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Secret Trades, Porous Borders

Yale University Press

Chapter One

The history of Western exploration, mapping, and concomitant categorization of the world is a huge subject, one that has fascinated scholars for a very long time. There is an almost Linnaean quality to the hunger for taxonomy that Europeans brought to this work: the world existed to be conquered, surely, but it also existed to be known. Explorers, cartographers, and statesmen carried out these projects, filing away newly "discovered" lands and seas into categories that could be interpreted by imperial concerns. In Southeast Asia, these dynamics were transregional in character, enveloping the length and breadth of this arena into a centuries-long embrace. Who were these new peoples? Where did they live, and what were their characteristics? By the mid-nineteenth century, the queries had become more covetous: Are the people on that bend of river part of your sphere of influence, or mine? How high are those mountains and do the minerals inside them fall into your dominion, or ours? Perhaps most important, the question began to be asked: How are the diverse economic and political realitiesof life in this region going to be interpreted and controlled? Lucien Febvre may have been right that policemen, customs agents, and cannons were not the only tools necessary for inscribing a new border in this region, but even the seeding of these initial aspects of imperial control seemed an enormous challenge to Europeans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

EXPLORING BOUNDARY LANDSCAPES

The political economies of the frontier areas between what was emerging as British and Dutch Southeast Asia were complex, and conceptually these spaces looked remarkably like a patchwork quilt in the decades leading up to 1900. By the Treaty of 1871, a line had been drawn bisecting the Straits of Melaka, separating the two colonial possessions by a shallow ribbon of water. Yet on the ground, in the lands and seas adjoining the frontier regions, this picture was exceedingly more complicated. Chinese gold-mining cooperatives, or kongsis, in western Borneo, for example, and tin-mining cooperatives on islands like Bangka and Belitung in the South China Sea shared space along the boundary with burgeoning colonial cities such as Penang and Singapore. Nomadic peoples, both in the forests of Borneo and on the waters at the terminus of the Straits, moved back and forth across the border more or less at will. Massive plantations in Sumatra and Malaya also adjoined the frontier and often abutted independent sultanates, which were sometimes very powerful. Christian mission posts and government outstations watched Chinese miners, Malay traders, Japanese prostitutes, and transient sea peoples criss-crossing the boundary in both directions. A border may have existed as an aspiration in the minds of bureaucrats far away in Europe, but life on the ground in this part of Southeast Asia was much more nuanced and complex.

Despite the enormous diversity of ethnicities, power structures, and economic undertakings along this divide, both Batavia and Singapore had little knowledge of large parts of the frontier. From the 1860s until the early 1880s, new lands and peoples along the border were still being discovered quite frequently, as can be seen in period exploration and ethnological journals, examples of which will be referenced in a moment. By the later 1880s, however, and into the 1890s, the pace of exploration along the length of the frontier was starting to change. Discoveries were now more remote: highlands, tiny islands, and sources of rivers and lakes constituted the majority of geographical discoveries by this time. Exploration in and of itself was becoming harder to achieve; the remaining tracts of terra incognita were further and further afield and difficult to reach. By the first decade of the twentieth century, such regions had virtually disappeared. Exploration of the frontier by this time was of a completely different character, focusing on new oddities and small discoveries: unknown waterfalls, new and unused sailing routes, or even quiet valleys containing unknown insects and plants.

The exploration of the Anglo/Dutch frontier was a major undertaking, however, one which created, in a sense, an entity that had never previously existed: a line of lands and seas that separated two discrete colonial dominions. Exploration validated and described the limits of what had already been decided upon in European drawing rooms. The consequences of these explorations would be immense. Entire convoys of entrepreneurs, scientists, miners, and missionaries steamed to the Indies to take part in this process. Each came for his own reasons, including profit, knowledge, and soul saving, but all contributed to the opening of the new frontier. The publications of just a handful of these societies and institutions give an idea of how varied and enormous their impact would become. The Batavian Society for Arts and Sciences, the Royal Institute of Ethnology, the Royal Naturalists' Society in Batavia, the Society for the Furthering of Medical Knowledge in the Indies, the Indies Society for Industry, and the Royal Geographic Society all came or sent their representatives, men who took part in the "laying bare" of the unknown. The frontier was to be explored and exploited, but mostly (in the colonial parlance of the day), in the interests of the local inhabitants themselves. "Toward this no force is necessary," one Indies publication intoned, "only the persuasion which the powerful, fatherly Indies government has in its possession. The peoples of our archipelago and the lands in which they live must in their own interests be made rich and prosperous."

