Bali Chronicles. Willard A. Hanna
Said Hassan al Habeschi, who knew from long experience how to deal with Asian royalty from Bengal to the Molukkas. Habeschi visited the Balinese radjas and reported back to his principals that, save only in Badung, not even the promise of great profit would elicit any interest in a treaty. If Pangeran Hassan failed to achieve his major purpose, he returned good value for the Dutch outlay upon his rather expensive travel arrangements by bringing back important intelligence relating to a second subject in which they were very much interested: the size and strength and hideouts of the pirate bands which then infested the waters of East Java, Bali, and Lombok. Hassan reported that he had counted ninety pirate perahu manned by conglomerate crews of ruffians from Celebes, Borneo, and the Sulus, who found aid and comfort in Balinese port towns to which they retreated when Dutch marine pursuit became too hot. He suggested that the Dutch could deal definitively with these vicious sea rovers only by asserting effective control over the whole of Bali and Lombok. For the time being the Dutch contented themselves with sending warships to harass the pirate fleet, also to reconnoiter and map the Bali coast—first the frigate Komet in 1825, than the schooner Iris in 1827. They succeeded so well that in 1828 some 300 pirates abandoned Bali to reestablish themselves in the little archipelago of Pulau Laut about halfway between Singapore and Borneo, where they became the concern primarily of the British.
In 1826 Batavia sent yet another Dutch agent, a Captain J. S. Wetters, who managed that year to negotiate a simple agreement whereby the Radja of Badung permitted the recruitment of soldiers, at a royalty of five guilders per head, and the opening of trade. Wetters himself settled briefly at Badung’s leading port town of Kuta, not far from the palace of the Radja. Thus began the modern Dutch presence in the island and the emergence of Kuta to compete in trade with the northern port of Buleleng.
The Kuta post did not prosper. Its main purpose was the recruitment of a proposed total of 1,000 Balinese on five-year contracts to serve in the colonial army. Most, if not all of the recruits, it is to be presumed, would be purchased as slaves and would earn their freedom after five years of military service. At just this time, however, the Dutch wound up their long but intermittent war against the Mataram Empire and decided that they no longer required so many more Balinese. The Kuta post, which therefore purchased few slaves, seems also to have sold little merchandise. For these and other reasons, relations between the Dutch and the Balinese were strained by mutual suspicion and at times overt animosity. Wetters’ successor, Pierre Dubois, who managed the post from 1827 to 1831 with one Dutch sergeant and a few soldiers as his companions and guards, reported despondently that Kuta attracted few European traders (a total of exactly three during the entire period) and kept petitioning the government to close it down. To support his case he reported incident after incident of actual or threatened robbery, arson, murder, and plunder, and almost daily scenes of amok. Dubois regarded the local ruler, Gusti Ngurah Ktut, the nephew of the Radja of Badung, with a combination of apprehension and contempt. He charged him with all manner of villainy, of which, by report other than that of Dubois, he seems in fact to have been guilty. The local population, according to Dubois, consisted mainly of criminals and ruffians. It seemed to be a matter mainly of chance, however, whether the incautious visitor would be done in by violence or by pestilence, for the location was as insalubrious as its inhabitants were unsavory. Before he conclusively established his point that European survival was unlikely, Pierre Dubois himself was transferred. In 1831 Batavia notified the Radja that it was closing its Kuta station, requesting that its properties be reserved for discretionary Dutch use thereafter, a request which seems to have been ignored.
Visit of Dr. Medhurst and His Report
Despite early Dutch failures it was now apparent that Bali could not much longer expect to remain isolated from Western impact. Dutchmen and other Westerners were visiting the island in ever increasing numbers and reports were beginning to circulate in the outside world. One report in particular attracted much attention and realerted the nervous Dutch to the danger that if they themselves did not soon take Bali the British could be expected to do so. It was a study prepared by Dr. Medhurst, a much traveled English medical missionary from Malacca, who spent three months (late 1829 to early 1830) in Bali in company with a Reverend Tomlin studying the northern regions, especially the radjadom of Buleleng, which, as noted above, was the traditional center of foreign contact and trade.
