Pepper (15 page)

A group of chiefs from Priaman and other settlements on the west coast happened to be in Aceh when Ord and Cawley visited the sultana. Happily for the English, these local rulers were in Aceh to ask the sultana for protection from the Dutch. The Sumatrans quickly seized the opportunity to ask the Englishmen to set up a fort in their territories to help fend off the Hollanders. In return, they offered exclusive purchase of their pepper, a proposal guaranteed to be accepted. Arrangements were made and an agreement was signed in Madras with Elihu Yale leading the negotiations for the Company. But a day or two before an expedition was to sail to Priaman, the Company received an invitation from the rulers of Benkoolen to establish a factory there. It seems likely that the Company officials in Madras accepted this invitation because the Dutch had already sent a party to occupy Priaman.

Perhaps their reluctance to confront the Dutch made Benkoolen especially appealing to the English, but in fact it was impossible to avoid the Dutch, even in this relatively isolated settlement. All of the southern ports of Sumatra were within reach of Bantam and Batavia, which were controlled by the Dutch. Benkoolen was also near Silebar, a major supplier of pepper to Bantam.

Although the Dutch hindered attempts by the English to establish themselves in several villages to the north of Benkoolen along the west coast, the English prevailed through sheer perseverance. In 1685 they set their base of operations in West Sumatra in Benkoolen, where they built Fort Marlborough and stayed for 140 years. Ironically, the “John Company,” as the East India Company came to be called, was to rue its decision to occupy Benkoolen until its final days.

Elihu Yale, the Boston black pepper trader who led the ill-fated negotiations for a fort in Priaman, became President and Governor of Madras, and donated the fortune he earned on his private trading account to establish Yale University. He apparently never visited Sumatra but did have a hand in establishing a factory in Aceh in 1688. Ousted from his post in Madras in 1692, he was jailed on charges of profiting through private trade with Aceh. After his release, he again traded on his own behalf in Madras, and finally left India in 1699.

Years after the English first came to Benkoolen, the directors of the Company wrote: “It was a fatall and never enough to be repented errour of our President and Council of Fort St. George [Madras] to break all our orders for a settlement at Pryaman upon a caprice of their owne to send our ships, spend our strength, our money and soe many men's lives upon settlement at such an unhealthful place as Bencoolen, because they heard there was more pepper there, which was noe news to us before wee writt a line concerning Pryaman, but wee avoided that place and others neare Sillebar because they were too neare Batavia and that we knew by long and ancient experience that they were unhealthful and, therefore, did purposely direct and enjoin Pryaman to be yet principall place of settlement and first secured and made as strong as Fort St. George.”

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If Aceh was a kind of Eden, then Benkoolen could only be described as a kind of hell. Remote, damp, and difficult to approach by ship because of dangerous surf, the village truly was an unfortunate place for the East India Company to establish itself in Indonesia. York Fort was built on a knoll near the mouth of the Benkoolen River, surrounded by swamps that were breeding grounds for malaria. It soon had to be rebuilt with convict and local labor in a more suitable location two miles away, and the new Fort Marlborough was poorly constructed. Meanwhile, there was a chronic shortage of military supplies, and relatively few English soldiers had signed on for service in Benkoolen. The Company bolstered its small force with Bugis people from South Sulawesi, Indian soldiers, and “Topazes,” men of Portuguese descent who practiced Christianity. At one time the English even considered using slaves from Madagascar as soldiers.

The small number of defenders made the fort vulnerable, and it had to be abandoned twice—in 1719 when much abused Indonesians attacked the still-unfinished Fort Marlborough and set fire to the town, driving the British onto a Company ship in the bay; and in 1760 when the humiliated English, who could not rally the Indonesians to their side, surrendered to a squadron of French ships led by French Brigadier-General Comte d'Estaing. Disease quickly overwhelmed d'Estaing's crew of 150 men, and he quit the settlement after only a few months.

Benkoolen again became a British possession, but Company officials could not restore order. They found “many of the pepper gardens in ruins, the people restless, and in many cases unwilling to commence cultivation,” wrote William Marsden, a scholar and Company man who lived in Benkoolen from 1771 to 1779, in his epic history of Sumatra. The sultan of Moko Moko, an important chief in a region north of Benkoolen, also had ordered the destruction of his territories, and the pepper gardens in Benkoolen and Silebar were ruined.

