The Malay Archipelago

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Map
Map: The Malay Archipelago
192
Chronology
1511 The Portuguese invade and take Malacca; Sultan Mahmud Syah flees to
the south and sets up his new capital in Bentan in the Riau-Lingga
archipelago.
1571 The Spanish occupy the Philippines and found Manila.
1619 The Dutch found Batavia.
1641 The Dutch conquer Malacca.
1669 The Dutch conquer Macassar; from this time, country traders from
Portugal, Britain, and Denmark could no longer deal in Macassarese
contraband. Displaced Portuguese factors and merchants relocated in
Timor, and the British and Danes fled to Bantam only to be expelled
from it in due course.
1699 Sultan Mahmud Syah of Johor-Riau is murdered by his nobles; this act
of treason marks the turning point in Malay world politics undermin-
ing as it does the special relationship between a Malay ruler and his
subjects which is founded on the idea of total obedience, unquestion-
ing allegiance, and the supernatural powers attributed to the ruler.
1743 The Bugis influence in the Malay world is sealed with Bugis control
over several peninsular Malay states and the kingdom of Johor-Riau.
1786 Francis Light, a country trader, takes possession of Penang in the name
of King George III.
1795 Napoleon conquers the Netherlands and Britain takes over Dutch pos-
sessions in the Malay Archipelago to prevent them falling into French
hands.
1816 Britain returns Malacca and other Dutch territories to the Netherlands.
1819 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles establishes Singapore as Britain’s main
entrepôt city in the Straits to rival Batavia.
1824 The Anglo-Dutch Treaty partitions the Malay Archipelago into two
spheres of influence; the Malay world is divided down the Straits of
Malacca where the British would confine their activities to the Malay
Peninsula or north of the line and the Dutch would control Sumatra,
Java, and islands south of Singapore.
1826 The formation of the Straits Settlements comprising Singapore, Malacca,
Penang, and Province Wellesley consolidates British presence in the
Malay world.
1833 The British Empire abolishes slavery.
1841 The Sultan of Brunei cedes Sarawak to James Brooke, who subsequently
becomes Rajah of Sarawak.
1846 With the help of Her Majesty’s Navy, Brooke launches a major attack on
pirate strongholds along the Saribas, Sekrang, and Rejang rivers in
Sarawak.
1868 Alfred Russel Wallace arrives in the Malay Archipelago. James Brooke dies
in England. Britain includes north Borneo under its sphere of influence.
1869 The Suez Canal opens.
193
194 Chronology
1873 Aceh wages war with the Dutch.
1874 The Pangkor Treaty is signed between Britain and the Malay state of
Perak. In return for help in a succession dispute, and for recognition as
the Sultan, Raja Abdullah invites the British Governor, Andrew Clarke,
to send a Resident to Perak. British involvement in the peninsular
Malay states begins to spread. The ‘forward movement’ of colonial
expansion begins to gain momentum. As more Malay states come
under British control, Residents are appointed to be the ‘indirect rulers’
of these states.
1883 Conrad sets eyes for the first time on the Far East after the vessel Pales-
tine, on which he is serving as second mate, catches fire near Muntok
and the crew is forced to abandon ship.
1885 Conrad sails for Singapore on board the Tilkhurst.
1886 Conrad becomes a naturalized British subject and obtains his master
mariner’s certificate.
1887 Conrad sails on the Highland Forest to Samarang, Java, during which he
sustains a sailing injury; he leaves Java for Singapore and, after recover-
ing in hospital, signs up as mate on the steamship Vidar. On this Arab-
owned steamer, Conrad sails to west Borneo and Celebes.
1888 Conrad is appointed captain of the Otago and sails from Bangkok to
Singapore and Sydney. He leaves the Malay Archipelago for the last
time.
1896 The Federated Malay States is formed to increase administrative effi-
ciency and rectify economic imbalance among the Malay states.
1901 The Netherlands East Indies proclaims the Ethical Policy.
1903 The Dutch declare Aceh conquered.
1908 Bali falls into Dutch hands as the last Balinese rulers fight to the death.
Budi Utomo is proclaimed as first official nationalist movement.
