CHAPTER IV
THE EMERALDS OF WILHELMINA
In Singapore stands one of the most significant statues in the world. From the centre of its sun-scorched Esplanade rises the bronze figure of a youthful, slender, clean-cut, keen-eyed man, clad in the high-collared coat and knee-breeches of a century ago, who, from his lofty pedestal, peers southward, beyond the shipping in the busy harbor, beyond the palm-fringed straits, toward those mysterious, alluring islands which ring the Java Sea. Though his name, Thomas Stamford Raffles, doubtless holds for you but scanty meaning, and though he died when only forty-five, his last years shadowed by the ingratitude of the country whose commercial supremacy in the East he had secured and to which he had offered a vast, new field for colonial expansion, he was one of the greatest architects of empire that ever lived. He combined the vision and administrative genius of Clive and Hastings with the audacity and energy of Hawkins and Drake. It was his dream, to use his own words, "to make Java the center of an Eastern insular empire" ruled "not only without fear but without reproach"; an empire to consist of that great archipelago—Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Celebes, New Guinea, and the lesser islands—which sweeps southward and eastward from the Asian mainland to the edges of Australasia. Though this splendid colonial structure was erected according to the plans that Raffles drew, by curious circumstance the flag that flies over it today is not his flag, not the flag of England, for, instead of being governed from Westminster, as he had dreamed, it is governed from The Hague, the ruler of its fifty million brown inhabitants being the stout, rosy-cheeked young woman who dwells in the Palace of Het Loo.
Though in area Queen Wilhelmina's colonial possessions are exceeded by those of Britain and France, she is the sovereign of the second largest colonial empire, in point of population, in the world. But, because it lies beyond the beaten paths of tourist travel, because it has been so little advertised by plagues and famines and rebellions, and because it has been so admirably and unobtrusively governed, it has largely escaped public attention—a fact, I imagine, with which the Dutch are not ill-pleased. Did you realize, I wonder, that the Insulinde, as Netherlands India is sometimes called, is as large, or very nearly as large, as all that portion of the United States lying east of the Mississippi? Did you know that in the third largest island of the archipelago, Sumatra, the State of California could be set down and still leave a comfortable margin all around? Or that the fugitive from justice who turns the prow of his canoe westward from New Guinea must sail as far as from Vancouver to Yokohama before he finds himself beyond the shadow of the Dutch flag and the arm of Dutch law?
Until the closing years of the sixteenth century, European trade with the Far East was an absolute monopoly in the hands of Spain and Portugal. Incredible as it may seem, the two Iberian nations alone possessed the secret of the routes to the East, which they guarded with jealous care. In 1492, Columbus, bearing a letter from the King of Spain to the Khan of Tartary, whose power and wealth had become legendary in Europe through the tales of Marco Polo and other overland travelers, sailed westward from Cadiz in search of Asia, discovering the islands which came to be known as the West Indies. Five years later a Portuguese sea-adventurer, Vasco da Gama, turned the prow of his caravel south from the mouth of the Tagus, skirted the coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean, and dropped his anchor in the harbor of Calicut—the first European to reach the beckoning East by sea. For a quarter of a century the Portuguese were the only people in Europe who knew the way to the East, and their secret gave them a monopoly of the Eastern trade. Lisbon became the richest port of Europe. Portugal was mistress of the seas. But in 1519 another Portuguese seafarer, Hernando de Maghallanes—we call him Ferdinand Magellan—who, resenting his treatment by the King of Portugal, had shifted his allegiance to Spain, sailed southwestward across the Atlantic, rounded the southern extremity of America by the straits which bear his name, crossed the unknown Pacific, and raised the flag of Spain over the islands which came in time to be called the Philippines. Spain had reached the Indies by sailing west, as Portugal had reached them by sailing east.
Though the fabulous wealth of the lands thus discovered was discussed around every council table and camp-fire in Europe, the routes by which that wealth might be attained were guarded by Portugal and Spain as secrets of state. The charts showing the routes were not intrusted to the captains of vessels in the Eastern trade until the moment of departure, and they were taken up immediately upon their return; the silence of officers and crews was insured by every oath that the church could frame and every penalty that the state could devise. For more than three-quarters of a century, indeed, the two Iberian nations succeeded in keeping the secret of the sea roads to the East, its betrayal being punishable by death. In 1580, however, the English freebooter, Francis Drake, nicknamed "The Master Thief of the Unknown World," duplicated the voyage of Magellan's expedition of threescore years before, thus discovering the route to the Indies used by Spain.
