Bali Chronicles. Willard A. Hanna

      (6.) Sri Paducca G.M.M.P. requests the aforesaid Captain to assume responsibility for the increase of the kingdom’s revenues and the improvement of its internal policy.

      (7.) Captain of the Dragoons van der Wahl undertakes in the name of His Excellency the Marshal and Governor-General to protect Sri Paducca G.M.M.P., Radja of Bali Badong against his foreign and domestic enemies.

      (Translated from the Dutch text as published in Annex C of Dr. E. Utrecht’s Sedjarah Hukum, etc., pp. 306–307.)

      Had this quite outrageous agreement ever been implemented, the Island of Bali would have been converted into a fiefdom of the Iron Marshal with the dubious Captain of the Dragoons as regent. But Daendels was recalled and replaced shortly thereafter, the Captain vanished, the English conquered and ruled the Indies, and it served everyone’s purposes to forget this improbable arrangement. Nor did the Dutch choose to revive it when Napoleon was overthrown and the English handed back their empire in order to bolster the post-Napoleonic Dutch-English alliance, in which the Dutch, without the Indies, would have been a crippled and crippling partner.

English Occupation; Raffles and Crawfurd

      Whether or not he was aware of Daendels’ overtures to the Balinese, and in all probability he was, Sir Stamford Raffles, the mastermind of the English invasion and the Lieutenant Governor-General of the occupation (1811–1816), entered into preliminary personal correspondence with certain of the Balinese radjas to entice them to favor the English side in the coming conflict. The radjas were at first disposed to be receptive to English advances. They sent a certain Njoman Bagus of Buleleng to meet with Raffles in Malacca, where he was induced to accept the rank of major in the invasion forces. After dispatching and perhaps forgetting Njoman Bagus, who never reappears in the records, the radjas remained aloof from the campaign and from the occupation. Bali itself fell just outside the sphere of English administration and the far-reaching changes which Raffles introduced affected it only indirectly. But one of Raffles’ most important reforms, the abolition of slavery and hence of the traffic in slaves between Bali and Java, threatened to deprive the radjas of an important source of revenue. The Radjas of Buleleng and Karangasem, motivated apparently by indignation at the loss of a slave market, in February, 1814, mounted one of their periodic little military expeditions against Blambangan, where they clashed with British Sepoys. Small bands of armed Balinese in fact roved into other parts of East Java, occasioning no little consternation. In May, therefore, Raffles sent Major General Nightingale to Bali with a small contingent of troops to make a show of force and to receive prompt assurances, which nobody took very seriously, of Balinese “submission.” The English stationed no garrison in Bali, however, and made no further attempt to impose their control.

      In early 1815 Raffles himself paid a visit of a few days’ duration and exhibited his usual energy in collecting data for his historical and cultural studies. His administrative subordinate and literary rival, John Crawfurd, had visited the island somewhat earlier and had engaged in similar activities. In their published works, which included sections on Bali, neither Crawfurd nor Raffles, unfortunately, attained his usual standard of accuracy and perceptiveness. Both restricted themselves mainly to comment on Hinduism on the basis of observations made, apparently, not in Bali but in India.

Dutch Demarches of 1817, 1824, 1826; Kuta Post

      In 1817, over Raffles’ vigorous protest and obstruction, the Dutch regained control of the Indies. One of their first moves was to dispatch a mission to Bali to establish formal relations with the radjas. Their most immediate and compelling consideration was the well-founded suspicion that Raffles was casting about for some new island to colonize. Raffles eventually chose Singapore; but by then the Dutch had already made what they regarded as a successful preemptive move to reserve Bali for themselves. They had drawn up certain “contract concepts” which they interpreted to signify sweeping concessions on the part of the radjas, who had merely discussed but had not accepted the Dutch proposals.

      The contract concepts of 1817 were the work primarily of H. A. van der Broek, a revenue officer who was named special commissioner. Van der Broek arrived in Bali in mid-1817, accompanied by Heer Roos as his aide and by Lt. Lotze heading a party of twenty well-armed soldiers. He had been provided with impressive credentials authorizing him to negotiate formal agreements with the radjas.

      The van der Broek visitation was not altogether unsolicited. Gusti Gde Karangasem, Radja of Buleleng, had himself sent a mission to Batavia seeking aid for relief of famine and intimating interest also in arms. The shortage of food and weapons in Buleleng was occasioned, it seems, by British interference with the slave trade, from which much of the Radja’s income was derived, and the Radja had been experiencing certain economic and political difficulties in consequence. The Dutch, happy for once to repair an English oversight, shipped off a modest quantity of rice, receiving in return the gift of three slave girls, whom they generously freed. They then decided that the time was appropriate for an official mission.

      The van der Broek visit was not a success. He arrived in Bali just as war broke out between Buleleng and Karangasem, a war in which Klungkung and Mengwi supported the latter and the other southern states the former. He found the radjas unresponsive to his suggestion of political alliance and most of them unwilling even to receive him in audience. He attributed their hostility not to any recent experience with Daendels’ Captain of the Dragoons or his own evasiveness about military aid but rather to defamatory reports which, he believed, the English had spread and were in fact still inspiring. Eventually van der Broek prevailed upon the Radja of Badung to intercede with his peers in Mengwi and Gianjar to join him in hearing what the Dutch wished to propose. In 1818 the southern radjas themselves sent a mission to Batavia, under escort of Heer Roos, to confer with the Governor-General. Van der Broek remained in Bali, where his stay was made most uncomfortable by reason of various petty annoyances, one of them the interception of supply shipments meant for himself and Lt. Lotze’s soldiers. The atmosphere, in fact, was distinctly unfriendly. Nevertheless, as a result of various obscure maneuvers both in Batavia and in Bali, the Dutch drew up two somewhat different but very formalistic sets of contract concepts. They assumed that selected paragraphs would be incorporated, with, or preferably without alteration, into the series of treaties which they envisioned with the individual states.

      The treaties did not materialize, for the radjas reverted to their non-cooperative stance. Nevertheless, the rejected contract concepts achieved a sort of quasi-validity in the minds of their Dutch authors. Nothing much resulted from this diplomatic exercise other than the demonstration that Western and Eastern concepts of appropriate treaty provisions were all but irreconcilable and that Western concepts would probably prevail. The radjas were interested in occasional military aid against Lombok, Mataram, and one another; the Dutch wanted to assert sovereignty and to assure themselves that Balinese political and commercial contacts with the outside world would remain in all perpetuity under their own exclusive control. Neither side quite understood what the other was driving at save that it was altogether unacceptable.

      A few years later, in 1824, the Governor-General tried again. This time he chose as his agent not a Dutch official but an Arab merchant from Surabaya, a far-roving