Pepper (18 page)

The Company, however, did not reward Raffles. After he spent six years in Benkoolen, it shut down the settlement, and all of its money-draining residencies along the southwestern coast of Sumatra, relinquishing these possessions to the Dutch. During his years in Sumatra, four of Raffles's children had died, and years of overwork and illness had broken his health. When he left in 1824, he also lost all his wealth. The ship that was to carry him and Sophia home to England caught fire off Benkoolen. It contained his money and personal property—his extensive natural history collections, rare books, art and artifcacts from Malaysia and Indonesia, along with all of his own manuscripts, documents, and maps. The couple was saved, but everything he owned was lost. The ship also carried a “perfect Noah's ark.” Raffles wrote: “… there was scarce an unknown animal, bird, beast, or fish, or an interesting plant, which we had not on board: a living tapir, a new species of tiger, splendid pheasants, &c, domesticated for the voyage…”

Even Malaysian literature suffered an incalculable loss. Abudullah wrote that when he heard about the fire, his “imagination reeled to think of all the works in Malay and other languages, centuries old, which he [Raffles] collected from many countries, all utterly lost.” Raffles and Sophia gamely picked up their lives and took another boat back to London, but he never recovered his health or his money. The man “who spoke in smiles” died two years later at the age of forty-five.

*   *   *

In 1824 the English and Dutch reached an agreement that was to become infamous. It defined the spheres of English and Dutch colonialism in Southeast Asia, and the pepper trade as well, and enlarged Britain's presence in India. By that time, the Dutch East India Company, which had always operated as a quasi-government entity, had been dissolved, and the Dutch government had officially taken its place. The English East India Company was still limping along, but its days, too, were numbered, and the British government had for all intents and purposes replaced it. So the negotiations were between two European countries interested in the profits of Asian trade. Despite centuries of rivalry, war, and hatred, each knew that the time had come to reach an understanding, and Sumatra was sacrificed in order for the agreement to proceed.

Like a piece on a chessboard, the English gave Sumatra to the Dutch, and Dutch-controlled Malacca, which had been bounced among various European trading powers for hundreds of years, was handed over to the British once again. Singapore became a British free port. Now the British could protect their interests in the Strait of Malacca and secure a protected route to China and its lucrative trade. The British at last had more than an “inch of ground to stand upon Between the Cape of Good Hope and China.”

For the Dutch, the 1824 aggreement gave them the Indonesian archipelago. To obtain the vast collection of islands, they had to cede their territorial possessions and factories in India, which stretched along the southwestern Malabar Coast and the eastern Coromandel Coast and into Bengal, and give up any claim to Singapore.

The handover of Sumatra was stated in the dry language of the treaty: “The factory of Fort Marlborough, and all the English Possessions on the Island of Sumatra, are hereby ceded to His Netherland Majesty; and his Britannick Majesty further engages that no British Settlement shall be formed on that Island, nor any Treaty concluded by British Authority, with any Native Prince, Chief, or State therein.”

After 140 years in Sumatra, the English were finally leaving. The men who had staked their fortunes on growing nutmeg and clove trees in plantations in Benkoolen were dismayed. These Englishmen argued that the Company had encouraged their activities to offset the Dutch spice monopoly in the far eastern Spice Islands and had repeatedly promised to support and protect the plantations. The spice planters believed that they were “rendering an acceptable service to Great Britain, and were in fact promoting a great national object.” Now the Company was pulling out when they had not yet earned an adequate return on their investment. “… the Bencoolen planter is as effectually ruined as if every tree in his possession were torn up by the roots,” the planters bitterly complained.

What about the people of Sumatra? When the Dutch took over, they reinstituted the forced cultivation of pepper. The people were left to their fate. At the handover ceremonies in 1825, a senior local ruler surveyed the gathering of Dutch and English officials and protested. But there was little that he could do. Sumatra had become a pawn in an imperial land swap between colonial powers. “… Against this transfer of my country I protest,” the ruler said. “Who is there possessed of authority to hand me and my countrymen, like so many cattle, over to the Dutch or to any other power? If the English are tired of us, let them go away, but I deny their right to hand us over to the Dutch … We were never conquered, and I now tell the English and Dutch gentlemen here assembled that, had I the power and the will, I would resist this transfer to the knife. I am however a poor man, have no soldiers to cope with yours and must submit.…”

