Pepper (16 page)

The overriding concern of the British was profits, and despite increasing efforts to force people to cultivate more pepper, the Company continued to lose money. A typical dispatch from the Company in 1755 complained of the drain on funds following another disappointing pepper harvest. Company officials wrote to Fort Marlborough: “… encreasing the investment of pepper is the material point in view for the interest of the Company, and if a sufficient quantity is not procured for loadings for two ships in a year at least, notwithstanding the great care and economy in your management and the reduction of expences to the utmost prudent extent, we are satisfied our settlements on the West Coast will be a continual drain [on] our estate…”

The Company men in London pressed for more frequent surveys of the residencies to ensure that production would meet quotas. Yet such efforts proved fruitless; the pepper enterprise in southwest Sumatra did not turn a profit for the Company. National pride and an unwillingness to cede the region to the Dutch kept the English Company in Sumatra year after year.

The Company never lost its conviction that the failure to grow enough pepper stemmed from the inherent laziness of the inhabitants. Letters from Fort Marlborough were filled with accusations about indolent and lazy “Mallays,” and threats about disciplinary actions against the most recalcitrant. In 1746 Company officials in Fort Marlborough asserted: “The People of Manna and Laye [Lais] Residencies have really been remiss [in cultivating pepper], and as the mallays are a stubborn, ignorant people, it is very Difficult task to make them sensible of their Interest.… We find by experience that the Lenity which Your Honours have always recommended to us hath [no] Effect upon such Illiterate Dispositions, and that it is highly Necessary [that] We should for once Act with some Strictness towards the most undeserving.”

The same letter laments that several Bugis people had quit and returned to their homeland. “They are reported to be a bold Trusty people when employed at Ceylon, The Malabar Coast, or other places where the Dutch use them, but here they intermix with the Mallays and soon Contract their Lazy, Idle, Disposition, which was not at first Apprehended.”

Even the scholar William Marsden, who studied the Malay language and was a more sympathetic observer, refers to the “natural indolence of the natives,” although he at least acknowledges the “smallness of the advantage” pepper cultivation brought to them. The price paid for pepper in the British districts was quite low, Marsden observed, “affording to each man an income of not more than from eight to twelve dollars yearly…” He attributed the cheap price to Benkoolen's isolation, and noted that pepper cultivation was more successful in other parts of Sumatra. “In the northern countries of the island, where people are numerous and their ports good,” he wrote, referring to the pepper ports that had sprung up along the northwestern coast of Sumatra, “they are found to be more independent also, and refuse to cultivate plantations upon any other terms than those on which they can deal with private traders.”

The Benkoolen settlement and its residencies were difficult to approach by boat. This had deterred the Chinese and other Eastern merchants from buying pepper in southwest Sumatra. Without competition, the British could pay low prices for pepper. The British did attempt to attract the Chinese to Benkoolen, hoping that it would be seen as an alternative destination to Batavia, where a large number of Chinese immigrants had settled. Although Benkoolen never became an important destination for the Chinese, the settlement did have a “China bazaar” and tea shops and other businesses, and under Joseph Hurlock, the governor of Benkoolen from 1746 to 1752, most of the pepper grown in the English residencies was sent to China rather than to Europe. In the 1750s, exports resumed to Europe.

Company men couldn't imagine that their own disastrous policies caused their economic problems in Benkoolen. To boost pepper production, they entertained the bright idea of relocating people from the hills to the coastal areas to cultivate pepper. “This country being very thinly inhabited,” officials wrote in 1754, “it should be strongly recommended to the gentlemen in the management of affairs here to encourage the people from the hills to come and settle upon the sea coast. We have been treating with two of their chiefs, who have promised to bring down all their subjects to the number of about five or six hundred families.”

