This is the first extant letter from Raffles to the mother he loved. Sophia, after his death, destroyed all family correspondence (except that with Cousin Thomas and with a few peripheral relatives) from the time before Raffles knew her. For sure, neither she nor he would have wanted anything to remain which betrayed the misfortunes of his father, but she was seemingly motivated by resentment of Olivia, and of the life he had before his second marriage. There is only one reference to Olivia in her monumental Memoir of her husband. It is a footnote, and inaccurate. Sophia presented his private life, for posterity, as beginning and ending with herself.
The Lady Raffles encountered heavy gales and rough seas in the Channel. Off Land’s End in Cornwall, she was struggling, and making no progress at all. After four days, everyone on board was exhausted and seasick, and the ship had to put in at Falmouth.
Raffles profited from the delay by rushing off inland to go down another tin mine, and on 30 October wrote again to Elton Hamond about his second edition, sending him copies of two papers by John Crawfurd, on Prambanan and Borobodur, which Crawfurd had ‘allowed me to take for my information.’ Acknowledging that his account of Borobodur was ‘very scanty’ and inaccurate, he desired Elton to make good the deficiencies from Crawfurd’s papers. ‘You may borrow freely – but if you adopt any opinion state the authority in a complimentary manner to Crawfurd.’
Sophia wrote to Maryanne, envisaging some future time when they would all live happily together with their children. ‘You were always a little dear, and now more than ever.’ She was quite well again: ‘My strength has returned like magic and I am quite equal to a second edition of seasickness.’ She indeed suffered a second edition, and a third, and lost a lot of weight. Their ship set sail again on 6 November, with a fair wind – which changed almost at once, and they were driven back once more into Falmouth.
Raffles took the opportunity to write to Elton yet again, with instructions about William Daniell’s illustrations; the landscapes to be engraved were with the Duchess of Somerset, and she and the Duke would advise on what to include. He was still exercised about his use of Crawfurd’s material, which reflects the touchiness of their relationship: ‘There is no occasion to mention Crawfurd’s name unless opinions are quoted or unless you make extracts from the papers,’ in which case ‘it perhaps would be right to notice in a note that they have been consulted… I would willingly do what was right.’
While in Falmouth they heard some terrible news. Princess Charlotte went into labour at Claremont on 3 November. The baby was large and in the breech position. She suffered for two days and nights and then gave birth to a stillborn son. She died the next day. The popular Princess was mourned by the public in a hysterical outpouring of grief.
Raffles too was ‘shocked beyond measure,’ as he told the Duchess of Somerset. ‘I dare not dwell on it.’ He had lost a friend. He had also lost an influential supporter, the presumptive heir to the throne. He never expressed this, but Cousin Thomas was less delicate. While acknowledging that Raffles’ regard for the Princess was ‘beyond any consideration of rank, or wealth, or honor, which he might have attained, had both their lives been prolonged,’ the idea was ‘no doubt entertained at the time, that had he lived, he would have been Governor-General of India – while she would have been too much delighted to have raised him to the Peerage in that capacity.’
Another attempt to make way was again foiled by strong west winds. The ship was driven back miles in the wrong direction; this time they put in at Plymouth. They passed the time by visiting the Somersets who happened to be at their Devon House, Berry Pomeroy; and then went to see Sophia’s sister Alice and her husband Richard Mudge at Beechwood in Plympton St Mary, which belonged to the banker Richard Rosdew. The Rosdews and the Mudges were much intermarried, and Alice and Richard were to inherit Beechwood.
‘Once more we are off,’ wrote Raffles to the Duchess on 19 November, ‘and as we must go, God grant it may be for good!’ He despatched a last letter to Elton Hamond as they left the harbour: ‘I write these hurried lines for the pilot who is now waiting on the gangway – your letter has only been with me for an instant and we are once more off.’ Fretting about the illustrations, he told Elton: ‘The Ronggeng I decidedly think must be left out.’
