by Pat Shipman
In all probability, the children’s babus came with the family to Sumatra and were therefore as newly arrived in Medan as Gretha and the children themselves. From the time of their arrival in Medan, the children were unwell—witness Rudolf’s insistence that they be examined by a doctor. They began vomiting and showing serious signs of illness a mere seventeen days after their arrival. If this vomiting was caused by one of the babus who was seeking revenge for Rudolf’s punishing her soldier boyfriend, she had acquired a devoted lover very rapidly and Rudolf had punished him severely in a short period. Even if it was the cook, not the babu, who poisoned the children, nothing about these stories explains why it was the children, not Rudolf himself, who were poisoned. Would not poisoning the harsh garrison commander—or the sexual assaulter—himself make a more fitting revenge than killing his innocent children?
Poisoning in and of itself is easily believed. In Indies novels and memoirs, poisoning of Europeans by natives was widely thought to occur. However, in these sources, babus were not the poisoners and the children they cared for were not the victims. In Indies literature, nyais poison or otherwise kill either their masters or their masters’ wives.
Though greatly feared, poisoning was not a common cause of death. According to official documents, between 1894 and 1899, only fifteen Europeans and thirteen natives in the Dutch East Indies were treated for poisoning, and none of these died. The opportunity to poison someone was always present, because every adult Indonesian man whose family could afford it owned a kris, a singularly Indonesian, wavy-edged dagger. By tradition, once a year a kris should be cleaned and reconsecrated. Part of the ceremony is bathing the kris in a substance called warangan, mixed with water, to bring out the intricate pattern of the different metals in the blade. Warangan is a potentially fatal arsenic compound (arsenic trioxide), and it was (and is) available in almost any Indonesian household or any market.
How much warangan would have to be administered to cause death? Fatal doses are tiny, on the order of one to fifteen milligrams of arsenic trioxide or sodium arsenate for a toddler.
Would warangan poisoning fit the crime as it is reported? The main symptoms of acute arsenic poisoning—severe nausea, vomiting, bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramping—are consistent with those of the MacLeod children. Additional symptoms of arsenic poisoning not mentioned in Norman’s case are a dry, burning mouth, a metallic taste in the mouth, garlicky breath, headache, and cold, clammy extremities, followed by hair loss after two to three weeks (if the patient survives so long). Neuropathies in the extremities, renal damage or failure, or dermatologic problems may also be found among survivors.
Other traditional means of poisoning relied on the considerable number of plant-derived poisons that were well known in the Dutch East Indies. Guna-guna, or black magic, was widely feared by the native population and many of the Europeans as well. The most commonly used native poison was a decoction prepared from the leaves, sap, or fruit of Datura fastuosa. In Indonesia, the poison was administered either by mixing an extract with food or by creeping into the house at night and blowing a dried powder of Datura into the nostrils of a sleeping victim.
Symptoms of Datura poisoning are caused by its two main pharmacologic ingredients, hyoscamine (an antispasmodic and antisalivation drug) and scopolamine (used in ophthalmic preparations to dilate the iris). Datura is also a hallucinogenic. A vivid description of the effects of Datura ingestion is given in an anonymous ditty: “Red as a beet, dry as a bone, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, hot [sexually aroused] as a hare.” These symptoms do not match those described of the MacLeod children.
Another way of examining Norman’s death is in the context of its being an attack on a white person by an Indonesian, a circumstance that in Sumatra raised extreme anxieties at the time. The poisoning (or suspected poisoning) of the son of one of Medan’s most prominent citizens would surely have caused an uproar and a thorough investigation. Yet none of the four major Indies newspapers of the day and none of the three more local Sumatran newspapers carried anything about inquiries into Norman’s death.
A discreet official death notice appeared in the Deli Current (Deli Courant) on June 28:
Our darling
NORMAN JOHN MAC LEOD
passed away this night.
