Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blame a chuck for boarding and I'm Fara Dali and we touched a lot on British imperialism in this podcast and in the stories we usually tell, those pertaining to India in particular, the British tend to dominate and seem like the most powerful governing force in the East Indies. But the story that we're going to tell today is about the island of Java, which is now part of Indonesia, and in the late seventeen hundreds early eighteen hundreds or so when our story begins, it was actually controlled by the Dutch and their Dutch East India Company. So the Dutch had come to control most of the East Indies by this time, along with its very lucrative spice trade that was kind of the main attraction, and they set up a monopoly system that prevented other European ships from even coming into the area. That's how whore in the spice trade was to them. And the subject of this podcast, Sir Thomas Stanford Bingley Raffles, was one of the first to try to change all of that and to help the British Empire get more of a foothold in the East. Raffles is now best known as the founder of Singapore, but years before making a move into Singapore even entered his mind, Raffles successfully helped lead a mission to ouse the Dutch from Java and ended up serving as Lieutenant governor there for five years in a time known as the British Interregnum. So today Raffles is kind of almost celebrated as a kind of hero, someone who is reform minded, who fought against slave trading in Southeast Asia. He was also a celebrated naturalist who discovered several species of plants and helped found the London zoos. So he's got a very respectable resume, But during his lifetime he wasn't always so well thought of by everyone. In fact, his time in Java basically ruined his reputation with the British East India Company because there was one important thing that mattered, and that was making money. So we're gonna look at what happened there that would have such a ruinous result, and how Raffles managed to salvage his career actually have a successful career in spite of it. But first a little bit on raffles background, just because it makes what he did later even more surprising and impressive to me at least. Raffles was born into a modest middle class family. His father, whose name was Benjamin Raffles, was a merchant captain in the West Indies trade, and Stanford Raffles was actually born on board his father's ship off the coast of Jamaica on July six one, and Raffles is known as only having had a couple of years of formal schooling. He had to leave boarding school at age fourteen because his family was having some serious financial trouble, and at that time he got his first job with the British East India Company as a clerk, which something young, but I think that was kind of the norm. You would enter the navy at a young age and by extension at to like a trading company pretty young. But a couple of years after he did that, his father died and that put a lot of extra pressure on Raffles for having to support his mother and his four sisters completely on his own. But he didn't just you know, get down to work and forget about everything that he was interested in himself. Even though he never resumed formal schooling, Raffles continued to study the sciences and several languages on his own, and that's of course where his interest in natural history started. It kind of reminds you a little bit of James Murray from our English Oxford English Dictionary episode, somebody who was really self taught, and you remember how impressed we were by him. So when you see where Raffles accomplishes, you'll kind of understand why we thought he would make a good podcast subject. So you'd imagine someone who has thus much initiative would be pretty good at his job too, And sure enough, by eighteen o five, Raffles had impressed his superiors enough that they appointed him to be the assistant secretary for the new government of Penang in the East Indies. And as we mentioned, the Dutch had a pretty tight grip on the East Indies at this time, but the island of Penang was sort of on the periphery of their sphere of influence, and this was a British attempt to make their move, albeit very tentatively, into that region for something on the edges. Yes, So before Raffles left for the east. He married a widow named Olivia fan Court and they set off together on this five month sea journey to Penang. And this was no honeymoon cruise either. The conditions of the ship weren't great. They only made one stop in five months in the draw, so it's not like they were just lounging around getting to stop at very sport right. So again, not a good time, but Raffles managed to use his time wisely. He spent his time aboard the ship studying the Malay language, which was the major language of the area to which he was traveling. And as peers might have thought that this was a little weird, but Raffles seemed to have a natural knack for languages, and learning Malay happened to open up a whole new world for him. He was able to start reading Southeast Asian books, histories, literature, and so forth, and this gave him a better understanding of the Southeast Asian people. Yeah, so when he got to Penang, his knowledge of Malay helped him converse with the