ANTHONY Reid2008

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MERCHANT PRINCES AND MAGIC

MEDIATORS
Anthony Reid
Published online: 29 Sep 2009.
To cite this article: Anthony Reid (2008) MERCHANT PRINCES AND MAGIC MEDIATORS, Indonesia and
the Malay World, 36:105, 253-267, DOI: 10.1080/13639810802268007
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Anthony Reid
MERCHANT PRINCES AND MAGIC

MEDIATORS
Outsiders and power in Sumatra and
beyond
Downloaded by [Chulalongkorn University] at 15:56 25 December 2014
This paper distinguishes two types of association between strangeness and power, both of which
were salient in Sumatra and the western Archipelago more generally. In the port-states, power
and trade were thoroughly integrated. Foreign traders who played a role in their politics might
be called ‘stranger-orang kaya’, the orang kaya being the class of merchant-aristocrats who
dominated the port-states of the region in the 16th to 18th centuries. In the stateless high-
lands, the power associated with distant kings was essentially religio-magical, in common with
the role of symbolic kingship in these highlands. The outsiders who benefited from this effect
might be called ‘magical mediators’. The highlanders frequently wanted to utilise the cosmic
powers of such figures, but never to be effectively ruled by them. Europeans were frequently
among those who became stranger-orang kaya, and in the 19th century also sometimes
magical mediators. The paper examines several Sumatran cases of both, noting that the
options for Europeans to play such roles narrowed as the colonial system hardened.
Most of archipelago Southeast Asia has been historically averse to building bureaucratic
states, despite familiarity with them through long contact with China, India and Siam.
Highland Indonesians, in particular, were accustomed to dealing with river-mouth out-
sider kings, essential in trade and sometimes useful in defence, but at the same time
guarding their freedoms jealously, and organising society through kinship, ritual and
economic ties rather than kingship. The kings they did acknowledge for their own
people were essentially magical symbols useful in times of conflict, like Singamangaraja
or Raja Paggaruyung. Outsider traders were well equipped to play the role of
river-mouth ruler, and occasionally also that of magical highland symbol. They
blended naturally into the mercantile elite of the port-states known as orang kaya, a
term which appropriately expressed both wealth and power.
The nature of kingship
The two types of royal charisma expressed themselves in two very different types of
origin myth. Many interior peoples have a story of ethnogenesis in the place most
Indonesia and the Malay World Vol. 36, No. 105 July 2008, pp. 253– 267
ISSN 1363-9811 print/ISSN 1469-8382 online # 2008 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13639810802268007
254 INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD
sacred to them, such as Nunuk Ragang to the east of Ranau for the Kadazan or Dusun of
Sabah (northern Borneo). I will take the Batak of northern Sumatra as the epitome of
this type of magical legitimacy, involving descent from the legendary ancestor Si Raja
Batak, who descended from the world of the gods onto the sacred mountain Pusuk
Buhit to the west of Lake Toba.
On the other hand almost all the rulers of the coastal port-states proudly traced
their origin to a mighty foreign ruler, of whom the epitome for Muslims was the
world-conqueror Iskandar Zulkarnain (Alexander the Great). Malay rulers sought to
trace their descent from this ultimate source, though often mixed with more probable
antecedents associated with the Middle East (Raja Rum) or India (Raja Kalinga or
Vijayanagar). Even many of the upland stateless people shared some knowledge of this
distant source of ultimate supernatural power (Burton and Ward 1995: 179; Modigliani
1995: 199–209).
Simplistically one might say that the port-states depended almost entirely on trade
for their prosperity and military strength, so that both power and prestige were linked
to trade. Most ruling dynasties did in fact arise from a foreign trader, a local particularly
adept at using foreign traders, or some marriage between the foreign and the local.
Tomé Pires in the early 16th century claimed Javanese coastal rulers ‘are not Javanese
of long standing in the country, but they are descended from Chinese, from Persians and
Klings, and from the nations we have already mentioned’ (Cortesão 1944: 182). The
foreign origin myths are in part a domesticating of reality, but they also demonstrate
the status attached to foreign trade wealth and technology.
For present purposes it is important to acknowledge both the centrality of foreign
trade in the way power worked in the port-states, and the limitations of this kind of
power. Port-rulers might claim, especially to outsiders, that their sovereignty extended
to the whole river-system of which the outlet to the sea they controlled. But they knew
that any power they exercised in the more populated upper reaches was wholly depen-
dent on their trading partners there. They could not command any action in the uplands,
and the highlanders discouraged visits by their representatives by exaggerating their own
reputation for ferocity.
The symbiosis between upriver and downriver power was explained in a number of
myths. The mythic foreign progenitor of a dynasty is often portrayed as marrying a magi-
cally appropriate local woman. The chronicles of the Malay dynasty of Melaka dwell exten-
sively on the foreign and distant kings from whom the dynasty is descended, always
including Alexander the Great and a king of India, through Bukit Siguntang (presumably
connected to Sriwijaya) in Palembang. But some versions closer to the Sumatran side of
this story add that later kings of Palembang were descended from a union between a
Chinese general and a princess who miraculously appeared from the foam being carried
down the Musi River from the highlands (Shellabear 1961: 29–31).1 South Sulawesi
state myths usually begin with the coupling of a heaven-descended male tomanurung and
a local woman; though in Makasar it is the female tomanurunga who descends from
heaven and marries a Bajau ‘stranger-king’, Karaeng Bayo (Reid 2000: 100–1).
Jane Drakard has well described the complementarity of the two rajas of Barus, both
near the mouth of the Aek Batu Geringis, and the dependence of both on good relations
1
The better-known Raffles text of the chronicle, the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals translated in C.C.
Brown (1952): 12 – 28 omits this last detail.
MERCHANT PRINCES AND MAGIC MEDIATORS 255
with the interior Batak who brought their camphor resin to the port in Barus. The
Hulu (upriver) dynasty traced its origins matter-of-factly to Toba Batak outmigrants
from the Balige area south of Lake Toba. The Hilir (river-mouth) chronicle begins
with a typical Malay-style foreign trader from Indrapura in southwest Sumatra,
who first establishes his royal legitimacy with the Batak by travelling through their
territory and being hailed as their king. A Dutch account in 1669 explained why
despite their vastly dominant numbers and military prowess, the Batak would never
conquer the small coastal settlements of Barus. All the quarrelling Batak villages
needed the port as an outlet to the coast, and if one ever marched towards the
coast to finish off the Malay ruler, other villages would inevitably block their progress
(Drakard 1990: 33 and passim).
Drakard’s discussion of Barus texts provides an entry into the puzzling issue of
highland ‘freedom’ in relation to coastal rajas, on which David Henley and I have
already exchanged views (Henley 2002: 1). The Barus Hilir chronicle describes the
journey of its founder-hero, Sultan Ibrahim, through the Batak territories prior to
establishing his kingdom on the coast. First in Silindung, and then at the
Singamangaraja’s sacred place of Bakkara, on Lake Toba, and finally in the Pasaribu
territory, the local chiefs pleaded with him to stay and become their king. At
Bakkara he urged the Batak to become Muslim, because then they would be one
people (bangsa) with him and he could stay as king. The Batak responded apologeti-
cally, ‘We do not want to enter Islam. Whatever else you order we will obey.’ He
therefore moved on, but not before fathering a child by a local woman, who
became the progenitors of the Singamangaraja line. In each place agreements were
sworn to by both sides, establishing the long-term relationship between upland
Batak producers on one hand and coastal Malay traders on the other. These included
establishing the ‘four penghulu’ of Silindung as a supra-village institution linked to the
Barus trade (Drakard 1990: 75 – 80).
This story of the refusal to accept Islam, while accepting a kind of symbolic but
harmless coastal kingship, is an appropriate myth for the upland/coast relationship.
A symbolic supremacy of the coastal ruler, including even some items of symbolic
tribute, was acceptable in the highlands but effective control and cultural absorption
were certainly not. Throughout the highlands there was, in my view, explicit resist-
ance to any project of incorporation into lowland polities. Among the Pasemah of Ulu
Palembang there was even an ideology of freedom, particularly among the self-
designated ‘two free [clans]’ (merdike due), who refused all relations with Palembang
lest it compromise their freedom. A Dutch official characterised the Pasemah area in
1870 as ‘a republic in the most democratic sense. The people rules itself; for that
purpose great public meetings would be convened’ (Collins 1979: 90 – 92; Reid
1998: 145 – 46).
This was not the freedom of sparsely populated backward areas in relation to city-
centred population concentrations in the lowlands. Until the later 19th century popu-
lation in Sumatra was concentrated in the stateless highlands. Without benefit of
states, these societies developed more elaborate irrigation systems, market cycles
(based on a four-day week; Sherman 1990: 38 – 40), ritual and kinship circles, and
even writing, than most of the lowland states. They deliberately kept outsider represen-
tatives of coastal power from travelling in their highlands through exaggerated stories of
their ferocity and cannibalism (Hirosue 1996).
Explaining the foreign element in (western archipelago)

