Article

Elephants

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Elephants

Elephants held a position of considerable economic, social, and ceremonial importance in the Malay Peninsula during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the northern states of Perak, Trengganu, and the Siamese-administered territories of the former Patani confederation. As beasts of burden, personal transport for the aristocracy, and objects of prestige, domesticated elephants were integral to the material culture of the Malay elite and to the tin-mining economy of the Kinta Valley. The records also document the capture and taming of wild elephants as a hazardous and wasteful industry, the export of live animals to India, and the gradual displacement of the elephant by bullock carts, ponies, and motor vehicles as transport technology advanced. The following account draws on the substantial body of evidence preserved in the Society’s journal, which treats the elephant not merely as a biological subject but as a lens onto questions of colonial administration, inter-state diplomacy, and the social hierarchies of the Malay world.

Economic Value and the Tin-Mining Economy

The market value of a domesticated elephant rose sharply over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, from $350 to $450 in 1877 to as much as $1,000 by 1902, a doubling driven by the expanding demand for elephant labour on the tin mines and by the export trade in live animals shipped to India via Penang [1, p. 120]. The primary economic use of the elephant was as a beast of burden in the carriage of tin ore from mine to river. When Sir Charles Mitchell visited the mines near Ipoh in 1894, he recorded “a parade of 52 elephants awaiting me,” noting that these animals were “chiefly used in the carriage of tin” [1, p. 120]. However, the owners of these elephants pitched their rates of hire so high that mining employers found it cheaper to employ human labour; Mitchell observed that “the Chinaman with his little wheelbarrow is a formidable labour competitor with these huge beasts” [1, p. 120].

The income an elephant could generate for its owner is documented in the compensation awarded to Syed Mohamed Zin of Chigar Galah, whose two elephants were seized and held in Raman for over three years. The settlement was calculated at $400 per annum for the use of an elephant, yielding a total of $1,000 for 2¼ years of deprivation, plus a further $319.28 for an additional 292 days of delay, the latter figure computed by an accountant in the Siamese Foreign Ministry [1, pp. 117–118]. This rate of $400 per annum represents, so far as the records indicate, the only explicit statement of the annual earning capacity of a hired elephant in the Society’s literature [1, p. 121].

Beyond mining, elephants served as personal transport for persons of rank. Swettenham noted that “when people of consideration had to journey by land they travelled on elephants, if they could get them” [1, p. 113]. An elephant could cover approximately 15 miles in a day at a rate of 3 miles per hour [1, p. 120]. The expense of maintaining an elephant was considerable: one animal could consume as many as 30 complete coconut fronds as a day’s food, and the cost of supporting the mahout (elephant driver) added to the burden [1, p. 120]. A Sultan or other high dignitary might own as many as 50 elephants, partly for reasons of prestige [1, p. 120]. Sultan Ismail of Perak (r. 1871–1876) is recorded as having possessed 50 to 60 elephants [1, p. 123, n. 34].

Capture, Taming, and the Wild Elephant Trade

The capture and taming of wild elephants was a thriving industry in northern Malaya, though for unexplained reasons the practice was unknown in Selangor despite the fact that “the Selangor forest teemed with elephant” [1, p. 119]. Trapping was a sport of kings and chiefs, requiring the mobilisation of a large body of men assembled under the customary system of kerah (compulsory communal labour) [1, p. 119]. Sultan Ismail was found absent from Blanja in March 1875, “and is said to have gone to catch elephants at Campar” [1, p. 119].

The most detailed account of a trapping operation comes from C. Mayer, who lived by trapping and exporting Malayan wild animals to menageries and zoos in the early twentieth century. Mayer describes the capture of a herd of 60 elephants in Trengganu, in which he was assisted by a nephew of the Sultan and a Malay hunting party [1, p. 119]. The operation involved the construction of a stockade with a funnel-shaped mouth, using tree trunks 20 to 25 feet in length sunk 5 feet into the ground and lashed together with jungle rattan ropes, all accomplished with no tools other than parangs (broad-bladed machetes) [1, p. 119]. Despite a propitiatory ceremony to the spirits of the jungle at the outset, the operation went catastrophically wrong: the herd turned back on the beaters, killing three men and injuring a dozen more [1, p. 119].

Once captured, the taming process was long and brutal. The elephant was kept hobbled so that it could hardly move, and starved into submission over a period of three to four months [1, p. 119]. Another observer described recently captured elephants “confined by ropes in strong timber stalls, and behind the ears stout timber uprights prevented the head from being drawn back” [1, p. 119]. Mortality was high at every stage. Mayer deliberately killed the adult male elephants he had taken, since their ivory could be sold for as much as the live animal if it survived taming; in the end he exported only 16 out of the 60 elephants captured [1, p. 119]. In captivity, elephants were prone to develop sores from the chafing of their loads or harness, which would often turn gangrenous [1, p. 119]. The Perak State Council restricted the issue of licences to capture elephants, citing “the loss of life of these animals being too great owing to the inexperience of the persons employed” [1, p. 119].