Glossary
adat: tradition; custom; source of customary law
alam Melayu: Malay world/universe
bangsa: this is rather difficult to translate given its wide distribution of meaning
in early modern Malay history; in the classical texts, it has a narrower defin-
ition of ‘descent’ or ‘lineage’; contemporary equivalent of ‘nation’ or ‘people’
Bendahara: a palace minister with duties akin to those of a prime minister
Daeng: a Bugis title of nobility (rendered ‘Dain’ by Conrad)
haji: a returned Muslim pilgrim who has just completed the Haj (the pilgrimage
to Mecca is one of the five pillars of Islam)
hikayat: history, chronicle, epic
jihad: holy struggle by which the faith is spread through force of arms; in the
earlier centuries in Southeast Asia, a rallying cry among Muslims to unite them
in their battle against Christian Europeans; it can refer to any holy cause
Karaeng: a Makassarese title granted to high-ranking nobles (Conrad’s ‘Karain’)
kerajaan: kingdom, the condition of having a raja; in contemporary usage,
‘government’
kongsi: brotherhood; company
lanun: Malay for ‘pirate’, ‘sea robber’; originating from ‘Illanun’, a seafaring tribe
from the Sulu-Mindanao region previously widely feared for their piratical
campaigns
masuk Melayu: literally, ‘enter Malaydom’; ‘become Malay’; assimilate into the
Malay community and civilization; adopt the culture, language, and religion
of Malays
mufti, sheikh al-ulama, sheikh al-Islam: high-ranking Muslim clerics with top reli-
gious positions within the Malay polity
negara: approximately, ‘country’, ‘state’
Nusantara: vast archipelago sprawling between Sumatra and New Guinea (some
definitions encompass an even wider area); nusa means ‘island’ or ‘place’ and
antara ‘in between’; geopolitical expression for the pan-Malay world
orang asli: aboriginals, proto-Malays
orang kaya besar: an honorific or a title used for a grandee, a palace minister/
official, or a nobleman
orang laut: literally, ‘sea people’; seafaring and riverine tribes many of whose
descendents today live in the Riau-Lingga and Sulu archipelagos
padri: Muslim radical group seeking to establish a stricter adherence to Islamic
tenets in Minangkabau in the mid-nineteenth century; ‘padri’ is said to be
derived from the Portuguese word for ‘priest’, that is, ‘padre’; its origin is also
thought to be ‘Pedir’, a place-name in Sumatra
Pangeran: in Brunei, a title for aristocrats; used in Java as well
Pata: probably a corruption of ‘patih’, an honorific used for Javanese noblemen
penghulu: village headman
peranakan: local-born or locally born in the diaspora; for example, the Chinese
Baba community in Malaysia and Singapore and their hybridized culture
195
196 Glossary
which is the result of long-standing commingling with local Malays; the
Chinese peranakan of Indonesia; the Jawi-Peranakan in Malaysia who are of
Indian-Muslim (Malabar) and Malay descent
raja/rajah: ruler, monarch
rakyat: subjects, citizens
Serani: Eurasian; (sing.)’Nasrani’, that is, ‘Nazarene’
sharia: Islamic laws
syed/sharif: male descendant or kinsman of the prophet Mohammad
tanah air: ‘land of water’; fatherland
Tengku/Tunku: title for Malay princes
ulama: Muslim scholar and teacher
Yamtuan: Johor-Bugis title for the ruler; an abbreviation of ‘Yang diPertuan’, ‘he
who is made Lord’; in present-day Malaysia, the ruler is the ‘Yang diPertuan
Agong’ (‘The Paramount He who is made Lord’ i.e. the Supreme Ruler)
Notes
Introduction
1. For a detailed account of Conrad’s excursions to the Far East, see Sherry,
1972: 33–51.
2. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 had carved the Malay Archipelago into two
parts or imperial ‘spheres of influence’ along the Straits of Malacca. The
British sphere is to the north of the dividing line and the Dutch zone is to the
south. Although real or imagined places like Berau, Patusan, Samburan,
Makassar, and Pulau Tujuh (Seven Isles) fall within the Dutch sphere as
demarcated in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, borders were ambiguous in
the ‘outer islands’ where control was nominal and allegiance was pledged
simply by the flying of Dutch flags and the utterance of verbal oaths of sub-
mission. As an embittered Almayer told off his Dutch visitors: ‘You have no
grip on this country’ (AF 138). The battle for the east coast of Borneo is a case
in point, historically as well as fictionally.
3. See Resink, 1968: 307–23.
4. Robert Hampson notes that ‘Clifford is in the tradition of the colonial admin-
istrator who is also an amateur scholar. Like Raffles and Brooke, he gathers
information about Malaysia in order to make himself a more efficient colon-
ist’ (Hampson, 2000: 27). For an excellent and insightful discussion of ‘the
development of a textual tradition of “writing Malaysia” from Marsden to
Brooke’, see Hampson, 2000: 26.