port-states
Most of the port-states which arose at the river-mouths of Sumatra and the Peninsula were
essentially trading posts for the merchants who mediated between or within the trading
worlds of the Indian Ocean, the Java Sea, and the South China Sea. Ethnically these
merchants were of diverse Indian, Chinese, Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern origin,
but always ‘foreign’ in the sense of having another base and origin than the port in
which they traded. Even as great a city as the Thai capital, Ayutthaya, owed its origins
to Chinese or Sino-Thai traders who made it their base in the 14th century and made
common cause with a hitherto agricultural and Thai dynasty. The story of Ayutthaya is
explained in various references in the chronicles, of which the earliest, that of Jeremias
van Vliet, claims the first king of Ayutthaya to have been a Chinese prince, banished
from the empire along with numerous followers after he had rebelled (van Vliet 1910:
6–8).2
Northern Sumatra, like the Peninsula, was a place of numerous entrepôts and
foreign trading colonies. Pasai (Samudra) was the leading one until the rise of Aceh
in the 1520s, an enclave of Muslim traders from the ports of India and the Middle
East. The Sejarah Melayu comments that in its early centuries ‘all the people of Pasai
knew Arabic’ (Brown 1952: 46). Its chronicle is thick with Tamil and Dravidian refer-
ences, including the arrival from South India of various remarkable figures, one of them
an ingenious yogi credited with ‘naming’ one of the Muslim sultans Perumudal Perumal,
evoking the Chera dynasty which united Kerala up until the 12th century (Hill 1961:
117, 123, 134, 136). As its editor points out, the chronicle’s account of the peripatetic
adventures of the mythic dynastic founder ‘reflect the ease with which a wealthy and
resourceful Hindu could get himself acclaimed, his needs met, and his leadership
accepted, by the people of the country’ (Hill 1961: 15).
The Aceh chronicles are not well provided with origin stories. The Bustan as-Salatin
begins matter-of-factly with the first historical ruler, Ali Mughayat Shah (d.1528). Only
one fragment of the early pages of the one text we have of the Hikayat Aceh has survived,
but it contains an intriguing reference to the journey of legendary ancestral figures to the
court of China, and of one becoming pregnant there (Iskandar 1958: 66). The chronicle
of Melaka provides a remarkable stranger-king story not known to surviving Aceh
chronicles. It ascribes the origin of the Aceh dynasty to Cham refugees, after the fall
of the Champa capital to Vietnamese arms in 1471.
There were two sons of the King of Champa, one named Shah Indera and one named
Shah Pau Ling. Both of them fled by boat with many people including their wives
and children; Shah Pau Ling went to Aceh, and that is the origin of the kings of Aceh
. . . Meanwhile Shah Indera Berma went to Melaka, where Sultan Mansur Shah
[r.1459 – 77] rejoiced to see them all.
(Shellabear 1961: 162)3
2
See also Baker (2003) and Reid (2006).
3
The better-known Raffles text of the chronicle has a shorter version of the story, naming the prince
who went to Aceh ‘Shah Palembang’ without stating that he began the line of Aceh kings (Brown
1952: 110).
The orang kaya phenomenon
Orang kaya dominated such powerful port-states as Aceh, Patani, Johor, Palembang, Brunei
and Banten in the 17th century, especially at times when trade-friendly oligarchs prevailed
over warrior autocrats. Literally the term means ‘rich man’, but kaya is an old Austronesian
term whose roots lie closer to the concept of power. In its 17th century usage the term is
best translated as ‘merchant-aristocrat’ since it includes both traders with political influence
and officials who engage in trade. They were most prominent as the effective ruling class in
Aceh and Patani during their periods of female rule, and Banten during the minority of the
boy-sultan in the early 1600s. The title well reflected the interdependence of wealth and
power in these port states. It was inconceivable that a wealthy individual would not
have political and even military power, or that a politically powerful figure would not
become wealthy through some form of involvement in trade (Reid 1993: 114–23).
This commercial world of the 17th century was the antithesis of the later colonial
stereotype, whereby an unbridgeable gulf separated indigenous aristocracy from a
‘foreign’ (especially Chinese, Indian and European) trading class. Upward social mobility
from the cosmopolitan commercial world into the royal aristocracy was the rule rather
than the exception. The two dominant families of 15th century Melaka, for example,
were both of foreign merchant origin. The Bendahara family, the heroes of the Melaka
chronicle, was descended from a Hindu (probably chettiar) financier whom Sultan
Mansur recruited to organise the royal treasury. The Laksamana dynasty also descended
from a non-Muslim slave from Palembang brought into royal service by Sultan Mansur
(Cortesão 1944: 249; Reid 1993: 121). Even in the more hierarchic world of Ayutthaya,
David Wyatt (1995: 106–30) traced the four most powerful official families of Siam in the
17th century to able foreign traders brought into government by the king.
Although the 16th and 17th century ‘age of commerce’ was the epitome of orang
kaya prominence, foreign merchants continued to play a prominent role in the
governance of port-states as long as they remained independent. The reputedly Cham
line of Aceh kings was followed by an Arab one from 1700, and a Bugis one from
1729. Only under European rule did aristocratic governance and commercial activity
become sharply distinguished. Before then, European traders followed their Asian
counterparts by joining the ranks of orang kaya, and sometimes of kings.4
Europeans as orang kaya in the port-states
The first ‘white raja’ in Southeast Asia was Philip de Brito, who ruled the port of
Syriam, opposite modern Rangoon, as an independent state from 1599 to 1613. Like
4
