to these esthetic, perfume-loving people heaped for sale in the
flower-market of the passer, along with the oils and the gums and spices
that give out, and burn with, such delicious odors. Short-stemmed roses
and heaps of loose rose-petals were laid on beds of green moss or in
bits of palm-leaf in a way to delight one’s color-sense, and, with the
mounds of pale-green petals of the _kananga_, or ylang-ylang-tree’s
blossoms, filled the whole air with fragrance. We dried quantities of
kananga flowers for sachets, as they will crisp even in the damp air
of Java, and retain their spicy fragrance for years; but the exquisite
white-and-gold “Bo-flowers,” the sacred _sumboja_ or frangipani (the
_Plumeria acutifolia_ of the botanists), would not dry, but turned dark
and mildewed wherever one petal fell upon another. This lovely blossom
of Buddha is sticky and unpleasant to the touch when pulled from the
tree, and the stem exudes a thick milk. After they have fallen to the
ground they may be handled more easily, and fallen flowers retain the
spotless, waxen perfection of their thick, fleshy petals for even
two days. One wonders that the people do not more often wear these
flowers of the golden heart in their black hair; but the sumboja is a
religious flower in Java, as in India, and in Buddhist times was almost
as much an attribute and symbol of that great faith as the oltus. This
Bo-flower is still the favorite offering, together with the _champaka_,
or Arabian jasmine, in the Buddhist temples of Burma and Ceylon, and is
often laid before the few images of that old religion now remaining in
Java. All through the Malay world, however, it is especially the flower
of the dead, associated everywhere with funeral rites and graves, as
conventional an expression or accompaniment of grief, death, and burial
as the cypress and the weeping willow. For this reason one rarely sees
it used as an ornamental tree or hedge, even in a European’s garden or
pleasure-grounds, and its presence in hedges or copses indicates that
there are graves, or one of Islam’s little open-timbered temples of the
dead, within reach of its entrancing fragrance. Our Malay servant would
never accept our name of “frangipani” when told to spread out or stir
the petals we tried to dry in the sun. He stoically repeated the native
“sumboja” after me each time, very rightly resenting the baptism in
honor of an Italian marquis, who only compounded an essence imitating
the perfume of the West Indian red jasmine, which breathes a little of
the cloying sweetness of the peerless sumboja. After but a few trials
of its syllables, “sumboja” soon expressed to me more of the fragrance,
the sentiment and spirit, of the lovely death-flower than ever could the
word “frangipani.” Chinese Buddhists seem not to have any traditions or
associations with the Bo-flower, as in South China, where the tree is
grown in gardens, it is only the _kai tan fa_, or “egg-flower,” those
hideously matter-of-fact people noting only the resemblance of the lovely
petals to the contrasting yolk and albumen of a hard-boiled egg.
VIII
THE “CULTURE SYSTEM”
While the Dutch East India Company held the monopoly of trade and
production in Java, farmed out the revenues, and exacted forced labor
and forced delivery of produce, this tropical possession yielded an
enormous revenue. With the company’s monopoly of trade with Japan, and
only Portugal as Holland’s great rival in the ports of China, the company
made Amsterdam the tea- and spice-market and the center of Oriental trade
in Europe. The early Dutch traders not only cut down all the spice-trees
on the Molucca Islands, and forbade the planting of clove-, cinnamon-,
and nutmeg-trees, save on certain Dutch islands, but they burned tons of
spices in the streets of Amsterdam, in order to maintain prices in Europe
and realize their usual profit of three hundred per cent.
The Dutch East India Company acquired control of Java through pioneer
preëmption, purchase, conquest, strategy, and crooked diplomacy, and,
finally, as residuary legatee by the will of the Mohammedan emperor
at Solo. The company then claimed the same sovereign rights over the
people as the native rulers, who had exacted one fifth of the peasant’s
labor and one fifth of his crops as ground-rent, the land being all
the inalienable property of the princes. When the colony passed from
the company to the crown of Holland, Marshal Daendels at once turned
such feudal rights to profitable account and instituted public works
on a great scale. With such forced labor he built the great double
post-road over the island from Anjer Head to Banjoewangi,—that road
upon whose building twenty thousand miserable lives were expended,—so
that difficulty of communication no longer interfered with the delivery
of products at government warehouses on the sea-shore. He further
established government teak- and coffee-plantations, but the natives who
were forced to cultivate them were no more tyrannized over nor oppressed
than they had been under their own princes, the change of masters
making small difference in their condition. Previous to Daendels’s time
all the coffee came from the Preangers, whose princes, having yielded
their territories by treaty in the middle of the last century, retained
sovereignty and their old land-revenues on condition of paying the Dutch
East India Company an annual tribute in coffee, and after that selling
the balance of the crop to the company at the fixed rate of three and a
half florins the picul (133⅓ pounds).