Ceremonial and Diplomatic Significance

The elephant carried a non-economic, ceremonial significance that outlasted its practical utility as a beast of burden. The arrival of Sultan Idris of Perak at the inaugural meeting of the Federated Malay States Federal Council at Kuala Kangsar in December 1909 provides a striking example: “His Highness came at the head of a procession of nearly fifty elephants to present a letter of welcome. On the elephants were seated all the members of the Perak Royal Family, the members of the State Council and a number of the leading Malay Chiefs of Perak. As many elephants as could be ranged in front of the house side by side, about twenty in number, at a signal from their drivers knelt down and His Highness descended” [1, p. 120]. The British observer Anderson was “enormously impressed,” declaring that he had “seen nothing during my visits to the Federated Malay States to compare with it” [1, p. 120].

The ceremonial use of the elephant persisted into the twentieth century. As late as 1922, when King Rama of Thailand visited the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar in company with Sultan Iskander, the Sultan brought his guest on “a grandly caparisoned elephant with a beautifully decorated howdah on its back” [1, p. 121]. Elephants also featured prominently in diplomatic processions: at a 1886 meeting between the British district officer of Upper Perak and the Siamese governor of Singgora, the latter arrived “with a train of a hundred elephants and a proportionate following” [1, p. 116].

The elephant also figured in the broader context of the Perak–Raman boundary dispute, which involved approximately 2,500 square miles of Perak territory absorbed by Raman during Perak’s civil wars of the 1850s [1, pp. 115–116]. The Raja of Raman, as a professional trapper of elephants, was motivated to appropriate Syed Zin’s animals as a ready-made addition to his trade stock [1, p. 119]. The dispute was eventually settled by a compromise agreement dated 29 November 1899 [1, p. 116, n. 16].

Decline and Displacement

Several factors converged to eliminate the elephant as a general-purpose beast of burden. The new network of bridlepaths, in effect rough country roads, made it possible for the well-to-do to ride ponies and for the businessman to send goods by bullock cart [1, p. 120]. Harrison, writing in 1916, described the itinerant Malay bullock-cart driver as a familiar sight on both short and long journeys, with some carts carrying goods from Melaka as far afield as Pahang [1, p. 120]. By this time the roads were good enough to be usable by the omnibus and the lorry [1, p. 120]. Gullick himself observed elephants being used to shift timber at a sawmill outside Seremban in the late 1940s, but noted that the general use of elephants for such purposes had long since ended [1, p. 120].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on elephants is characterised by a shift from the descriptive and anecdotal to the administrative and economic. Early accounts, such as those by J.W.W. Birch in his 1874–1875 journals and by Swettenham in his Malayan Journals, treat the elephant primarily as a feature of the landscape and of aristocratic life, recording the discomfort of the ride, the sagacity of the animal in crossing rotten bridges, and the elaborate saddlery employed for persons of rank [1, pp. 113–114]. Hugh Low’s journal of 1877 provides the earliest market valuations and notes the practice of hiring out elephants to tin miners [1, p. 120].

The mid-period literature, including Mayer’s 1922 account of trapping in Trengganu and the Perak State Council minutes of 1880, introduces a more systematic concern with the economics of the elephant trade, the mortality rates in capture, and the regulatory framework governing licences [1, p. 119]. The Straits Settlements Despatches and Colonial Office papers (CO 273 series) provide the administrative backbone for understanding how the elephant became entangled in inter-state diplomacy, as in the case of Syed Zin, where eight despatches were written to London on the subject of two animals [1, p. 118].

Gullick’s 1986 article represents a distinctive historiographical approach: it uses a single incident of property dispute as a lens into the broader economic, social, and ceremonial role of the domesticated elephant in late nineteenth-century Perak [1, p. 121]. Gullick explicitly positions his narrative as one of “many fragments of information on the use and importance of domesticated elephants” that, when assembled, “makes the picture a little more complete” [1, p. 119]. The article also highlights a gap in the existing literature: Syed Zin’s case is, so far as Gullick is aware, the only record in the Society’s journals that mentions the income an elephant could earn for its owner [1, p. 121].

The second record, Anthony Reid’s 1989 article on elephants and water in the feasting of seventeenth-century Aceh, indicates that the Society’s interest in the subject extends beyond the colonial period and beyond the Malay Peninsula to encompass the broader maritime Southeast Asian context, where the elephant held ritual and symbolic significance in courtly ceremony. However, the full text of this article is not available in the present records, and no further detail can be offered.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. J.M. Gullick (1986). The elephants of Syed Zin JMBRAS 59(1): 113–123.