Early Contacts
Bali remained obscure in the West for so long because of its lack of
spices, fragrant woods, ivory, and natural harbors, and because of its
natural orientation toward the deep straits and treacherous tidal currents
and reefs of the south rather than the tranquil Java Sea. These factors
tended to isolate Bali from the elaborate international trade which swirled
around it.
Bali was therefore allowed to evolve uninterrupted
artistic and social traditions far more independently than other settlements
in the region. But the island soon attracted notice because of its position
at the beginning of the Lesser Sunda Islands. In the early 16th century,
navigators started labeling the small island east of Java Major "Java
Minor." Not long thereafter the name "Bally" began to appear
on maps.
The English buccaneer Sir Francis Drake paid
a call in 1580. In 1585 the Portuguese attempted to establish a trading
station in south Bali, but their ship was wrecked off Bukit. Finally, in
1597, a small fleet of Dutch war yachts, headed by Cornelius de Houtman,
landed on Bali. He and his crew of 89 men were all that were left after
a 14-month trading journey that began in Holland with 249 men.
Bali was the high point of de Houtman's journey,
an island attractive and hospitable. The Dutchmen made great friends with
the king, who, according to written accounts of the time, was "a good-natured
fat man who had 200 wives, drove a chariot drawn by two white buffaloes,
and owned 50 dwarves whose bodies had been distorted to resemble kris
handles." After a lengthy stay and many postponements, de Houtman
announced a sailing date. Reluctant crew members disappeared up to the
moment of departure. Upon their return to Holland the Dutchmen's reports
of the new "paradise" created such a sensation that in 1601 the
trader Heemskerk was sent to Bali weighted down with gifts for the king.
Early Dutch Incursions
In 1602 the Dutch trading company Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie
(VOC) was formed by a group of merchants. Maintaining its own private army,
the VOC's goal was the unlimited exploitation of the East Indies. At first
Bali offered little of commercial value, and for more than 250 years after
its discovery the island was more or less left alone while the company
concentrated its efforts on capturing control of the cash crops and spice
trade of Java and the Moluccas.
Bali did not grow cloves or nutmeg—spices
needed by the Europeans to make their meats more palatable—so there was
little on the island to exploit. Bali's imports were gold, rubies, and
opium; its exports mercenaries who fought in various wars in Java, and
thousands of highly prized male and female slaves sold to Batavia, the
Dutch capital in West Java. The massive eruption of Gunung Tambora on Sumbawa
in 1830 brought so much devastation to Bali it forced curtailment of the
slave trade. The rajas of south Bali, finding their wealth and power drying
up, turned to rice, coconut oil, cattle, pigs, dried meat, hides, tobacco,
and coffee. This new mercantile orientation attracted traders, including
the English.
The Dutch versus the English
During the Napoleonic Wars, when the East Indies were occupied briefly
by the English, a British military mission was sent to Bali. Sir Stamford
Raffles, who would establish the colony of Singapore in 1819, visited Bali
in 1814. Rumors circulated the English were about to take possession of
Bali, intent on building a second Singapore. The Dutch, believing the English
sought to obtain control over the archipelago's rice trade, began their
own colonial adventure in Bali. From 1839 to 1844, the Dutch East Indies
Trading Company (Nederlandsche Handels Maatschappij, or NHM), which had
taken over operations from the bankrupt VOC, ran an agency, or "factory,"
in Kuta. In 1837 The Hague decided the NHM would function as a political
outpost on Bali and Lombok. The aim was to obtain exclusive contracts and
acknowledgments of sovereignty, binding the rajas of Badung, Klungkung,
Karangasem, and Buleleng to Batavia.
But because the NHM was not allowed to sell
opium or weapons, the enterprise was economically a failure. Ultimately
the Dutch began involving themselves directly in Balinese internal affairs.
They fomented discontent among the lesser, increasingly independent rajas
in order to gain concessions from the highest-ranking raja, the Dewa Agung
of Klungkung.
