CHAPTER 4

MONOPOLY AND
SOVEREIGNTY, PLUNDER
AND SALVAGE

(1830–1843)

Dutch Alarm Regarding Western Interlopers

Dr Medhurst’s illuminating report on conditions in Bali in the year 1830 commanded a remarkably widespread audience for an article published originally in obscure ecclesiastical journals which one might expect to be read only by village clergymen. Bali was already becoming known, however, to the international world of traders and travelers, among them the ships’ companies of English and American whalers which were beginning to frequent waters adjacent to Bali and sometimes sent parties ashore to purchase provisions in the port towns or to hunt deer and banteng (wild cattle) in the mountains. The recently established English colony of Singapore, which most of these voyagers eventually visited and from which no few of them came, was especially curious about its not so distant neighbor, hence the quick Singapore reprints of the Medhurst report.

Enterprising individuals from Singapore were making tentative efforts to establish themselves elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago than just Batavia and Surabaya, where certain English merchants had managed to stay in business even after Raffles handed Java back to the Dutch. The Singapore concern of Dalmeida and Company, of which the proprietors were Portuguese by origin, was especially active. It sent its ships frequently to Bali and may have had a resident European or Eurasian agent for a time in nearby Lombok. The Batavia- and Surabaya-based firm of Morgan, King and Company, the enterprise of a pair of not very reputable English traders from Bengal, also seems to have traded extensively throughout the eastern islands. George Po-cock King, one of the partners, did regular business both in Bali and in Lombok and may have established his own trading post in Bali as early as 1831. There were others as well, but one of the most aggressive of all Western traders in Asian waters at the time was a Scottish sea captain, John Burd, who affiliated himself with the Danish East India Company to trade under the Danish flag in Singapore, Macau, Canton, Batavia and wherever else profit offered.

John Burd and Mads Lange in Lombok

Captain John Burd recruited an especially energetic and promising young Dane, Mads Lange (b. 1807–d. 1856) of Rudkobing as one of his ship’s officers and presently made him a business partner. Lange sailed with or for Burd on several voyages to the East and persuaded his three younger brothers, Hans, Karl Emilius and Hans Henrick, to join him. In late 1833 Captain Burd set out on the heavily armed 800-ton merchant vessel de Zuid on a voyage to China and the Indies with Mads Lange as First Officer and the three other Lange brothers as members of the ship’s company. In early 1834 de Zuid visited Lombok and probably also Bali. It was decided that Mads Lange would establish a permanent trading post ashore in Lombok as the focus for region-wide commerce which John Burd would develop. The pair would build up a shipping fleet of their own, captained by themselves, the three younger brothers and other willing adventurers.

The enterprise was an instant success. Lombok was a happy choice as a commercial center. It was strategically located on the direct sea route between Singapore and Australia which was beginning to carry very heavy traffic. It was rich in rice and other local produce for which there was great regional demand. It was also a convenient provisioning and servicing center for the many ships’ captains who preferred, if possible, to avoid the heavy charges and suspicious scrutiny of the Dutch in such ports as Batavia and Surabaya. Mads Lange established cordial relations with the Raja, accepted service as his Syahbandar for the port town of Ampenan, built a factory (trading post), set up a shipyard and very soon became a man of such wealth and influence that he inevitably became known as “the White Raja of Ampenan.”

Pak Jembrok’s Espionage Report

The Dutch, naturally, were far from pleased with this development. A Javanese spy named Pak Jembrok, who was then in the employ of Rollin Couquerque, the Resident of Besuki, East Java, in 1836 brought in a detailed and disturbing report. Between May 20 and December 27, 1835, Pak Jembrok had observed the arrival in Ampenan of fifteen European vessels—nine three-masters, three brigs and three schooners—of which three flew the French flag and the others the English or the Dutch, some of those which flew the Dutch flag being English-owned vessels from Singapore. These ships brought in large cargoes, inclusive, said Pak Jembrok, of arms, ammunition and opium. At Tanjung Karang, a point in Ampenan Bay where Lange had built his shipyard, Pak Jembrok noted two more ships, a schooner and a brig, the latter under the command of Captain George Pocock King. Pak Jembrok further reported that when he visited the island of Bali shortly thereafter he encountered the same Captain King in the market places in Badung with sixteen casks full of Singapore-minted coins (superior, he said, to the “cash” from China), with which he was buying up quantities of goods for export.

