by Nigel Barley
* * *
‘Being of a cheerful lively disposition and very fond of Society it was surprising how he [Raffles] was able to entertain so hospitably as he did and yet labour so much as he was known to do at the time, not only in his official capacity but in acquiring a general knowledge of the history, Government and local interests of the neighbouring states; and this he was greatly aided in doing by conversing freely with the natives who were constantly visiting Penang at this period, many of whom were often found to be sensible, intelligent men and greatly pleased to find a man holding Mr Raffles’ station able and anxious to converse with them in their own language.’
— Captain T. Travers, Journal
Again and again, writers comment on the extraordinary fact that Raffles actually liked the peoples of the East and treated them with respect. Raffles’ love–affair with the Malay nation had begun.
* * *
The rickshaw swung round towards the waterfront. A clutch of white, classical buildings stood out against the sea, their fancy-pastry fronts compromised by roofs of asbestos sheeting. Raffles might well have seen those, peeling in the damp heat. At night nowadays they are lit up with fairy lights.
The driver gestured towards the museum, another white- pillared pile.
‘You go there. They got the Rolls-Royce from when the Communists shot the Governor but they washed off the blood and filled up all the bulletholes. No fun any more.’
‘That was certainly a mistake. But I’ve already been.’
‘They got old British uniforms.’
I had seen them, worn by white-faced mannequins with long Beatle haircuts fit to give a sergeant major apoplexy.
‘I’ve been.’
‘They’ve got old Japanese uniforms …’
‘The fort,’ I said. ‘Just take me to the fort.’
* * *
It is in Penang that Raffles begins to be able to discharge patronage, slipping a commission to a friend here, easing another into an office there. The immediate, personal result of this is that his three sisters – two later to be certified dowdy by Lord Minto – emerge from the shadows and become marriageable. Henceforth, there will usually be one of them in the wings of Raffles’ life. In succession to his new brother-in-law. Raffles becomes the Naval Agent, bringing down official displeasure on his head by combining offices of Company and military. But the last laugh is his. When, in 1807, he briefly leaves the colony for the sake of his shattered health – destroyed by malaria and overwork – the Council are forced to send a longboat after him begging him to return. In his absence, no one even knows how to send an official dispatch back to London.
* * *
An air of failure still hangs over Penang. In the nineteenth century, the great wonder of the place was a Chinese bakery powered by water. That has now gone.
The fort remains a self-conscious tourist attraction. In front of it stands an unremarkable bungalow, as at Eastbourne, owned by the Malaysian navy. It is made glamorous only by stern warnings against the perils of photography contrary to the Official Secrets Act.
Fort Cornwallis was begun in 1805 and almost immediately began to fall apart. The Company was endemically incapable of building forts in the Far East. It was the same at Bengkulu, where the tower fell down.
The rain had mitigated to a fine mist like steam, encouraging the lichen sprouting among the cannon. That day, Fort Cornwallis was attracting few tourists. A legend claims that the cannon are frequented by barren women hoping to be cured by the sheer phallic potency of ordnance. None was apparent. The interior was haunted by feral cats and raucous crows that stalked each other among the ramparts. Obviously effete Chinese youths trailed their scarves and struck advantageous postures against the skyline – a trysting place of sorts, then. Rounding the corner of a pillbox, I came across a panting young man and giggling girl at grips in the damp grass and thought it best to stare into space like Francis Light and keep walking as if towards some celestial vision. The path was a dead end, and the only alternative to retracing my steps was to climb down some twenty feet onto sharp railings that ripped my trousers.
‘All here is dull stupidity,’ Olivia had written tartly of Penang. It was still an unexciting town, ramshackle but not mysterious. Raffles had never given himself to Penang. It was an upstart place. An upstart himself. Raffles was curiously in awe of history and could not wait to leave it for the ancient city of Malacca. There was nothing for me here. I decided I would hurry after him.
All Good Friends & Jolly Good Company
‘For forty days the Portuguese ships traded at Malacca; but still the Portuguese commander remained on shore, presenting dollars by the chest and gold; and how many beautiful cloths did they present to the illustrious Shah Ahmed Shah, so that the Sultan was most happy!