Although the East India Company practically ended its rule in 1798, the
States-General canceled the lease in 1800, and the colony passed to the
crown of Holland, the same trade monopoly continued until the happy
interval of British rule (1811-16), and there was a continual movement
of natives from the Dutch to the native states up to 1811. Under Sir
Stamford Raffles’s enlightened control the Java ports were made free to
the ships of all nations, the peasants were given individual ownership of
lands, great estates were bestowed upon native chiefs, and a bewildering
doctrine of liberty and equality before the law was preached to the
people. Free trade, free culture, and free labor were decreed at once.
The same treaty of London (August, 1814) which restored Java to the
Dutch (August, 1816), at the close of the Napoleonic wars, secured the
freedom of the ports; but the Dutch quickly resumed the old system of
land-tenure by village communities paying ground-rent in produce and
labor through their _wedana_, or head man, who answered to a district
chief, who in turn reported to the native prince acting as regent for
the Dutch government. Dutch residents “advised” these native regents,
who ruled wholly under their orders and were mere middlemen between the
Dutch and the natives. These regents were always chosen from the greatest
family of the province, and the Dutch _contrôleurs_ directed the chiefs
and wedanas. The Dutch retained the excellent British police and judicial
system in the main, while having more regard for the native aristocracy,
their prejudices and their laws of caste. British philanthropy had
introduced the British India ryot system of separate property in the
soil and a separate land-tax, along with equality of rights, duties, and
imposts, while abolishing all monopolies, forced labor and productions.
The natives, like true Orientals, preferred their own old communal land
system, with yearly allotments of village lands and the just rotation of
the best lands, to any modern system of individual property, and to what
was most dreaded by the native, individual liability. The Dutch resumed
the old land system, exacted the old one fifth of produce as land-rent,
and obliged the peasants to plant one fifth of the village land in crops,
to be sold to the government at fixed prices; but they only demanded one
day’s labor in seven, instead of one day in five. The lands which Sir
Stamford Raffles had given to the chiefs and petty princes soon passed
into the hands of Europeans or Chinese; and except for this one tenth
of the land held by private owners, and two tenths held by the Preanger
regents, the rest of the island became crown land, subject to lease,
but never to be sold. The Preanger princes resumed their payment of a
revenue in coffee and the sale of the surplus crop to the government at
a fixed price. Marshal Daendels’s plantations, so long neglected, were
put in order again and cultivated by seventh-day labor. Each family was
required to keep one thousand coffee-trees in bearing on village lands,
to give two fifths of the crop to the government, and deliver it cleaned
and sorted at government warehouses established all through the coffee
districts.
But with the open ports, the abolition of the government’s spice monopoly
in 1824, and the expenses of a protracted war with the native ruler of
Middle Java (1817-30), the revenues still only met the expenses; and
there was great concern in Holland at the decrease of the golden stream
of Indian revenue, and consequent satisfaction in England that its
statesmen had handed back the island, that might have proved only an
embarrassment and intolerable expense instead of a profit to the British
crown. The King of Holland had established and guaranteed the Netherlands
Trading Company, which acted as the commission agent of the government in
Europe, importing in its own ships exclusively, selling all the produce
in Europe, and conducting a general business in the colony. The partial
failure of this company, which obliged the king to meet the guaranteed
interest, brought about a new order of things destined to increase the
colonial trade and crown revenues.
[Illustration: A MARKET IN BUITENZORG.]