When relocation proved futile, another bright idea was hatched—plant valuable nutmeg and clove trees from the Banda Islands and the Moluccas in Benkoolen. This was one of the great dreams of all rivals in the spice trade who wanted to break the Dutch spice monopolies. The English and the French had each schemed to steal seedlings from the far eastern Spice Islands and plant them elsewhere. Finally, a one-armed Frenchman named Pierre Poivre (Peter Pepper; yes, this really was his name), a missionary-turned-botanist who wrote some of the earliest works about forest conservation, successfully accomplished this act of botanical piracy, smuggling nutmegs and cloves to the island of Mauritius in the 1750s. Another European adventurer in Asia, Poivre came from a wealthy family of silk merchants in Lyons and at one time worked for the French East India Company, which was founded in 1664. As a young man, he traveled as a missionary to China and Southeast Asia, and later lost an arm in a battle in Batavia. In the 1760s he was the administrator of Mauritius and Réunion, two islands in the Indian Ocean that were frequented by pepper traders on their way to India and Indonesia.

The British had their chance to transplant nutmeg and clove seedlings from the far eastern islands when they temporarily wrested control of the Moluccas from the Dutch in 1796. They brought the seedlings to West Sumatra. Earlier attempts to grow the spices in Benkoolen had failed, but now large numbers of seedlings could be transported without fear of Dutch reprisals. Although the horticultural experiment was a success—between 1811 and 1816 some 42,390 pounds of nutmeg and 6,155 pounds of cloves were shipped from Benkoolen to India and England—the costs of obtaining the spices from the spice islands and establishing plantations in Benkoolen outweighed profits. However, until the very end of the Company's involvement in Benkoolen, officials at Fort Marlborough hoped that the nutmeg and cloves planted in Company and privately owned plantations could save the pepper residencies.

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The settlement was in especially bad shape when Sir Stamford Raffles and his second wife, Sophia, arrived in Benkoolen in 1818, and the new Lieutenant Governor was deeply shaken by what he saw. The system of forced cultivation had long failed to meet the demands of the Company, and the people of southwestern Sumatra had been crushed. Soon after arriving in Benkoolen, he wrote to the Company's directors in London: “It will be pretty obvious that the population is for the time as effectually enslaved to the local Resident as the Africans of the West [Indies] are to their proprietors with this difference only that the former having no permanent property in the people, and only a temporary interest in their services, has consequently a great inducement to exact them with severity.”

Encountering a desperate, depopulated country, Raffles immediately attributed the loss of its inhabitants to the Company's harsh policies. “Of the desolating effects of this system I can hardly convey to your Honble. Court anything like an adequate idea,” he wrote. “The country has been nearly depopulated, and the remaining labourers charged with the additional duties of those who are no more to be found have nearly lost all character and energy. If a planter does not cultivate his stipulated number of vines, or deliver his proper produce of pepper, he is punished corporally or otherwise at the discretion of the local Resident, without any reference to the chief authority at Bencoolen. Such, in short, have been the results of this system that latterly the Government have been obliged to bring down rice at an enormous expense from Bengal [India] for the support of these poor wretches. Under such a system where is the motive for energy or industry!”

An abolitionist, Raffles was particularly upset by the slaves in Benkoolen, and he ended his letter with an urgent appeal “in favor of the unfortunate African. I allude to the Company's public slaves, of whom there are men, and women, and children, upwards of two hundred now at this settlement—most born at Bencoolen, being the children of slaves originally purchase by the East India Company. They have hitherto been considered as indispensable for the duties of the place, and it has been asserted that they are happier than free men. I cannot be expected to concur in either of these views. They are employed in loading and unloading the Company's ships, and other hard work, for which free labourers ought to be engaged. No care having been taken of their morals, many of them are dissolute and depraved—the women being in promiscuous intercourse with the public convicts for the purpose (as I was informed by the superintendent) ‘of keeping up the breed'—and the children left to a state of nature, vice and wretchedness.”

Finally, an intelligent, thoughtful Company man who could acknowledge the evils of the British system had arrived in West Sumatra. With his characteristic energy and dedication to “liberal” imperialism—that empire was of the greatest benefit to those natives under the care of the “enlightened” British—Raffles abolished slavery in West Sumatra and set up a system of “free” pepper cultivation, although natives who didn't grow pepper still had to pay an annual tribute of two dollars, a huge sum of money to them, or deliver fifty pounds of pepper to Company storehouses.