locals, and they were pretty impressed and happy that he bothered to learn the language and that he could converse with them in their own language. I'm pretty impressed that he was able to self teach himself so much on the ship with presumably just the books, I know what I mean, five months sounds like converse with them fluently exactly. I mean, five months sounds like a long time to be stuck on a ship, but it's really not that long to learn a language exactly. So this is probably partly though. This ability to learn this language and then his ability to converse so readily might be partly why Raffles has a reputation for having sympathy for the locals, because he could talk to them, He could hear their issues and get their point of view. Yeah, and he gathered from talking to them, Hey, these people are pretty smart. You know. They were probably stereotyped at the time by a lot of people coming over from other countries, a lot of foreigners, and he was able to kind of bridge that gap a little bit. And these qualities soon caught the attention of a Gilbert Elliott, better known as Lord Minto, the Governor General of India at a very crucial time. Okay, so we mentioned that the British were already trying to get a bit of a foothold in the East Indies because of all the lucrative trading going on there, but certain events were taking place back in Europe that convinced them that this was the time to make a more significant move to go for it. So in the mid seventeen nineties, Napoleon and his French Republican forces had invaded Holland and that meant in the eyes of the British, all Dutch controlled areas were now enemy territory. You know, they had a French connection. So the British wanted to invade Java pretty much right away to keep it from becoming a Napoleon power based But for years that was just kind of an idea, something that they were sort of talking about. And then finally around eighteen ten, Lord Minto got the orders from Britain to quote, proceed to the conquest of Java at the earliest possible opportunity. Get on at Lord Minto. So Minto, who by this time had met Raffles and was not only impressed by his abilities. I mean, there weren't a lot of foreigners who were well versed in Malay at this time, so he was pretty well known for the skill, but he also really related to him. Lord Minto did. They seem to have similar ideas about extending British influence in the East Indies and making reforms. So Lord Minto appointed Raffles to his staff and recruited him to participate in the attack on Java, and that happened August six, eighteen eleven. The British finally made their move. They arrived with a fleet of about a hundred chefs and twelve thousand men near the Javanese city of Batavia, and they took that city without a struggle, pretty much no struggle at all, because they had been abandoned by the Dutch, and in fact, the British really didn't have any opposition at all at first. According to an article in History Today by Tim Hannigan, even though the Dutch had about eighteen thousand soldiers stationed in the area, they decided to just hang back, see what happened, and hope that the British would start dying naturally. I mean that sounds like they're kind of hoping for a lot there. But but Toby had a really fatal climate and Westerner would get sick there, get catch fevers and get thick pretty easily, and that's probably one of the reasons why there weren't a lot of Dutch in the area in the first place. It worked to a certain extent. Some of the British did die of fever in the first few days, but most of them were able to press on further into the island, and by August they were finally engaging the Dutch in battle. According to Hannigan's article, the Dutch actually had an advantageous defensive position in this battle, but their defenses chrome bold rather quickly, mostly because a lot of the Dutch troops weren't committed to the Napoleonic caused the big problem. Yeah, so when the British were rounding a prisoners, several of them even said, you know, quote, I am no Frenchman, but a Dutchman, and they'd trample on the French emblems on their uniforms. So they really did not want to be fighting for the French. By September seventeen, the Dutch governor general had surrendered and the conquest of Java was complete. They would think the British would at this point get to work setting up a new colony. You know, they bothered to go fight the Dutch in the first place, and they wanted to break into this area for so long, right, But the British at least initially had no intention of hanging around at all. Lord Minto's official orders were to drive out the Dutch quote destroy their fortifications, distribute their weapons and other supplies to the natives, and then evacuate all the British troops. It was basically get in there and then get the men out. So both Minto and Raffles had other ideas about Java. They didn't want to just immediately give up this place they had won. They thought it would be a mistake to abandon the area, and they had a vision of really turning it into some reformed, lucrative, promised land of sorts, so they basically ignored their orders. Minto appointed Raffles, who was only thirty years old at this time, lieutenant governor of Java, and Colonel ROLLA. Gillespie, who had led the