Pak Jembrok’s upsetting report almost stirred the Dutch to immediate action to forestall any more foreign interlopers. But they procrastinated long enough that Mads Lange had time to acquire invaluable experience and contacts. By the time they took action, Lange was a seasoned and toughened operator, not in Lombok from which he had had to flee in the course of civil wars, but in Bali where he settled himself at almost exactly the same place and time as did the Dutch themselves, that is, at Kuta in mid-1839.

Dutch Policy of Economic–Political Penetration

The Dutch in The Hague, Amsterdam, and Batavia, having engaged in a prolonged exchange of government and company papers formulating various policy alternatives with regard to Bali, concluded this rigorous intellectual exercise by taking a somewhat clouded decision. It was, in effect, that they would first infiltrate traders and presently assert sovereignty. The exact line of demarcation between commerce and politics was left so vague that a few years later the NHM (Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij, the successor to the trading interests of the long since bankrupt and defunct VOC), claimed but only after prolonged and acrimonious negotiations collected the sum of fl. 172,194.39 for losses sustained in Bali in pursuit more of governmental than of company interests.

Governor-General Merkus first considered proposals such as one for designating Banyuwangi, East Java, as a free trade entrepôt to enable the Dutch rather than the Singapore English to realize the profits of exporting opium, arms and coins to Bali and Lombok in exchange for the islands’ cheap and plentiful rice. He half rejected the idea on moral and pragmatic grounds, but half accepted it for commercial and political reasons. He authorized—in fact, he prompted—the NHM to establish its own factory in Bali in the expectation that it would be permitted to trade openly in opium, arms and coins. The company was later to claim that the non-fulfilment of this expectation was one important reason for its losses. Another was the necessity for housing, entertaining, sponsoring and otherwise providing logistic support for the political missions whose activities it in part cloaked and in part promoted. It was mainly for the sake of these visitors that it had to place a special vessel at the disposal of the factory, build fine residential quarters protected by a high stone wall and dispense expensive gifts and favors to the local rulers.

For this two-pronged colonial offensive against Bali (also neighboring and closely related Lombok), the Dutch could and did allege other motives, in particular humanitarianism. They proposed, they said, to impose peace and order for the benefit most of all of the local population, pointing to the serious disturbances in Lombok and Bali’s continuing involvement in them as evidence of the need. They also mentioned four highly laudable specific aims to which no one except, perhaps, the people of Bali and Lombok could take exception. They were resolutely determined, they said, to wipe out opium smuggling and arms running, Bali and Lombok being the transshipment points for opium and arms from Singapore which found their way to Java and other Dutch-held islands in which the Dutch opium and arms monopoly presumably protected the public from many abuses. They were as resolutely determined to wipe out the two associated evils of plunder and slavery, pursuits in which the opium smugglers and arms runners also vigorously engaged, in diversification of their sources of income.

The special circumstances in Bali with regard to slavery and plunder have already been referred to in an earlier context. The Balinese rajas routinely enslaved and sold indigent or unwanted people. The Dutch themselves had been among their most importunate clients, for Balinese slaves, male and female, made excellent household servants and the males made splendid recruits for the colonial army. But Raffles had caused the colonial Dutch uneasy twinges of conscience, to which they paid special attention when their worrisome wars with the Mataram Empire ended and they no longer had much need for Balinese slave-soldiers.