5. In his review of the story ‘Karain’, Hugh Clifford states that the piece ‘can
only be called Malay in Mr. Conrad’s sense’ (Clifford, 1904: 849).
6. Bernard Vlekke offers an explanation of the word’s etymology:
Its original meaning is ‘The other islands’ as seen from Java or Bali, hence
it took the more general meaning of ‘the outside world’, or ‘abroad’. In this
meaning it is used in fifteenth century Javanese texts. After having been
re-introduced by the Dutch archaeologist Brandes, it was taken up by
E.F. Douwes Dekker in the twenties of [the twentieth] century, to be used
as an Indonesian name for the whole of the Indies, though wrongly, from
the phil ologist’s point of view. (Vlekke, 1959: 400)
7. Throughout this book, spellings for place-names, titles, and concepts, may
differ: for example, Malacca and Melaka, Rhio and Riau, sayyid and syed, and
so on. Malacca or Melaka (the Malay spelling) refers to the historic port-city
on the west coast of the Malay peninsula. Its strategic location along the
Straits of Malacca (which served as a main waterway linking the western
world with the far east) had contributed to its rise as a major trading centre
for centuries. This same Malacca/Melaka also refers to the great Malay dyn-
astic kingdom and empire founded by Parameswara, a prince from Sumatra,
in the early fifteenth century. Upon his conversion to Islam, Melaka became
the first Muslim empire in Southeast Asia. The empire thrived until the
Portuguese invasion of 1511 which resulted in the forced relocation of
197
198 Notes
Melaka’s royal house. Melaka is arguably synonymous with Malays and
Melaka-Malay often refers to the civilization and culture of the Malays which
are considered to have attained their pinnacle during the reign of the
Melakan sultans.
8. At this juncture, it is timely to say a few words about the peranakan Chinese
societies in the Malay Archipelago. In the fifteenth century and perhaps
even earlier, Chinese settlers had set up home on the Malay peninsula,
including in Malacca. Intermarriage and interaction with local Malays (in
the days when religious differences were not yet a serious obstacle to mixed
marriages), coupled with cultural adaptability on the part of the Chinese,
had created peranakan societies domiciled in the region long before the
arrival of the British. A classic example would be the Baba community of
Malacca (in the second half of the nineteenth century, third-generation
Babas were already being born). In so far as the Babas have evolved a
unique, hybridized way of life, merging both Chinese and Malay elements,
and have adopted the Malay lingua franca (developing a patois called Baba
Malay), they may be said to have entered Malaydom. In the British era,
Babas were also drawn to the dominant power and identified themselves
with the British. C.M. Turnbull writes about the Babas’ ‘counter pull of
three different cultural loyalties’ (Turnbull, 1977: 105) and John Clammer
describes them thus: ‘By descent Chinese, by culture Sino-Malay and by
political allegiance British, their position is very uncertain’ (Clammer,
1979: i). Members of these communities, born in the British-ruled Straits
Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, were also known collect-
ively as the Straits Chinese. The Straits Chinese, or Straits-born Chinese,
are differentiated from later immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth
century and were known as sin keh or ‘newcomer’. Their contact with the
European official and commercial class made them very powerful middle-
men and business figures. P’ng Poh Seng writes that ‘In the heyday of
Straits Chinese prestige and influence it was an advantage to be a Baba,
and it is not far-fetched to assume that all Straits-born Chinese then liked
to be known as Babas. As a result the terms Baba, Straits Chinese, and
Straits-born Chinese came to be used synonymously’ (P’ng, 1969: 97–8).
The British presence as new masters of the Straits probably had something
to do with the emergence of their triple loyalty. Attracted to the new order
and the opportunities offered, the Straits Chinese, like Conrad’s Jim-Eng,
would lay claim to ‘whiteness’, moving back and forth with ease across
‘national’ borders and disrupting the writing of the British nation. This
may be said to be the Straits Chinese’s attempt to enter the fold of the
British!
9. The extent of cultural hybridization in the Malay world can also be seen in
commerce and shipping. Take for example, the Sino-Javanese junks that
dominated the waters in the precolonial era and the fact that even then the
Chinese had assimilated into Javanese civilization, many of them even
embracing Islam. Chinese commercial units of measurement such as kati
and picul entered the Malay and Javanese trading culture, while dacing, the
Malay/Javanese term for a measuring device, is from the Cantonese
toh-ch’ing.
