FRANCOIS VALENTIJN – preacher, plagiarist, encyclopaedist

For someone generally referred to as the Preacher of Ambon, the epitaph of plagiarist with a tendency for self-aggrandisement does not seem to be fitting. Or am I naïve… Anyway, according to my sources[1] he was both.

Born in Dordrecht where his father was deputy principal of the Latin school he read theology, philosophy and related subjects in Utrecht and Leiden. In 1684 he finished his studies and was called as a minister to the Netherlands Indies where he arrived in Batavia end-December 1685, and in April 1686 Amboina. Under the guidance of among others Rumphius he quickly mastered the Malay language and in slightly more than three months he was able to conduct his first service in early-August of that year. Against his bitter objections he was subsequently posted on Banda—he was forced to take the position as his superiors told him that it was Banda or nothing, with repayment of the travelling expenses Amsterdam-Batavia-Amboina. After 11 months on Banda he returned to Amboina (1688) where he started the translation of the Bible into Ambon Malay, and the search for a wealthy wife. This latter task was accomplished in 1692 when he married Cornelia Snaats, widow of his friend and patron Hendrik Leydekker, who had left Cornelia four children and a significant fortune. May 1694 he returned to Holland accompanied by wife and five children—four Leydekkers and one Valentijn. He returned to Dordrecht and was ready to settle down. At the request of the Compagnie and persuaded by many friends he, however,  agreed to return to the East.

Although the VOC Board had agreed to his condition that he would be posted in Amboina—and only Amboina, without any obligation to visit the outlying islands—upon arrival in Batavia he was assigned the post of army chaplain for a campaign in East Java.

Quite obviously the masters in Batavia and Amsterdam had different sets of priorities, a situation that also nowadays is not uncommon in globally operating organisations.

Message Regional Office to HQ:  we need an additional marketing unit, our geographic region superimposed on Europe would stretch from Ireland to Moscow, you have representatives in nearly all countries in that area, we have to service that area by ourselves.

No doubt Valentijn complained bitterly, but in the same way as during his first tour, he had to comply. Worn out he returned to Batavia after four months in the field. Finally, early-1707 he could continue his journey to Ambon. A further reason for complaint concerned his translation of the Bible. The VOC principles in Batavia did not approve his translation into Ambon Malay, They insisted on the use of High Malay. This fight dragged on and the Compagnie even threatened to disallow his return—at their expense.

Permission to return home was finally given in 1713 and after a difficult return voyage he settled again in Dordrecht. There he devoted himself fully to his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën—more than 5,000 pages of text and over a thousand maps and illustrations which took Valentijn 15 years to complete; and in an astonishing burst of speed was printed within four years, with the last volume published some eight months before his death in 1727.

Old and New East Indies, consisting of five parts published in eight volumes, was the first encyclopaedia of the Indonesian archipelago and surrounding regions and contained sections on Amboina and the Moluccas, North and East Celebes, New Guinea, Makassar, Batavia, Java, Sumatra, China, Formosa, Japan, Persia, Coromandel, Bengal, Ceylon, Malacca, the Cape of Good Hope, and Mauritius. Plus, the lives of the Great Moguls, the Governor Generals of the Netherlands East Indies, flora and fauna of Amboina, Amboina church affairs, and accounts of his two (return) voyages to the Indies.

The systematic arrangement of this magnum opus is a bit chaotic: Sumatra, for instance, is given a place between Malacca and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), while Celebes (Sulawesi) is partially covered in Part 1 and also in Part 3. And yes, he used material of others and did not always specify original sources. And yes, it is an opinionated hotchpotch of information. Valentijn displays a lack of interest and knowledge—typical for his epoch—about the native peoples of the different islands. Of the Javanese he for instance writes that the men are typically murderous, perfidious and cruel… but also ready to cowardly knife someone for a few copper coins. And in respect of the Sumatrans (all ethnic groups of the island combined into one) he maintains that it is not necessary to describe them in detail as they do not much differ from the Javanese. But still, it is the first encyclopaedia of the region and until now retains information of great value—his maps, for instance, are exceptionally accurate, and his description of Ambon and Batavia shed light on conditions of these two places that have not been recorded anywhere else.

The amount and detail of information is moreover staggering, from the number of craftsmen by skill in a certain year in Sri Lanka, and the names and years of assignment of the heads of the Dutch trading post on Deshima Island in Nagasaki harbour, to a lion hunt in the Cape.