With regard to plunder, from the Dutch point of view the material and metaphysical considerations were equally clear. The Balinese rajas entertained a traditional concept of ship salvage which seemed to the Dutch to combine the worst features of slavery, piracy, plunder and lese majesty. In accordance with their principle of tawan karang, honoring Batara Baruna, the sea deity, the rajas accepted as a gift of the gods whatever ship came to grief on the treacherous reefs which ringed their island. They took the ship, the cargo, the crew and the passengers as their personal properties, sharing, naturally, with those who actually performed the act of salvage or rescue but entertaining no doubts at all regarding the sanctity of the deed. From the Dutch point of view it was bad enough if the Balinese exercised their so-called reef rights (Dutch: kliprecht) upon a Chinese, an Arab, a Bugis or a Javanese craft, many of which sailed under the Dutch flag and expected Dutch protection. It was quite intolerable if the ship in question was Dutch owned and operated. And it was acutely embarrassing even if it flew the English flag. The British then promptly and sternly protested. They were even so tactless as to intimate that if the Dutch presumed to sovereignty over the Indies, they were obliged to provide security and to suppress slavery and piracy, unless, that is, they preferred the English to do so for them.

At the end of the 1830s all circumstances combined to prompt the Dutch to address themselves quite earnestly to discussion with the Balinese rajas of the delicate subjects of trade and politics, slavery and plunder, and to try to blanket these various topics with treaties of friendship and commerce, in fact, recognition of Dutch sovereignty and monopoly. Batavia therefore dispatched three separate missions, first a small probing expedition headed by Captain J. S. Wetters (former recruiting agent at Kuta), then a commercial mission under G. A. Granpré Molière, the NHM Agent in Surabaya, and finally a political mission under H. J. van Huskus Koopman, a specially designated Commissioner for Bali and Lombok. Captain Wetters, who visited both Lombok and northern Bali between July 5 and September 3, 1838, reported that the time was at hand for some decisions. Molière and Koopman followed in due course.

Granpré Molière’s Mission and Company Trade

Granpré Molière arrived in Bali on December 6, 1838. He traveled on the brig Ondernemer, chartered to the NHM for fl. 2,500 per month, but he had decided to spare the expense of the war schooner Zwaluw, which was originally assigned to him as escort. On shore he practised no economies, for he traveled with four to six horses and thirty to sixty porters, carrying with him everything needful for his comfort and dignity. Between December 6 and January 1 he made the rounds of the royal palaces of Badung, Karangasem and Klungkung, but he failed to get an audience in which to present the impressive credentials with which the Governor-General had provided him.

Molière was not an inexperienced trader, so he resorted to well-tested devices for opening Asian palace doors. He poured out samples of ginever, demonstrated a music box and distributed a few firearms as keepsakes. The Dewa Agung and the Raja of Badung became friendly. Both received him in audience and they even began to manifest a healthy spirit of rivalry in representing the respective merits of Kusamba, Klungkung, and Kuta, Badung, as the site of the factory which, Molière hinted, would be well stocked with other trinkets. It developed that what the Dewa Agung had in mind was no trinket. The Dewa Agung craved a rhinoceros, a creature which did not exist in Bali but was necessary nevertheless for an especially solemn state ceremony which he was hoping to conduct. Even apart from its ritualistic significance, a rhinoceros would be a sensation among all Balinese connoisseurs of curiosities, and the Dewa Agung’s badly frayed prestige would be immensely enhanced if he, and only he, possessed one. Molière, disguising his dismay, promised to deliver one live rhinoceros.

The Raja of Badung, an earthier type than the Dewa Agung, yearned for one hundred pikuls of lead. He intended, he said, to cast it into balls for use with the bronze cannon which, it seemed, Wetters had promised but neglected to deliver. Wetters’ oversight accounted for the coolness of his original attitude toward Molière, who seems to have convinced him, however, that the promise still held good. A daughter of Raja Pemecutan (a minor ruler of Badung) wanted quantities of linen and offered advance payment of three pikuls of tobacco, adding, as an afterthought to clinch the deal, three slaves. In view of the government’s disapproval of slavery, Molière might have passed up this first trading opportunity except that the slaves insisted upon attaching themselves to him.

All in all, Molière judged his visit a success. On the basis of his own experiences he anticipated certain unpredictable difficulties, but he thought that a factory in Bali might flourish and he so reported to the NHM and the Governor-General. He kept a meticulous record of his expenses, for which the NHM was later to claim compensation. Inclusive of gin, guns and incidental items like payment of ship charter, but not allowing for the rhinoceros (later procured and delivered at a cost of fl. 839.25), the trip cost exactly fl. 9,738.58.