Honesty requires me to include a report from the area which might seem to support a more classic
interpretation of the European ‘stranger-king’. The Malay river-statelets of the coast of essentially
Batak territory near the British settlement of Natal were reported in the 1760s ‘to be rather
managed than ruled. They find the English useful as moderators between their own contending
factions, which often have recourse to arms, even upon points of ceremonious precedence, and
are reasoned into accommodation by our Resident going among them unattended’ (Marsden
1966: 374). The context suggests that among Batak the English were acting much like the Malay
port-rulers before them, using the charisma from their trade-wealth to mediate in disputes,
without thereby being invited in any sense to become true kings.
most of his successors, he owed his success to the pragmatic advantages of trade wealth,
military technology, and bravado. Like many of his contemporaries, he also no doubt
profited from his strangeness. Portuguese adventurers were valued as elite military
troops in Burma and Siam, not only for their familiarity with firearms, but also for
their minority status which made them seem less threatening to kings. De Brito orig-
inally captured Syriam from Pegu on behalf of the king of Arakan, an intermediate
step common to many stranger-kings. In the aftermath of the total destruction of
Mon power after 1599, he also found allies among embittered Mon of the delta. The
chronicles generally remember him as an enemy of Buddhism and he was put to a hor-
rible death by the Toungu dynasty, which captured Syriam in its path towards reunifying
Burma (Furnivall 1915: 53 –7; Reid 2000: 171 – 72).
In the western Archipelago, Aceh was the greatest single magnet for private
European traders and adventurers, as it was for Arabs and for Tamil Muslims, known
in Southeast Asia as Chulias. Even when the sultans were strong, European traders
like Thomas Best and Augustin de Beaulieu proved useful and were given official
titles. Foreign ships, whether Muslim or European, were expected to help the sultan
with his military campaigns, and in turn could be well rewarded.
In the 18th century the sultans grew weaker and conditions more unstable, but Aceh
remained the most important free port of Southeast Asia, in the sense that it was not
under the control of either a monopolistic European power or an autocratic mainland
state. A diverse group of foreign merchants became the new orang kaya class, mixing
trade and politics in the capital. As William Dampier put it, ‘there are always a great
many merchant-strangers, viz. English, Dutch, Danes, Portuguese, Chinese, Guzarats,
etc.’ (Dampier 1931: 90). The most influential such elements by the latter part of the
18th century were, French soldiers of fortune seeking a livelihood after the collapse of
the French military adventure in India, Chulia Muslims from the Tamil coast, and a
group of Madras-based English merchants led by Gowan Harrop. His ‘Madras Associ-
ation’ built up a substantial power base in Banda Aceh from 1766, bringing about
100 Indian sepoys ostensibly to guard his warehouse but probably also to provide
some needed security for the sultan. But Harrap was too closely connected with the
East India Company (EIC) to be entirely trusted as an independent orang kaya, as
became clear in 1772 when the Company took over the factory. The EIC sought to
levy all port duties on European ships and to strengthen the fortification of the
factory. It looked like the thin edge of a colonial wedge, and the Acehnese reaction
came swiftly. As a British report noted, the Acehnese believed that the Company
‘after having built a strong fort intended to enslave them in the same manner as they
had in Bencoolen’ (Wright 1961: 254). Local pressure against the British forced the
EIC to withdraw its settlement in 1773. Despite further attempts in 1784 and 1805,
British interest turned increasingly to Penang, as it did not require the massive army
of occupation that any post in Aceh would have (Wright 1961: 251– 54, 327 – 30;
Lee 1995: 28 –55; Mills 1925: 23 – 26).
There followed a period of particular influence by South Indian orang kaya. A
Malabar Muslim named Kassim was Sultan Mahmud’s favourite during the early
1770s, acting as his syahbandar (harbourmaster), but was replaced in 1773 by a
Chulia. Under the following sultan, Muhammad Syah (1781– 95), the Chulias
became still more entrenched. One of them, Poh Salleh, served as an increasingly influ-
ential syahbandar through the whole of this reign, and was perhaps the most influential
man in the kingdom in the minority years of the following ruler, later known as Johaur
al-Alam (1795 –1823) (Lee: 1995 45 – 6, 56, 65 – 6).
Meanwhile, individual Europeans were increasingly employed by Sultan Muhammad,
to command his ships, to enforce his will on the small ports along his extensive coastline,
and to manage the increasingly important relationship with British Penang (from 1786) and
with European and American pepper ships arriving in ever greater numbers. There were
said to be a dozen Europeans serving Aceh in this way in the early 1790s, the most influ-
ential of them being the Flemish commander of the royal fleet, Huatt, and his English
deputy, William Lesle. This relationship broke down in 1792, and Huatt took four of
the sultan’s ships to Junkceylon (Phuket) to enter Siamese service (Lee 1995: 81–2).
French adventurers were also common in Aceh from the 1760s, as it was one of the
independent states from which they could operate during their long, losing battle with
the English in the Indian Ocean. In 1760, when Admiral d’Estaing de Toulouse captured
Natal and Tapanuli on the west coast near modern Sibolga from the English, there
appears to have been some cooperation with Acehnese naval forces, to whom Natal
was turned over (Lee 1995: 24). French interest was revived during the revolutionary
wars by privateers operating out of Isle de France (Mauritius) who repeatedly ravaged
English settlements on Sumatra’s west coast. In May 1809 French official interest in