As private enterprise could not make the Java trade what it had been,
Governor Van den Bosch, who originated the “culture system” as a means
of relieving the distressed finances, was sent out from Holland in 1830,
with power to grant cash credits and make ten-year contracts with private
individuals who would assist in developing the sugar industry. Sufficient
advances were made to these colonists to enable them to erect sugar-mills
and to maintain themselves until, by the sales of their products, they
were able to repay the capital and own their mills. The government agreed
that the natives of each community or district should grow sufficient
sugar-cane on their lands to supply the mills’ capacity, and deliver it
at the mills at fixed rates. The natives were obliged to plant one fifth
of the village lands in sugar-cane, and each man to give one day’s labor
in seven to tending the crop. The village head man was paid for the
community three and a half florins for each picul of sugar made from
their cane, and the natives who worked in the mills were paid regular
wages. The mill-owner sold one third of the finished product of his mill
to the government, at rates rising from eight to ten florins the picul;
the mill-owner paid back each year one tenth of the government’s cash
advanced to him in sugar at the same rate, and was then free to ship,
as his own venture, the balance of his sugar to the Netherlands Trading
Company, which held the monopoly of transport and sale of government
produce. Enormous profits resulted to the government and mill-owners from
the sales of such sugar in Europe, and during one prosperous decade the
crown of Holland enjoyed a revenue amounting to more than five million
dollars United States gold each year from its Java sugar sales. The whole
east end of the island and the low, hot lands along the coast were green
at their season with the giant grass whose cultivation has forced or
encouraged slavery everywhere throughout the earth’s tropic belt. Slavery
itself ceased in Java by royal edict in 1859, but sugar-culture went on
under the admirable Van den Bosch system so profitably that mill-owners
did not grumble at having to sell one third of their product to the
government at a merely nominal price.
The great success in sugar led the government to extend the culture
system’s method to other crops. Would-be colonists competed for such
profitable contracts, and all young Holland cherished the ambition to
sail away to the East and make fortunes on Java plantations. A choice was
exercised to secure the best class of young men as colonists; education,
cultivation, and gentlemanly manners were made essentials, and it was
known that no absenteeism would be tolerated, that the planters were
expected to settle in Java in permanence, and that leaves of absence
would be granted during the ten-year contracts only for actual illness.
By providing military bands and subsidizing an opera, by establishing
libraries and fostering the museum of the Batavian Society, and by
encouraging a liberal social life among the higher officials, everything
was done to secure all the advantages of civilization and to make life
tolerable in the far-away tropics.
Early experiments had been made with the tea-plant in Java, and the
government initiated tea-growing with great anticipations. Tea-plants
and -seeds were brought by botanists from Japan as early as 1826, and
later from China, together with skilled cultivators and workmen to
instruct the natives. Crown lands were leased on long terms, and cash
advances made during the first years of hill-clearing and planting. The
government obliged the planters to produce equal quantities of green
and black tea, and four grades or qualities of each kind; the planters
were to repay the government’s cash advances in tea, to sell the whole
crop to the government at a fixed rate, and to pay the workmen fixed
wages. Tea-growing was not profitable at first, as there was difficulty
in securing a market in Europe for the bitter, weedy Java leaf, until,
by a great reduction in the selling-price, its cheapness gained it a
sale in Germany. The discovery of the wild Assam tea-plant in India,
and the results obtained by grafting it on the Chinese plant, marked
a new departure in tea-growing, and with better understanding of new
methods and the aid of machinery in curing the leaf, tea-gardens became
profitable ventures. After fostering the industry to success, the
government refused further contracts after 1865, and the tea-planters
were free to dispose of their crops as they wished. All through the
hill-country of the Preangers tea-bushes stripe the rolling ground for
miles, and new ground is being cleared and leased each season. Java
teas have greatly improved in quality, and win medals and mention at
every exposition; but they have India and Ceylon as formidable rivals,
in addition to China and Japan, and their market remains in Holland and
Germany, and in Persia and Arabia by way of Bombay—this Mohammedan trade
an inheritance of those early times, when the Dutch drove the Moormen out
of Ceylon and the far Eastern trade.
While the culture system was succeeding with sugar and tea, the
government coffee-plantations were extended, and more and more
hill-country cleared for such cultivation. Coffee-culture was carried on
by the government without contractors’ aid. Each native was obliged to
plant six hundred Arabian or Mocha coffee-trees and keep them in bearing,
and deliver the crop cleaned and sorted at the government warehouses at a
fixed price—nine and twelve florins the picul previous to 1874, although
forty and forty-five florins were paid in the open market of the ports.