The realities of the opening of the frontier in this part of the world, of course, proceeded somewhat differently from this high-minded declaration. The exploration of Sumatra from the 1870s onward can serve as an example. Parts of this huge island had already been traversed by Dutch explorers and military columns earlier in the century; lowland Palembang from 1819 to 1824 and the Padri areas of West Sumatra, where a long, bloody war had been fought until 1837, had been claimed by the Dutch. Yet large parts of the island were still unknown in the 1870s and early 1880s or were only beginning to be explored. These included the river mouths of Jambi, Musi, Tonkal, Reteh, and Indragiri on the east coast, which began to be systematically surveyed only in the 1880s, as well as the higher reaches of the Kampar, which were described by J. B. Neumann's and J. Faes's extensive riverine expeditions (fig. 1). In the interior of central Sumatra, J. C. Ploen was given permission to travel at government cost to several unknown and inaccessible areas, primarily to collect botanical and zoological specimens. Small polities in these interior regions were gradually contacted and annexed by Batavia, a fact that did not elude the attention of the British across the Straits, who busily translated these expedition reports to keep track of Dutch advances. Yet the greatest attention in Sumatra exploration in these early years was reserved for Aceh, where war with that sultanate was raging unabated in the 1870s. Junghuhn's book of 1873 laid out some of the parameters of Acehnese geography in that year, but it would be the contributions of later explorers that showed where this interest was moving, especially in terms of resource exploitation.

By the late 1880s and into the 1890s, the nature of these Sumatran frontier explorations was changing. The coasts and lowlands of the island were now fairly well known, leaving inland and upland areas as the major sites for new discoveries. One of those, for example, was Upper Jambi, where most exploration was still dependent on rivers for travel. Predictions declared that "it won't be long before the Dutch flag waves over all of Sumatra, as a symbol of peace and protection of the (local) inhabitants." Universities and other institutions of higher learning in the Netherlands were also helping with the exploration process: the Rijkskunstnijverheidschool in Amsterdam, for example, volunteered to send a representative for frontier flora and fauna research, while a professor of zoology in Utrecht received forty-two hundred guilders in government funds to carry on state-sanctioned research expeditions. Lake Toba in North Sumatra also received renewed attention at this time, drawing explorers to the relatively unknown northern reaches of the lake, where the local Bataks were known to be unfriendly to the Dutch, and maps of the area still contained blank spaces. The search for bismuth and other minerals of potential value pushed these journeys forward. Although Toba's existence had been known to European explorers and officials for some time, it was the further, distant reaches of the lake that attracted Dutch attention in the 1880s and 1890s.

By the turn of the century and into its first decades, the nature of these frontier explorations in Sumatra had changed once again. The biggest change was that there was no more true frontier, at least not in the traditional sense. Dutch maps of the island contained all of the major geographical landmarks and had catalogued Sumatra's peoples as well as their physical environments. What remained were explorations which filled in gaps in existing knowledge or took the process of discovery to a slower, more leisurely pace. The military apothecary W. G. Boorsma, for example, was given permission to set out on a chemical-pharmacological expedition, the special concern of which was to collect new plants that might be useful in the fabrication of medicines. J.T. Cremer set out for the Batak highlands in 1907 this time not with a column of laden-down coolies, but in an automobile, which could barely traverse the recently cut roads. Not to be outdone, other explorers of the late period also ventured to the northern shores of Toba's great lake but did so by way of petrol-fueled motorboats. Even the coasts of Sumatra, which had been circumnavigated for years by Dutch traders, adventurers, and military men in various steamships, yielded up small discoveries, such as a waterfall at Mansalar, which could now be used as a navigation aide. All of these voyages enhanced European knowledge of the "periphery," yet there was gradually a discernable slowing of the gathering of data as colonial explorers ran out of peoples and places to "discover."