using Aceh (and Burma) against the British was revived, with a daring but abortive
mission by Lt-Col. de la Houssaye from French-occupied Batavia to Aceh and Ava, in
response to a letter from the Aceh sultan seeking French assistance (Lee 1995:
132 – 34; Reid 2004: 153 – 58). Although these official overtures worried British strate-
gists in Penang and India, the reality was that the French were even less likely than the
British to be permitted a permanent base in Aceh.
More relevant as stranger-orang kaya were individual Frenchmen, most of whom
wanted nothing to do with official France. The most interesting in this period was
Francis L’Etoile, a Eurasian born (or in some accounts naturalised) in the Danish settle-
ment of Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast. Having been engaged for many years in
the trade between South India and Aceh, he became increasingly involved with Sultan
Jauhar al-Alam (1795 – 1823). By 1808 he was styling himself the sultan’s commercial
agent, although others called him ‘Commodore of Aceh’ and regarded him as the most
influential minister of the court. After negotiating with L’Etoile and the sultan, a British
agent reported in 1810:
Of all the men possessing influence in the state, Mr L’Etoile certainly holds first
place. He is a half caste, born at Tranquebar, who has constantly been employed
in the Country Trade. He sailed in command of a ship several years from Madras,
afterwards went and resided for a length of time in Rangoon, which he left a few
years ago, and has subsequently been employed by the King of Acheen. Having
the chief direction of affairs, of which the ships are the most important, he is invari-
ably called the Commodore. He is considered by merchants who went thither to be a
man of very superior abilities. He has I fancy had great experience in the Indian Trade,
and acquired an accurate knowledge of it. If he has the inclination he has probably not
yet had the means of interfering much in political concerns . . . His ideas appeared to
me to turn chiefly on commercial gains, and his master’s opinion and conduct to be
directed by him in the same channel.
(Campbell to Edmonstone 14 July 1810, in SSFR 31: 1811)
The same envoy mentioned two of L’Etoile’s brothers also being in Aceh, together with
‘a Portuguese named Manuel de Silveira’5 – considered the second most influential
adviser in the kingdom – as well as a number of other Europeans ‘employed either
immediately about the king’s person or on his ships’ (SSFR 31: 1811). The sultan,
facing a major rebellion in his country, was dangerously dependent on foreigners. He
was anxious for yet more foreign support, begging for a British force to be sent from
India to help him regain his capital. But even his two foreign advisers, L’Etoile and
de Silveira, were aware of the certain negative reaction this would have triggered in
Aceh, and counselled a more sophisticated policy. In a letter to Penang, L’Etoile
explained that Aceh needed arms and ammunition, and the promise of military help
from Penang in an emergency, but absolutely not resident British troops (Campbell
to Edmonstone 14 and 24 July 1810, in SSFR 31: 1811).
L’Etoile died in Aceh at the end of 1812. To replace him as commercial agent and
effective prime minister, Sultan Jauhar decided he needed an experienced Englishman
familiar with Penang and able to deal with the British. His choice of Cuthbert Fenwick
was a natural one, though it proved disastrous. The sultan had known Fenwick for 20
years and trusted him as someone of great experience in the Aceh trade. Fenwick had
come out to Calcutta in the service of the EIC in 1790 but later became a private
country trader and captained the ship Malcolm, trading from India to Aceh and the
Peninsula. In the early 1800s his primary base was Penang, though he made himself
extremely unpopular there with officials and established traders. Perhaps because
he was on the other side of several local conflicts, they portrayed him as pugnacious
and quarrelsome. With a number of unsuccessful court cases against merchants with
whom he had fallen out, Fenwick in 1809 was banned from continuing to reside in
Penang (Lee 1995: 156 – 58).
Most of the Penang establishment, in fact, preferred to support Jauhar’s rival in the
Aceh civil war of 1814 –19, the son of the Penang Arab tycoon Syed Hussain Aidid.
Sultan Jauhar and Fenwick had attempted, like most rulers before them, to ensure
that traders visiting the long Acehnese coast paid duties to the Aceh court, while the
Penang merchants naturally desired to trade directly with the subordinate rulers of
the tiny river-ports. Many conflicts had arisen, especially after 1810, when the sultan
decreed that opium could only be brought into the country at Lhokseumawe. The
Penang merchants ignored the proclamation, forcing the sultan and his European officials
into numerous conflicts with the Penang ships (Lee 1970: 78).
Fenwick was more capable and experienced than most, and according to his own
account succeeded in separating the state finances from those of the sultan by giving
the ruler an allowance:
He [Sultan Jauhar] is now reconciled to His Nobles and is every day becoming more
and more powerful. I have made the receipt meet the Expenditures and some surplus.
The next year the Estimates in the receipts will double the expenditure . . . He
has now seven vessels, regularly paid every three months, his Sepoys always
one month in advance (Fenwick to Carnegy 13 June 1814, as cited in Lee 1970: 80).
5
This seems to be the same person referred to as Carlos de Silva by Lee (1970: 75, 77); I cannot tell
which name is correct.
Fenwick’s forthright language on behalf of the sultan, however, further irritated the
Penang establishment. Even the principal supporter of Sultan Jauhar al-Alam’s case
within the Penang government conceded:
It is true some very intemperate letters were received from the king, written in
English, and well understood by the government to have been written by
