The Dutch had not seen the last of Raffles, however, for in 1817 he returned from England, where he had been knighted by the Prince Regent, to take the post of lieutenant-governor of Sumatra, to which the British did not finally relinquish their claims until half a century later. His administration of that great island was characterized by the same breadth of vision, tact, and energy which had marked his rule in Java. It was during this period that Raffles rendered his greatest service to the empire. The Dutch, upon regaining Java, attempted to obtain complete control of all the islands of the archipelago, which would have resulted in seriously hampering, if not actually ending, British trade east of Malacca. But Raffles, recognizing the menace to British interests, defeated the Dutch scheme in January, 1819, by a sudden coup d'etat, when he seized the little island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula which commands the Malacca Straits and the entrance to the China seas, and founded Singapore, thereby giving Britain control of the gateway to the Farther East and ending forever the Dutch dream of making of those waters a mare clausum—a Dutch lake.
The thousands of islands, islets, and atolls which comprise Netherlands India—the proper etymological name of the archipelago is Austronesia—are scattered over forty-six degrees of longitude, on both sides of the equator. Although in point of area Java holds only fifth place, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea and the Celebes being much larger, it nevertheless contains three-fourths of the population and yields four-fifths of the produce of the entire archipelago. Though scarcely larger than Cuba, it has more inhabitants than all the Atlantic Coast States, from Maine to Florida, combined. This, added to the strategic importance of its situation, the richness of its soil, the variety of its products, the intelligence, activity and civilization of its inhabitants, and the fact that it is the seat of the colonial government, makes Java by far the most important unit of the Insulinde. Because of its overwhelming importance in the matters of position, products and population, it is administered as a distinct political entity, the other portions of the Dutch Indies being officially designated as the Outposts or the Outer Possessions.
Westernmost and by far the most important of the Outposts is Sumatra, an island four-fifths the size of France, as potentially rich in mineral and agricultural wealth as Java, but with a sparse and intractable population, certain of the tribes, notably the Achinese, who inhabit the northern districts, still defying Dutch rule in spite of the long and costly series of wars which have resulted from Holland's attempt to subjugate them. The unmapped interior of Sumatra affords an almost virgin field for the explorer, the sportsman and the scientist. It has ninety volcanoes, twelve of which are active (the world has not forgotten the eruption, in 1883, of Krakatu, an island volcano off the Sumatran coast, which resulted in the loss of forty thousand human lives); the jungles of the interior are roamed by elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers and occasional orang-utans, while in the scattered villages, with their straw-thatched, highly decorated houses, dwell barbarous brown men practising customs so incredibly eerie and fantastic that a sober narration of them is more likely than not to be greeted with a shrug of amused disbelief. One who has no first-hand knowledge of the Sumatran tribes finds it difficult to accept at their face value the accounts of the customs practised by the Bataks of Tapanuli, for example, who, when their relatives become too old and infirm to be of further use, give them a pious interment by eating them. When the local Doctor Oslers have decided that a man has reached the age when his place at the family table is preferable to his company, the aged victim climbs a lemon-tree, beneath which his relatives stand in a circle, wailing the deathsong, the weird, monotonous chant being continued until the condemned one summons the courage to throw himself to the ground, whereupon the members of his family promptly despatch him with clubs, cut up his body, roast the meat, and eat it. Thus every stomach in the tribe becomes, in effect, a sort of family burial-plot. I was unable to ascertain why the victim is compelled to throw himself from a lemon-tree. It struck me that some taller tree, like a palm, would better accomplish the desired result. A matter of custom, doubtless. Perhaps that explains why we dub persons who are passé "lemons." Then there are the Achinese, whose women frequently marry when eight years old, and are considered as well along in life when they reach their teens; and the Niassais, who are in deadly fear of albino children and who kill all twins as soon as they are born. Or the Menangkabaus, whose tribal government is a matriarchy: lands, houses, crops and children belonging solely to the wife, who may, and sometimes does, sell her husband as a slave in order to pay her debts.
Trailing from the eastern end of Java in a twelve-hundred-mile-long chain, like the wisps of paper which form the tail of a kite, and separated by straits so narrow that artillery can fire across them, are the Lesser Sundas—Bali, noted for its superb scenery and its alluring women; Lombok, the northernmost island whose flora and fauna are Australian; Sumbawa, where the sandalwood comes from; Flores, whose inhabitants consider the earth so holy that they will not desecrate it by digging wells or cultivation; Timor, the northeastern half of which, together with Goa in India and Macao in China, forms the last remnant of Portugal's once enormous Eastern empire; Rotti, Kei, and Aroo, the great chain thus formed linking New Guinea, the largest island in the world, barring Australia, with the mainland of Asia. Of the last-named island, the entire western half belongs to Holland, the remaining half being about equally divided between British Papua, in the southeast, and in the northeast the former German colony of Kaiser Wilhelm Land, now administered by Australia under a mandate from the League of Nations.