Notes 199
10. The Andayas observe that in the eighteenth century,
[t]he very concept of what ‘Melayu’ signified had broadened far beyond
the narrow definition of Melaka’s early days. The language and culture
of the Riau-Johor court was still held up as a model, but ‘Malayness’ had
grown to incorporate the whole range of regional variations from Patani
to east Sumatra. ... transition to the changed political and economic
environment of the nineteenth century required time, and it was one of
the ironies of history that this is precisely what Western imperialism
could least afford to give. (Andaya and Andaya, 1982: 112)
It can be said that this process of cultural expansion ended with Western
colon ization and the imposition of Western concepts of race and nation. In
present-day Malaysia, the rhetoric of race is supplanted by that of ‘ethnicity’
with the creation of entities such as the Malaysian-Chinese and the
Malaysian-Indian. Before Independence, non-Malay ethnic groups had
struck an inter-ethnic bargain with the dominant ethnic Malays whereby
citizenship might be given to descendants of immigrants in return for priv-
ileges for the traditional inhabitants.
11. Cynthia Chou, in her fieldwork amongst the indigenous people or orang asli
of Riau (‘Rhio’ to the British, including Conrad), writes that her informants
referred to the alam Melayu (Malay world) as a territory comprising ‘a net-
work of genealogically related kingdoms, which are currently divided
between five nation-states – namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei,
and Thailand. The Malay world thus transcends the boundaries of these
nation-states’ (Chou, 1997: 148).
12. See McNair, 1972: 313–14.
1 The Collision of Indistinct Ideas
1. For a history of the white rajahs of Sarawak, see Payne, 1986, and Reece,
2004.
2. Dutch participation in the Malay world began with the VOC, the chartered
mercantile company set up in 1602, just two years after the EIC. For a history
of the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centur-
ies, see Boxer, 1979, 1988. There is a need to examine the origins of Kaspar
Almayer, Peter Willems, Hudig, Vinck, Captain Heemskirk, and Colonel (rtd.)
Van Wyk. All of these were either VOC servants or privateers who owed their
existence in the East Indies to the fact that the Dutch had traversed these
waters in search of cloves, nutmeg, and mace from the late sixteenth century
onwards. The Dutch nation was perhaps not very high on Conrad’s Pan-
European preferred-nation list, along with the Prussians, Russians, and
Germans. Glimpses of Dutch imperial rapacity and greed provide a foil to
the influential English country traders in Conrad’s Malay tales. A measure of
anti-Dutch sentiment is also traceable, displayed either explicitly by the
characters themselves, or implicitly, by authorial intrusion. The owner of the
schooner-yacht Hermit wants to expose the Dutch colonial system. Resink
points out that the yacht is correctly bound for Batavia because ‘only on Java
could the “Dutch colonial system” actually be studied’ (Resink, 1968: 309).
200 Notes
Dutch territorial/legal control over the archipelago was largely confined to
Java at the time although gunboats and Dutch agents would ensure that
other parts of the archipelago paid nominal allegiance to Batavia. Arguably,
most of the ‘various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago’ (TU 3) or
anti-colonial predilections that are reported in Conrad’s East are directed
against the Dutch (‘the hated Orang Blanda’ [AF 82], ‘the hostilities be-
tween Dutch and Malays’ [AF 81]) and the Spanish (‘He will make it hot for
the caballeros’ [TU 54]), rather than the British. Eduard Douwes Dekker’s
novel Max Havelaar (which Conrad had read) highlights Dutch avarice and
oppression of their subjects. The history of Dutch atrocities in the archipel-
ago, including the depopulation of the Banda islands and Ambon through
genocidal policies, cruel trade monopolies, and other draconian measures,
had created a hatred and distrust for the Dutch among the islanders from
the seventeenth century on. Back in Europe, many Dutch people had been
appalled by the villainy of their countrymen out in the Indies. The Heeren
XVII or Lords Seventeen, directors of the VOC, were alarmed at the scale of
the destruction in the Spice Islands perpetrated by mercilessly resolute gov-
ernors like Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1629). A critic in the Netherlands
had apparently denounced the company’s many servants and agents in this
manner:
What honourable men will break up their homes here to take employ-
ment as executioners and jailers of a herd of slaves, and to range them-
selves amongst those free men who by their maltreatment and massacre
of the Indies have made the Dutch notorious throughout the Indies as
the cruellest nation of the whole world? (quoted in Corn, 1998: 194)
The extirpation of spice trees, the extreme methods through which the sup-
ply of spices was controlled by the Dutch in order to cause an artificial
increase in the price or to stem smuggling and the selling of spice to non-
Dutch traders, caused many villagers to lose their livelihoods. To be sure,
some of Conrad’s Dutch characters are social outcasts and the pitiable vic-
tims of a notorious colonial history marked by the lust for lucre and power.
