A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  But for the man tossing and turning on his cot in a backroom of the little house, Ternate was what passed for civilisation. He was a thirty-five-year-old Englishman, and he had spent months wandering in the wilder parts of the Archipelago. He was a naturalist and a professional hunter of exotic birds, bugs and beasts. And now he was sick. Long months in the forests had exposed him to the most virulent strains of malaria, and he had been laid up for weeks.

  As he lay sweating and shivering and staring up at the rattan ceiling he had wrestled with big questions. Over the course of his meandering journeys he had already noticed the clear distinction between the flora and fauna of the western and eastern parts of the Archipelago, Asian plants and animals giving way dramatically to those of Australia and the Pacific somewhere around the vicinity of Sulawesi. One day the putative line that marked the division would bear his name. Now, though, as the fever wracked his body, he had even bigger issues to contend with.

  It was surely the state of his own health that had brought him to the ominous subject of death. He pondered awhile, as the mosquitoes whined around his sweat-drenched form, on the grim theories of Thomas Malthus about the natural—and unnatural—balances that keep human populations in check, and then carried his thoughts into the animal world. The beasts too, he realised, were subject to ‘enormous and constant destruction’, and he found himself wondering why it was that some survived and others did not. For a sick man on a remote island far from home it was a profoundly unsettling question, and given his current sorry state he can surely have taken little comfort when the answer came to him: ‘that on the whole the best fitted live’. But there followed a revelation that was electrifying enough to rouse even an ailing man from his bed:

  [I]t suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive…

  In that one feverish moment Alfred Russel Wallace had grasped the unknown concept of evolution.

  Alfred Russel Wallace had arrived in Southeast Asia four years earlier. He was a chronically modest man with a thoroughly un-Victorian talent for self-deprecation, always more inclined to portray himself as a comic bumbler, tripping over roots and tangling his butterfly net in overhanging branches, than as some stiff-lipped imperial hero. But he was a true enthusiast for travel and exploration, and fevers and tropical ulcers did nothing to dampen his zest for stomping through swamps and jungles. He had been born in 1823 into a lower-middle class family on the Welsh Borders. After leaving school at the age of fourteen, he worked as a surveyor and as a teacher, but along the way he had developed a considerable passion for zoology. In 1848, he and a friend headed to Brazil to seek their fortunes by collecting exotic creepy-crawlies to sell in London, where amateur entomology was something of a craze. Unfortunately, after four years in the Amazon, Wallace lost most of his haul in a mid-Atlantic shipwreck, but he had cut his teeth in the world of professional collecting and gained a modest name for himself in scientific circles. As a consequence he was given government funding for his ticket to Singapore.

  By this stage there were steamships plying the route from Europe, and a journey that might have taken a year in the days of the spice trade now took just six weeks. Wallace had embarked in Southampton in early March, been hassled and hustled by Egyptian hucksters during the overland hop from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and had reached Singapore in the middle of April. He had brought a good supply of pins and nets from England, as well as a fourteen-year-old assistant by the name of Charles Allen. The nets would prove rather more useful than the boy, and by the time they disembarked in the tropics Wallace was already grumbling about the ineptitude of his teenage assistant.

  By 1854 the British settlement of Singapore was a bustling port. In 1819, at the end of his tumultuous career in Asia, a sickly Thomas Stamford Raffles had overseen the founding of an outpost here. The treaty he signed with the local rulers had contravened long-standing Dutch agreements with the lords of the scattered isles of Riau, the archipelago that included Singapore, and something of a diplomatic crisis between the two European powers had ensued. But in the end British Singapore had endured, and under the canny administration of its co-founder William Farquhar and his successor John Crawfurd (Raffles’ onetime point-man in Yogyakarta) the place had prospered, drawing in trade from those parts of the Archipelago not yet under Dutch rule and attracting settlers from all over the region. It was, Wallace noted, already very much a Chinese town, and ‘The Chinese do all the work, they are a most industrious people, & the place could hardly exist without them’.