This onset of propriety is funny. Daniell’s aquatint of ‘A Ronggeng or Dancing Girl’ was to prove the most popular of the illustrations in The History of Java. Raffles recorded in his Chapter 7 how the ronggengs were the ‘common dancing girls of the country,’ whose conduct was ‘generally so incorrect, as to render the title of ronggeng and prostitute synonymous.’ He devoted a page to their costumes and coiffures, and to the style of their dancing and singing, sometimes ‘rude and awkward, and on that account disgusting to Europeans.’ (‘Disgusting’ then meant merely distasteful, or disagreeable.)
The ronggengs’ costume was a less opulent version of that of the bejewelled court dancing girls: a long, decorative open sarong, its folds revealing the leg when dancing, and the upper body ‘enclosed in a kind of corset (pemakak) passing above the bosom and under the arms, and confining the waist in the narrowest possible limits.’ In Chapter 2, in a passage praising young women’s slender wrists and ankles, he had complained that the cloth which narrowed the waist was ‘injurious to female elegance’ by ‘drawing too tightly that part of the dress that covers the bosom.’ The illustration is graceful and not remotely pornographic. Perhaps Sophia objected to the representation of a loose woman.
They were at last on their way. By 1 December 1817 The Lady Raffles had weathered the Bay of Biscay. Sophia had ‘still not left her couch’ but everyone and everything on board was recovering, as Raffles assured the Duchess: ‘the cows, dogs, cats, birds, the latter singing round me, and my nursery of plants thriving beyond all expectation; the thermometer is at 76. What a waste of waters now lies between us, and yet the distance daily widens, and will widen still until half the world divides us.’
Chapter 10
The Golden Opportunity
Bencoolen and Calcutta 1818–1819
In February 1818, three and a half months after they left Falmouth, Raffles announced his great news to Maryanne from The Lady Raffles: ‘As it was decreed so it has happened, Sophia was confined on board… Miss Charlotte has made her appearance – on the 15th of this month, without any previous illness and I may say with less suffering than most women undergo…a beautiful little girl, the very image of yourself – with blue eyes, beautiful features and crooked toes.’
Sophia, after a labour of only two hours, was receiving ‘the visits of all the party aboard, seated on the couch to see them enjoy Cake and Caudle.’ (Caudle, served at christenings, was a sort of egg-nog.) Everything went so smoothly that Raffles thought he might arrange for their next baby to be born at sea too. Mary Grimes, whom they employed to be the baby’s nurse, was ‘excellent’.
‘We have now thrown the whole of the roundhouse into one cabin, which is occupied by Sophia and the child, and the cuddy is given up to us as an audience or antechamber, in which I sleep. The little darling has been baptised Sophia Charlotte.’ At the suggestion of the Radin Rana Dipura, she also received the name ‘Tunjong Segara’, Lily of the Sea.
He wrote to his mother the same day: ‘My dear Sophia has followed your example,’ i.e. in giving birth at sea. ‘You don’t know how proud we are of the little darling and what a beauty it is – tho’ I say it who should not say it, for they say it is the image of me.’
Bencoolen on the west coast of Sumatra was a shock after Java. The only way out was along the surf-battered beach, or by sea. Outside the town, the Company controlled most of a thinly populated three hundred-mile coastal strip, extending forty miles or so into the interior. There were no built roads either across the island or along the coast. Bencoolen’s Fort Marlborough had an unnerving 180-degree prospect of the Indian Ocean, broken by Rat Island six miles offshore.
The price of pepper had sunk in London. Yet pepper was about
all that Bencoolen had to offer. Free-trading Americans were buying pepper from the ports of Acheen in the north of Sumatra, without the cost of maintaining establishments, and were undercutting the market. The settlement could not even feed itself; rice was imported from Bengal.
Thomas Parr, Resident in the early years of the century, banned Company servants’ private trading and, to repair the economy, set up forced deliveries of coffee. He was hated. Men of the Pasumah people broke into his house and decapitated him. The Company responded with reprisals of an extreme and brutal kind. All this happened a decade before Raffles arrived, but Bencoolen reeked of unease and economic failure. Malaria and smallpox were endemic.