On the sufferings brought about by Dutch trade monopolies in the Moluccas,
see Vlekke, 1946: 120–1.
3. After Sultan Mahmud Syah and his followers fled Malacca in 1511 following
the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, they set up a new capital on the island
of Bentan in the Riau-Lingga archipelago. This re-established royal house
eventually became the Riau-Johor or Johor-Riau kingdom.
4. ‘Chryse’ is Greek for ‘golden’, hence, ‘Khersonese’. For a historical geography
of the Malay peninsula in precolonial times, see Wheatley, 1961.
5. The national identity of the Danish Nielsen a.k.a. Nelson is noteworthy. The
Danish East India Company was one of the contenders in the scramble for
trade in the Far East, although it would be easily surpassed by the EIC (English
East India Company) and the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische
Compagnie, or United East India Company) Nielsen had been ‘one of us for
years’ (TLS 147). Nielsen or Nelson’s admission into the fraternity of expatri-
ate gentlemen-sailors and merchants is closely tied to his having served
English firms and married an English girl. ‘One of us’ refers to the English
nation as much as it points to whiteness and a common vocation.
6. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869.
Notes 201
7. For historical data to support this statement, see Pelras, 1996. He describes
how the Wajo Bugis were in conflict with the Bone Bugis (‘national risings’)
in the late seventeenth century and how religious hostilities were also
endemic in the resistance against Christianization (‘religious disturbances’).
Boni or Bone was also a colony of the Makassarese kingdom of Goa at the
time. Like the Johor sultan who had struck an alliance with the Dutch in
order to try to recapture Melaka from the Portuguese, Boni nobles and their
exiled prince, Arung Palakka, offered themselves as an auxiliary fighting
force to the Dutch in order to avenge themselves on Goa/Makassar. Bone’s
Dutch-backed victory over its erstwhile conqueror Goa/Makassar in 1669 had
been a landmark event; it set in motion a chain of emigrations among the
South Sulawesi peoples (i.e. Bugis/Makassar migrants) fleeing civil wars in
their homelands and altered their patterns of navigation in the Malay
Archipelago. Among those peoples affected by the fall of Makassar and who
would later make up Conrad’s Bugis ‘heroes’ were the Wajo Bugis. Christian
Pelras comments that the Wajo Bugis, for one, ‘never accepted Bone’s suzer-
ainty, although after an armed rebellion was put down by a joint Bone-Dutch
force, they were seemingly content to express their wish for freedom through
successful trading enterprises overseas’ (Pelras, 1996: 144–5). To be sure, Bugis
migrations, from the seventeenth century to this day, are also economic strat-
egies motivated by the desire to find wealth and material stability abroad.
8. Srivijaya was the leading entrepôt state/empire in the archipelago from the
late seventh century to the thirteenth. This Buddhist maritime empire was
based in Sumatra and is synonymous with its capital, Palembang. For a his-
tory of Srivijaya, see Wolters, 1970.
9. The prime minister during the reign of Hayam Wuruk (a Majapahit king),
Gajah Mada, is reputed to be the ‘first to succeed in unifying the whole
archipelago under one authority’ and ‘the first conscious empire-builder of
Indonesia. Never before had the islands been united under one government,
nor did this happen again until the Netherlanders completed their con-
quest’ (Vlekke, 1946: 39–40).
10. The British interregnum of 1811–16 was the result of Napoleon Bonaparte’s
conquest of the Netherlands. The Stadhouder, Prince William V of Orange,
issued a directive to all Dutch colonies in the Indies to surrender all author-
ity to the British who would administer the colonies until such time that
the Netherlands was freed from French occupation.
11. See Bastin, 1954.
12. For more on the Treaty, see Mills, 2003: 86–98. On Anglo-Dutch rivalry in
the Malay world leading up to the Treaty, see Tarling, 1962.
13. For a history of the English East India Company, see Keay, 1991.
14. Liberalism in the Netherlands saw to it that slavery officially ceased to exist
in Batavian-controlled territory on 1 January 1860. However, slavery and
the trade and smuggling of slaves continued to exist despite their express
prohibition. According to Islamic law, only non-Muslims could be enslaved.
In the peninsular Malay realms, slaves were likely to be pagan aboriginals
(orang asli) from the interior. After 1874, slavery was abolished in the Malay
states controlled by the British; however, as Khoo Kay Kim notes: ‘The abo-
lition of slavery freed many bondsmen but did not uplift the status of the
rakyat’ (Khoo, 1991: 128).