  After three months in Singapore as the house guest of a French missionary, who lived in the jungles of the interior (where there were still a few surviving tigers to provide a frisson for his first tentative insect-collecting expeditions), Wallace and Charles Allen clambered aboard a small schooner and sailed two days up the coast to Melaka, struggling along the way with the unfamiliar seaboard diet of curry and rice. Melaka, the one-time hub of trade in the western Archipelago, was a British port by this stage. The Dutch had captured it from the Portuguese in 1641, but in 1824 Britain and the Netherlands had signed a friendly treaty swapping ownership of Melaka for possession of that long-standing British white elephant at Bengkulu on the west coast of Sumatra. The trade-off certainly made sense: the Dutch were the only serious colonial presence in Sumatra, and despite their troubles in Palembang and Minangkabau, they looked set to stay. Meanwhile, with the British settled at both Penang and Singapore, it was certainly logical for them to hold the third major harbour on the eastern side of the Straits of Melaka, too. But the 1824 treaty, which drew a dividing line of imperial influence right down the middle of the Straits, had arbitrarily cleaved a single region in half. Since the days of Srivijaya, it had been the Straits themselves which had defined this neck of the woods. Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula had formed a loose, Malay-speaking whole around this storied stretch of sea. Now, however, Melaka, Johor and all those other places that had long played a part in the wider Archipelago story had been hived off altogether. Illogical as it was, from now on Sumatra would have more in common politically with Maluku than with Melaka.

  Wallace probably thought little about such matters; he was more interested in the birds and the bees. In Melaka he made his first serious forays into the forests, had his first unpleasant run-ins with leeches and fever, and made an admirable start on gathering a collection of unknown mini-beasts. After two months he returned briefly to Singapore and then set out for Borneo.

  Borneo forms a vast, green thumbprint at the core of the western Archipelago. A ragged round of swamp, jungle and mountain, it is the third largest island on earth and until very recently most of it was true terra incognita. For millennia, a thin patina of civilisation has clung to its mangrove-meshed littoral. One of the very earliest Indianised states had emerged at Kutai on the east coast, and in later centuries small sultanates had appeared on the estuaries—Sambas, Banjarmasin, Pontianak, and most powerful of all, Brunei, the place that had given its corrupted name to the entire island. These kingdoms had been the domain of Malays, with settler communities of Chinese and Arabs living amongst them. But they had always faced the sea and kept their backs to the interior. It was not that inner Borneo was empty, of course—this was the realm of wandering bands of Dayaks, Austronesian hunter-gatherers who lived in communal longhouses far up the coffee-coloured rivers, or wandered footloose through the forests armed with blowpipes and spears. Neither Hindu-Buddhism nor Islam had had much impact in their lands, and in the mid-nineteenth century most of the Dayaks were still animists.

  Back in VOC days, the Dutch had settled a few unfortunate residents in the various estuary sultanates of southern Borneo, but their outposts had proved singularly unprofitable and notably unhealthy. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, their presence amounted to a handful of ill-fated officials, marooned on the mosqu
ito-infested coastline and looking longingly in the direction of Java. However, the Dutch had been stirred abruptly into action in the 1840s by the moves of the man who was to play host to Wallace during his stay in Borneo: a dandyish Indian-born Englishman who had turned himself into an oriental despot—James Brooke, the first ‘White Rajah’ of Sarawak.

  Brooke was an adventurer in the old and not entirely reputable sense of the word. At the age of thirty he had spent his modest inheritance on an armoured schooner named, appropriately enough for a man who would be king, the Royalist. He set sail for Borneo, where he helped the Sultan of Brunei to crush an uprising. The grateful sultan granted him the personal title to the territory of Sarawak at the western end of the island by way of reward. Brooke rapidly expanded his domains inland and along the coast, ruling under the title of ‘rajah’. This all prompted considerable embarrassment in official British circles—and outright panic amongst the Dutch, who swiftly set about tightening up their own lackadaisical operations on the southern underbelly of Borneo. By the time Wallace and Charles Allen landed at Brooke’s royal capital of Kuching in October 1854, the Dutch had staked a notional claim of suzerainty to most of the southern sections of the island. The British, meanwhile, had tentatively invited Rajah Brooke into the Establishment by giving him a knighthood. The basic outlines of the Dutch and British spheres of influence in southern and northern Borneo had been fixed—though of course, under the canopies of cloud forest, the Dayaks were still going about their business entirely oblivious to colonial machinations.