The Lady Raffles anchored on 19 March 1818. There was a major earthquake the day before, and Government House was too damaged to receive them. ‘This is,’ Raffles wrote to William Marsden, ‘without exception, the most wretched place I ever beheld. I cannot convey to you an adequate idea of the state of ruin and dilapidation which surrounds me… The roads are impassable; the highways in the town overrun with rank grass; the Government-house a den of ravenous dogs and polecats… In truth, I could never have conceived any thing half so bad. We will try and make it better; and if I am well supported from home, the West coast may yet be turned to account.’ He and Sophia would try to make themselves comfortable, and ‘happy we always are.’
‘Never was there such a pair of darlings,’ he wrote to Maryanne on 12 April. Sophia was feeding Charlotte herself, and at two months she was ‘as intelligent and large as most children at six [months], – and such a beauty!’ There is no record of Sophia complaining, as many new mothers would, even though ‘Government House is nearly a ruin, full of rents and cracks, and shaking with every blast.’ There were constant aftershocks. ‘We have seldom been a day or night without them. The lamps in the hall are thrown across each other…The couch pillows and mattress cast into the middle of the rooms as well as all the books from the shelves.’
There were in Bencoolen, apart from Malays and Sumatrans, several hundred Chinese and Bugis, and around five hundred convicts from Bengal. There were native slaves, and slaves from Africa imported by the Company. As well as forced cultivation, there was a system of ‘free gardens’: cultivators were paid lump sums of money in advance in exchange for pepper. Most never grew enough pepper to pay off the advance and became ‘slave-debtors’ to the Company. If they decamped their families, and, ultimately their villages, remained liable. Raffles’ brief, inevitably, was to reduce costs. Even he did not feel that even more investment from the Company was the immediate answer, informing the Court of Directors: ‘It is in the principle of Government, and in the management of the country that the evil lies.’
He emancipated the slaves and set up a school for their children, the African ones being ‘in a state of nature, vice, and wretchedness’ according to Sophia. She took on one ‘little bright-eyed girl’ for Nurse Grimes to train as a nursery maid. When Raffles reported the emancipation of the slaves to the Court of Directors, they let him know that he had been ‘precipitate’. Any decision should properly have been referred to them beforehand. No surprises there.
Raffles made a regulation that the slave-debtors could not be bound for more than ten years. He ‘graded’ the convicts, and awarded privileges and opportunities accordingly. The Europeans, nervous since the Parr murder, had razed all vegetation near the Government buildings so as to afford no cover. Raffles ordered trees and a garden to be planted.
He banned cockfighting and gaming, a measure that lost the Government money, since the ‘farmers’ who licensed those activities bid competitively for the privilege. He let go his personal bodyguard and made administrative cuts. The trouble was that he could remove a civil servant from a post and abolish the post, but the man remained a Company employee – paid for doing nothing.
Raffles annulled former treaties with the Sumatran Chiefs, and declared the free cultivation of pepper. There would be no forced deliveries, but a ‘free’ delivery of so much pepper per cultivator, or ‘tribute’ in lieu. Not much change there, then. The Chiefs, as in Java, were paid salaries to compensate for the loss of their cut on deliveries. Their salaries came out of the Government Treasury, so the price Raffles could afford to pay for pepper was reduced, making the cultivators’ situation worse. Raffles’ ventures in Bencoolen have an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland quality, and not only because the Duchess’ cook filled the kitchen with incapacitating clouds of pepper.
Nothing Raffles did in Sumatra saved the economy. Mutatis mutandis, ‘It was the story of Java all over again,’ as John Bastin has written. Add to this the horrid fact that when Captain Travers checked the Treasury accounts he discovered a deficit amounting to the equivalent of £40,000.
Nevertheless, Raffles could not resist projecting expansion. He sent Captain Travers to Batavia to negotiate with the Dutch for an extension of British lands in Sumatra, and to argue against ceding, as instructed, the port of Padang north of Bencoolen. Travers got nowhere. It was strange for him to see under the new regime the ‘wonderful changes’ at familiar Buitenzorg, where by chance he was given his old room to sleep in. The house was much improved, and would be ‘superbly finished’, while the gardens and grounds were ‘altogether altered, and very much for the better.’ Buitenzorg, though a happy house, had never been comfortable or well-maintained in Raffles’ time.