Schuurman, the Rhinoceros and the NHM Factory

After Molière’s visit, the NHM moved fast to establish a factory at Kuta, where the Raja of Badung had promised to prepare quarters for its representative. The company designated one of its brightest young men, D. Boelen Schuurman, as its Kuta factor at a salary of fl. 500 per month, placed an order for a factory trading ship, the Merkurius, to be completed and delivered at an early date, and meanwhile chartered the bark Blora at fl. 1,800 per month to get men, goods and equipment moving Baliwards. On July 30, 1839, the Blora appeared off Kuta, carrying Heer Schuurman, his assistant G. W. Veenman Bouman, trade goods to the value of fl. 42,000 (inclusive of the linens for the princess), construction materials for a company warehouse and one healthy young rhinoceros for the Dewa Agung.

Heer Schuurman hustled hopefully ashore only to discover that the Raja had made no provision whatever for his reception. He made his way wearily on foot to Kuta, then by horse to the puri, where the Raja allowed him to wait at the gate, much to the diversion of the public, while deciding whether to receive him. The Raja, whose intelligence in matters of commerce was better than his memory of his own promises, seems already to have been informed that although the ship’s manifest listed one gift rhinoceros, it showed no lead and no cannon.

Schuurman, who may have deemed a rhinoceros token enough of company esteem not just for the Dewa Agung but for all the lesser rulers as well, spent a few frustrating days trying to interest the Raja in his factory and his residence. It finally occurred to him to make a present of a fine sword and to renew assurances of the NHM intentions with regard to the lead and the cannon. The cannon was, in fact, to be delivered two years later. It cost the company fl. 1,007.95, and it had been cunningly miscast so that the Dutch need never fear looking this gift gun in the mouth. The Raja himself seems never to have tested it out. He made it the nucleus of what was to become rather an extensive palace armory, to which, in 1849, in appreciation of his good behavior during the Dutch–Balinese wars, the government added a mate. The second cannon probably was not miscast. It seems to have come out of current military stock with which the Dutch themselves had just subdued the island.

Heer Schuurman underwent many harrowing experiences highly educational to a young trader in the course of his first few months in Badung. He spent the early weeks as a not especially welcome and certainly an uncomfortable guest in rather a dingy pavilion inside the Raja’s puri. Eventually he persuaded the Raja to assign him a scrap of property in Kuta, a run-down compound with one fairly habitable clay hut. But when he started building his factory, he had to rely upon the crew of the Blora and later that of the Merkurius for skilled labor which the Balinese themselves could not or would not provide. His precious rhinoceros had proved enormously difficult and costly to offload, and the people of Badung seemed more interested in obstructing than assisting. The eventual delivery to Klungkung, fortunately, was a great success. On his way back from Klungkung, however, Schuurman decided impulsively to drop in on the Raja of Gianyar. The Raja, no doubt apprised of the massive tribute to his near but undear neighbor, allowed the perplexed merchant to wait for an hour at the palace gate and then to go away unreceived and unenlightened. Schuurman’s subsequent commerce in Kuta did not flourish and he was no happier than Pierre Dubois had been before him. The Balinese, the Chinese and the Bugis visited his factory in droves, impelled, however, by curiosity rather than by a desire to purchase. They took their trade to the Danish factory which Mads Lange was opening up just next door.

Schuurman could not complain that his life was either inactive or uneventful, and being young, vigorous and ambitious, he labored mightily during the first year or two to make his factory a success. He had to adjust to the fact that his assistants were usually less rugged than himself. The first of them, Veenman Bouman, fell seriously ill almost immediately upon arrival and had to return to Java. The second, J. A. Santbergen, was his mainstay and remained in Bali until the end of the period of NHM operations, well after Schuurman himself had been transferred. The third, Andries Beetz, died shortly after arrival and was buried at Kuta. Intermittently, there were others, and always there was an armed guard, but only Santbergen was of much comfort or assistance.

The factory itself gradually expanded although its business did not. It became rather too overawing and fortress-like to create a very favorable impression upon the Balinese or upon certain later and highly critical Dutch visitors. At enormous expense, with materials and labor imported from Java, Schuurman built a high stone wall and behind it placed a big stone warehouse, providing also residential quarters for the staff and for visitors. From the very first the factory catered more to visitors than to customers, much better serving Dutch political than commercial purposes.