  Wallace spent some fifteen months in Borneo. He collected endless bugs and butterflies, and killed a large number of orangutans in the name of science. He also palmed off his unfortunate assistant, Charles Allen, on some local missionaries and replaced him with a Malay boy called Ali. He then set his sights on Sulawesi and the isolated landfalls of Maluku.

  En route for Sulawesi—aboard a tramp ship owned by a Chinese trader, crewed by a mob of Javanese, and captained by an itinerant Englishman—Wallace stopped off at Buleleng on the north coast of Bali. For several years the Dutch had been bickering with the rajas of Bali—mainly over the rajas’ irrepressible habit of plundering the ships that frequently ran onto their sharp coral reefs. In the 1840s some semblance of Dutch suzerainty had been established on the north coast, but the bulk of the island still had no experience of colonial control, and a gaggle of competing Hindu rulers still held sway. Wallace was only in Bali for two days, but he was, like the piratical crew of Cornelis de Houtman 260 years earlier, thoroughly impressed: ‘I had never beheld so beautiful and well-cultivated a district out of Europe’.

  His next landfall lay just twenty miles east of Bali, but within hours of arriving in Lombok, Wallace realised that the gulf between these neighbouring islands was bigger than distance suggested. There was something unusual about the birdlife: there were cockatoos and parakeets here. That great ecological Rubicon that would one day been known as the Wallace Line ran slap-bang down the middle of the deep-water channel between Bali and Lombok. Bali was the most easterly part of the Archipelago that had ever been attached to mainland Asia.

  Lombok had had even less to do with the Dutch than Bali. Its inhabitants, the Sasaks, had been Muslims since at least the early seventeenth century, and local legend gave credit for the conversion to apostles from the Javanese house of Giri, the dynasty founded by one of the most orthodox of all the Wali Songo. The Sasaks had never proved very successful at organising a robust indigenous sovereignty, however, and the more powerful kings of Bali and Makassar had tussled for control of their island for hundreds of years. By the time Wallace turned up, Lombok was ruled by a line of the house of Karangasem, a powerful Balinese kingdom. In a curious inversion of everything that had happened in the Archipelago in the previous half-millennium, Muslim Lombok was dominated by a Hindu elite who still carried the torch of Majapahit.

  Wallace was every bit as impressed by Lombok as by Bali:

  These two islands are wonderfully cultivated, in fact, they are probably among the best cultivated in the world. I was perfectly astonished when on riding 30 miles into the interior [of Lombok] I beheld the country cultivated like a garden, the whole being cut into terraces, & every patch surrounded by channels, so that any part can be flooded at pleasure.

  So much for ‘the lazy native’ and the racist paternalism of Johannes van den Bosch: the locals seemed to be perfectly capable of their own agricultural endeavours, if only they were left to get on with it.

  After two-and-a-half months stuck in Lombok waiting for onward passage, Wallace got underway for Sulawesi. He came ashore at the fabled port of Makassar on 2 September 1856. He had been in the Archipelago for two-and-a-half years, but he was only now setting foot in a Dutch settlement for the first time, and he was thoroughly impressed: ‘I found it prettier and cleaner than any I had yet seen in the East’. There were rows of whitewashed Dutch bungalows set along broad and well-swept streets. The drains were covered over, and each afternoon, by order of a local bylaw, every householder had to water the road before his home to keep down the dust. The commercial quarters thronged with sarong-clad Bugis and Makassarese, and, as everywhere, there were dozens of prosperous Chinese-owned trading houses.