Fenwick, sometimes without the knowledge and consent of his master.
(Anderson 1971: 92)
After his Penang Arab challenger, Saif al-Alam, succeeded in establishing himself in the Aceh
capital with the help of a rebel movement, Sultan Jauhar Alam withdrew to Penang in 1815,
along with eight ships and most of his foreign advisers, some of whom were unwell. He
needed to insist with the British on his rights as sultan, but also to sort out his business
affairs and purchase more arms to recover his throne. The British governor, however,
refused permission to land. While they waited helplessly in the harbour, the
conflict between Fenwick and the sultan became more acute, and Fenwick led all European
employees of Aceh to defect in January 1816. Fenwick was already ill, and died in Melaka
later that year. To replace him, Jauhar next turned to the Penang Kapitan China and holder
of the monopoly farm in spirits, Koh Lay Huan (Lee 1995: 194–233). If, as his enemies
maintained, Jauhar had lost the support of his people because his European advisers had
led him into a ‘profligate and debauched life . . . publicly drinking spirits and eating
pork’ (Anderson 1971: 95), the change of advisers may not have been much help.
The ‘white raja’ stereotype made some later 19th-century stranger-orang kaya all
too well known. James Brooke in Sarawak is the archetype, but William Lingard and
Charles Olmeijer (model for Conrad’s Almeyer’s Folly) in Northeast Borneo have also
received renown. Their emulators in Sumatra were not so fortunate, save for the
self-promoting Walter Murray Gibson, whose ambition in Jambi (cut short by the
Dutch police) prefigured his later more successful stranger-orang kaya role as Prime
Minister of the Kingdom of Hawaii (1882 –87) (Gibson 1855; Daws 1980: 129 – 61).
A less known Sumatran adventure is that of Adam Wilson, chief clerk in the
Singapore Merchant House of Martin, Dyce & Co. In 1856 Sultan Ismail of Siak
sailed into Singapore with a fleet of 30 prahu to ask the British Governor for help in
putting down his brother, the Raja Muda Tengku Putra, whom he said had usurped
his authority. The governor declined to interfere, but Wilson took a schooner with a
few Europeans and 50 Bugis across to Siak, enough to enable the sultan to regain his
capital. He then established a small fortified settlement of English, Bugis and Chinese
at Kelapa Putih on Bengkalis Island. Mr N.M. Carnie was placed in charge with
seven other Europeans and a British flag flew over the fort for about a year. Wilson,
who claimed to have a document from Sultan Ismail ceding the island to him, considered
himself ‘Raja of Bengkalis’. He imposed a tax on the rich fishing grounds of the straits,
which brought him 300 Straits dollars a month. Evidently this was not what the sultan
had had in mind; he appealed to the Dutch and denied the legitimacy of Wilson’s act of
cession. Wilson and his party were forced to leave by a Dutch gunboat in December
1857 (Reid 1969: 25 –6; Schadee 1918-19, I: 68 – 72; Buckley 1965: 637, 663 – 4).
Celso Cesare Moreno, like Walter Murray Gibson, became briefly prominent late in
life in the turbulent politics of Hawaii, siding with the king in his doomed struggle against
the Euro-American planter establishment. An Italian from the Piedmont, his earlier life
seems to have been even more colourful, though we know it only from his own self-
serving statements to American newspapers. He claims to have joined the anti-British
resistance of Nana Sahib following the Indian Mutiny in 1857, first as an observer and
eventually as a partisan. In 1859 he sailed to Aceh where he claims to have gained influence
with Sultan Ibrahim (1837–70), then concerned about Dutch advances on the east coast of
Sumatra. The sultan was unusually rude to a British mission in September 1859, perhaps
because Moreno had given him an anti-British picture of the conflicts he had witnessed in
India. After the Dutch took the east Sumatran area (around modern Medan) which he
considered his frontier, the sultan dispatched Moreno to Europe to try to persuade a
European government to protect Aceh in return for cession of those provinces – Deli,
Langkat and Serdang – the Dutch had newly occupied. The Italian foreign minister
declined the offer in 1864, and Moreno subsequently moved to the US, where in 1868
he was reportedly in conversation with Secretary of State Seward about protection for
Aceh (New York Herald 17 August 1868; Reid 1969: 85–6). Although we know something
about these diplomatic overtures, the record is unfortunately silent on his time in Aceh
when he may have been another type of stranger-orang kaya – though rather more political
than L’Etoile and Fenwick.
There are many other such figures in the small ports of the Archipelago from the
19th century, but these may be enough to give a flavour. They were entirely consistent
with a pattern of maritime power dependent on wealth from trade, and therefore unu-
sually open to outsiders with wealth, ships, guns, and international know-how. From the
viewpoint of Southeast Asian rulers attempting to negotiate their way as independent
sovereigns through the perilous 19th century, these Europeans were both necessary
and dangerous. They possessed the essential keys to modern technology and diplomacy,
though their relationships with colonial establishments were fraught with tension.
Gregor Muller has documented similar European adventurers in Cambodia, who
attempted to mediate between King Norodom and the world outside, but ended by
being condemned as ‘bad Frenchmen’ who had betrayed the ‘honour’ of the ever
more narrowly-defined colonial project through their hybridities and boundary-cross-
ings (Muller 2006). We might say that for an Asian monarch, the only safe European
to employ within the British commercial sphere was one selected by and partly respon-
sible to the colonial authorities, as was the case in Siam.
Europeans as magical mediators in the highlands
In the highlands of Sumatra, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, there was a completely