The first important guests were the officers of the government steamship Phoenix, who arrived on October 29 on a visit of inspection and wished to pay courtesy calls upon the rajas. It was an exercise which cost Schuurman much effort and many gifts and yielded no discernible results. Next, in early April 1840, came Navy Lieutenant Van Oostervijk accompanied by the important Pangeran (Prince) Hamid of Pontianak, Borneo, who also wanted to meet the rajas. In between these visits Schuurman took delivery of his own factory ship, the Merkurius, and sailed off on a trading cruise of all of Bali and Lombok, hoping to stir up more business than at Kuta, but with equally meager results. Then, on April 27, 1840, there arrived in Kuta, traveling presumably on the Merkurius, the soon to be famous political agent Heer H. J. van Huskus Koopman. Schuurman and the NHM factory played thereafter the support role in the evolving drama of Dutch colonial penetration.

Huskus Koopman, the Contract Maker

H. J. van Huskus Koopman, famous in Dutch colonial history as the contractsluiter (contract maker), had received his appointment on December 10, 1839, as special commissioner for Bali and Lombok, at a salary of fl. 700 per month, plus fl. 300 for expenses, with instructions to perform what seemed at first rather a vague and innocuous mission. He was “to bring the rajas ... into such a relationship with the government [of the Netherlands Indies] that they will be removed from foreign influence.” The foreign influence from which they were to be removed and isolated was mainly that of the English. The relationship into which they were to be brought and held was that of colonial subjects. These Dutch objectives, which were to become precise and categorical as time went on, were formulated into various sets of highly legalistic “contract concepts” which Huskus Koopman was charged with explaining to the rajas in order to elicit their concurrence. The preliminary contract concepts were to be converted into perpetually binding treaties just as soon as there was an agreed-upon text which both the Governor-General and the rajas had ratified.

Huskus Koopman’s job was essentially that of the traveling salesman. It was the Governor-General’s expectation that the Dutch-drafted texts would be endorsed with little if any necessity for modification. These Western documents, however alien they might at first appear to the Balinese mentality, would form the basis for an enduring new commercial and political relationship agreeable both to the Dutch and the Balinese without occasioning anything so distasteful to both as a military campaign. As it turned out, the rajas gave their preliminary concurrence, the Governor-General ratified, the rajas refused to ratify, the Dutch–Balinese wars followed and Dutch might prevailed. But by then Huskus Koopman, who had been awarded the Order of the Netherlands Lion for his services, was already in his grave. So too was Governor-General Merkus, as were numerous of the offending Balinese princes, and a great deal of history had happened.

Impasse of 1840; Treaties of 1841; Afterthoughts of 1842

Huskus Koopman’s first visit to Bali (April 27–late December 1840) was almost a complete failure. With Schuurman to guide and introduce him, he made the rounds of the courts, starting with the Dewa Agung who not only refused to receive him but dispatched a letter to the other rajas instructing, or perhaps merely advising them to do likewise. In November he voyaged to Buleleng, where the Raja also denied him an audience but did send a message (as did the Raja of Karangasem) saying that he would permit trade. The Commissioner meanwhile had picked up the clue which enabled him to dangle before the eyes of the rajas the political equivalent of Molière’s rhinoceros. It was the intimation that the rajas might induce the Dutch to provide them with military aid for an adventure which they were eagerly anticipating—the reconquest of Lombok, where the recent civil wars had gone against Balinese interest.

The Raja of Karangasem dispatched a mission of his own to Batavia to inform the Governor-General that he was already raising troops to invade Lombok and to invite the Dutch to participate. When Huskus Koopman himself returned to Batavia to report the futility of offering political without military alliance, the Governor-General ordered him back to Bali to exploit what seemed like a favorable opportunity. Neither the Governor-General nor Huskus Koopman seems ever to have made any explicit commitment about military aid. But on his return trip Koopman did not actually discourage the Balinese from awaiting favorable response to their request for Dutch ships, arms and men to help re-subdue their former dependency. Later on, in Lombok, he did not encourage the Raja to think that the Dutch would decline to underwrite exactly such an enterprise.