After this Sultan Ahmed Shah said to the commanders of the Portuguese, “What more do you require from us, that you present us such rich presents?” To this the commander replied, “We only request one thing of our friend, should he be well inclined towards the white men … We wish to request a small piece of ground, to the extent of what the skin of a beast may cover” … The commander then took the skin of the beast, and having rent it into cords, measured out therewith four sides, within which the Portuguese built a store–house of very considerable dimensions, leaving large square apertures in the wall for guns; and when the people of Malacca enquired the reason of the apertures being left, the Portuguese returned for answer, “These are the apertures that the white men require for windows.”’
– T. S. Raffles, ‘On the Malayu Nation’
That any fortifications are still there in modern Malacca is due entirely to Raffles. The Dutch succeeded the Portuguese. Then the British, at war with Napoleon, had seized the city from the Dutch in a sort of uneasy trusteeship that was half military occupation, half smooth civilian face. By the time Raffles arrived in 1808, the normally dilatory East India Company had decided on a bold stroke. They would demolish the entire city and forcibly disperse its mixture of European, Arab, Chinese, Malay and Indian inhabitants in the hope of diverting its trade to Penang. The fort was already gone. They had blown it up.
‘The Fort was the glory of the town of Malacca, and when the fort was destroyed, the town lost its glory like a woman whose husband is dead. Her face no longer has its glory.’
– Munshi Abdullah, Hikayat Abdullah
* * *
In the course of his life, Raffles wrote many reports lauding the resources, prospects and potential of the parts of the world he wanted to grab. They are in the bland and soft-edged language that one nowadays recognizes as the domain of the estate agent. Areas ‘abound in’ game and fish, are ‘enbosomed’ in verdure, resources are ‘virtually limitless’. He wrote one on Malacca arguing that it was a valuable possession and should be retained, that the policy of destruction would work no magic for ailing Penang. It should have got him fired. Instead, it convinced the Council, saved the city and made him an important friend in Lord Minto, Governor-General of India. All his life, he would try to catch the tone of such a report again, writing on Java, Nias, the Philippines, Singapore. He never did. One suspects that the Malacca document carried conviction by showing that the city paid its way. It still does.
* * *
‘The prejudices of the inhabitants are too well known to require comment here; and it is no common advantage that will induce them to quit the tombs of their ancestors, their temples sacred to their Deity, their independence and estates on which they depend for their livelihood and respectability.’
– T. S. Raffles, Report to the Governor and Council at Penang
I sat in the small stall at the base of Bukit China, where the Chinese still bury their dead. The air is heavy with the cloying scent of frangipani. The Malays call it ‘dead Chinaman flower’ because it grows in profusion in their cemeteries. Herds of tourists are led around by Indian guides disgorging pointless information.
‘The Portuguese arrived in 1511 and built the f
ort at the bottom of the hill … the largest Chinese graveyard in Southeast Asia … The Chinese build their graves in the form of wombs …’ A woman squawks, ‘Did he say moons?’ ‘No dear, tombs.’
Across the road, with the relaxed logic of the East, stands a traditional Chinese temple dedicated to a man who was actually a Muslim. Serried ranks of bespectacled faces stare back at the worshipper, each photograph glued to a piece of wood.
‘They’ve just put the rent up,’ a man complains, tumbling bundles of counterfeit money into the flames. ‘My father is costing me a fortune.’ We both look blankly at the heavenly money now transferred to his father’s divine account, a way of cheating, really. ‘No, not this sort of money, the money – the real money – I pay to keep his picture here.’
Elsewhere people are reading fortunes, leaning over into the future. A young woman lies back sluttishly against a shrine with her hand out.
‘What sort of shrine is this?’ She looks blank. ‘Buddhist, Taoist?’ She shrugs.
‘Don’t ask me. I just kill devils.’
Inside, a child sits at a table before a glass of water, its meniscus brimming like a tearful eye. He slips coins into the water. The water does not overflow.