Historians point out that the 1824 treaty was deliberately vague about territorial ambitions. As long as the Dutch limited their interests to the archipelago and kept out the French and other rivals, the British were reluctant to intervene as long as their treasured route to China was protected. In imperial terms, the treaty was a tacit acknowledgment that Indonesia “belonged” to the Dutch while Malaysia was in the British sphere of influence. It forbade Britain to establish settlements in Sumatra, but it did not preclude trade with the island. Under its articles, the Dutch could not charge the British more than double the duty charged to Dutch vessels in Dutch-controlled Indonesian ports, and native rulers in the eastern seas could not sign an exclusive treaty with either the Dutch or the British. All previous treaties were abrogated.

*   *   *

The people of Sumatra were largely unaware of the subterranean currents running through the 1824 agreement that secured the Dutch and English realms of Asian trade. The Acehnese still believed they would remain independent of the Dutch because of the treaty brokered by Raffles in 1819, which had promised a defensive alliance between Britain and Aceh, protecing Aceh from the Dutch. They were further lulled by a note attached to the 1824 treaty that officially recognized their independence, but it is doubtful that the British would have come to Aceh's defense if the Dutch had attacked Aceh then.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the Dutch became increasingly fearful that Aceh, a strategic gem, could not remain outside of their control. After the Javanese wars of the 1820s, the Dutch moved against Sumatra, subduing Jambi in the 1830s and other regions along the eastern coast in the 1850s. When they had secured most of Sumatra, they finally moved against Aceh in 1873, after a new Anglo-Dutch treaty was signed that explicitly gave the Dutch permission to intervene in Aceh. The Acehnese reached out to Turkey, Britain, and the United States, but their pleas were ignored.

However, the fiercely independent people of northern Sumatra, who since the time of Iskandar Muda had shown remarkable resilience in the face of the European onslaught, would not submit to foreign rule easily. The Acehnese would wage a courageous defense of their land, surprising the Dutch with the strength of their resistance.

The Dutch attacked the seat of power in Banda Aceh in March 1873. Surprisingly, the Dutch soldiers were ill prepared for battle and the force retreated after its commander was killed. Later that year, a larger, better-equipped expedition was launched, and this time the palace of the sultanate was overtaken and the city fell to the Dutch. Rather than being the end of the conflict, however, this proved to be just the beginning of a long war that would eventually claim the lives of ten thousand Dutch and some fifty thousand Acehnese.

After Aceh fell, local rulers elsewhere in northern Sumatra immediately rallied to defend their land, and when those uprisings did not succeed, the war took on the trappings of a religious crusade. The local ulamā, or clergy, organized the resistance. In 1885, Teungku Cik di Tiro, a leader of the resistance, appealed to his fellow Acehnese in Dutch-occupied zones: “Do not let yourself be afraid of the strength of the kafir [infidels], their fine possessions, their equipment, and their good soldiers, in comparison to our strength, our property, our equipment and the Muslim people, for no one is strong, no one is rich, and no one has fine armies but the great God … and no one gives victory or defeat than God…”

When the tides of the war turned against the Acehnese in the 1890s, the tenor of the argument made by resistance leaders changed to one promoting the glories of life after death, echoing the language used by Islamist extremists today to recruit suicide bombers.

… to die a shahid [martyr] is nothing. It is like being tickled until we fall and roll over …

Then comes a heavenly princess,

Who cradles you in her lap and wipes away the blood,

Her heart all yours …

If the heavenly princesses were visible,

Everyone would go to fight the Dutch.

It took the Dutch some thirty years to conquer Aceh, and in the years that followed the Acehnese remained bitterly opposed to Dutch rule. When the Japanese occupied the island in World War II, the Acehnese welcomed them. Their hatred for the Dutch overrode their feelings about the Japanese.

Sumatra was the world's leading producer of pepper from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the berry exacted an awful price from the people of this island. After WWII, its extensive plantations were largely abandoned and, although pepper is still grown in Indonesia today, Sumatra never regained its prewar eminence in the trade.