Since Bali–Lombok animosities dovetailed very neatly with Dutch designs, on his second visit to Bali (May 1–December 15, 1841), Huskus Koopman achieved what seemed for a time like almost total success. His fortunes were further enhanced, it seemed, by an otherwise woeful event—the wreck of the Dutch frigate Overijssel on the Kuta reef and the plunder of some of its cargo. Koopman promptly demanded fl. 3,000 in compensation from the Raja of Badung, who paid no money but did rather suddenly concede (July 26) that he might accept the contract concepts which Koopman had just been rather laboriously and as yet unproductively explaining to him. With Badung all but signed up, Huskus Koopman journeyed to Klungkung. The Dewa Agung too was amenable, at least up to the point of giving his approval (July 30) to the Badung negotiation. With this prestigious backing Koopm an next treated successfully with the Raja of Karangasem (November 11) and the Raja of Buleleng (November 26), both of whom were impatient to get on with the scheduled invasion which they expected soon to follow.

Having accomplished his purpose in Buleleng and Karangasem, Koopman traveled yet again to Klungkung. There, on December 6, he persuaded the Dewa Agung himself to enter into the same preliminary arrangement and to state that whatever contract he might eventually sign would be binding also upon those of his vassal states which had not entered into similar agreements of their own. To the three original clauses of the contract concept, Huskus Koopman added three more which, with the approval of the Dewa Agung, automatically became part of the agreement with any of the other states. These contract concepts, to which the Dewa Agung and the rajas gave preliminary and tentative but by no means final approval, were later to be converted unilaterally and arbitrarily by the Governor-General into binding agreements which provided a pretext for subsequent demands.

The full text (inclusive of Article 7, which applied, of course, only to Klungkung) read as follows:

The following are the terms of a treaty between Hendrick Jacob Huskus Koopman, duly constituted Komisaris of the Government of Netherlands India, and Sri Paduka Ratu Dewa Agung Putra, Emperor of the Islands of Bali and Lombok ruling with full powers in the state of Klungkung:

1. We, the Emperor of the Islands of Bali and Lombok acknowledge our domain to be that also of the Netherlands India Government.

2. Therefore when any ship or boat enters any harbor of this domain the Dutch flag will be raised.

3. In accordance with this agreement, we, the Emperor, will never surrender to any other white people whomsoever or enter into any agreement with them.

4. We promise never to accept any other flag over our lands except that of Holland.

5. The Dutch merchants who are now in Kuta with our consent we shall always assiduously protect.

6. Should the Government of Netherlands India encounter difficulties in warfare the rajas of Bali are obliged to assist them to the best of their abilities.

7. Finally, we approve the provisions of the treaties which have already been made by Komisaris Huskus Koopman with the rajas of Buleleng and Karangasem and Badung.

Thus transpired in the palace of Klungkung on Monday, the 21st day of the month of Shawal in the year 1257 (i.e. 6 December 1841).

Ratu Dewa Agung Putra

Witnesses:

Cokorde Dewa Agung Putra

Ratu Dewa Agung Gede

Anak Agung Ketut Rai

Pedanda Wayahan Pidada

Ida Wayahan Sidaman

(Translated from the original Malay of the treaty text found in the National Archives in Jakarta and published as Annex G (pp. 321–3) to Dr E. Utrecht’s Sedjarah Hukum lnternasional di Bali dan Lombok, Bandung, 1962.)

