Article

Baud on Raffles

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Baud on Raffles

W. Ph. Coolhaas, a Dutch colonial historian and former director of the Batavian Archives, published this article in 1951 as a direct rebuttal to C. E. Wurtzburg’s 1949 paper on the 1811 Palembang massacre. Writing from the Dutch historiographical tradition, Coolhaas defends the reputation of Jean Chrétien Baud—long maligned by Furnivall as an unscrupulous careerist—and argues that Baud’s 1853 article attributing moral responsibility for the massacre to Raffles was fair, well-grounded, and based on documentary evidence that predated Baud’s own publication. The overarching thesis is that Raffles, through imprudent and deliberately ambiguous Malay-language correspondence with Sultan Mahmud Badr’uddin, created the conditions for the murder of the Dutch community in Palembang, even if he did not consciously intend the killing.

Summary

The article operates on two interlocking levels. The first is a defence of Baud’s character and intellectual integrity against the sustained attacks of Furnivall’s Netherlands India, which Wurtzburg had inherited uncritically. Coolhaas marshals testimony from Blok, Stapel, Alberts, and the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie to establish that Baud was universally regarded in the Netherlands as an honest, moderate, and able statesman—a conservative who supported the Culture System in principle while mitigating its worst effects, and who refused to extend his Governor-Generalship beyond what he considered necessary. The second level is a close philological and documentary examination of the letters Raffles wrote to Badr’uddin, which Baud published as appendices to his 1853 article in the first volume of the Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Instituut.

Coolhaas corrects a critical chronological error in Wurtzburg’s argument. Wurtzburg had published a letter from Raffles to Badr’uddin and argued it preceded Baud’s first published letter, thereby suggesting Baud had fabricated or rearranged his evidence. Coolhaas shows, using Daendels’s own letter of 24 September 1810 announcing the dispatch of gunboats under Lieutenant-Colonel Voorman, that the letter Wurtzburg cited must date from late 1810, not December 1809 as Wurtzburg supposed. This collapses Wurtzburg’s central objection to Baud’s sequence of evidence. On the crucial Malay phrase boeang abieskan sekaliekalie segala orang olanda, Coolhaas enlists the authority of Professor C. Hooykaas of the University of Indonesia and Mr. Datoek Besar of the ITCO, both of whom confirm that the expression can only mean “make an end to all of them so that none remain”—a reading that Badr’uddin himself would have understood unambiguously.

The article also situates the massacre within the broader diplomatic context of the 1816 handover. Coolhaas reproduces the 1818 letter of the Commissioners-General and the 1820 letter of Governor-General Van der Capellen, both of which had already attributed the massacre to Raffles’s “imprudent instigations and promises,” demonstrating that Baud was not the first to raise the question but merely consolidated an existing official Dutch position. He further discusses the 1818 restoration of Badr’uddin by Muntinghe, which he regards as a grave political error, and traces the career of Captain Robison—Raffles’s secretary, later Resident in Palembang, and a lifelong adversary of Raffles—whose complaints to Lord Minto and to London predate Baud’s publication by decades.

Key Findings

  • The Commissioners-General wrote to the Governor-General of British India on 5 October 1818 describing Raffles’s conduct as “evidently imprudent and indelicate, if not criminal” (p. 114).
  • Governor-General Van der Capellen wrote to Lord Hastings on 16 April 1820 that since Raffles’s letters to the Sultan of Palembang in 1811, “the inevitable consequence of which was the horrible massacre of all the Dutch there,” Raffles “never ceased to act hostilely against us” (p. 114).
  • Daendels’s letter to Badr’uddin of 24 September 1810, published by Van der Kemp, confirms that the gunboat division under Lieutenant-Colonel Voorman was the first and only naval expedition Daendels dispatched to Palembang, fixing the chronology of Raffles’s correspondence (p. 118).
  • Baud’s letter No. 3, dated 8 Sapar 1225 (16 March 1810 by Coolhaas’s reckoning), contains the phrase miesti sobat boeang abieskan sekalie-kalie segala orang olanda, which Hooykaas and Datoek Besar translate exclusively as “make an end to all of them so that none remain” (pp. 118–119).
  • Captain A. Meis wrote in 1840, years before Baud’s 1853 publication, that Badr’uddin had tried to excuse the massacre by referring to an expression in Raffles’s letters meaning beking habis dengan orang wolanda (p. 119).
  • Palembang and Banka were formally transferred from British to Dutch authority on 10 December 1816 under Article 1 of the London Treaty of 13 August 1814 (p. 117).

Conclusion

Coolhaas’s definitive judgment is that Raffles did not consciously intend the murder of the Dutch in Palembang—this would be inconsistent with his known character—but that he was guilty of using words in so rash and deliberately ambiguous a manner that he must bear moral responsibility for the deaths that followed. A man who prided himself on his knowledge of Malay character ought to have foreseen what cue a sultan like Badr’uddin would take from being told to “make an end to” his bitter enemies. The political arithmetic was clear: the massacre served Raffles’s immediate objective of acquiring Banka, and Badr’uddin, believing himself protected by Raffles’s letter, committed what he later recognised as a political error when Raffles himself became Lieutenant-Governor of Java.

Context

  • The article draws on the Raffles Collection in the India Office Library (noted as apparently uninvestigated), the Landsarchief in Djakarta, and the published correspondence in Levyssohn Norman’s De Britsche Heerschappij over Java en Onderhoorigheden (1858) and Van der Kemp’s Bijdragen articles (1897, 1900).
  • Historiographically, the piece represents the Dutch conservative-liberal consensus on Baud and the Palembang affair, positioned against the Anglo-British liberal tradition (Furnivall, Wurtzburg) that had exonerated Raffles. It is a significant intervention in the historiography of the 1811 British conquest of Java, insisting that the Dutch documentary record—long neglected by English-language scholars—must be read before any final verdict on Raffles’s conduct can be reached.

References