THE WHITE RAJA OF BALI: MADS LANGEThe year was 1839. The Dutch had not yet suc-ceeded in penetrating the fertile rice-growing districts of southern Bali, where a glorious and carefully guarded Hindu theater state had flour-ished undisturbed for a thousand years. In that year, after he had been run oft the neighboring is-land of Lombok by an English rival, the flamboyant Danish merchant-adventurer Mads Johansen Lange (1806-56) set up a fortified 'factory' (trading post) on Bali's southern peninsula near the fishing village of Kuta. The Balinese were eager for trade contacts, but at the time foreigners were strictly confined to the edge of the island in places like Kuta, a political freeport and no man's land where outcasts and opponents could find refuge. Lange's busy emporium became a vital link between inter-Asian trade and the inland Balinese economy. Al-though his sojourn on Bali lasted only 10 years, it was to change Balinese history. Although a few Chinese and Buginese monsoon traders had settled near the main harbors of the island in the 19th century, mostly serving as inter-mediaries in the slave trade, Mads Lange estab-lished the first large trading post. Surrounded by an imposing wall with an elaborate gateway, the huge complex contained warehouses, a pasat; comfortable residences, and an open dining pavil-ion with a billiard table where foreign guests-mer-chants, ship captains, early tourists, Indologists, botanists, linguists-were sumptuously entertained. Lange lived there with his Chinese and Balinese concubines, his Dalmation dogs, and his retinue of servants. In the evenings cosmopolitan parties were held there, from where the Kuta villagers could hear Danish folk music and bawdy songs sung and played by Lange and his friends on flutes, violins, and a piano. Half the races of Europe were repre-sented at the trader's hospitable table. The Bali-nese gentry, sarunged and parasoled, were also often invited to the gay parties and treated with the utmost care and deference. Relations with the dirt-poor Kuta villagers, however, were not as cordial. Once, when one of Lange's servants struck a Bali-nese, his factory was surrounded by a howling mob who wanted to burn it to the ground. Deftly, the trader bought the peace with 200 guilders and two balls of opium. Lange himself came to play a crucial role in early colonial expansion. He fell under the protection of the highest-ranking raja of south Bali, Gusti Ngurah Gde Kesiman of Badung, who made Lange a per-bekel (district official). Not only was he a powerful commercial broker who gained great profit from trade, but Lange also served as an indispensable link between the Dutch and southern Balinese rulers. In 1844, the Dane was appointed Dutch agent and official middleman, maintaining many personal relationships with the quarrelsome Bali-nese princes. He served as a channel of information between the vastly different worlds of East and West, able to solve most problems by simply buying protection and goodwill. Lange was also an adept mediator between conflicting parties, acting as a human buffer and diplomat between Dutch colo-nial interests and internal Balinese court politics. To avoid conflicts between oafish Europeans and the Balinese natives, no one but Lange and his brother Hans were allowed into the island's interior. Although Kuta at the time was the gateway to the island's rich inland economy of coffee, tobacco, and other cash crops which Lange brokered, his major business derived from a monopoly on the sale of Chinese kepeng, which became the island's dominant monetary unit. Lange would buy the round coins cheap and Sell them on Bali at 100% profit or else trade them for rice. Large quantities of these coins were sent from China to Singapore, from where Lange would import them to Bali along with opium, iron, arms, and textiles. Working through Chinese agents, Lange maintained a system of storehouses on neighboring islands where his fleet of 12 ships would gather raw produce to resupply stocks on Bali. Numerous European ships called at Kuta to buy rice, coconut oil, animals, hides, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and other goods. He maintained two slaughterhouses, killing oxen to supply dried beef for the Dutch garrisons on Java. His close re-lationship with the local ruling elite allowed him to expand his trade and commercial contacts without competition or political risks. Lange became an im-mensely rich and powerful man. But with the launch-ing of several large-scale military expeditions by the Dutch against Bali in 1846,1848, and 1849, Lange's world was about to come tumbling down, leaving him brokenhearted. At one point during a Dutch attack on Klungkung in 1849, Lange's trading station at Kuta was threat-ened. Filled with plunder, it was much coveted by the rajas of Mengwi and Gianyar. With opposing armies poised to attack near Klungkung, Lange averted a bloody disaster by dramatically riding out to meet the Dutch troops marching inland from Padangbai. He mediated a temporary peace by arranging an extravagant ceremonial meeting at his factory