R. MAC LEOD
M.G. MAC LEOD—ZELLE
MEDAN, JUNE 28, 1899
On July 1, the bereaved parents put in another formal notice thanking people for their expressions of sympathy. There was no other acknowledgment of Norman’s death in these newspapers.
The striking absence of newspaper coverage of Norman’s death cannot be attributed to delicacy. During the same year, Indies newspapers included a long, rather graphic account of a colonial housewife who shot herself with her husband’s revolver in a fit of despair and another account of a planter who was attacked by natives with machetes and agricultural tools. The Deli newspapers were so local and gossipy in character that almost any event was reported. In early June of 1899, for example, there was a series of articles and letters debating the quality of a musical concert that had been given by a visiting professor who had been accompanied by local amateurs. That Norman’s death featured in not a single article or letter shows clearly that it was not considered a suspicious death or potential poisoning in Medan.
Other potential sources of information are the Colonial Report and the Government Almanac for Netherlands-Indies 1899–1901. The first is an annual report compiled by the provincial governor on all of the happenings in his province, reported numerically; the latter summarizes several years from all of the provinces. While these reports are sometimes inaccurate with regard to native Indonesians, the number of Europeans in eastern Sumatra in 1899 was so small that nothing pertaining to them was likely to be missed.
Appendix E of the Colonial Report lists the deaths of Europeans in eastern Sumatra in 1899, divided by age, sex, and place of origin (Indies-born or not Indies-born). In 1899, Norman was the only European child born outside of the Indies and between the ages of two and ten years to die; eight Indies-born children of similar age also died. Norman was not identified by name, nor was there any comment on the cause of his death. This lack of remark is flatly impossible if there had been anything suspicious about his death. There is no remark about Norman’s death in the Almanac.
What alternative hypotheses would account for Norman’s death and the lack of comment upon it? And what motivation or action would account for the children, rather than Rudolf, falling ill when Rudolf at the time was widely held responsible for provoking the attack?
The first and most obvious explanation is some sort of accidental food poisoning, which is reasonably common even in modern Indonesia. Children ate separately from their parents, so food poisoning affecting Norman and Non would not necessarily strike the senior MacLeods. Were that the case, Norman’s death was simply another tragedy of life in the tropics. The MacLeods would mourn, the friends and colleagues would offer sympathy, and nothing out of the ordinary would have occurred.
The second hypothesis is that the garrison physician who was treating Norman and Nonnie was attempting to cure congenital syphilis. This hypothesis, which traces the death back to Rudolf’s contracting syphilis, has never before been evaluated. Indeed, no previous writer concerned with Mata Hari’s life ever noticed the glaring lack of newspaper coverage and comment on Norman’s death.
Is this hypothesis probable? Certainly, if the garrison physician miscalculated the dosage of the mercury compounds he was giving the children, because he was used to treating grown men, then he would have poisoned them inadvertently. Further, the children’s symptoms of violent vomiting, incoherence, diarrhea, and abdominal cramping match those of mercury poisoning as well as they do those of arsenic poisoning, both mercury and arsenic being heavy metals.
According to modern medical texts, ingestion of 0.5 grams of mercuric chloride (the most common preparation used in treating syphilis then) usually produces serious symptoms
within about ten to fifteen minutes; fatal doses are recorded after ingestion of 1 to 1.5 grams. Modern mortality rates are much improved since the use of chelating agents, which were not available in 1899. However, in eighteen relatively recent cases of a single ingestion of mercuric chloride, all patients experienced severe symptoms and nine individuals died. The fatal doses in these cases ranged from 29 milligrams per kilogram of body weight to 50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Children are notoriously more susceptible to poisoning with mercuric chloride than adults.