Exploration on the frontier was not limited to Sumatra between 1865 and 1915. The maze of islands dotting the South China Sea also provided impetus for Dutch exploration around 1900, though these undertakings were more maritime in nature. Some of these islands had been known to the Dutch for a long time and had significant contacts with Malay politics and trade in the region. Barbara Watson Andaya has shown this for Bangka in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Carl Trocki for Riau, in the area just south of Singapore, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other scholars have worked on the gradual incorporation of these islands into the regional web of trade and alliances through mining, through the Chinese presence, through local literature, and also through ethnolinguistic contacts. Bangka and Belitung were, indeed, important centers of trade and production well before 1865, making explorations there essentially a matter of filling in already-known spaces. Yet the island groups of Anambas, Natuna, and Tambelan, all in the lower reaches of the South China Sea, were much more distant from these crossroads and received only scant attention from Batavia at this stage. The Dutch knew these islands were populated by a mix of Malays, Orang Laut, Bugis, and Chinese but had little idea about everyday existence there, including the islands' trade contacts (legal or illegal) and other economic activities.

By the late 1890s, this picture of benign neglect for the northernmost islands in the Dutch Indies' possessions was quickly changing. Ship captains' notations on the geography of the islands started to be compiled and collated, new bays and creeks were noted, depths in fathoms were presented, and drinking-water sources were all pointed out, rendering the islands more transparent to passing traders. The exploration journeys of A. L. Van Hasselt between 1894 and 1896 especially broke new ground, showing that earlier maps of the area contained islands that did not exist or were drawn in the wrong place, to the detriment of travelers. Van Hasselt was straightforward in admitting the source of most of his information: English Admiralty charts, which had surveyed the area a few years earlier and had drawn excellent maps. Though these charts had been done with the permission of Batavia, Van Hasselt could not resist stating that Dutch explorers should have been the ones to make these measurements, as the islands (after all) were part of the Netherlands Indies. The vocabulary lists of area peoples, photographs of local topography, and ethnographic notes that followed in Van Hasselt's account brought Dutch knowledge of the archipelago to a new level. In the years around his voyages to the area, in fact, more general directives started to come down from Batavia, asking administrators of far-flung groups to send such ethnographic data to the capital. Important information could thus be systematized and reviewed.

By the turn of the century, exploration of the South China Sea island groups had become part of a coherent program of development in the Indies. Mining interests took the lead in conducting new surveying operations and expeditions, mapping Bangka in incredible detail, and starting work on Belitung and even on the tiny islands off Belitung's coasts after 1894. The island of Blakang Padang, facing Singapore in the Riau archipelago, was also extensively surveyed at this time. Though formerly it had been seen as a useless scrap of land with few natural resources and only a marginal population, by 1900 planners were seeing the island as a complementary port near Singapore, with coal sheds, docking complexes, and a series of interconnected lighthouses. This sort of exploration, indeed, with coherent and definitive development purposes in mind, was among the last stages of discovery along the length of the Anglo/ Dutch frontier. Even many of the myriad reefs and atolls which made up the maritime boundary of the Netherlands Indies, from Aceh eastward to coastal New Guinea, were explored and chronicled by Dutch oceanographers at this time. Some of this interest was pure science or was fueled by the emerging nationalist impulse to mark the boundaries of the archipelago with Dutch flags. But a significant part of it was also economic and utilitarian, as exploration was bent to the service of the state to locate new resources and wealth.

The last section of the frontier that was targeted for exploration, outside of Sumatra and the islands of the South China Sea, was the vast forested wilderness of Borneo. Here too, as in Sumatra, initial contacts had already been made earlier in the century. The Dutch presence in Pontianak, West Borneo, for example, went back to the late eighteenth century. Yet it was only in the 1870s and early 1880s that the Dutch started to explore inland areas in any more systematic fashion. Kater, Gerlach, and Bakker pushed the frontier of Dutch knowledge up the great rivers, for example, and into parts of the lake districts of internal West Borneo, while Dutch residents reached the high headwaters of the Mahakam, which eventually emptied out on the eastern half of the island. The pace of exploration and the advancement of Dutch interests into the western half of the island was also the project of J. J. K. Enthoven, whose massive two-volume study became a landmark work on West Borneo. Like the British who carefully translated Dutch expedition accounts in Sumatra, however, the Dutch in Batavia also made sure to keep abreast of English stabs into the periphery on the other side of the Borneo frontier. Published accounts of British residents from the interior districts of Sarawak were translated into Dutch very quickly, so that the Dutch had an idea what their erstwhile allies (and competitors) were doing along the border.

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Excerpted from Secret Trades, Porous Borders by Eric Tagliacozzo Copyright © 2005 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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