‘Magic,’ he says happily.
A line of skinny Chinese joggers appear in designer sportswear and labour up the hill on hairless legs, dripping with sweat, pausing to do limp step-ups on a convenient womb-tomb. I am shocked at this domestication of death, or perhaps I have absorbed Eastern notions of the uncleanliness of feet. The stall-holder laughs at my expression.
‘No, no. It is not the young misbehaving. These athletes are our heroes. This is politics. We are fighting for our heritage. It is a protest against the government plans to demolish our cemetery and build a housing estate for the Malays. The Malays have too many children. Too many. They have put our leaders in jail, so we show our solidarity with our ancestors by jogging on their graves. They can’t touch us for that.’
* * *
In Malacca, there seem to be none of those small, informal hotels you find in Indonesian towns and large hotels belong to nowhere. The lift wishes me good morning in a robot voice with a Japanese-American lilt. Downstairs is a continuous buffet called ‘hi-T’, a cornucopia of food from three continents, with, at the end, a dish to bring tears to an expat’s eyes – bread-and-butter pudding, slimy with eggy goodness, dusted with brown sugar. Suddenly there is a gust of sniggers. A gaggle of Chinese schoolgirls enter, simpering in sailor suits, and descend on the bread-and-butter pudding with flailing spoons. They chop it up with little cries and eat it with boiled squid. Then they sit with their hands neatly folded in their laps and sing to one of their number: ‘Happy birthday to you/You belong in a zoo.’
* * *
It is time to give Raffles a face. What did he look like? You grope for a reliable icon. The statues are inaccurate. Some of the artists had never seen him. The portraits all show him pensive, bowed in thought. A sketch of him made from life in Bengkulu suggests this to be flattery: he is virtually a hunchback. Fortunately, Raffles would return to Malacca in 1810 and meet another writer. Munshi Abdullah, then a boy of about twelve, would, as befits a child of mixed Arab and Indian descent, become one of the founding fathers of Malay literature. It is typical of Raffles that he bothered to be kind to a small, native boy of no importance, to encourage him in his studies. Unlike many Europeans of that age, he could always see himself in the troubled people he ruled. Abdullah’s candid eye leaves us a description of Raffles and Olivia that disarms by its simplicity and sets the portraits in their context.
‘And when I first saw Mr Raffles, he struck me as being of middle stature, neither too short nor too tall. His brow was broad, the sign of large-heartedness; his head betokened his good understanding; his hair being fair betokened courage; his ears being large betokened quick hearing: his eyebrows were thick, and his left eye squinted a little; his nose was high; his cheeks a little hollow; his lips narrow, the sign of oratory and persuasiveness; his mouth was wide; his neck was long, and the colour of his body was not purely white; his breast was well-formed; his waist slender; his legs to proportion and he walked with a stoop …
‘… I observed his habit was to be always in deep thought. He was most courteous in his intercourse with all men. He always had a sweet expression towards Europeans as well as native gentlemen. He was extremely affable and liberal, always commanding one’s best attention. He spoke in smiles. He was also an earnest enquirer into past history and gave up nothing till he had probed it to the bottom. He loved most to sit in quietude, when he did nothing else but write or read … He had a time set apart for each duty, nor would he mingle one with another. Further, in the evenings, after tea, he would take ink, pen and paper, after the candles had been lighted, reclining with closed eyes in a manner that I often took to be sleep; but in an instant he would be up and write for a while until he went to recline again. Thus, he would pass the night, till twelve or one … He kept four persons on wages, each in their peculiar departments; one to go to the forests in search of various kinds of leaves, flowers, fungi, pulp and such like products. Another he sent to collect all kinds of flies, grasshoppers, bees, in all their varieties, as well as scorpions, centipedes and such like, giving him needles as well as pins with a box to stick the creatures therein. Another he sent with a basket to seek for coral, shells, oysters … and another to collect animals such as birds, jungle fowl, stags, mousedeer and so forth … Further, people brought books on Malay history to the number of many hundreds, so as to nearly finish the national literature … Now Mr Raffles’ disposition was anything but covetous, for, in whatever undertakings or projects he had in view, he grudged no expense so that they were accomplished … Thus loads of money came out of his chest daily, in buying things, or in paying wages. I also perceived that he hated the habit of the Dutch who lived in Malacca of running down the Malays and they detested him in return; so much so that they would not sit down beside him. But Mr Raffles loved always to be on good terms with the Malays, the poorest could speak to him …’