  Makassar had, of course, long been a major hub of maritime power, seat of the old Sultanate of Gowa, and for all the impression of calm, dust-free Dutch order that Wallace described, this was still a feisty corner of the Archipelago, a place of usurper pirate princes. The forty-two-gun frigate and the trio of armed cutters that Wallace spotted anchored off the Makassar waterfront were not just for show.

  Sulawesi’s strange and spidery form was anchored by Dutch settlements at its northern- and southern-most extremities. Makassar was mirrored in the far northeast by the old port of Manado. Wallace would go there too, later in his wanderings, and would call it ‘one of the prettiest towns in the East’. Manado was the hub of a region called Minahasa, a peninsula of mountainous land fringed with coral seas. It had been under the sway of both Ternate and Makassar in the past, but the ancestor-worshipping local tribes had proved particularly amenable to European influence. Portuguese and Spanish sailors had stopped here in the sixteenth century and planted white churches between the palms. The Dutch had taken over from the Iberians in 1679. During the VOC years, the authorities had generally frowned on the work of missionaries, and their efforts had been officially discouraged in the regions where Islam dominated. Like the British in India, Dutch officials tended to look on Christian missionaries as meddlesome men whose proselytising could provoke needless hostility amongst the locals. But in places like Minahasa where the people were deemed either uncouth tribal heathens, or were already Christians of an alternate flavour thanks to the efforts of an earlier set of colonialists, the Protestant missionaries were given leeway. By the middle of the nineteenth century, well over half of all Minahasans had been baptised. No other region in the Archipelago would commit itself so closely to the Europeans.

  Alfred Russel Wallace was in Sulawesi until the end of 1856, when he and his assistant Ali sailed from Makassar on a local ship bound for points far to the east. Bugis and Makassarese seamen had long sailed for shores beyond the southern horizon in search of slaves, sandalwood and other strange substances. They had even gone as far as the upper reaches of Australia, to the bleached coastline of Kimberley and Arnhem Land in search of sea cucumbers to trade with the Chinese. They called these places Kayu Putih, ‘White Wood’, for the pale eucalyptus trees, and they lent the locals their own word for the Dutch—Belanda—long before the Aborigines had ever met a white man.

  Wallace would not travel as far as Australia, but over the coming years he incessantly criss-crossed the eastern seas aboard local sailing ships. He reached the Aru Islands off western New Guinea, where he sampled the supposed delicacy of sea cucumbers and was singularly unimpressed (‘like sausages which have been rolled in mud and then thrown up the chimney’ he thought), and where he captured several specimens of th
e fabled birds-of-paradise. He also visited Timor, stopping by in the stony settlement of Kupang. This far-flung port had long been a source of slaves and sandal-wood. The Dutch had taken over here from the Portuguese in the middle of the seventeenth century, though the place was always a hardship posting. A 1665 report on the state of the VOC’s Ku-pang garrison had condemned the entire force, from the officers downwards, as ‘leading a very foul, slovenly, and unruly life, as much with drunken drinking as with whoring’. Moral standards had apparently improved slightly by the time Wallace arrived, but the place was very much a colonial backwater.

  The region around Kupang was the one part of the Archipelago where the Portuguese were still, just about, clinging on. Their government was finally settling its affairs with the Dutch, rescinding all claims to Flores on the condition that the Protestant missionaries should leave the local Catholics as they were. But in the eastern half of Timor a relic of the lost Iberian empire still endured, though when Wallace saw their capital, Dili, he declared it ‘a most miserable place compared with even the poorest of the Dutch towns’.

  All the while Wallace was travelling, he had been corresponding with men of science back in England—with Charles Darwin most significant amongst them. And all the while he had been netting butterflies and shooting birds-of-paradise, he had been pondering the question of diversity and development in the natural world. During that two-day foray in Bali, he had spotted a tiger beetle on the beach that seemed perfectly camouflaged against the dark volcanic sand, and elsewhere, too, he had seen uncanny adaptations to the myriad environments he encountered. The idea of natural selection as the driver of evolution may have come to him in one feverish flash that day in Ternate in 1858, but the inspiration had been all around him for years.