in Ampenan Bay where Lange had built his shipyard, Pak Djembrok noted two more ships, a schooner and a brig, the latter under the command of Captain George King. Pak Djembrok further reported that when he visited the island of Bali shortly thereafter he encountered the same Captain King in the market places in Badung with sixteen casks full of Singapore-minted coins (superior, he said, to the “cash” from China), with which he was buying up quantities of goods for export.

Pak Djembrok’s upsetting report almost stirred the Dutch to immediate action to forestall any more foreign interlopers. But they procrastinated long enough that Mads Lange had time to acquire invaluable experience and contacts. By the time they took action, Lange was a seasoned and toughened operator—not in Lombok from which he had had to flee in the course of civil wars, but in Bali, where he settled himself at almost exactly the same place and time as did the Dutch themselves, that is, at Kuta in mid-1839.

Dutch Policy of Economic-Political Penetration

The Dutch in The Hague, Amsterdam, and Batavia, having engaged in a prolonged exchange of government and company papers formulating various policy alternatives with regard to Bali, concluded this rigorous intellectual exercise by taking a somewhat clouded decision. It was in effect that they would first infiltrate traders and presently assert sovereignty. The exact line of demarcation between commerce and politics was left so vague that a few years later the N.H.M. (Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij, the successor to the trading interests of the long since bankrupt and defunct V.O.C.), claimed but only after prolonged and acrimonious negotiations collected the sum of fl. 172,194.39 for losses sustained in Bali in pursuit more of governmental than of company interests.

Governor-General Merkus first considered proposals such as one for designating Banjumas, East Java, as a free trade entrepôt to enable the Dutch rather than the Singapore English to realize the profits of exporting opium, arms, and coins to Bali and Lombok in exchange for the islands’ cheap and plentiful rice. He half rejected the idea on moral and pragmatic grounds, but half accepted it for commercial and political reasons. He authorized—in fact he prompted—the N.H.M. to establish its own factory in Bali in the expectation that it would be permitted to trade openly in opium, arms, and coins. The company was later to claim that the nonfulfillment of this expectation was one important reason for its losses; another was the necessity for housing, entertaining, sponsoring, and otherwise providing logistic support for the political missions whose activities it in part cloaked and in part promoted. It was mainly for the sake of these visitors that it had to place a special vessel at the disposal of the factory, build fine residential quarters protected by a high stone wall, and dispense expensive gifts and favors to the local rulers.

For this two-pronged colonial offensive against Bali (also neighboring and closely related Lombok), the Dutch could and did allege other motives, in particular humanitarianism. They proposed, they said, to impose peace and order for the benefit most of all of the local population, pointing to the serious disturbances in Lombok and Bali’s continuing involvement in them as evidence of the need. They also mentioned four highly laudable specific aims to which no one except, perhaps, the people of Bali and Lombok could take exception. They were resolutely determined, they said, to wipe out opium smuggling and arms running, Bali and Lombok being the transshipment points for opium and arms from Singapore which found their way to Java and other Dutch-held islands in which the Dutch opium and arms monopoly presumably protected the public from many abuses. They were as resolutely determined to wipe out the two associated evils of plunder and slavery, pursuits in which the opium smugglers and arms runners also vigorously engaged, in diversification of their sources of income.

The special circumstances in Bali with regard to slavery and plunder have already been referred to in earlier context. The Balinese radjas routinely enslaved and sold indigent or unwanted persons. The Dutch themselves had been among their most importunate clients, for Balinese slaves, male and female, made excellent household servants and the males made splendid recruits for the colonial army. But Raffles had caused the colonial Dutch uneasy twinges of conscience, to which they paid special attention when their worrisome wars with the Mataram Empire ended and they no longer had much need for Balinese slave-soldiers.

With regard to plunder, from the Dutch point of view the material and metaphysical considerations were equally clear. The Balinese radjas entertained a traditional concept of ship salvage which seemed to the Dutch to combine the worst features of slavery, piracy, plunder, and lese majesty. In accordance with their principle of tawan karang, honoring Batara Baruna, the sea deity, the radjas accepted as a gift of the gods whatever ship came to grief on the treacherous reefs which ringed their island. They took the ship, the cargo, the crew, and the passengers as their personal properties, sharing, naturally, with those who actually performed the act of salvage or rescue but entertaining no doubts at all regarding the sanctity of the deed. From the Dutch point of view it was bad enough if the Balinese exercised their so-called reef rights (Dutch: kliprecht) upon a Chinese, an Arab, a Bugis, or a Javanese craft, many of which sailed under the Dutch flag and expected Dutch protection. It was quite intolerable if the ship in question was Dutch owned and operated. And it was acutely embarrassing even if it flew the English flag. The British then promptly and sternly protested. They were even so tactless as to intimate that if the Dutch presumed to sovereignty over the Indies, they were obliged to provide security and to suppress slavery and piracy, unless, that is, they preferred the English to do so for them.