Raffles went about reforming the residencies with the zeal of a headmaster, modifying harsh laws regarding debtors; removing British officials from the southern residencies and replacing them with Bugis people; abolishing cockfighting; and rescinding regulations banning men from bearing their creese, the long dagger, often with a wavy blade. Lancaster had received one as a gift from the sultan of Aceh in 1602. Charles Lockyer, an independent trader who traveled to Sumatra, had written in 1711 that “Mallayans, at work or play are never dressed till their naked daggers are in their girdles. Nor do they ever walk abroad without swords and targets, or other weapons in their hands, besides the daggers.” Raffles only learned of this after local chiefs told him that it was a disgrace to be prohibited from showing their weapons.

The story of Raffles in Benkoolen is a grace note in the otherwise miserable story of the English East India Company's 140-year rule in West Sumatra. Although he was an imperialist, his genuine interest in the people of Malaysia and Indonesia is remarkable for a Company man. “What saves him is the large proportion in his make-up of humanitarian principle,” wrote Emily Hahn, one of his biographers. “He provides what excuses there are for the imperialistic pattern. His appearance coincided more or less with a merging of the Crown and John Company's interests. Perhaps because of this he was a departure from the type of man who, before him, enlarged the influence of the East India Company abroad.”

Raffles was not a stranger to Indonesia. He had previously spent nearly five years as Governor of Java, which the British had seized from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars. The British held on to the island until the French were defeated, and then gave Java back to the Dutch, which put Raffles out of a job. This bizarre situation arose because the British fear of imperialist France outweighed their mistrust of Holland. In some ways, Benkoolen resembled Java, where Raffles had endeavored to reverse forced cultivation and other vicious Dutch policies by instituting a more humane and equitable system of government and work.

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Based on his upbringing, Raffles seems like an unlikely candidate for knighthood. The son of an impoverished sea captain, he was born in 1781 on a boat off the coast of Jamaica. Although he received little formal education, he managed to find work as a clerk with the Company at the age of fourteen. Over the next ten years, he rose through the ranks, based on his studiousness, intelligence, and ability to cultivate relationships with influential men. The young Raffles got a big break in 1805, when he was sent to Penang, an island off the west coast of Malaysia that the British called Prince of Wales Island, as a member of the new governor's staff. The British hoped the island would become a major pepper-producing colony, a replacement of Malacca, but its fortunes never amounted to much. (Aceh, in fact, offered a better location than Penang for the British to refit their fleets and to procure pepper, betel, and other goods. In 1762, the British appealed to the Acehnese sultanate to allow a trading base, but after repeated rejections of the Company's proposals, Penang was established in 1786.)

In Penang, the ever-studious Raffles learned how to speak Malay, which few other company men had even attempted. He also became indispensable to the workings of the colony, and most important, won the patronage of Lord Minto, governor-general of India, with his incisive argument against relocating the inhabitants of Malacca to Penang. The Penang Council had wanted to move everyone out of Malacca and destroy the city in the hopes of reviving the fortunes of Penang. Raffles's persuasive arguments convinced them otherwise.

In 1810 Lord Minto recruited his protégé to serve in Malacca, where Raffles was expected to gather information on Java and help plan its invasion to rid the island of the then-menacing French. Fifteen years earlier, the British had wrested Malacca from the Dutch when France invaded Holland and annexed the country. The British suspected that the French, whose fleets were now in Java, would use the island as a launching pad to take over Indonesia and Malaysia. Lord Minto had already put a stop on French designs to raid India when he handily dispatched the French from the islands of Mauritius and Reunion off the coast of Madagascar. Now he wanted to do the same in Java.

It is back in Malacca that we catch a glimpse of Raffles thanks to Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who became one of Malaysia's leading literary scholars. Abdullah was only about thirteen years old when Raffles gave him a job as a copyist in his office. The young boy, who had already earned money by writing Koranic texts and teaching religion, was enthralled by Raffles and his first wife, Olivia. His description of Raffles, published in his autobiography,
The Hikayat Abdullah
, offers one of the most affectionate portrayals of the man.