– Munshi Abdullah, Hikayat Abdullah
* * *
There is an odd lopsided look about Malacca. It takes a while to realize why. They have moved the sea, pushing hills into it in reclamation projects. It no longer laps pensively at the hill with its Portuguese fort, like a child at an ice-cream. The fortifications stick up bare and embarrassed like men unexpectedly caught with their trousers down. In the church on the hill is a statue of St Francis Xavier, who brought the Catholic faith to the East and died here for his pains. The locals, whatever the name of their God, rub his back for luck. The statue lacks a hand. They tell you how the Pope demanded that a hand should be hacked off the corpse of St Francis and sent to Rome as a relic. When severed, it gushed fresh blood. The statue was erected in atonement. That night a falling tree sheared off the hand of the statue. Malays like stories like that.
The church is bathed in the sound of Viennese waltzes, blowing across from a ‘song and lumier’ show in the football stadium.
‘Does it have Raffles in it?’
‘Yes, yes. Laffers, orl history of Maracca. You buy ticket.’ The Chinese ticket-seller tried to push one into my hand.
‘Who plays Raffles?’
He grinned. ‘Is my brother, thin man, have wig.’
I pictured a Chinese Raffles, powdered and perruqued, shouting, ‘You no destloy Maracca-lah!’
No. I did not yet have a firm enough grip on Raffles to deal with caricature. I passed on.
Round the back of the hill is the reconstruction of the royal palace, executed in wood. Rickshaw-drivers congregate in front of it to play Malay pop music on their radios. Here, absurdly, above the blare of a song about hens and cockerels, a thinly veiled treatment of Malay marital relations, I bump into a colleague from England. We perform a dance of very English embarrassment in the middle of the road, both feeling like matter out of place. He is led off by Malay friends to the muse
um of the independence struggle and joyfully photographed under a label, ‘the beginnings of British interference’. There is hardly any mention of Raffles in there, just an adulatory story of the endless bickering of second-rate modern politicians.
I sidle off and find a damp, small British cemetery, tucked away behind the hill, fitting really, a bit of an English garden awash with the same Malay pop music but full of Madras soldiery. The British of that time regarded all of Southeast Asia as a mere offshoot of India. Raffles had been one of the first, in his paper ‘On the Malayu Nation’, to recognize the Malays as a separate people.
The white monuments are like loaves set aside to rise, pocked and buckled with time. One reads:
‘Frances Anne died age 5, 1862. Early piety, affection and precocious talent were her distinguishing and endearing characteristics.
Too sweet a blossom for a tainted earth.
She blooms transplanted in the courts of heaven.
The stone, despairing to describe her worth,
Tells but of blighted hopes and bosoms riven.’
There would be plenty of riven bosoms for Raffles later on, but for the moment he was in his element, for the first time in his life fully alive, released from the purdah of his office – he was going to war with an army brought for him from India.
* * *
The British were on the move in the East. The veto on expansion had been lifted in the struggle against Napoleon. They had seized the French islands of Reunion and Mauritius with embarrassing ease and a Dutch force in the Moluccas had most inconveniently surrendered. Now they looked to the threat of a French fleet using the Dutch colony of Java. In those long, dreamy writing sessions of the night, Raffles created paper empires of the imagination and plotted the annexation of islands and brown, friendly peoples. He yearned for Java. For once, Company policy was in agreement with his own designs. He was transferred to Malacca, the personal protégé of Lord Minto, to gather intelligence about Java, make friends with the local princes and help plan its invasion. He was like a bird released from its cage. The Penang government were furious.