Dr. Medhurst’s report was published originally in certain English missionary journals and then reprinted (anonymously) in Singapore, first in the Singapore Chronicle (June 1830), later in J. H. Moor’s famous compilation, Notices of the Indian Archipelago (1837). It was also translated into Dutch and republished in the Netherlands. Dr. Medhurst attempted, within the brief scope of his essay and the limits of available information, to do for Bali what Raffles had recently done for Java and other English writers were occasionally doing for other little-known lands. He adopted the classical approach of the generalist, dealing with matters of geographical, historical, ethnographical, and commercial interest and introducing such particulars as he had been able to assemble from local sources. His historical sketch focused mainly upon the family of the ruling Radja of Buleleng, in whom all Western visitors, naturally, were very much interested. Dr. Medhurst portrays this young gentleman, the twenty-year old Gedemgoorah Ratna Ningrat, as a princeling so sunken in torpor and licentiousness as to seem little better than an imbecile. Unattractive as he was, he seems to have been preferable as a ruler to various of his uncles and cousins who were his immediate predecessors. One uncle, Gusti Moorah Gde Karang (the ruler who asserted Karangasem hegemony), had been murdered twelve years earlier by his own rebellious subjects, who found his conduct too distasteful even to recall. One cousin, Dewa Pahang, had occupied himself principally in quarreling and battling with another uncle, Gusti Moorah Lanang, the Radja of Karangasem.
Royal Family of Buleleng; Its Blood Feuds
Dr. Medhurst’s report is perhaps a bit over-ornamented with picturesque detail obligingly furnished by fanciful Balinese informants. But if it does not reveal exactly what it was that had happened quite recently in northern Bali, it does show what perceptive foreign visitors were quite prepared to believe had happened. The blood feud between Dewa Pahang and Gusti Moorah Lanang, according to Dr. Medhurst, lasted for years and resulted in widespread disorders which had seriously affected the entire northern region. Dewa Pahang, a high-spirited youth of vulgar tastes, became so enraged that he took a great oath to drain and drink his uncle’s blood, reserving a small part of it for his beautiful young sister to employ, more delicately, for washing her lovely hair. Gusti Moorah Lanang, not to be up-staged, vowed to cut off his nephew’s head, slice his body into small pieces, send these morsels as admonitory gifts to neighboring royalty, then to build a temple of thanksgiving to be ornamented with the bones and skins of his nephew’s retainers.
The fortunes of war first favored Dewa Pahang until, in dalliance between battles, he committed incest with his sister; the balance then shifted toward Moorah Lanang. In the course of a particularly audacious campaign, Moorah Lanang captured his unfilial nephew and proceeded, while professing grief at having to fulfill so impetuous a vow, to detach the head and to mince up the body to provide mementos for friends and relations. He then set out to accumulate the bones and skins necessary for his memorial monument. But Gusti Moorah Lanang’s soldiers began to fear for their own hides and bones and many of them deserted. With his still loyal companions, Moorah Lanang retired into a nearby forest, where he made a sacrificial offering to the gods of fifteen plump infants upon whose roasted remains he and his party banqueted. This gruesome ceremony was so repugnant to others of his countrymen that the Radja found it advisable to flee to Lombok. He did not actively object when his nephew, Anak Agung Madi, was elevated to the throne of Buleleng or when the new radja was deposed by his unhappy subjects and replaced by his nearly catatonic brother, the above-mentioned Gedemgoorah Ratna Ningrat. Such was the gist of Dr. Medhurst’s gory account, which the present writer has made no effort to reconcile, in the spelling of proper names, for instance, or other more significant detail, with less excruciating chronicles.
Dr. Medhurst did not acquire, or he did not choose to report any