Overdosing a very young child during treatment for congenital syphilis must have occurred fairly commonly. The standard advice in the late nineteenth century for the treatment of congenital syphilis was to increase the dosage of “bichloride of mercury”—the usual name for mercuric chloride then—dissolved in syrup (to facilitate swallowing) until excessive salivation appeared. Iodide of potassium dissolved in syrup was a second choice of treatment. However, Diday warned that
[a child’s] gastrointestinal mucous membrane may be too susceptible to bear the irritating contact of preparations of mercury or iodine. There is even need of greater vigilance here to forestall the inflammation before it breaks out, and to meet it on its earliest indication by the suspension of the internal treatment….
Employment of remedies internally irritates the stomach and occasions diarrhea, a tympanic condition of the abdomen, cries, and an expression of suffering remarked during the first hours which follow the ingestion of them—if vomiting supervenes under the same circumstances, and especially if emaciation be observed, do not wait for more serious derangements before changing your plan of treatment. The substitution of topical remedies for internal ones then becomes imperative and cannot be adopted too soon.
Contradicting this caution, he also advised that syphilis proceeds rapidly and the dose must be increased equally rapidly to a maximum tolerable dose.
Salivation was a sign that the effective dose was being reached, according to Diday, and he argued that a degree of inflammation of the gums and intestines must be endured and used as a guide that the physician was giving a big enough dose. In this, Diday was disastrously wrong. Excessive salivation is one of the signs that a toxic dose has been reached.
Diday continued:
So long as strength, sleep, and plumpness are absent, [we] must persist in the treatment and increase the doses rapidly…. I will say that we may commence by administering one tenth of a grain [6.5 milligrams] of bichloride or three twentieths of a grain of Hahnemann’s soluble mercury, in three doses, in the course of the twenty-four hours. This quantity may be augmented one twentieth of a grain every three days until it produces a sensible effect either upon the mouth, or upon the syphilitic symptoms. The daily quantity may then be diminished, as is done for the adult, so as to keep up a slight action on the gums, or rather so as to reproduce it, several times in succession, during the whole course of the treatment.
If the garrison physician who treated the MacLeod children followed the treatment protocol prescribed by Diday in his standard textbook, he began their treatment with 6.5 milligrams of mercury bichloride and increased that amount by 3.25 milligrams every three days. After about a month of such treatment, each child would have ingested 175.5 milligrams of mercury bichloride, a dangerous amount for small children. If the children had been treated previously with mercuric chloride, their total chronic ingestion would have been much higher.
The timing was right. In the case of the MacLeod children, vomiting began less than two weeks after treatment by the garrison physician began, worsened and became fatal to Norman after three to four weeks. If the children were poisoned by the garrison doctor, their death soon after arrival in Medan was related directly to the onset of his medical care. The strength of this hypothesis is that it explains why Norman died so soon after his arrival in Medan, it accounts for the children’s symptoms, and it explains the fact that the children, not Rudolf, were poisoned.
Why, then, was there no public comment on the death in the newspapers? The MacLeods and the physician had good reasons to suppress any suspicions. All would have been ruined had the cause of death come out. Thus, those most intimately involved in the death had a vested interest in preventing further inquiry, such as an autopsy. Instead, they spread a flimsy story that blamed the death on a vengeful native who died most conveniently. The story had the added benefit of playing into the colonists’ fears and distrust of Indonesians.
The third and least likely possibility is that an Indo woman was involved, but instead of being the babu, the poisoner was Rudolf’s former nyai. If Rudolf had resumed his relationship with her without telling her of his changed marital status, her hopes of obtaining European status for herself and/or any child she had borne Rudolf previously would have been cruelly dashed when Gretha and the children arrived. Poisoning Rudolf’s European children would have been vengeance for his preferring them and Gretha over the nyai and her children. The nyai may even have hoped that, once Norman and Nonnie were dead, Rudolf would turn to her child or children and officially recognize him/them. This scenario also explains why the children were attacked, not Rudolf, and why the attack occurred so rapidly after the arrival of Gretha and the children in Medan. However, it does not explain the lack of comment on the death or the lack of an investigation. It is wildly improbable that a poisoning nyai would be permitted to get away with her crime when the ruling class in society was so anxious to maintain its superior status. At the very least, a serious and ruthless criminal investigation would have been initiated—and it was not.