By careful supervision and by percentages paid to native officials for
any superior quality in the berries produced in their district, the
coffee from Java government stores was superior to anything else sold
in Europe, and maintained its average steadily. Coffee was indeed “the
pivot of the Netherlands colonial régime,” a staple of greater economic
value than spices had been. In 1879, the year of the greatest production
of the government plantations in Java, some 79,400 tons of coffee were
shipped to Europe. Blight and scale and insect pests were afterward to
reduce the shipments to but 17,750 tons in 1887.
Indigo was at first cultivated on the same terms as sugar, but the
government soon dispensed with such contracts, bought back the fabriks,
and continued the industry without contract aid, obliging the natives
to plant indigo on all village land not required for rice, and deliver
the crop to the mills at fixed prices. Cinnamon, pepper, cinchona,
and cochineal were grown by the natives in the same way, under merely
official supervision, and delivered to the government for a trifling
price.
In 1850 the government sent agents to Peru to obtain seeds of the
cinchona-tree, and after fifteen years of effort and risk the
indefatigable botanists and explorers secured the treasured seeds
of the red-barked kina-tree. The records of those expeditions, the
lives ventured and lost, are the romances of travel and exploration;
and Sir Clements Markham’s and Charles Ledger’s narratives are most
fascinating tales. The first little nursery of trees in the Buitenzorg
Botanical Garden and in experimental gardens on higher ground near
Bandong furnished the seeds and plants from which have sprung the great
kina-plantations, or cinchona-groves, both government and private,
whose red branches show in definite color-masses on every hillside of
the Preangers, while the spindling young trees shade acres of tea-,
coffee-, and cocoa-plants in their first growths. Java now produces, from
government and private plantations together, one half of the world’s
supply of quinine, Ceylon and India furnishing the balance. Ship-loads
of bark are sent to the laboratories or chemical factories of Europe,
which produce the precious sulphate on which rest England’s and Holland’s
conquest of the Indies and all European domination in the farther East,
and laboratories are now building for manufacturing the sulphate from the
bark in Java.
[Illustration: SCENES AROUND THE MARKET.]
Poppy-culture has always been strictly prohibited, although the natives
are greatly addicted to opium-smoking, especially in the middle or Hindu
provinces. With all their zeal for revenue, the Dutch have resisted the
example of the British in India and the Chinese in Szechuen and the
western provinces of China, and have never let the land bloom with that
seductive flower. The sale of opium is a closely guarded government
monopoly, conducted at present under the _régie_ system, the government
itself importing all that is consumed in the colony and selling it from
fixed offices throughout the island.
Salt-works and tin-mines were managed in as systematic and profitable a
way as crops and cultures. No private individual was allowed to make or
import salt into the colony. The government still holds the salt-supply
as a monopoly, and there are large salt-works on Madura Island, where the
natives are required to deliver fixed quantities of coarse salt at the
government warehouses at the rate (in 1897) of ten gulden the _kojan_
(1853 kilograms). The government manages the tin-mines on Banka Island
in the Java Sea, while the mines of the neighboring Billeton Island are
leased to private individuals.
IX
THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” (_Continued_)
The culture system, as an experiment in colonial government and finance,
was the greatest success and worked incalculable benefits to the
islands and the native people, as well as to the assisted colonists
and the crown of Holland. Great stretches of jungle were cleared and
brought under cultivation, and more money was paid in wages directly
to native cultivators and mill workmen each year than all the natives
paid in taxes to the government. The Javanese acquired better homes,
much personal wealth, and improved in all the conditions of living. The
population increased tenfold during the half-century that the culture
system was in operation—this alone an unanswerable reply to all critics
and detractors, who declaimed against the oppression and outrage upon
the Javanese. As the island became, under this system, a more profitable
possession than it had been under the real tyranny exercised during
the days of close-trade monopoly, the envy and attention of all the
other colonizing nations of Europe were drawn to this new departure in
colonial government. Spain copied the system in its tobacco-growing in
the Philippine Islands, but could not follow further. Philanthropic and
pharisaical neighbors, political economists, advanced political thinkers,
humanitarians, and sentimentalists, all addressed themselves to the
subject, and usually condemned the culture system in unmeasured terms.