The population of Dutch New Guinea is estimated at a quarter of a million, but the predilection of its puff-ball-headed inhabitants for human flesh has discouraged the Dutch census-takers from making an accurate enumeration, as the Papuan cannibal does not hesitate to sacrifice the needs of science to those of the cooking-pot. Though New Guinea is believed to be enormously rich in natural resources, and has many excellent harbors, the secrets of its mysterious interior can only be conjectured. The natives are as degraded as any in the world; their principal vocation is hunting birds of paradise, whose plumes command high prices in the European markets; their chief avocation in recent years has been staging imitation cannibal feasts for the benefit of motion-picture expeditions. But, unknown and unproductive as it is at present, I would stake my life that New Guinea will be a great colony some day.
To the west of New Guinea and to the south of the Philippines lie the Moluccas—Ceram, Amboin, Ternate, Halmahera, and the rest—the Spice Islands of the old-time voyagers, the scented tropic isles of which Camoens sang. Amboin, owing to the fact that Europeans have been established there for centuries on account of its trade in spices, is characterized by a much higher degree of civilization than the rest of the Moluccas, a considerable proportion of its inhabitants professing to be Christians. The flower of the colonial army is recruited from the Amboinese, who regard themselves not as vassals of the Dutch but as their allies and equals, a distinction which they emphasize by wearing shoes, all other native troops going barefoot. Beyond the Moluccas, across the Banda Sea, sprawls the Celebes,[1] familiar from our school-days because of its fantastic outline, the plural form of its name being due to the supposition of the early explorers that it was a group of islands instead of one. And finally, crossing Makassar Straits, we come to Borneo, the habitat of the head-hunter and the orang-utan. Though Borneo is a treasure-house for the naturalist, the botanist, and the ethnologist, the Dutch, as in New Guinea, have merely scratched its surface, almost no attempt having thus far been made to exploit its enormous natural resources. Thus I have arrayed for your cursory inspection the congeries of curious and colorful islands which constitute Netherlands India in order that you may comprehend the problems of civilization and administration which Holland has had to solve in those distant seas, and that you may be better qualified to judge the results she has achieved.
The Insulinde has eight times the population and sixty times the area of the mother country, from which it is separated by ten thousand miles of sea, yet the sovereignty of Queen Wilhelmina is upheld among the cannibals of New Guinea, the head-hunters of Borneo, and the savages of Achin, no less than among the docile millions of Java, by less than ten thousand European soldiers. That a territory so vast and with so enormous a population, should be so admirably administered, everything considered, by so small a number of white men, is in itself proof of the Dutch genius for ruling subject races.
From the day when Holland determined to organize her colonial empire for the benefit of the natives themselves, instead of exploiting it for the benefit of a handful of Dutch traders and settlers, as she had previously done, she has employed in her colonial service only thoroughly trained officials of proved ability and irreproachable character. The Dutch officials whom I met in Java and the Outposts impressed me, indeed, as being men of altogether exceptional capacity and attainments, better educated and qualified, as a whole, than those whom I have encountered in the British and French colonial possessions. Since the war, owing to the difficulty of obtaining men of sufficient caliber and experience to fill the minor posts, which are not particularly well paid, Holland has given employment in her colonial service to a considerable number of Germans, most of whom had been trained in colonial administration in Germany's African and Pacific possessions, but they are appointed, of course, only to posts of relative unimportance.
Every year the Minister of the Colonies ascertains the number of vacancies in the East Indian service, and every year the Grand Examination of Officials is held simultaneously in The Hague and Batavia, the results of this examination determining the eligibility of candidates for admission to the colonial service and the fitness of officials already in the service for promotion. With the exception of the Governor-General and two or three other high officials, who are appointed by the crown, no official can evade this examination, to pass which requires not only an intimate knowledge of East Indian languages, politics and customs, but real scholarship as well. The names of those candidates who pass this examination are certified to the Minister of the Colonies, who thereupon directs them to report to the Governor-General at Batavia and provides them with funds for the voyage. Upon their arrival in the Indies the Governor-General appoints them to the grade of controleur and tests their capacity by sending them to difficult and trying posts in Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes, or New Guinea, where they must conclusively prove their ability before they can hope for promotion to the grades of assistant resident and resident, and the relative comfort of official life in Java. In the Outposts they at once come face to face with innumerable difficulties and responsibilities, for the controleur is responsible, though within narrower limits than the resident, for everything: justice, police, agriculture, education, public works, the protection of the natives, and the requirements of the settlers in such matters as labor and irrigation. He is, in short, an administrator, a police official, a judge, a diplomatist, and an adviser on almost every subject connected with the government of tropical dependencies. The officials in the Outposts are given more authority and greater latitude of action than their colleagues in Java, for they have greater difficulties to cope with, while the intractability, if not the open hostility of the natives whom they are called upon to rule demands greater tact and diplomacy than are required in Java, where the officials are inclined to become spoiled by their easy-going life and the semi-royal state which they maintain.