Huskus Koopman returned to Batavia in early 1842 in full expectation of receiving the warmest congratulations of the government and of being honorably discharged from his arduous mission. But the Governor-General refused just then to ratify, and Koopman found himself formally accused of negligence. It was all because of the unfortunate Overijssel incident, which had aroused the greatest of indignation and outrage in the Netherlands and in Batavia. The Governor-General himself was therefore under strong pressure to get categorical assurance from the rajas that they renounced reef rights and would refrain from plunder. The question of reef rights having been deemed of secondary priority, the Governor-General had not dealt with it in the original contract concepts. And even though Huskus Koopman had seized upon the Overijssel incident as pretext for pressuring the rajas into accepting his contracts, he had not considered it advisable to insert a special clause to deal with a problem which, once Dutch sovereignty were exercised, might be expected to resolve itself. But the furor over the Overijssel had caused the Governor-General to draw up a very lengthy and detailed set of new contract concepts which amounted virtually to a codified law of salvage, with stipulation of rules of conduct and scales of payment, and he was determined to make these a part of the original package. He therefore ordered Huskus Koopman to return to Bali to renegotiate with the rajas, those of Lombok as well as Bali, for he put no faith at all in his Commissioner’s assurances that the Dewa Agung could speak for all of his presumed vassals and he was determined to leave no loopholes.

On July 31, 1842, Huskus Koopman wearily embarked on his third voyage. Once he arrived in Bali he very quickly persuaded the rajas to approve if not actually to read and study his rules of ship salvage. In October he traveled onward to Lombok. There he got the raja’s consent to renunciation of reef rights but failed to convince him to forgo sovereignty as well. That required a fourth voyage (January 1843) and the rather thinly veiled threat of force. Then, to his great dismay, it was necessary to make yet a fifth trip (September 1843) to get acceptance of a clause which had been inadvertently omitted from the Lombok copies. This time all was complete. The Governor-General wearily approved and hastily ratified, Huskus Koopman got his Netherlands Lion and soon died, and the Balinese rajas repudiated the whole Bali-bundel, as some of the more irreverent Dutch were already beginning to refer to the documentary coups of their highly skilled contractsluiter and traktaatsluiter, who could so artfully transform concepts into irrevocable commitments.

Once they had a chance to reflect, the rajas decided that they had been hustled, threatened, tricked, cajoled, deceived and betrayed in making commitments which they never intended. What upset them most was the mysterious and sinister matter of sovereignty, which remained both ill-understood and ill-explained. They had acknowledged their own domain to be the domain also of the Netherlands. They had been offered Huskus Koopman’s standard explanation: “You say your realm is your friend’s realm, and so it is with sovereignty.” But as a clarification of the concept of sovereignty, the remark seemed on careful consideration to be singularly specious. The Dutch word for domain, as used in the treaty texts, was eigendom (property) and the Malay word was negeri (country), but it made as little sense in Dutch as in Malay to say that the raja’s eigendom or negeri was also the Dutch eigendom or negeri without adding further mystification such as only a constitutional lawyer could have provided. There was no attempt to render the text into Balinese, in which the mystical significance of this imprecisely shared sovereignty over domain might at least have been endowed with symbolical validity.

What the rajas began to realize and indeed also to assert was that they had never intended to raise the Dutch flag over their ports and palaces (they themselves flew not flags but banners), or to elevate the Dutch crown over the many-tiered royal umbrellas (tiers signified rank but a crown was a suspicious alien device suggestive of black magic), or to seat a Dutch official on a golden chair as ornate as that of the raja, let alone one even more ornate and placed on a higher level. And it was one thing to say that their realm was their friend’s realm but quite another for the friend to move in to stay. It was to take three Dutch military expeditions to persuade them to think or at least to act more like the loyal and tractable protégés of the Dutch Crown which they were already destined to become.

The eigendom–negeri conundrum was illuminated for them by the tawan karang (reef rights) episode of the Overijssel, which the rajas deplored as deeply as did the Dutch but for different reasons. It had demonstrated to their own subjects that they were powerless to prevent the Dutch from intervening in affairs either more or less innocent than the ancient practice of taking possession of a stranded ship. The Overijssel had yielded them little in plunder but had cost dearly in prestige.