At the end of the 1830s all circumstances combined to prompt the Dutch to address themselves quite earnestly to discussion with the Balinese radjas of the delicate subjects of trade and politics, slavery and plunder, and to try to blanket these various topics with treaties of friendship and commerce, in fact, recognition of Dutch sovereignty and monopoly. Batavia therefore dispatched three separate missions, first a small probing expedition headed by Captain J. S. Wetters (former recruiting agent at Kuta), then a commercial mission under G. A. Granpré Molière, the N.H.M. Agent in Surabaya, finally a political mission under H. J. van Huskus Koopman, a specially designated Commissioner for Bali and Lombok. Captain Wetters, who visited both Lombok and northern Bali between July 5 and September 3, 1838, reported that the time was at hand for some decisions. Molière and Koopman followed in due course.

Granpré Molière’s Mission and Company Trade

Molière arrived in Bali on December 6, 1838. He traveled on the brig Ondernemer, chartered to the N.H.M. for fl. 2,500 per month, but he had decided to spare the expense of the war schooner Zwaluw, which was originally assigned to him as escort. On shore he practiced no economies, for he traveled with four to six horses and thirty to sixty porters, carrying with him everything needful for his comfort and dignity. Between December 6 and January I he made the rounds of the royal palaces of Badung, Karangasem, and Klungkung, but he failed to get an audience in which to present the impressive credentials with which the Governor-General had provided him.

Molière was not an inexperienced trader, so he resorted to well-tested devices for opening Asian palace doors. He poured out samples of ginever, demonstrated a music box, and he distributed a few firearms as keepsakes. The Dewa Agung and the Radja of Badung became friendly; both received him in audience; they even began to manifest a healthy spirit of rivalry in representing the respective merits of Kusumba, Klungkung, and Kuta, Badung, as the site of the factory which, Molière hinted, would be well stocked with other trinkets. It developed that what the Dewa Agung had in mind was no trinket. The Dewa Agung craved a rhinoceros, a creature which did not exist in Bali but was necessary nevertheless for an especially solemn state ceremony which he was hoping to conduct. Even apart from its ritualistic significance, a rhinoceros would be a sensation among all Balinese connoisseurs of curiosities, and the Dewa Agung’s badly frayed prestige would be immensely enhanced if he, and only he, possessed one. Molière, disguising his dismay, promised to deliver one live rhinoceros.

The Radja of Badung, an earthier type than the Dewa Agung, yearned for one hundred pikuls of lead. He intended, he said, to cast it into balls for use with the bronze cannon which, it seemed, Wetters had promised but neglected to deliver. Wetters’ oversight accounted for the coolness of his original attitude toward Molière, who seems to have convinced him, however, that the promise still held good. A daughter of Radja Pamat-jutan (a minor ruler of Badung) wanted quantities of linen and offered advance payment of three pikuls of tobacco, adding, as an afterthought to clinch the deal, three slaves. In view of the government’s disapproval of slavery, Molière might have passed up this first trading opportunity except that the slaves insisted upon attaching themselves to him.

All in all, Molière judged his visit a success. On the basis of his own experiences he anticipated certain unpredictable difficulties, but he thought that a factory in Bali might flourish and he so reported to the N.H.M. and the Governor-General. He kept a meticulous record of his expenses, for which the N.H.M. was later to claim compensation. Inclusive of gin, guns, and incidental items like payment of ship charter, but not allowing for the rhinoceros (later procured and delivered at cost of fl. 839.25), the trip cost exactly fl. 9,738.58.

Schuurman, the Rhinoceros, and the N.H.M. Factory

After Molière’s visit, the N.H.M. moved fast to establish a factory at Kuta, where the Radja of Badung had promised to prepare quarters for its representative. The company designated one of its brightest young men, D. Boelen Schuurman, as its Kuta factor at a salary of fl. 500 per month, placed an order for a factory trading ship, the Merkurius, to be completed and delivered at an early date, and meanwhile chartered the bark Blora at fl. 1,800 per month to get men, goods, and equipment moving Baliwards. On July 30, 1839, the Blora appeared off Kuta, carrying Heer Schuurman, his assistant, G. W. Veenman Bouman, trade goods to the value of fl. 42,000 (inclusive of the linens for the princess), construction materials for a company warehouse, and one healthy young rhinoceros for the Dewa Agung.

Heer Schuurman hustled hopefully ashore only to discover that the Radja had made no provision whatever for his reception. He made his way wearily on foot to Kuta, then by horse to the puri, where the Radja allowed him to wait at the gate, much to the diversion of the public, while deciding whether to receive him. The Radja, whose intelligence in matters of commerce was better than his memory of his own promises, seems already to have been informed that although the ship’s manifest listed one gift rhinoceros, it showed no lead and no cannon.

Schuurman, who may have deemed a rhinoceros token enough of company esteem not just for the Dewa Agung but for all the lesser rulers as well, spent a few frustrating days trying to interest the Radja in his factory and his residence. It finally occurred to him to make a present of a fine sword and to renew assurances of the N.H.M. intentions with regard to the lead and the cannon. The cannon was in fact to be delivered two years later. It cost the company fl. 1,007.95, and it had been cunningly miscast so that the Dutch need never fear looking this gift gun in the mouth. The Radja himself seems never to have tested it out. He made it the nucleus of what was to become rather an extensive palace armory, to which, in 1849, in appreciation of his good behavior during the Dutch–Balinese wars, the government added a mate. The second cannon probably was not miscast; it seems to have come out of current military stock with which the Dutch themselves had just subdued the island.