Monday 30 May 2011

Ghosts of Brittania


Searching for traces of the British Empire in Bengkulu, Sumatra

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 27/03/11

The little hilltop is thick with vegetation. To the east the dark hills of the Sumatran hinterland rise under banks of pearly cloud; to the west the wind-chased expanse of the Indian Ocean rolls away towards an empty horizon.
I scramble through the undergrowth, searching for some trace of the building that once stood on this riverside hillock on the outskirts of Bengkulu. There are fragments of brick and concrete, and here and there a chunk of rough-hewn limestone. Mosquitoes needle at my ankles and I beat a retreat to the bright sunlight.
A bulky middle-aged woman waddles across from a nearby house to ask what I’m looking for. Her name is Eni, and she tells me that the remnants of something do indeed stand on this overgrown hill in the Pasar Bengkulu district.
“Something from the Japanese era, or maybe from the Dutch era,” she says. The fragments of brick and concrete suggest that she might be right on both counts, but long before those foreign occupiers another nation flew its flag over the river here. This spot was the site of Fort York, the first British outpost in Bengkulu.
Bengkulu, occupying a little knuckle of land and presiding over a 400-kilometre sliver of coastal territory is modern Sumatra’s sleepiest provincial capital, but for 140 years was an anomalous pocket of British territory. Two centuries later I am here to hunt down the traces of this forgotten episode in Indonesian history.
***
The first servants of Britain’s East India Company reached Bengkulu in 1685 after being kicked out of Java by the ascendant Dutch. They hoped that the place would prove to be a honeypot – an essential stopover for China-bound shipping and a fertile garden for lucrative pepper crops. Instead Bengkulu turned out to be an unremitting economic black hole, losing the Company £100,000 a year. It was the original Southeast Asian hardship posting.
The Sumatran climate proved catastrophic to foreign constitutions, and Fort York, the outpost that once stood on that little hillock, had a particularly insalubrious location.
“Some unusual malignity infests our air and strikes at all,” wrote the governor Joseph Collet in 1713. In search of a better climate Collet abandoned Fort York and had a new garrison built, a couple of kilometers further south. After bidding goodbye to Eni, that’s where I head, following a coastal road beneath ranks of tilted casuarina trees.
Much more remains of Fort Marlborough than of its predecessor. Rising in hunks of off-white masonry like slabs of mildewed wedding cake, it dominates the old part of Bengkulu. Rusting cannons, stamped with English coats of arms, lie like beached wales in the courtyard, and the ramshackle red roofs of the town sprawl away inland. The views are fine for modern tourists, but for earlier generations of foreigners with no chance of a quick escape this was a bleak and lonely place. Many drowned their sorrows in drink. Governor Collet and his 19 assistants went through a staggering 900 bottles of claret a month, prompting appalled company directors in Calcutta to declare that “It is a wonder to us that any of you live six months.”
Not all British residents of Bengkulu succumbed to drink and disease, however. William Marsden, who was here in the 1770s, wrote The History of Sumatra, the first major scholarly work in English on Indonesia. The most famous Englishman to call Bengkulu home also made the most of his time here. Thomas Stamford Raffles – famed as the founder of Singapore – was governor of Bengkulu for six years.
On arrival in 1818 Raffles declared that “This is without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld”. The buildings were collapsing, and most of the officials were drunk – or dead. During his term Raffles did his best to reform Bengkulu.
A hundred meters from Fort Marlborough I find one of his civic works. It is a chunky neoclassical monument which Raffles erected to Thomas Parr, an earlier governor who was beheaded in his bedroom by disgruntled locals. From here I wander on along sleepy streets half-swamped in tropical vegetation. At many of the junctions stand concrete models of tabot, a Bengkulu icon. Once a year these tottering wood-and-paper models are paraded through the streets and toppled into the sea. The tabot ceremony falls 9 Muharram, a date usually commemorated by Shia Muslims. The celebrations in Sunni-majority Bengkulu are usually attributed to the British influence – the soldiers of the East India Company were mostly Indians, many of who were indeed Shia. But the ceremonies also show a link to earlier Hindu traditions.
Passing another British monument – to Captain Robert Hamilton who died in 1793 – I come to the great sweep of Pantai Panjang, Bengkulu’s “Long Beach”. Choppy waves are surging onto the sand and the sun is dropping west across an achingly empty ocean. I cut back northwest through the lanes to the European cemetery, the place where all too many of Bengkulu’s British residents ended up. Pale headstones stand at crooked angles and barefoot children are using the tombs as goalposts for a football match.
Hundreds of British soldiers and civilians – including Raffles’ four young children – were buried here. Today it is a strangely tranquil place. Many of the inscriptions have vanished over the years, while others were replaced with amateurish replicas during an ill-considered refurbishment in the 1990s. But there are still traces of small tragedies. One hulking vault outside the main cemetery is the resting place of a 10-day old child and of his mother, who died five years later at the age of 25. Another commemorating Captain Thomas Tapson who died in 1816 was “erected to his Memory by his much afflicted friend Nonah Jessmina”, hinting at a cross-cultural love affair.
As I wander around, scribbling notes and taking photos, the gang of children drift away from their ballgame to follow me. They come here to play football most afternoons, they tell me, but they know nothing about the tombs. No one has ever explained to them about the history of their hometown, and they do not even know the nationality of the people buried here.
Once I start to explain they quickly take an interest, and they drag me around the marked tombs demanding to know exactly who is buried where. They take a particular delight in the graves of small children, though they assure me that none of them have ever seen a ghost here.
Having done my small bit for historical awareness I head back to Fort Marlborough to watch the sunset. The British departed Bengkulu in 1824 when they organized a territorial trade-off with their Dutch rivals, swopping the town for the Malay port of Melaka. The fort remained a garrison for Dutch troops but the place was so remote and insignificant that it was chosen as a suitably far-flung exile for Sukarno during the years of anti-colonialist agitation.
As I clamber back onto the ramparts and look out towards a fiery western sky a young woman sitting with her friends on one of the parapets calls me over and we fall into conversation. Her name is Riani and she has recently returned to Bengkulu after several years in Jakarta. She comes from village 200 kilometers to the south on the old frontier of British territory. To my astonishment, she tells me that in that part of the province the local Malay dialect still contains a few English words: blanket, school, pocket and try. Almost two centuries after the Union Jack and the red standard of the East India Company flapped down the flagpole here for the last time, it seems that something still remains… 