different economy of power. As sketched in the beginning of this paper, the highlanders
often accepted the magical charisma of coastal and commercial rajas but sought to
prevent any direct exercise of that trade-based power in their highlands. When strangers
were hailed as kings in this stateless world, they were being asked not to rule, but to
mediate with the cosmos, to convey the sacred power that myths often attributed to
them. In complete contrast to the pragmatic stranger-orang kaya of the coastal settle-
ments, these outsiders might be called ‘magical mediators’. The Barus Hilir chronicle
cited above sought to portray its dynasty as having this kind of power among the
Batak. For the Toba and the Mandailing Batak prior to the Padri incursions, the
magical kings of Minangkabau had enjoyed this kind of reputation (Burton and Ward
1995: 179 –80; Marsden 1966: 376– 77). There were also legends of mighty
kings ‘above the winds’, epitomised by Rum (Rome-Constantinople-Turkey) and
Alexander the Great, whose charisma reinforced that of Sumatran kings such as those
of Minangkabau, Aceh or Palembang.
The earliest European known to me to have claimed some kind of power in the
Sumatra highlands was a Frenchman called de Molac in the first half of the 19th
century. The name is a Breton one, though I have not been able to trace independently
any members of this family adventuring in Asia. According to the account he gave a
Pondichery newspaper in 1858, his grandfather had served in India with the French
General de Bussy and was killed in Karnatika in 1779, presumably then fighting – as
did many ‘franctireurs’ – for one of the Indian rulers after the collapse of the
French enterprise. According to the de Molac of the 1850s, ‘his family settled in the
most savage part of Sumatra, established magnificent agricultural establishments