From the very beginning, Benkoolen was a graveyard. Only four months after setting up the trading post, disease had already spread like wildfire through the small settlement. The desperation of the men is evident in their letters. “… Wee are by Sicknesse all become uncapable of helping one another & ye great Number of people that came over not above thirty men [are] well,” wrote Benjamin Bloome, who was chief of the settlement from 1686 to 1690, to Company officials in Madras. The mounting death toll was awful, he confided to Ralph Ord in Indrapurna, a settlement to the north of Benkoolen. “Our people dayly die & now we are in worse Condition then ever, for wee have now neither men to Make a grave to bury ye dead & none to carry the dead corps out of the towne.” The situation in Indrapurna, Ord replied, was equally dire. “We are sorry to hear ye Sickly Condition you are in though are little better or Rather worse our Selves,” Ord noted. “There is not one of our black people well, some dead, and many near dying; the Rest alltogeather disabled from any service…” Ord, the founder of the English settlement in Benkoolen, died in Priaman in 1686. It was rumored that he was poisoned by the Dutch.

Along with the dying and the sick, the officials constantly worried about Dutch assaults on the settlements. Bloom appealed to a rajah whose territory was near Seblat, a pepper-growing region some seventy miles north of Benkoolen. “At our first Settlement here, you Promised at all time to Stand by & assist us, when ever any Occasion required it,” Bloome wrote. “Now therefore, as before there was Never any Occasion, Soe now Your constancy must be tried. For as ye Dutch & Javas are come to Sillibar, and undoubtedly with a designe to assault this Place, as you are Senicble [sensible] of … I desire that you will come back with all Speed, for … your presence now here is much more requisite then at another time.” Although the Dutch were indeed near, they never attacked Benkoolen.

Despite the number of deaths, the fledgling settlement managed to survive, and residencies to the north and south became part of the British domain. But life in Benkoolen was confined. Sumatra's formidable mountains and treacherous jungles did not inspire exploration. Those who had to make annual inspections of the pepper gardens in the so-called outer residencies dreaded the task. Many turned to drink to help them get through the days, which wasn't unusual among Company men. During July 1716, the nineteen “covenanted” civil servants of Fort Marlborough imbibed “… 74 dozen and a half of wine [mostly claret], 24 dozen and half of Burton Ale and pale beer, 2 pipes [each 105 gallons] and 42 gallons of Madeira wine, 6 Flasks of Shiraz [a Persian wine], and 164 gallons of Goa [toddy]…” The bill for the wine alone was said to exceed the value of all pepper exports from West Sumatra in 1716.

It wasn't easy to recruit men to a remote garrison infamous for being a death trap. So it isn't surprising that many of the fort's administrators were despicable characters. The pirate trader William Dampier, who spent five months in Benkoolen as a fort gunner in 1690, described James Sowdon, the “Chief” from 1690 to 1692, as a detestable petty tyrant. Sowdon possessed “so much Insolence and Cruelty with respect to those under him, and Rashness in his management of the Malayan Neighbourhood, that I soon grew weary of him … under a Man whose Humours were so brutish and barbarous,” wrote Dampier. “I forebear to mention his name after such a Character; nor do I care to fill these Papers with particular stories of him: But therefore give this intimation, because as it is the interest of the Nation in general, for it is especially of the Honourable East India Company, to be informed of abuses in their Factories.”

On occasion, an administrator's behavior was so outrageous that he was suspended and imprisoned, which was the fate of Deputy Governor Richard Farmer in 1718. In 1807 Resident Thomas Parr was beheaded by enraged Malaysians after he tried disbanding the men of the Bugis Corps, the refugees from South Sulawesi who formed the so-called country guard, and instituting forced cultivation of coffee. Even Joseph Collett, an administrator who is credited with more humane treatment of the local inhabitants, seems like a typical British colonial who treats his charges like children. Collett, who was Deputy Governor of Benkoolen from 1712 to 1716, boasted in a letter about his approach: “I treat them as a wise man should his wife, am very complaisant in trifles, but immoveable in matters of importance.”

