Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad heretic Who Led History° Batam Island ° Batavia ° Borneo ° Java ° Panjang
° Surabaya ° Riau Islands ° Malacca Strait
The map below is an unusual 1658 map of the Indian Ocean, or Erythraean Sea, as it was in antiquity. Composed by Jan Jansson after a similar 1597 map published by A. Ortelius in his Parergon. Covers from Egypt and the Nile valley eastward past Arabia and India, to Southeast Asia and Java. Cartographically, India, Arabia, and Africa roughly correspond to the conventions of the period.
Indonesia is the world's largest archipelago. Estimates are that the country is made up of over 13,000 islands, many of which are mountainous and have active volcanoes. Another name for the group is the Moluccas. (This is the group of islands Christopher Columbus was seeking when he sailed into the Americas in 1492.)
The Spanish and Portuguese had a monopoly of the East Indies spice trade until destruction of the Spanish Aramada in 1588, which permitted the British and Dutch to seek their share of this wealthy import business. Because of the risks taken to bring spices to Europe, they were very expensive. Early on, their delivery was largely in the hands of the Moslem world which Catholic Europe was often at war with. Spices attained luxury status as emblems of conspicuous consumption.
Fortunes were made in the East Indian and Spice Island trade, since precious spices brought huge rewards to successful importers. The glittering wealth of the Portuguese and Spanish courts, of Italian port cities, Dutch trading firms, German bankers and British speculators was followed by the extraordinarily successful entry in 1672 of the United States into the spice trade.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Southeast Asia was colonized by Britain, France, and Holland. The Dutch virtually excluded company members from the East Indies after the Amboina Massacre in 1623 (an incident in which English, Japanese, and Portuguese traders were executed by Dutch authorities), but the company's defeat of the Portuguese in India (1612) won them trading concessions from the Mughal Empire. In 1799, the Dutch government took over the Dutch East India Company's rule of parts of the Indonesian archipelago. Over the next hundred years, control extended throughout the entire archipelago, including Sumatra and Bali, and the modern boundaries of Indonesia were established at this time. By the early 1800s new plantations of spices in Africa and India opened up new supplies to the traders. As a consequence, prices fell.
Britain's East India Company went out of existence in 1873. During its heyday, the East India Company not only established trade through Asia and the Middle East but also effectively became of the ruler of territories vastly larger than the United Kingdom itself. In addition, it also created, rather than conquered, colonies. Singapore, for example, was an island with very few Malay inhabitants in 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased it for the Company from their ruler, the Sultan of Johor, and created what eventually became one of the world's greatest trans-shipment ports.
Borneo
January 17, 1876, London and China Telegraph
London, United Kingdom
CONSULAR REPORTS.
BORNEO.
The report of Acting Consul General Low, on the trade and commerce of Borneo for the year 1874, has just been issued. The foreign trade of the Port of Brunei for that year consisted, as usual, chiefly of imports and exports to the British Colonies of Singapore and Labuan, and the results taken at Brunei are —imports, from Singapore, £26,545, Labuan, £17,595, total, .£44,140, against a total of £31,840 in 1873. The trade with the provinces from Labuan was to the value of £33,326, against £30,268 in 1873, thus making the total British import trade at Brunei £77,466, against £56,466 in 1873. The total exports from. Brunei were £77,444 in 1874, against £56,161 in 1873, or an increase of £21,283. The Consul points out that if the valuable coal mines of Borneo be worked, "revenues would be obtainable which, while supporting the Eajahs, would permit the introduction of a regular fiscal system in place of the irregular exactions now made upon the people of the various rivers by their territorial lords." Mr. Low says :—
I have known the coast for many years, and remember that in 1845 the trade of Borneo Proper was conducted with Singapore in a very few native prahees, which, at great risk, made annual voyages. It was dangerous at that time to move by sea from one village to another during the fine season, and the river of Brunei was annually blockaded by squadrons of Llancon and Balinini pirates. No instance of piracy has occurred during the last two years, on the whole coast line from. Tanjong Api to Sancakan Bay, a distance of 700 miles, and for many years no considerable fleet has been known to visit these waters.
That a steam vessel has been placed in the trade is entirely owing to the efforts of Sir H. Bulwer in forcing this question on the attention of those whom it was intended to benefit. So apathetic and so averse to innovation were they, that every kind of objection was raised to the trial of the experiment, and it was only by great perseverance on Sir Henry's part that the necessary energy and enterprise could be aroused. This vessel, while paying as a commercial undertaking exceptionally well, has been of signal service in relieving the famine caused by the invasion of the small-pox, the ripening harvests having been abandoned ungarnered at its approach, and the whole community now see and acknowledge the propriety of Sir Henry's disinterested exertions. It is believed that it will soon be necessary to establish another vessel of the same size to carry the increasing trade of Brunei and Labuan to Singapore.