there, acquired great influence among the natives and succeeded in reforming their
customs’. The head of the family ‘had recently been elected chief of the confederation
of Bataks, a Malay people whose lands border Dutch possessions and the kingdom of
Aceh’ (Le Moniteur Universel 14 April 1858: 467).
The Dutch authorities were alarmed at the report and enquired of the French
government, which of course knew nothing of it. France, however, at the time had
an underemployed consul in Padang who offered information from a Dutch
priest who had visited the southern Batakland in 1853 – 54. He had encountered an
Anglo-Portuguese called Macleam, who had fled to independent Batak territory after
a dispute with a Dutch controleur in the Mandailing area, and was playing priest
(he used the unfamiliar term ‘basso’) among the Batak there (Letter of Consul Eroplong,
23 August 1858, in MAE Consuls 5: 225– 7). De Molac, however, remains an intriguing
mystery.
The British missionaries Richard Burton and Nathaniel Ward left a better record of
one of the first journeys by Europeans into the Batak highlands in 1824. They had
intended to travel to Lake Toba and Si Singamangaraja’s lakeside redoubt of Bakkara,
but because of illness reached only as far as Silindung, the first densely cultivated
valley on the road from Sibolga. They were perceived by some as envoys from a magi-
cally powerful distant king. The priest-king later wrote to the missionaries, pleading
with them to complete their journey to Bakkara as the crops had failed when they
did not visit the first time (Castles 1975: 73). They were seen by the Singamangaradja,
it would appear, as emissaries of that distant source of magical power which the
Singamangaraja also claimed to represent.
This ‘magical mediator’ quality was double-edged, as the eccentric Netherlands
Bible Society linguist Neubronner van der Tuuk was to discover. In 1853 he was the
first European to reach Lake Toba, on his way to meet Singamangaraja XI in Bakkara.
Because Bakkara represented territory hostile to the Dutch, van der Tuuk’s guides pro-
claimed that he was not a Dutchman but the son of a sacred Batak prince, Raja Lambung,
taken away as a captive by the hated crusader of the puritanical Padri movement known
to the Batak as Si Pokki (from Arabic al-Fakih, the conqueror) who had laid waste the
Bakkara area and killed the then Singamangaraja, Raja Lambung’s father. They
claimed that the Dutch had killed Si Pokki during their subsequent defeat of the
Padris at Rao, and taken Raja Lambung to Holland to be educated as a Dutchman.
The story backfired with nearly fatal results. The Singamangaraja saw him as a threat
to his own legitimacy as a younger son. Van der Tuuk’s small party was surrounded by
thousands of hostile Batak; the translator quickly fled, after taking the precaution of
staying very close to the sacred king with his pistol at the ready (Van der Tuuk letter
of 1853, in Groeneboer 2002: 179-85; also Castles 1975: 73).
The clearest beneficiary of Batak ideas of a distant, magically powerful king was the
Italian scientist and intrepid traveller, Elio Modigliani. He arrived in the Toba Batak area
in October 1890, after having travelled extensively in Nias. Dutch authority had recently
been established but was much resented in some quarters, including the followers of the
last Singamangaraja, the 12th, who had become the embodiment of resistance to Dutch
rule. Modigliani managed to reach Bakkara, although it had already been destroyed by
the Dutch and its sacred raja forced to flee. Despite not meeting him, Modigliani gave a
useful description of his role.
The Singamangaraja, in addition to being a rich and very powerful chief, is the king
of the Batak priests, and there are many mystic beliefs about him. Flames come out
of his mouth when he speaks; he has a black tongue; nobody can look at his face.
(Modigliani 1995: 201 – 2)
Modigliani fared much better than van der Tuuk. He was sat down in the centre of the
ruined village, ringed by all the remaining notables. According to his account, the
following exchange took place:
They wanted to know ‘how my heart feels about Singamangaraja’; what was my thought
about the Netherlands; if I was coming in peace; and a thousand other questions.
I answered that my Raja is very powerful, and that he sent me to Toba because he
wants to see how the Toba are dressed, and what objects they use.
‘And who is your Raja?’
‘He is Raja Roma,’ I answered, just to have something to say.
There followed a great discussion among them. Eventually one asked why, since they
have often sent horses and buffaloes to Raja Rom (not Roma), he never thanked or reci-
procated for them.
‘What a mess I have created, and who is this Raja Rom they are talking about?’ I
thought to myself.
‘Raja Rom’, I told them, ‘never received your gifts. Perhaps you sent them to Acce
[Aceh], and Raja Acce kept them for himself.
They were extremely convinced by that, and the name of Raja Uti, which followed in
their speeches, led me to believe that this Raja Uti is a real scoundrel.6
(Modigliani 1995: 202–3)
Modigliani soon realised that the widespread belief that he was the wakil (representative)
of Rom, or even Raja Rom himself, could help him escape Dutch protection and visit the
6
Raja Uti (sometimes Raja Biak Biak) was believed to be one of the sons or grandsons of Si Raja Batak
who did not (like the others) have descendents who gave rise to the different Batak margas, but mys-
teriously fled to Barus or Aceh, where he appeared to represent the Batak connection with coastal
power. In 1994 a monument to Raja Uti was erected in Barus, after an enterprising medium in
Pangururang claimed to have been told in trance by his spirit that that was where he was buried.
still-independent Batak most hostile to the Dutch. In particular he convinced a prominent