The whole eight volumes have been reprinted in facsimile and some parts are available from Amazon. For those interested to see more I recommend the following URL which will take you to Part 5.


http://archive.org/stream/oudennieuwoostin05vale#page/n384/mode/thumb

Enjoy!

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[1]   Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, Martinus Nijhoff, 1919

        ARCENGEL History of Netherlands East Indies

        Wikipedia

BALI – before the tourists invaded... (2)

During the centuries, all nine Balinese kings—Klungkung, Karangasem, Mengwi, Badung, Bangli, Tabanan, Gianjar, Buleleng, and Jembrana—remained an unruly and obstinate lot, fiercely independent and not in the least interested in following the rules and regulations that the Dutch wanted to impose on them. They strongly objected to the curtailment of their power. Those pesky Dutch wanted to stop the nearly incessant fighting among the kingdoms, while not giving thought to how their demand for slaves would then be met. The rajas would also no longer be allowed to attack and plunder ships flying the red-white-and-blue, and not even have the right to cargo salvaged from ships stranded on their coasts.

Only in 1839 did all kings agree to recognise Dutch sovereignty. But whatever treaty was signed, its actual enactment was poor. The kings (all nine) remained stroppy and showed in no uncertain way that they did not agree to colonial power being superimposed on them. Unsurprisingly the colonial government did not stop complaining that its representatives were not received in a friendly and courteous manner, Dutch ships were plundered, and that letters from the Governor General were not responded to. This lead to a series of expeditions to punish the—some of them successful, quite a number not.

One wonders, however, what priority Bali was given in the colonial policy of the Dutch. The VOC's, and later the colonial government's, main interest was trade, and in that respect Bali had little to offer. Slaves were no longer a traded commodity after the British handed the Netherlands East Indies back to the Dutch, and Bali lacked the spices of Banda and Ambon, or the large foreign owned estates (coffee, tea, rubber) of Java and Sumatra.

Supremacy of the Dutch was not fully established till the twentieth century when in 1906, the raja of Badung, together with members of the nobility, some of his wives and children, and members of the royal household, marched into the gunfire of the Dutch troops, preferring death over a curtailment of his royal power and having to bend his knee to the Dutch. This puputan was repeated two years later in Klungkung. And after the remaining unruly elements were deported to Lombok, law and order was established. Dutch law and order, that is. Dutch sources of the day report that the common people were not sorry to see the kings go, as they had had enough of the lack of legal certainty (for the non-privileged) and the continual state of war that had been part of the old system.

That the population felt relieved might even be true and not wishful thinking on the part of the Dutch. According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz[1] it is the Balinese who have the entrepreneurial drive to look for opportunities and to benefit from changing conditions. Whether made possible by the imposition of the new law and order, or because improved transport facilities opened Bali to the world, tourism started to become a profitable service activity.

Although negligible by present day standards, the number of tourists in 1930 was large enough to warrant the first tourist guide to Bali[2]. As an illustration of the Balinese entrepreneurial nous, the writer of the tourist guide, G.H. von Faber, remarks that woodcarvings of quality were becoming difficult to find, as carvers and traders, having noted that the tourists were undiscerning in their appreciation of the products, would prefer to produce virtually mass produced low-quality work and thereby improve their cash flow.

The 136 lorries, 264 busses and 787 rental cars, part of which were serving the tourist industry in 1930, have grown and grown and are still growing. Kuta, which in those days was a quaint fishing village with a beach and a government cabana to change into bathing costumes, has outgrown itself. Hotels, restaurants, bars, cafés, shops and market stands cater to the tourists' needs—cold beer, continental and American breakfasts at all hours, beach wear, souvenirs, it's all available at reasonable prices. What's more, thousands of foreigners have started a business, or taken up residence on the island, finding the official paperwork to get permits and licenses fairly easy, definitely when compared to other places in Indonesia.

If only the VOC, and later the colonial government, had let the kings keep their beachcombing rights, and sent tourists and cruise ships rather than Navy flotillas and marines, would not the Balinese, the common people, have brought about a smooth, silent and bloodless power change from the inside.

Sources:       Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, Martinus Nijhoff, 's Gravenhage, 1917
                  BALI, Het Land Der Duizend Tempels, G.H. von Faber, H. van Ingen, Soerabaia

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[1] Peddlers and Princes, Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns, Clifford Geertz, The University of Chicago Press, 1963. A comparative study of two Indonesian towns—Modjokuto, a market town in East Java, and Tabanan, a court town in southwest Bali.

[2] BALI, het land der duizend tempels, G.H. von Faber