Collett's day in Benkoolen started with a good breakfast of bread and butter and Bhoea tea, a popular black tea from China, at about seven o'clock. He worked until noon, and then dined on boiled chicken, pigeon, crawfish, crabs, or prawns, “all excellent in their kind, or some good relishing bit,” along with “a good Draught out of the Punch-Bowle.” After taking a “Pipe for Digesting,” he goes back to work. “If I find it possible to get so much time, I go out at 4 and either ride or walk till six. If I ride I have a Horse Guard attending me and the Union Flagg carry'd before me. I have also a foot Guard of Buggess [Bugis] Soldiers who generally keep way with me.” The Bugis were especially recruited by the British in West Sumatra to supervise pepper planters and to serve as soldiers because of their reputation as good fighters.

In fact, Collett was accompanied by guards wherever he went. “If I walk, I have 4 men with Blunderbusses go before and a Guard of Buggess to bring up the rear,” he wrote. “If I dine abroad or shou'd lye out of the Fort, which I have not yet done, the number of my Guard is increased.”

Collett closed his office at six and came home to “sitt again and then to Supper. I take a Pipe or two with a chearfull Glass and then to my Chamber, where I either sit to business or what else is proper before my going to bed. I have two servants and two slaves of my own, one of them a female too, but not a present of any king … However to prevent scandal I keep her in another Family where she works for me, ironing, etc. but never comes into my house.… The Mallay Town adjoining to our Fort consists of seven or eight hundred houses full of Inhabitants.”

As Collett was sitting down for his fine meals attended by servants and slaves, the natives in the so-called British residencies didn't have enough to eat. British policies in Benkoolen were starving the population, and it started with the number of vines that the inhabitants were forced to plant and then sell at a contracted price.

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Only ten years after Benkoolen was founded, officials on Leadenhall Street in London, the headquarters of the English East India Company, were aware of the faltering pepper trade in southwest Sumatra. Losses mounted year after year, and little could be done to offset the considerable expense of building a fort and provisioning soldiers. The entire operation was proving a drain on the Company's finances. Spurred into action, officials in Benkoolen decided that forced cultivation, a euphemism for slavery, would increase pepper production and ensure a regular, reliable supply of the spice, thereby improving the Company's ledger sheets. The result was part reservation, part plantation, and a disaster for the people of southwest Sumatra, where pepper cultivation relied on families in upstream villages to plant the vines and maintain the pepper gardens. Men usually cleared the jungle forests for the gardens while women and children planted and harvested. Women sold the pepper in local markets.

The English largely destroyed this system of agriculture and even the social fabric of West Sumatra by striking deals with local chiefs for the delivery of contracted amounts of pepper. In 1695 the chiefs agreed to “bind their subjects to plant 2,000 pepper vines annually, and to give their assistance to the English officials to see that the terms were enforced.” Unmarried men over the age of sixteen had to grow half as many vines as married men. When the imposed quotas failed to be met, the number of vines was reduced in 1724 to one thousand for families and five hundred for single men. It was an overwhelming amount of work. Many single men simply left their villages rather than face the daunting prospect of planting twice as many vines upon getting married. During the British occupation in southwest Sumatra, many historians have noted, it was said that single women greatly outnumbered single men. Married women found that they were no longer welcome in local markets to sell their family's pepper because the English did not think this was an appropriate job for women.

The penalties for families that didn't make the quota were harsh. Men and women would be fined or thrown in prison, and over the years the punishments became more severe. Pepper wasn't necessary for survival, and yet as early as 1690, only five years after the establishment of Benkoolen, William Dampier observed that two chiefs were in the stocks “for no other Reason but because they had not brought down to the Fort such a quantity of pepper as the Governour had sent for.”

Families still had to plant rice to survive. Over the years, British demands for pepper led to a critical shortage of rice and near starvation as people neglected growing food while they struggled to meet the Company's pepper quotas. “… the scarcity of rice such as was never known here before has forced People to quit their Habitations to go 6 to 7 Days Journey inland to procure Provisions for their Families, many of whom for several Months together had had no other Sustenance than Roots and leaves of Trees; and the Misery they have undergone is almost inexpressible,” wrote a Company official in Benkoolen in 1741.