Bali Chronicles. Willard A. Hanna
of a favorite wife and two royal princes. The emissaries had brought a fine Persian horse as a gift for the ruler and they hinted that a gift elephant might be delivered later, but nothing availed to gain them an audience. They had to content themselves with a bit of trading by which they acquired, among other things, 2,000 skeins of cotton, 460 pieces of woven textiles, and 1,200 measures of rice.
In 1639, when Mataram suddenly invaded Bali, the Dewa Agung appealed to Batavia for assistance; for reasons now unknown, the Dutch withheld their aid, but the Balinese themselves succeeded in repelling the enemy forces. In 1651, when the Dutch were momentarily at peace with Mataram, they sent another ambassador, Jacob Bacharach, with instructions to negotiate an alliance with the Dewa Agung just in case of future need. Again nothing came of the mission.
In the course of the next century there were frequent outbreaks of hostilities between the Dewa Agung and the Susuhunan, and both Bali and Mataram applied repeatedly for Dutch assistance. The Dutch never obliged—at least not openly. But in the years 1717–18, when Balinese troops were roaming East Java and Madura, causing great destruction and dismay throughout the region, the Dutch themselves launched little clean-up operations which helped to chase the intruders back home. If the Dutch refrained from intervening in the Balinese–Javanese wars, the English did not, or at least the Dutch believed that the English did not and that they were providing the radjas with arms. They were also selling opium and buying slaves; the northern Balinese port of Buleleng, according to vigilant informants of the Dutch, was becoming a hotbed of British–Balinese anti-Dutch intrigue.
The persistent intrusions of the English into Balinese waters caused the Dutch the most excruciating seizures of political and financial agony. The English, they were convinced, were seeking to colonize and would seize any opportunity which they themselves might overlook to establish some British monopoly of their own in competition with those of the V.O.C. The Dutch were forced therefore to live with the awful suspicion that the predatory English were about to pounce upon some new island, large or small, among the thousand islands known or unknown, which they themselves regarded as the indisputable patrimony of the Netherlands. They entertained the recurrent premonition that the choice would probably fall upon Bali, a rich and strategic little island which they had never yet really explored even though it lay only one nautical mile off the tip of their stronghold of Java. Dutch and English rivalry over Bali was indeed to play a part, even though a very minor part, in the great new English–Dutch conflict which preceded the actual opening of the island to massive Western impact. But that was an eventuality which somehow managed to postpone itself from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. During that interval, except for a few episodes such as those mentioned above, Bali enjoyed the priceless benefits of European neglect.
CHAPTER 3
Recruitment, Trade, and Travel
(1800–1830)
Distant Effects of Napoleonic Wars
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Bali remained relatively unaffected by the Western influences which were already transforming much of the Indonesian archipelago. Bali’s sixteenth century Hindu civilization was still inviolate to any serious religious, commercial, or political infiltration either by Muslims or by Christians. In the early decades of the century, however, there came intimations of what by mid-century amounted to the breaching of all the island’s defenses. What happened in Bali was a remote, tragic, and elsewhere almost unnoticed side-effect of the Napoleonic Wars.
The early triumphs of Napoleon occasioned the fall of the Netherlands, the extension of French influence not only into Holland itself but also into the Dutch possessions overseas, and a challenge to English power everywhere in the world. The English determined to protect themselves in India by seizing Java, thinking to foil Napoleon’s design of converting the Dutch colony into a base of Asian military operations of his own. This Java enterprise, in which the English succeeded brilliantly, several times focused incidental English and Dutch attention upon Bali. It served ever so slightly but significantly to illuminate and therefore to diminish the obscurity by which the island had previously been sheltered. Coming events were foreshadowed when the French–Dutch defenders of Java and the English challengers began to compete for Balinese allies in the forthcoming battle. The subsequent loss of Java to the English (1811) was a critical set-back to French interests in Asia and a far from unimportant episode in the defeat of Napoleon’s ambition to dominate the world. The eventual restoration of Java to the Dutch (1816) revived their own determination to dominate the whole of the Indies, inclusive of Bali, where their failure as yet to establish themselves very securely exposed them to the possibility of being forestalled by their presumed English ally. It is doubtful whether Napoleon himself had ever heard of Bali and the Balinese never identified him as their antipodal demon, but it may still be said, without doing grave damage to historicity, that Bali’s relatively serene isolation from the much troubled international scene was one of the casualties of Napoleon’s campaigns.
Daendels’ Design for Recruitment; van der Wahl’s Visit
Napoleon quite clearly signaled his own intentions with regard to Java by sending out French civilian and military personnel who quickly infiltrated the colonial administration. Napoleon himself picked a new Dutch Governor-General, Marshal Willem Daendels, appropriately known as the “Iron Marshal” and almost equally hated by the Dutch and the Indonesians. On behalf of the French, Daendels undertook enormously costly defense works which resulted in the swift completion of a military highway stretching the length of Java, the strengthening of many military garrisons, and the deaths of thousands of Javanese conscripted for corvée. Napoleon sent French troops under French commanders to reinforce the long neglected and badly demoralized Dutch garrisons which were stationed in all the important settlements. Daendels himself devised a scheme to import Balinese manpower to support the European troops. He commissioned a certain Captain van der Wahl of the Dragoons as his special agent to negotiate with the Balinese radjas.
Captain van der Wahl arrived in Bali in 1808 with instructions, it seems, merely to arrange with the radjas for recruitment (presumably by purchase) of Balinese soldiers and workers (i.e. slaves) for service with the joint Dutch–French forces. The doughty captain brilliantly over-fulfilled his mission. He succeeded in negotiating a very curious treaty of friendship and alliance with the Radja of Badung, who, as will be noted later, was always the most susceptible of all the radjas of the time to European blandishments. In return for the promise of military aid against his enemies, both domestic and foreign, and in return also for recognition as Susuhunan (Emperor) of Bali—a dignity which attached traditionally to the Dewa Agung, the Radja of Klungkung—the Radja of Badung placed himself and his realm under the personal protection of Marshal Daendels and the personal direction of Captain van der Wahl. At the same time the Radja designated van der Wahl as his private representative for dealing with foreigners, handling commerce, and working administrative reforms. The terms of the treaty reward word-by-word reading as an exercise of self-projection into the psychology of early Western negotiations with Balinese royalty:
Treaty of Friendship between Sri Paducca Goesti Moerah Made Pamatjoetan, Radja of Bali Badong and Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl, Commissioner of Willem Daendels, Marshal of Holland, Privy Counselor of the Foreign Service, Holder of the Great Cross of the Order of the Dutch Kingdom, High Officer of the Legion of Honor of the French Kingdom, Governor-General of the Indies and Commander-in-Chief of the King’s Army and Navy therein.
(1.) Sri Paducca Goesti Moerah Made Pamatjoetan, Radja of Bali Badong in consideration of the trust and fatherly concern which the Dutch Government has constantly manifested in him as a friend and associate, and also in consideration of the high qualities and honorable sentiments of His Excellency Herman Willem Daendels, Marshal of Holland and concurrently Governor-General of the Indies, joins himself and his entire kingdom with the Dutch Government, seeking not only that he himself be taken under His Excellency’s personal protection but also his children, in life and death to be regarded as friends and kinsmen of His Excellency the Marshal and Governor-General, who accepts him and his into his most estimable fatherly protection.
(2.) Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl undertakes that in half a month after the signing