 

Six

The Dutch Terror

IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, ANIMOSITY DEEPENED BETWEEN THE DUTCH AND ENGLISH AFTER TEN ENGLISHMEN WERE BEHEADED BY THE DUTCH ON THE ISLAND OF AMBOYNA. ELSEWHERE, THE POLICIES OF VOC GENERAL JAN PIETERSZOON COEN LED TO THE GENOCIDE OF THE BANDANESE PEOPLE. COEN SET UP BATAVIA AS THE VOC'S HEADQUARTERS IN ASIA, WHICH BECAME A GREAT SEAPORT.

“Your Honours should know by experience that trade in Asia must be driven and maintained under the protection and favour of Your Honours' own weapons, and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the trade; so that we cannot carry on trade without war nor war without trade,”

—
J
AN
P
IETERSZOON
C
OEN TO THE
G
ENTLEMEN 17, THE DIRECTORS OF THE
D
UTCH
E
AST
I
NDIA
C
OMPANY, FROM
B
ANTAM,
J
AVA, 1614

“I believe there are nowhere greater thieves.”

—
E
NGLISH PIRATE
W
ILLIAM
D
AMPIER, 1685, REFERRING TO
D
UTCH SEAMEN

Only two years after the English East India Company received its charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600, the VOC was established. Soon millions of pounds of pepper began pouring into Europe, setting the stage for an intense rivalry between the two northern European trading companies that would last some two hundred years. By 1621, the total market for pepper in Europe was about 7.2 million pounds. In Indonesia, the then-new competition between the English and Dutch led to a considerable rise in the purchase price of pepper. They were bidding against each other, and consequently the price for ten Bantam sacks of pepper, about 654 pounds, had jumped fivefold from 1600 to 1620, enriching the rulers of Jambi and Palembang on the east coast of Sumatra. Producers in Aceh, Jambi, Palembang, and Bantam cleared more land to plant pepper gardens to meet the growing demand from Europe, as well as the ever-expanding market in China.

Elsewhere, however, the demand for more spices did not enrich the native inhabitants of Indonesia. In the Banda Islands, the only place in the world where nutmeg trees grew and where the natives were dependent on imported food for survival, the VOC ruthlessly pursued its quest to gain exclusive control of the nutmeg (and mace) trade. Violence had erupted almost as soon as Dutch and English company ships appeared in the far eastern islands.

When the rise in the purchase price of spices threatened the profits of both companies, and politics persuaded the Dutch to maintain good relations with the English, the two rivals were compelled to consider an option loathsome to them—cooperation. In an attempt to keep a lid on the cost of buying spices in Indonesia, the mercantile companies signed a treaty in 1619 that gave the VOC two-thirds of the trade in cloves and nutmegs, with the remainder going to the English East India Company. The pepper trade at Bantam was to be divided equally between the two, eliminating bidding on the spice. Any problems between the companies were to be resolved by the English sovereign and the States-General in Holland. Each company was also supposed to provide for the defense of their common interests, obliging the English to help pay for Dutch forts—a stipulation that was almost guaranteed to sink the agreement.

The Dutch in Asia did not know about the political forces that shaped the mutual trade agreement. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the brutal governor-general of the VOC's trade in Asia from 1619 to 1623 and from 1627 to 1629, couldn't believe such a treaty existed. Denouncing it as a gift to the English East India Company, he complained to his bosses in Amsterdam that the English “could not pretend to a single grain of sand of the Moluccas, Ambon or the Banda Islands.” He implored: “if you, gentlemen, want great and notable deeds in the honour of God and for the prosperity of our country, so relieve us from the English.”

Coen, who studied bookkeeping in his youth, was the antithesis of the tolerant Dutch mercantilist associated with the glory days of Holland in the seventeenth century. Advocating the ruthless enforcement of the VOC's spice monopolies, he once promoted the idea of colonizing the Spice Islands with Dutch colonists who would grow their own food with the help of slave laborers. Even the VOC wondered how native islanders would survive under this scheme, noting that “there is no profit at all in an empty sea, empty countries, and dead people.” Rising quickly anyway in the ranks of the company, Coen first sailed to Asia in 1607 at the age of twenty, and only a few years later became the commander of two VOC ships sailing to the far eastern islands. In 1619, when he was thirty-two years old, Coen attained the most powerful position in the VOC's Asian network by being appointed Governor-General. Wielding the power of the VOC, he immediately went about the business of ensuring that the company would have exclusive trade agreements with the inhabitants of the islands.