Holland’s voluntary abolition of slavery in its East India possessions
by no means stilled the storm of invective and abuse. Leaders, speeches,
books, pamphlets, even novels,[2] showed up the horrors, the injustice
and iniquities said to be perpetrated in Java. It was shown that almost
nothing of the great revenues from the island was devoted to the
education or benefit of the natives; that no mission or evangelical work
was undertaken, or even allowed, by this foremost Protestant people of
Europe; and that next to nothing in the way of public works or permanent
improvements resulted to the advantage of those who toiled for the alien,
absentee landlord, i. e., the crown of Holland,—the country being drained
of its wealth for the benefit of a distant monarch. It was estimated that
between 1831 and 1877 the natives were mulcted of one billion, seven
hundred million francs by the forced labor exacted from them, and the
sales of their produce to the government at the low market prices fixed
by the purchaser. By continued philippics and exaggerated accusations,
the names of Dutch government and Java planter became, to the average
European, synonyms for all of rapacity, tyranny, extortion, and cruelty,
and there was an impression that something worse than Spanish persecution
in the Netherlands, in the name of religion, was being carried on by the
Hollanders in Java in the name of the almighty florin. All the iniquities
and horrors of the Dutch management of the cinnamon-gardens of Ceylon,
and all the infamy of the Dutch East India Company’s misrule in Java
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were stupidly mixed up
with and charged against the comparatively admirable, the orderly and
excellently devised culture system of Governor Van den Bosch. Contractor
planters vainly urged that the only tyranny and oppression of the people
came from their own village chiefs; but philanthropists pointed steadily
to the colonial government and the system which inspired and upheld the
village tyrants.
[Illustration: A VIEW IN BUITENZORG]
In 1859 Mr. J. W. B. Money, a Calcutta barrister, visited Java, made
exhaustive search and inquiry into every branch and detail of the
culture system’s working, and put the results in book form inwoven with
a comparison with the less intelligent and successful management of the
land and labor question in British India, where, with sixteen times the
area and twelve times the population of Java, the revenue is only four
times as great. His book, “Java: How to Manage a Colony” (London, Hurst &
Blackett, 1861), is a most complete and reliable résumé of the subject,
and his opinions throughout were an indorsement of the Van den Bosch
culture system. He contrasted warmly the failure and inefficiency of
the British India _ryot warree_, or land system, with the established
communal system which the Oriental prefers and is fitted for, and showed
how a similar culture system in Bengal and Madras would have worked to
the advantage, benefit, and profit of Hindustan, the Hindus, and the
British crown. Mr. Money especially noted how the Dutch refrained from
interfering with native prejudices and established customs; how the
prestige of the native aristocracy was as carefully maintained as that
of the white race, with no modern, Western notions of equality, even
before the law, the Dutch securing regentship to the leading noble of a
district, and giving him more revenue and actual power than were possible
under the native emperor. Mr. Money noted only the best of feeling
apparently existing between natives and Europeans, a condition dating
entirely from the establishment of the culture system, and the general
prosperity that succeeded. “No country in the East can show so rich or so
contented a peasantry as Java,” he said.
Alfred Russel Wallace, who visited Java several times between 1854 and
1862, while the culture system was at the height of its successful
working, spoke in approval and praise of what he saw of the actual
system and its results, and commended it as the only means of forcing
an indolent, tropical race to labor and develop the resources and
industries of the island. His was one of the few clear, dispassionate,
and intelligent statements given on that side, and he summed up his
observations in the declaration that Java was “the very garden of the
East, and perhaps, upon the whole, the richest, best-cultivated, and the
_best-governed_ island in the world.”
The competition of French beet-sugar, fed by large government bounties of
West Indian and Hawaiian sugars, so reduced the price of sugar in Europe
that in 1871 the Dutch government began to withdraw from the sugar-trade,
and by 1890 had no interest in nor connection with any of the many mills
which colonists had built on the island. Java ranked second only to Cuba
in the production of cane-sugar, and now (1897) ranks first in the world.
Trade returns now show sugar exports to the value of six million pounds
sterling from the private plantations of Java and Sumatra each year, and
the distillation of arrack for the trade with Norway and Sweden is an
important business.