supporter of the Singamangaraja and opponent of the Dutch, Guru Somalaing, that he was
the awaited emissary of cosmic power. ‘Amatta (the father, hinting at Raja Rom) sent you to
drive away the cumponi (the Dutch). So Guru Somalaing will help you do it’ (Modigliani
1995: 208). Somalaing accompanied Modigliani on his further journeys for several weeks.
When the Italian departed, Somalaing was sufficiently galvanised by the experience to
launch his own millenarian movement, the Parmalim, which caused difficulties for the
Dutch in the early part of the 20th century.

In short, we must distinguish two types of association between strangeness and

power, both of them crucial for understanding Sumatra and the western Archipelago
more generally. In the port-states, power and trade were thoroughly integrated. We
have called the foreign traders who played a role in their politics stranger-orang kaya
since this role as merchant-aristocrat was the most natural for them. Occasionally
they moved from orang kaya to raja, but that too was a natural enough progression in
states that depended on maritime trade.
In the stateless highlands, on the other hand, the power associated with distant kings
was essentially magical. Strangers often benefited from this effect, though they could
equally fall foul of it. I have called this kind of foreign power-wielder the ‘magical
mediator’. The highlanders frequently wanted to utilise the magical power of such
figures – but never to be effectively ruled by them. The most striking cases in the
Bataklands, in fact, emerged precisely from the cults most anxious to resist the new
Dutch power, and to find a magically powerful means of doing so.
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Indonesia and the Malay World

MERCHANT PRINCES AND MAGIC

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PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

MERCHANT PRINCES AND MAGIC

The nature of kingship

Explaining the foreign element in (western archipelago)

The orang kaya phenomenon

Europeans as orang kaya in the port-states

Europeans as magical mediators in the highlands

In the highlands of Sumatra, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, there was a completely

most savage part of Sumatra, established magnificent agricultural establishments

still-independent Batak most hostile to the Dutch. In particular he convinced a prominent

In short, we must distinguish two types of association between strangeness and

Archipelago. New York: J.C. Riker.

House. [Original edition, 1909.]

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