Maryanne was in England without an income. ‘I calculate you will be coming out,’ Raffles wrote, ‘because I don’t know what you can do at home – and yet I fear I shall have but little to give you but eating and drinking and a broken-down home.’ He was, as always, responsible for his family, and wrote to his mother: ‘It is a heart-breaking thing to be so far apart and yet I am satisfied it is for the best – it is necessary – we could not live without it – to be in England without money would never do.’ The time was not far distant ‘when I shall return for good and all – never more to part… There is nothing to keep me in this country beyond the necessity of obtaining the means without which neither you nor I could live in England.’
He missed Maryanne. ‘We often long for my dear Pussy, that we may have some fun.’ She had no idea ‘what a prosing domestic couple we have become. We really want you to entertain us.’ The only familiar female friend the Raffleses had was ‘Mrs Tot’ – they called Mary and Thomas Otho Travers ‘the Tots’. But as before, Raffles assembled a ‘family’. His old friend Thomas McQuoid was in Bencoolen in the hope of private trading, and the Tots brought back from Java the naturalist Dr Horsfield – and ‘23 horses, birds without number, beasts of every kind and plants, seeds, etc in abundance.’ Java, the Land of Promise, was now a Paradise Lost.
Mrs Tot had a baby within a week after their return – a girl, and ‘a very ugly child,’ as Raffles, the prejudiced new father, told Maryanne. Sophia lent Nurse Grimes to Mary for the event, and ‘came over and watched my Mary as she would have done a sister,’ wrote Travers in his journal. (This baby died at four months.) Sophia had told the Duchess that ‘Sir Stamford will not long remain stationary, and when he is ready to move I am to wean my Baby that I may accompany him.’ The result of weaning Charlotte was that Sophia fell pregnant again at once.
That did not stop her from travelling rough with Raffles into the interior. ‘There is nothing to tell,’ she wrote to Maryanne with maximum insouciance, ‘except that we have walked all over Sumatra, and the people look upon us as a sort of wonder for returning alive.’
For three weeks in May 1818 they walked between twelve and fifteen hours a day. ‘Here am I alive and well – tho’ of course I suffered a great deal at the time, and sometimes thought I would have died of fatigue.’ Where the way was very steep, ‘I had a man to hold my hands, one before the other behind.’ Everyone had told them it was impossible for Europeans to penetrate the jungle. ‘Tom would not listen to difficulties…and I would not be separated from him merely for my own convenience, and there ends my story.’
Raffles’ lett
er to Maryanne told how ‘Sophia stood the fatigue and exposure like a heroine.’ He reserved his best account for the Duchess of Somerset, knowing she would share it with the Duke and with botanical circles in London.
Raffles’ primary purpose on the expedition was to assess conditions in the southern out-Residences and villages and, in Pasumah, to ‘reconcile conflicting interests which had long distracted the country’ (after the murder of Parr).
They rode eighty miles along the beach from Bencoolen to the out-station at Manna, where they turned inland, following the course of the Manna river, accompanied by Dr Joseph Arnold, Edward Presgrave (the young Resident at Manna), six native officers, and fifty Malays carrying equipment and supplies. Leeches ‘got into our boots and shoes, which became filled with blood; at night, too, they fell off the leaves that sheltered us from the weather.’ Sophia’s letter to Maryanne did not say what she wore. Presumably she had long pantaloons under her muslin gowns.
On the third day Dr Joseph Arnold’s attention was drawn to something extraordinary. We know the details from an unfinished letter found after his death:
I had ventured some way before the party, when one of the Malay servants came running to me, with wonder in his eyes, and said, “Come with me, sir, come! A flower very large, beautiful, wonderful!” I went with the man about a hundred yards into the jungle, and he pointed to a flower growing close to the ground, under the bushes, which was truly astonishing. My first impulse was to cut it up and bring it to the hut. To tell you the truth, had I been alone, and had there been no witnesses, I should, I think, have been fearful of mentioning the dimensions of this flower, so much does it exceed every flower I have ever seen or heard of, but I had Sir Stamford Raffles and Lady Raffles with me, and Mr Presgrave, who though equally astonished with myself, are able to testify to the truth.
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