Shipwreck and Plunder of the Overijssel; Kuta Scene

The sad tale of the Overijssel began on July 19, 1841, when the vessel, on the hundredth day of its maiden voyage from Plymouth to Surabaya with a valuable cargo of machinery for a sugar factory in Java, hit the Kuta reef and was promptly plundered. Subsequent Dutch outrage served in part to cloak their humiliation that a large and heavily armed frigate was wrecked by reason of an egregious navigational error, the captain having mistaken the coast of Bali for that of Java, and that the ship was looted notwithstanding the presumed vigilance of the ship’s company against exactly that contingency. The captain, Govert Blom, was soon to publish a highly controversial and quite incoherent “impartial” account of his experience. He blamed poor visibility, poor charts and poor judgment. It was not his own poor judgment, as others alleged, but that of Heer Huskus Koopman, who failed to control the rajas; of the NHM factory personnel, who neglected to save the cargo and salvage the ship; of the Dutch naval Captain Willinck, who delayed in responding to call. Captain Blom had good words only for Mads Lange, who provided good advice and good company and eventually purchased the wreck to cannibalize it for repairs to other vessels.

For a period of a week the Overijssel incident much enlivened life in Kuta. Lange and Santbergen both showed up on the beach to welcome the castaways, to warn them against Gusti Ngurah Ketut’s gang of ruffians, and to offer them the shelter and the hospitality of their respective factories. The Balinese plunderers went to work on the wreck just as soon as did the company salvagers, the one crew apparently working by day and the other by night but to equally little advantage. The main cargo of heavy iron machinery and boilers was not salvageable by any Kuta methods and much of the rest of the cargo and ship’s fittings were lost on the dangerous reef.

The Raja of Badung caused much excitement by sending an order commanding the Europeans, on pain of death, to desist from their efforts to remove property which now belonged to him; he rescinded the order on receipt of strong protest from Santbergen and Huskus Koopman; he revalidated it the next day under pressure from the Kuta looters. The dispute over salvage soon became academic as both ship and cargo were beyond hope of recovery. The NHM factory bought up for fl. 197.50 what little salvage was offered for sale, and Lange, as mentioned, bought the wreckage. As Huskus Koopman pointed out in his own self-defence, the goods were very heavily insured (for fl. 170,000).

The Overijssel incident offered social as well as commercial, political and economic diversion to the minute European community in Kuta, which suddenly found itself entertaining a total of 57 passengers and crew, among the former the large and important family of Colonel Lucassen—husband, pregnant wife, five children and nurse-maid—the Colonel being the owner of the cargo. Captain Blom and most of the ship’s company remained in Bali until July 25, when they left for Surabaya on the factory schooner Merkurius. Captain Blom was to return briefly later on to try to repair his ship and his reputation.

The family Lucassen remained until August 9, when they departed for Surabaya on board a government vessel, the Sylph. Vrouw Lucassen, meanwhile, had given birth to her child—the first European child to be born in Bali—and the event had been celebrated by a champagne dinner attended by 24 Europeans. These familial and festive events, which, according to one account, occurred in the NHM factory, and according to another in Lange’s establishment, no doubt greatly enlivened Kuta and comforted the castaways. But they did nothing to appease the wrath of the Governor-General, at least not until Huskus Koopman brought off the second series of what seemed at the time to be major coups of diplomacy.

More Complications; More Treaties

The Governor-General had scarcely even promulgated the still unratified contract concepts and terminated his long correspondence with The Hague over the Overijssel incident when the Balinese rajas quite deliberately defied him by reverting to vigorous exercise of reef rights. In 1844, therefore, the year in which the rajas were scheduled by the Dutch to send a mission of homage to Batavia, there arrived instead in Bali a newly appointed Dutch Commissioner, J. Ravia de Lignij, the Assistant Resident of Banyuwangi. His mission was to protest the most recent outrages and to demand the ratification and observance, without further delay or discussion, of the Huskus Koopman contracts. Commissioner de Lignij made his call at Buleleng, where the latest reef incidents had occurred, meeting there with the Raja and his council of state. It was at this meeting that the great modern hero of Bali identified himself. He was Gusti Ketut Jelantik, a dramatic, dynamic young prince, the younger brother of the Rajas of Buleleng and Karangasem, who defied the Dutch Commissioner in the following, perhaps apocryphal words:

Never while I live shall the state recognize the sovereignty of the Netherlands in the sense in which you interpret it. After my death the Raja may do as he chooses. Not by a mere scrap of paper shall any man become the master of another’s lands. Rather let the kris decide.

The upshot of this warlike declaration will be described in Chapter Six, but first let us examine events across the water in Lombok, where a protracted power struggle had been underway.