At this period the Dutch, "the waggoners of the sea," possessed, as middlemen, a large interest in the spice trade, for the Portuguese, having no direct access to the markets of northern Europe, had made a practise of sending their Eastern merchandise to the Netherlands in Dutch bottoms for distribution by way of the Rhine and the Scheldt. As a result, the enormous carrying trade of Holland was wholly dependent upon Lisbon. But when Spain unceremoniously annexed Portugal in 1580, the first act of Philip, upon becoming master of Lisbon, was to close the Tagus to the Dutch, his one-time subjects, who had revolted eight years before. As a result of the revenge thus taken by the Spanish tyrant, the Dutch were faced by the necessity of themselves going in quest of the Indies if their flag was not to disappear from the seas. Their opportunity came a dozen years later when a venturesome Hollander, Cornelius Houtman, who was risking imprisonment and even death by trading surreptitiously in the forbidden city on the Tagus, succeeded in obtaining through bribery a copy of one of the secret charts. The Spanish authorities scarcely could have been aware that he had learned a secret of such immense importance, or his silence would have been insured by the headsman. As it was, he was thrown into prison for illegal trading, where he was held for heavy ransom. But he managed to get word to Amsterdam of the priceless information which had come into his possession, whereupon the merchants of that city promptly formed a syndicate, subscribed the money for his ransom, and obtained his release. Thus it came about that shortly after his return to Holland there was organized the Company of Distant Lands, a title as vague, grandiose and alluring as the plans of those who founded it. In 1595, then, nearly a century after da Gama had shown the way, four caravels under the command of Houtman, the banner of the Netherlands flaunting from their towering sterns, sailed grandly out of the Texel, slipped past the white chalk cliffs of Dover, sped southward before the trades, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and laid their course across the Indian Ocean for the Spice Islands. When the adventurers returned, two years later, they brought back tales of islands richer than anything of which the Dutch burghers had ever dreamed, and produced cargoes of Eastern merchandise to back their stories up.
The return of Houtman's expedition was the signal for a great outburst of commercial enterprise in the Low Countries, seekers after fortune or adventure flocking to the Indies as, centuries later, other fortune-seekers, other adventurers, flocked to the gold-diggings of the Sierras, the Yukon, and the Rand. On those distant seas, however, the adventurers were beyond the reach of any law, the same lawless conditions prevailing in the Indies at the beginning of the seventeenth century which characterized Californian life in the days of '49. The Dutch warred on the natives and on the Portuguese, and, when there was no one else to offer them resistance, they fought among themselves. By 1602 conditions had become so intolerable that the government of Holland, in order to tranquillize the Indies, and to stabilize the spice market at home, decided to amalgamate the various trading enterprises into one great corporation, the Dutch East India Company, which was authorized to exercise the functions of government in those remote seas and to prosecute the war against Spain. When Philip shut the Dutch out of Lisbon, he made a formidable enemy for himself, for, though the burghers went to the East primarily in order to save their commerce from extinction, they were animated in a scarcely less degree by a determination to even their score with Spain.
The history of the Dutch East India Company is not a savory one. It was a powerful instrument for extracting the wealth of the Indies, and, so long as the wealth was forthcoming, the stockholders at home in Holland did not inquire too closely as to how the instrument was used. The story of the company from its formation in 1602 until its dissolution nearly two centuries later is a record of intrigue, cruelty and oppression. It exercised virtually sovereign powers. It made and enforced its own laws, it maintained its own fleet and army, it negotiated treaties with Japan and China, it dethroned sultans and rajahs, it established trading-posts and factories at the Cape of Good Hope, in the Persian Gulf, on the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, and in Bengal; it waged war against the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the English in turn. When at the summit of its power, in 1669, the company possessed forty warships and one hundred and fifty merchantmen, maintained an army of ten thousand men, and paid a forty per cent dividend.
Meanwhile a formidable rival to the Dutch company, the English East India Company, had arisen, but the accession of a Dutchman, William, Prince of Orange, to the throne of England in 1688 turned the rivals into allies, the trade of the eastern seas being divided between them. But toward the close of the eighteenth century there came another change in the status quo, for the Dutch, by allying themselves with the French, became the enemies of England. By this time Great Britain had become the greatest sea power in the world, so that within a few months after the outbreak of hostilities in 1795 the British flag had replaced that of the Netherlands over Ceylon, Malacca, and other stations on the highway to the Insulinde. When the Netherlands were annexed to the French Empire by Napoleon in 1810 the British seized the excuse thus provided to occupy Java, Thomas Stamford Raffles, the brilliant young Englishman who was then the agent of the British East India Company at Malacca, in the Malay States, being sent to Java as lieutenant-governor. Urgent as were his appeals that Java should be retained by Britain as a jewel in her crown of empire, the readjustment of the territories of the great European powers which was effected at the Congress of Vienna, in 1816, after the fall of Napoleon, resulted in the restoration to the Dutch of those islands of the Insulinde, including Java, which the British had seized. But, though Raffles ruled in Java for barely four and a half years, his spirit goes marching on, the system of colonial government which he instituted having been continued by the Dutch, in its main outlines, to this day. He won the confidence and friendship of the powerful native princes, revolutionized the entire legal system, revived the system of village or communal government, reformed the land-tenure, abolished the abominable system of forcing the natives to deliver all their crops, and gave to the Javanese a rule of honesty, justice and wisdom with which, up to that time, they had not had even a bowing acquaintance. As a result of the lessons learned from Stamford Raffles, the Dutch possessions in the East are today more wisely and justly administered than those of any other European nation.