Merchants sailing the world also faced many natural disasters, such as Krakatoa Volcano which erupted in 1883. It's fine ashes followed wind streams as far away as over New York City, whereas the eruption's tidal waves reached the American West Coast. At that very instant, Krakatoa vanished as if devoured by the sea, causing formidable tidal waves which in turn swept off just about everything alive from the surrounding coastal areas. However, the disappearance of the gigantic Krakatoa also meant the birth of small islands in its place, one of which is called Anak Krakatau or Krakatoa’s Child which is at present an extremely active young volcano. From both West Java’s West Coast and from Sumatra’s Lampung Province, this young and very active volcano is clearly visible. A boat trip to this place may be worth making. Batavia
Article 17, about the Company’s factory at Batavia from 1619-1740, is not so much the story of Dutch settlement, as it is one of a Chinese colonial town within Batavia. Batavia had been founded as the center of an inter-Asian maritime trading empire competing with the Spaniards and the Portuguese. When trade with the Dutch Republic became more important than Asian trade in the late 1600s, the Company gradually became a territorial power collecting tributary payments, and Batavia lost its position in the maritime trade empire.
Agriculture was almost completely controlled by the Chinese in Batavia by 1649, using both Javanese and Chinese labor. New Chinese immigration occurred after 1683.
The effort to develop sugar plantations and sugar mills was almost entirely in the hands of the Chinese, and population was growing outside the city. The administrative system did not change to meet the needs of this rural population and the cooperation between the Dutch and the Chinese gradually deteriorated.
When the sugar market declined, mass poverty, unemployment and ruin followed. The rural Chinese revolted in 1740. Not only were they defeated, but there was also a massacre of urban Chinese. By 1781, only sixty sugar mills were operating. Still, half of Batavia’s population profited from the industry.
The company's encounters with foreign competitors eventually required it to assemble its own military and administrative departments, thereby becoming an imperial power in its own right, though the British government began to reign it in by the late eighteenth century.
Java
A 19th century system of agricultural exploitation and taxation in kind in Java, Netherlands East Indies (NEI), introduced by governor-general Van den Bosch (1830–4) to pay for the expensive Java War (1825–30). The Javanese had to produce cash crops on an agreed proportion of their land, initially 20 per cent, which were shipped to The Netherlands and sold for the Dutch government by the Nederlandse Handelsmaatschappij (Netherlands Trading Company).
Bradstreet Rairden, Jr. (son of Mary Tarbox Rairden of Woolwich, Maine, and Captain Bradstreet Rairden of the 347-ton bark Henry Warren) went to sea in November 1874. He took command of the bark Evie Reed at Portland Maine in August 18, 1881 at the age of 23 and left the vessel due to sickness with Java fever, at Batavia, Java on March 1884. He settled at Aujer and set up as ship-chandler and commission merchant. He also became the United States consul in Batavia.
In July 1888, Emma Pray of the China trade ship Governor Goodwin, arrived at Anjer-Lor to discover that the ship chandlers were Scott and Rairden, "the only English speaking men in Anjer." When he met Emma, Mr. Rairden courteously invited her to "go down to his house, and see his wife, and said we ere to stop of tiffin with him. I didn't know that the had a wife," Emma commented, but went along anyway, to "a very pretty little house, and found Mrs. Rairden to be a young Englishwoman." Her maiden name was Frances Elizabeth Collins (born in Bootle, England, July 16, 1865); she had arrived in Java on the bark John A. Gaunt with her sister, her brother-in-law being the captain. Over the five weeks that the ship had lain in Anjer, Frances "met Mr. Rairden, became engaged to him, and two days before the vessel was to sail, they were married on board ship by a minister whom they sent for from Singapore.
The Indonesian coat of arms bears the inscription ‘Unity in Diversity’. There are over 300 socio-linguistic groups in Indonesia, each with a distinct culture and heritage. Only about one in six Indonesians speaks the national language at home. Even fewer speak Indonesian as their first language. The mother tongue of the vast majority is a regional language, for example, Javanese, Balinese, Minangkabau or Acehnese. Nursery rhymes, childhood stories, myths, legends and cultural mores are as diverse as the languages. Not surprisingly, most Indonesians first develop a regional identity, only learning the national language, Indonesian, when they begin school and with it an Indonesian identity.
January 29, 1896, Echo
London, United Kingdom
STRANGE DISCOVERY IN JAVA
While boring for water north of Burlington, Java, the operator who was running the drill, found it had struck a layer of sand and wet earth, in which was thickly mixed seaweed and small shells, at a depth of 150 feet. After passing through this the drill struck a mass of bones, that were so hard the 6-inch casing was broken and the drill destroyed. Samples of the bone brought to the surface show it to be pure ivory. It is thought to bo the bed of an ancient lake, and that the bones of some monster of a remote period have been discovered.