Analyzed in this way, the bulk of the evidence indicates that Norman died either of random causes, which required no public comment and had nothing to do with the family’s recent arrival in Sumatra, or of inadvertent poisoning during treatment for congenital syphilis shortly after his being placed under the care of a new physician. The lock of hair that Rudolf cut at the time of Norman’s death still exists, in the care of his descendants. If the living family would permit a few hairs from the lock to be analyzed for traces of mercury or arsenic, definitive proof of his cause of death might be forthcoming. Unfortunately, the family is wary of publicity and has declined repeated requests to provide hairs for examination.
There is one additional piece of pertinent evidence: Rudolf’s career trajectory tips the favor toward the congenital-syphilis hypothesis. On July 24, less than a month after Norman’s death, Rudolf was abruptly transferred back to Java to a posting of much lesser significance. Rudolf had been in the Indies with his family since 1897 and rising rapidly in his promotion and postings, yet immediately after the death of his son, and only four months after his arrival in Medan, his career turned sour once again. If his performance as garrison commander in that short time had been less than perfect, Rudolf would have been accorded pity and sympathy from his colleagues because his only son had died. Instead, he was removed from his post, sent away from Sumatra, and effectively demoted. This transfer suggests serious official disapproval, perhaps resulting from a suspicion or rumor about Norman’s death.
The MacLeods remained on Sumatra for another few weeks until Rudolf’s replacement, Major P. A. Gallas, formally assumed command on September 1. Then the devastated family left for Batavia on the S.S. Riebeek with Captain Koppeschar. From there, they were sent to Banjoe Biroe, a small village near Semarang. The transfer was a bitter disappointment to Rudolf and, probably, to Gretha. Leaving Norman’s grave behind, where they could never visit it again, was deeply painful.
After Norman’s death, the MacLeods’ marriage deteriorated still further and more disastrously. Rudolf blamed Gretha for the boy’s death, and she blamed him. Whatever the cause of his death, the tragedy deepened their vicious hatred for each other. Rudolf’s jealousy and brutality flared up in ugly ways; Gretha’s resentment and disgust took still crueller forms.
While they lived in Banjoe Biroe, Gretha sometimes sought refuge at Kemloko, the coffee plantation owned by the Balkstra family. She would go
there for prolonged visits, to get away from the atmosphere at home.
The Balkstra sisters characterized the woman they called Greta thus:
She was not beautiful, but had a pronounced individuality, full of charm, full of grace; she danced like a goddess. In the evenings she was a complete dancer, mastering the most intricate steps. She gladly dressed herself with much refinement and flirtatiousness. Her mouth was too large; her body too short to call her “beautiful,” but she had splendid legs.
Greta outraged Mother Balkstra on numerous occasions [by her behavior toward men, yet she had a]…deep affection for the woman, who she started to call “mother” in confidential moments.
“If you had been my mother, I would never have become bad…,” Greta said once, though Louise did not yet understand what she could mean by that. Louise had not then the slightest suspicion that Greta was already having affairs with other men.
When Louise went to Banjoe Biroe to visit, then Greta’s spouse appeared, although a withdrawn and somber man, he was nevertheless always pleasant and obliging towards his wife: there was no brawling. But there was an immeasurable distance between these two people, whose ideas of life, character and age were particularly badly matched.
Gretha said to Louise and Laura once, “half joking, half serious: ‘I will be celebrated…or notorious.’ And then that prophecy, which essentially came true: ‘I will die eventually on the scaffold.’”
The letters Gretha wrote from Banjoe Biroe tell a much more terrible story than the Balkstra sisters’ saccharine recollections. Though these letters are clearly self-dramatizing and intended to evoke sympathy, her words reveal her emotions. On December 2, 1899, she wrote to her father and stepmother: