The Shallow Seas

by Dawn Farnham

  Eerens introduced them to his guest of honour, with many bows. Seated in a corner of the room, dressed in a blue and red serge general’s uniform covered in gold braid, stars and crosses, was a portly, red-faced, bald-pated, middle-aged man with a bushy white beard, a smelly meerschaum clasped between his yellow teeth. This was His Serene Highness, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, a relative, so they were informed, with many condescending looks, of the King of the Netherlands.

  The Duke did not rise to greet them, merely looking up and grunting, then downing a full glass of brandy. Nathanial concealed a smile and directed Charlotte’s gaze to his feet, which were shod in ancient and worn red velvet slippers, through which a gnarled toenail could be glimpsed.

  Charlotte and Nathanial covered their mouths with their hands and Takouhi simply looked scandalised. Other guests emerged—le tout-Semarang, Charlotte supposed—and servants brought drinks. Nathanial knew something of this old Duke. He was a distant relative of the King, a military man who, through his profligate stupidity, had lost a fortune and, through his arrogance and ignorance had lost the lives of a regiment of men during the Napoleonic Wars. To get rid of him, he had been sent out to the colonies, given the honorary title of Army Commander, supported by payments from the national treasury. Having been very rich, he was now very mean, and a land where he had never to pay for the labour of his menials suited him very well. He had a house in Weltevreden, where he grew onions and went about under a yellow umbrella carried by a slave.

  “Doubtless these visits to the provinces allow him to exercise economies, for I understand he has been in Semarang already for three weeks, living on the hospitality of his hosts, who, I would guess, dare not refuse.”

  Nathanial shook his head at this folly but before he could continue, Mevrouw Eerens came up to Charlotte to take her off to the ladies’ side of the room. This division of the sexes was frequently relaxed in drawing rooms in Batavia, but Charlotte quickly realised that provincial Java adhered to old principles as if they were biblical law; men and women were separated literally like the sheep and goats would be on a certain day. The men had gathered on the verandah, where the gin and brandy flowed, smoking cigars and talking desultorily amongst themselves; Nathanial occasionally threw glances of desperation in Charlotte’s direction.

  Whilst Takouhi and Valentijna chatted in one corner, the other ladies, led by Mevrouw Eerens, who knew very well how rich the Manouks were, questioned Charlotte closely on her life in Batavia, admiring her dress and jewels, requesting, without the slightest embarrassment it seemed, the price of every garment and object on her person. It did not take Charlotte long to see that as a rich white European woman she found a very high place in her hostess’s regard. Mevrouw Eerens’s attitude to Takouhi was one of polite deference to her wealth, but it was plain that Valentijna was placed in a much lower position, not only by her husband’s inferior status but by her own mestizo bloodline. Charlotte understood that Valentijna’s marriage had been a match of genuine affection, and, despite her feelings for this young woman, was somewhat sorry for her. It was not easy to succeed in government service without the approval of the ruling class. Her looks, her status in Batavian society, and the wealth Tigran had bestowed on her had been gifted to her husband, a man of ordinary origins, and these had assured his present position. Charlotte hoped that the Assistant Resident would continue to appreciate these advantages.

  The clock struck resoundingly throughout the residence. It was eight o’clock, and, in unison, all the men took out their watches and set them right; their countenances brightened and each sought the eyes of his wife. In a moment, the couples had come together and within two they had left. Just as in the court of Louis XIV, acte de presence had been made. Dinner was announced. With a resounding Kreuzmillionen Himmel Donnerwetter! the Duke rose, mustering a greater animation than Charlotte had thought him capable of, and, grabbing the arm of his hostess, propelled her towards the dining room.

  After dinner, the card table appeared. The Duke packed himself off to bed with a large bottle of brandy and without so much as a by-your-leave as soon as the dinner was over, and, in the absence of a higher power, the Resident reigned. The Assistant Resident rushed to his superior’s side as soon as the cards were brought out. Mevrouw Eerens told Charlotte that her husband adored card games, and it was fortunate that his assistant shared the same passion and came over three times a week to spend his evenings in this diverting amusement which she herself could not abide. Nathanial made sure they knew he did not play. Nicolaus, despite his reluctance, out of feeling for his brother-in-law, allowed himself to be called on to make a third.

  “It is most admirable,” Nathanial said at Charlotte’s side. “Thus, not armed with a sword but with a pack of cards, patience and stoical courage, the low-born but ambitious man must endure his trial until the object of his ambition—preferment, high official honour, a Residency of his own perhaps—shall come his way. Let’s hope it shall not be long coming, for the man looks as if his heart grows fainter with every passing month.”

  Charlotte recognised what Nathanial had told her. The Resident of the Java station was as much a little king as his predecessor, the merchant, had been in the days of the VOC. To his subjects, his gold emblazoned cap was a crown. He travelled with the gilt umbrella raised over his head like a royal canopy, revered by the native chiefs as their “elder brother.” The social life of the station was exactly what he chose, for the man lived in an atmosphere of adulation. A lack of humour or an abundance of vanity in his composition would mean that he would certainly take his exalted situation very seriously and exact strict homage.

  After several games, Takouhi rescued Nicolaus and the party broke up. As they took their leave of Mevrouw Eeerens, they could see the Resident pouring large glasses of brandy and dealing out cards once more, for the evening was young, he said. Valentijna sat, forlornly staring at her hands.

  16

  Two days later they left for the interior. The Duke was to accompany them for an extended visit to the Resident of Surakarta. Whilst Charlotte had made a moue at this news, Nathanial assured her it was all to the good. The presence of such a personage, a relation of the King of the Netherlands, no matter the distance, would ensure they would be received with the greatest of honours. When she discovered the Duke was to travel separately, accompanied by his own aide de camp and guard, the Commander of the Semarang garrison’s aide de camp, a contingent of soldiers and a swarm of servants, she relaxed.

  She had been awakened at four o’clock and risen reluctantly. In the moonlight she saw Nathanial, who had risen even earlier to load the carriage, standing with two servants. There were six horses to pull them, for there had been considerable rain overnight and the road was heavy going. She and Takouhi slumbered fitfully in starts and snatches until the sun began to rise.

  The soft light of dawn revealed a vast sweep of countryside, green and peaceful, dotted with villages and rice fields, like so many in Java, neat and clean, on the banks of a sparkling stream. No pen could write, no tongue could utter, Charlotte thought, the sheer beauty of Java. Everywhere the shapes of mountains dominated the landscape, some smoking ominously. To their right lay Mount Merbabu and beyond that Mount Merapi, the sacred mountain of Java, its crown wreathed in ashy smoke and cloud. The road continued to rise.

  They stopped to take some refreshment at a post station whilst two buffalo were sought to yoke to the team, for, from here, the climb was very steep and the horses alone could not manage. They could only proceed at walking pace, so Charlotte and Nathanial left Takouhi to sleep for an hour or two. Accompanied by two of Tigran’s guardians, they set out.

  Nathanial pointed out statues standing by the roadside. One was an image of the Boodha and the other of Siva, doubtless brought from one of the hundreds of temples which lay all around them, covered in long grasses and bushes.

  “Indian kingdoms must have dominated this area of central Java for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years,” Nathanial sai
d. “We are still not sure how the Hindoo and Boodha faiths are related or indeed if they are related. In my view, one of Raffles’s great acts in Java was the discovery and description of the Hindoo temples at Brambanan and the mountain of Boodha at Boro Bodo. Raffles always believed that Java was the home of civilisations as mighty as any in Europe, and these monuments were the proof.”

  Nathanial stopped at a bridge where some stones provided a way to ford the stream. Helping Charlotte, he scrambled down the bank. Each of the sections of stones was intricately carved and sculpted with figures, plants and arabesque borders. Many depicted girls holding a lotus or other large flower. Charlotte was struck by the elegant proportion of their forms and their exquisite grace. To find such beauty in a pebble-strewn river was an unexpected pleasure, but to think it might soon be gone, erased by the passage of the water and the elements, made her sad. For though the river now was relatively dry, in the rainy monsoon it would be a swift and deep torrent.

  Nathanial took out a book and made a quick but expert sketch. Charlotte had not realised that he was so talented.

  “A necessity. I have no natural talent, but if one is to record one’s observations, it is a useful craft,” he explained.

  By the time they had made their way back to the road, the coach had caught up with them.

  One of the most remarkable things to strike Charlotte as they began their visit to these Eastern provinces was the attitude of the people. Every Javanese peasant, sometimes in groups of hundreds, no matter in what work he was occupied, would, at their approach, drop instantly to his heels as if pulled down by a puppet master. They squatted in the fields and villages and along the roadside, eyes lowered, the farmer quitting his plough and the porter his load at the approach of the great Tuans’ carriages. Nathanial remarked that this was an ancient custom.

  “It is called dodok. Whilst it has been virtually discontinued in West Java, where European rule is most strong, here in the native provinces it is still a powerful mark of respect. We English think it a humiliating posture, but the local people submit to it with cheerfulness as a time-honoured custom. They simply sink as we would rise in the presence of important personages. In the courts, you will see, it is most strictly observed, sometimes with comical results.”

  Nathanial mopped his brow, for the day had grown warm. “In his History of Java, Raffles recounts an amusing anecdote when he was at the court of Surakarta holding a private conference with the Susunan, the king, at the English Resident’s house. It became necessary for one of the Susunan’s ministers to go to the palace for the royal seal. The man was, of course, squatting, and, as the Susunan happened to be seated with his face towards the door, it was ten minutes before his minister, after repeated ineffectual attempts, could rise sufficiently to reach the latch without being seen by his royal master. The Susunan was inconvenienced, of course, but this was an insignificant matter compared with the indecorum of being seen out of the dodok posture. I myself have seen the surprising sight of numbers of inferiors, when despatched on some task or other, waddling, like so many ducks, on the hams of their heels until out of their superior’s sight.”

  Charlotte smiled and fanned herself. She was glad to stop thinking, for a moment, that she was over a week late. She had begun to feel the tell-tale signs of pregnancy, a heaviness inside her body and tenderness in the breasts.

  They arrived at Fort Salatiga at noon. When they were alone before dinner, Nathanial pointed out, with a tone of rueful smugness, that this fort had the singular distinction of being the place where General Janssens had surrendered to the British in 1811.

  “Poor Janssens,” he said gleefully. “He replaced Daendels, whom Napoleon recalled, would you believe, because he was considered too autocratic. But luck was against Janssens again. Having previously fought a British invasion and given up the Colony of the Cape, he arrived just in time to once more surrender a Dutch colony to the enemy.”

  The Duke, they were informed, was to stay overnight with a rich landowner in the region who doubtless, and uselessly, hoped for some advantage by the hebergement of such an illustrious personage. In consequence, the evening was quiet, apart from the occasional earth tremor, which the Commander informed them was so common as to be largely ignored. Charlotte was not convinced but was so fatigued and concerned about her condition that she simply decided not to worry about it.

  The next day they set out early to avoid the heat, for after Boyolali the road descended sharply. As the sun rose, it revealed the fertile plain of central Java, a sheet of rice fields, a patchwork of ripe green and harvested yellow fields spreading like a vast cloth over the land, tucking into the foothills of the surrounding mountains. All along the route, men and women could be seen carrying goods to market: fruit and vegetables, chickens and capons, turkeys, geese and peacocks.

  On the outskirts of Surakarta, they halted at a staging post to change horses, to pay their toll, and to take some refreshment while waiting for the Duke. The day had grown heavy, and a thunderstorm rumbled beyond the horizon. After an hour, a contingent of Javanese troops appeared in the distance. Charlotte and Nathanial had grown rather bad tempered at this waiting and welcomed this new diversion. There was still no sign of the Duke.

  To pass the time, Nathanial explained something of the Susunan of the Kraton Surakarta Hadiningrat, the “Palace of Surakarta, Finest in the World.” Takouhi listened too, for though a granddaughter of the king, Pakubuwono III, she knew almost nothing of the history of these Javanese relatives.

  “All I know,” she told them, “is that Pakubuwono means something like the ‘spike of the cosmos’.”

  “Yes,” said Nathanial. “Mountains are at the centre of Javanese belief. The king is Lord of the Mountain. He stands, like Merapi, at the centre of the universe. He is the pin that keeps the world turning safely on its axis, keeping the harvest plentiful and communing with the gods. The king has a mystical spiritual power which transcends everything, Hindoo, Boodha and Mohammedan, for he draws power from his marriage to Ratu Kidul, Queen of the South, the spirit goddess of the Southern Ocean. He is the shadow of God on the earth; he possesses supernatural powerful weapons and is heir to sacred powers. The regents emulate the king, and the chiefs emulate the regents, and thus is authority made in Java.”

  The present king, Nathanial said, was PakubuwonoVII, who came to the throne in 1830. That year marked the beginning of the Dutch annexation of Eastern Java, a growth of a desire, for the first time in hundreds of years, for a Dutch empire throughout the entire archipelago and the beginning of the cultuurstelsel, the Cultivation System. The Dutch, who had hitherto not wanted a real empire, suddenly needed a source of income to support Holland for they had lost the southern lands when Belgium broke away and the country was virtually bankrupt. The business of the Indies would henceforth be to erase the colonial government and old VOC debts, pay for Dutch expansion into Sumatra and the eastern archipelago and finance the Dutch state. Gone were the momentary dabblings with the liberal policies of earlier times that would give ownership of land to the farmer and open idle land to European cultivation and wage labour. Instead, the colonial government went back to the old monopolistic VOC ways. The Javanese peasant must pay for the comfort of Holland’s heedless citizens.

  Nathanial had difficulty keeping the contempt and irritation from his voice. He needed the good will of the Dutch authorities to pursue his studies in Java, but he was ashamed and often horrified at their attitudes towards this rich and industrious country and its downtrodden people. This was not the proper forum, though, and he immediately brought the discussion back to the royal courts.

  The present king, Nathanial added with a wry smile, seemed content to sit quietly in his palace, reigning over the ritual of the court and remaining the docile client of the Dutch.

  “Doubtless,” Nathanial said, “he dislikes this subservient position a great deal but conceals it under the refined surface of court affairs. For what can he do? He is a virtual prisoner in his palac
e, drained of all economic and political power. He and the ruler of Yogyakarta, in the south, have instead taken on the role of guardians of the Javanese soul, its artistic and courtly refinement.”

  Takouhi and Charlotte began to forget this interminable delay and pressed Nathanial for more information.

  Nathanial sought a way to render the wars and intrigues of the Dutch, the Chinese and the Javanese, the battles of royal succession and the countless feuds and rebellions of centuries of Java history, into a simple formula.

  “Well,” Nathanial said. “I’ll try to be brief, for it is devilishly complex. When the Dutch came in 1602, a Mohammedan kingdom, called Mataram, ruled over Java. After over a hundred years of uneasy coexistence, a final rebellion broke the camel’s back, and the Dutch, in 1764, divided the kingdom into two courts, one in Surakarta and one in Yogyakarta, to the south. These courts were further split in the years that followed. Thus was the kingdom of Mataram divided into four. In the end, these princes sought only their personal glory. Divide and conquer—the old saying holds true. The Javanese were complicit in their own downfall. From that time, there could be no further royal rebellions to challenge the Dutch.”

  The rumbling of thunder grew more ominous; the day darkened, rain was certainly on its way. They looked down the road, but there was still no sign of the old Duke.

  “We cannot progress without him,” Nathanial grumbled. “The Javanese love a procession, and without it we cannot enter in proper fashion into Surakarta. All has been arranged in this way.”