between the Dutch commander and the southern rajas, attended by 30,000 followers of the rajas in case something went wrong. For his re-ward, Lange received from the old raja one of Bal-i's highest titles, punggawa besar. Through this meeting, Lange's local patron and descendants were able to dominate southern Balinese politics until the final puputan of 1906-08, by which time nearly the whole of the Indonesian archipelago had come under Dutch colonial rule. Because of new technology and commercial pressure the fortunes of Lange's factory soon began to decline. The Dutch naval blockade of Bali (1848-49) and the continual warfare of the 1840s had seriously disrupted trade. The rice-growing hinterlands had suffered the ravages of war and a plague of rats, while accompanying smallpox epidemics and water shortages con-tributed to the chaos. In addition, Kuta harbor was inadequate for the steamships which were used increasingly after 1850 in the inter-Asiatic trade. Finally, new commercial rivals entered the picture when the northern harbor of Buleleng and Amp-enan on Lombok began to attract the bulk of Bali-nese exports. All these factors conspired to cause Lange losses from which he never recovered. It was said of him that there was more of the bold Viking than the prudent trader in his nature. He was soon put out of business. Bankrupt and dispirited, Lange died mysteriously in 1856 just before he was to return to Denmark. Historians believe he may have been poisoned by a member of a competing dynastic group seeking revenge. His brother and nephew tried in vain to continue the factory, but Raja Kesiman's death in 1863 left the establishment completely vulnerable. After several years nothing remained of the once-prosperous compound except for high stone walls. Remnants of the compound survived into the 1950s but today all has vanished. Descendants of his Chinese and Balinese wives went on to make names for themselves in Singapore, Malaysia, and Sarawak. Today, Lange's grave behind Kuta's pasar malam, a nearby alleyway named Gang Tuan Langa, and descendants of his Dalmation dogs are the only physical traces left of this remarkable Dane's mercantile adventure on Bali. |
Direct Action
In 1846, after the shipwreck of a Dutch vessel on the Badung shores
and its looting by the local population, the Dutch envoy threatened the
raja with reprisals. There were also several cases of looting—an ancient
and accepted right of island peoples—of ships washed up on the northern
coasts. When the Dutch resident went to Buleleng to investigate these cases
and exchange contracts, he received a hostile and humiliating reception.
At the end of June 1846, the first Dutch
punitive military expedition was launched against Buleleng—23 warships
and some 3,000 men. With rifles and mortars, the soldiers fought all day
against a Balinese force estimated at 50,000, armed with just spears and
kris. Four hundred Balinese were killed and the royal palace at
Singaraja was destroyed.
Within a few days a new treaty of submission
was signed, the raja forced to pay 400,000 guilders, and a Dutch garrison
stationed at Buleleng. Political tension increased all over the island,
convincing the Dutch that further military intervention was necessary.
In June 1848, after their treaties were violated and resistance continued,
another Dutch expedition was launched. Opposed by a young prince named
Gusti Ketut Jilantik, today an Indonesian military hero, this incursion
ended in disaster for the Dutch. Lured into pursuing the Balinese force
to the inland fortress of Jagaraga, the Dutch troops were encircled and
soundly defeated.
The Balinese suddenly became the nightmare
of the mid-19th century Dutch colonial state. There was no alternative
but to show the Balinese, the English, and all their enemies that this
rout was simply an aberration, and that the Dutch were still the dominant
power in the Indies. So in April 1849, 5,000 infantrymen, 3,000 mercenaries,
and a fleet of 60 vessels with 300 marines set out to settle once and for
all this Balinese business. Shipping out of Java, this was one of the largest
Dutch military expeditions ever organized in the archipelago. After just
two days of fighting and the loss of Jilantik, Buleleng and the fortress
of Jagaraga were defeated.
The army of 20,000 men under the raja of
Buleleng sued for peace. In May of that year Karangasem and Klungkung were
likewise subjugated, the first time Dutch forces entered southern Bali.
Gradually, over the next five years, political authority passed from the
native rulers of north Bali into the hands of Dutch controleurs.
Buleleng and Jembrana were placed under the direct administration of the
Netherlands East Indies government in 1882. The Balinese ruling neighboring
Lombok fared no better. In 1894 the Lombok War was initiated with the landing
of Dutch forces, who were promptly thrown into the sea. Heavy artillery
and reinforcements arrived and the well-trained Netherlands colonial army
swept over the whole island, capturing the Balinese capital of Cakranegara,
killing the crown prince, and exiling his father.