© Tim Hannigan 2011

Tuesday 10 May 2011

On the Trail of the Great Game in the Hindu Kush


 

Travelling through Northern Pakistan in the footsteps of George Hayward

Originally published in Globe, the magazine of the Globetrotters Club, May 2011

 

On a bright autumn morning I set out walking along the Yasin Valley, high in the Hindu Kush Mountains in the wild borderlands of northern Pakistan. Stark, iron-grey slopes rose on either side towards a cobalt-blue sky. In the lower reaches of the valley the poplar trees were flaming brushstrokes of copper-gold in the sharp sunlight, and the voices of children and the bleating of goats carried on the still air.
My destination – the end-point of a year of research and travel – lay twenty miles ahead in the little hamlet of Darkot, last settlement before a high pass that led towards Afghanistan. I was travelling in the footsteps of the 19th Century British explorer George Hayward, heading for the spot where, in 1870, he was brutally murdered while trying to reach the Pamir Mountains.
I had first come across brief accounts of Hayward’s strange story in books about “the Great Game”, the cold war of spying and exploration fought between Russia and the British Empire in the turbulent spaces of Central Asia in the 19th Century, and had been fascinated ever since. Like all the explorers who travelled in the region in the heyday of empire, Hayward straddled the boundary between espionage and scientific endeavour. But unlike his contemporaries – men with stiff upper lips and flying moustaches – he was somehow more modern, more intense. The motives for his murder remain a mystery to this day.
The first journeys in my quest to find out more about this intriguing figure had taken me to the British Library and the Royal Geographical Society in London. But once I had leafed through Hayward’s letters, squinted at the squiggles of his spidery handwriting, and rifled the reams of conflicting reports on his death, I had hit a rockier road.
For three years, in his desperate attempts to reach the Pamirs, Hayward had criss-crossed the high mountains of Asia, passing through the Karakoram in winter without a tent, being held hostage in Kashgar and falling out with the Maharaja of Kashmir, before finally coming to a sticky end in the Yasin Valley.
Over the course of four wonderful months 140 years later, I rode rickety buses through Kashmir, hitchhiked across Ladakh, crossed Xinjiang during a total communications black-out enforced by the Chinese government, and now, finally, I was approaching my goal.
I had been to Pakistan before, but this was my first return since the recent turmoil which has tipped the troubled nation to the very brink of the abyss. Coming in the footsteps of a fellow countryman who was beheaded by the locals didn’t, I had to admit, seem like the luckiest of pilgrimages, but in the ten days since I arrived on the stomach-churning Karakoram Highway from China I had met nothing but warm welcomes and hot cups of tea. The ramshackle town of Gilgit, capital of Pakistan’s far north, had been a place of firm handshakes and wild polo matches, and the Hunza Valley had been achingly beautiful. Yasin itself was a place of sharp light and gifts.
It was late afternoon when I shambled into Darkot, a cold, stony village of flat-roofed houses beneath scored brown slopes. A ragged glacier curved to the west and the trail to the pass that Hayward had been trying to cross when he was killed bent away to the north.
But today Darkot seemed a world away from the political troubles of both the 19th century and the modern era. Gaggles of friendly children led me to the house of the local schoolmaster, Mohamed Murad. He was completely unperturbed by my arrival and invited me to stay the night, though he later told me I was the first foreign traveller to visit Darkot for more than a year.
After plying me with fresh bread and salty mountain tea Murad and another kindly teacher named Abdul Rashid led me to the spot where Hayward was killed – still known today as Feringhi Bar, “the Foreigner’s Valley”. It was a strangely beautiful spot, a patch of goat-cropped grass beneath a buckled apricot tree with the mountains all around. There, in the company of Murad, Abdul Rashid and a local farmer called Badal Beg I was treated to an impromptu picnic and a taste of the warm hospitality for which the rugged uplands of northern Pakistan are rightly famous.
It was, I decided as I sipped my tea looking out across the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, a fitting end to my pilgrimage…
©Tim Hannigan 2011
 
The full story of George Hayward’s wild life and violent death – and of Tim Hannigan’s own travels in Hayward’s footsteps – is told in Murder in the Hindu Kush, published by the History Press. You can find out more about the book at www.murderinthehindukush.com.