invasion, was made commander of Java's military forces. So Minto returns to India at this point, and he tells the East India Company that he thought there might be serious consequences if they abandoned Java, and he promised that Java would at least pay for its own expenses. It's kind of justification for this move. They've just ye, it won't cost you anything, don't worry about it, and don't worry the dogs. Right. In reality, though, the Dutch had left Java completely bankrupt, so one of Raffles's biggest challenges during the British interregnum was to try to battle these economic problems, and he was left to do this pretty much entirely on his own. So Raffles did a lot over the next five years, as we mentioned in the intro. Nowadays, he's mostly remembered for his reforms and attempted reforms. Most of these reforms were targeted toward changing the Dutch colonial system that was currently in place. He made reforms in taxation, for example, tried to abolish slavery and feudal dues, and we'll come back to those a little later and talk about them more. According to a nineteen eighty one lecture by Michael Stewart, who's actually a descendant of Raffles, which appeared in the journal Asian Affairs, Raffles also made some more radical reforms, like introducing trial by jury. He also tried to eradicate smallpox by vaccinating the entire country, which is a rather modern idea, it is, and he worked hard to nobody can deny that much. His hours were from four am to eleven pm, and not all of that time was spent with these grand social plans like eradicating smallpox. Part of the time was spent cataloging Javas history and its natural landscape, and with the help of engineers and surveyors, Raffles really explored the island's Indian and Islamic influences and relics, and was planning on when he came home or just at some point writing a history of Java. But he also just really believed it was important for the British cause to examine all of this, to inquire into these areas. Uh. He was known to have said knowledge is power. Strangely enough, it reminds me a little bit of Napoleon in his invasion in Egypt. You know, part of it was military, part of it was government base, but there was also this huge scientific expedition going on because he really believed that was important. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's not so much of a coincidence, because, as we'll find out a little later, Raffles actually admired Napoleon so all that stuff that we just mentioned that was kind of the good stuff, the reform minded stuff, the positive part of fuls experience in Java. But there were alo a lot of controversial aspects of raffles time and Java, some of which seem to have been kind of glossed over throughout the years, probably because many of his other achievements were so laudable in hindsight. One questionable line you might see in brief biographies about him is that during his time in Java he quote reduced the power of native princes. But what does that really mean. I had to wonder about that and like dig around a little bit to learn a little bit more about it. And Hannigan goes into it in a lot more detail in his History Today article. Apparently, the British had only been in Java about a year when Raffles decided they needed to teach the locals a little something about the power of the British government. I mean, if you want your reforms to take I guess you have to make sure that right you establish yourself this one exactly, you have to make sure that the people you are reforming are paying attention. So part of this lesson was just delivered through raffles demeanor. Java was broke up into several native kingdoms, and the courts of these kingdoms were running in a very formal way. For example, they spoke a very formal high form of Japanese, which was considered the only language appropriate for conversing with kings. But on his first visit to Joe Jakarta, which was one of the most significant native kingdoms, Raffles spoke Malay, which really offended the court because it was considered very uncultured. He also did something that reminded me of a recent episode. He demanded to sit on the same level with the sultan, which was unheard of. Reminds me, of course, of Queen and Jinga me too. But even the Dutch had followed that standard protocol of of sitting on different levels in the sultan. But Raffles was trying to make a point when he came in about the British position there that they were in charge, that his reforms were worth making. So Raffles waited a while to take military action, but by June twe eighteen twelve, the British did attack Joe Jakarta, and even though the natives outnumbered them, the British overcame them and destroyed much of their kingdom. According to Hannigan's article, the Japanese were very superstitious. Their thoughts about power were very closely tied to the supernatural, and in this battle it almost seemed to them like the British had some sort of divine influence behind them or helping them. So maybe this is part of why they were so caught off guard by the attack. Well, and what happened next surely emphasized that belief. Raffles exiled the sultan and took the court archives, and his men looted the court, and when the new sultan was crowned, courtiers were made to kneel and kiss Raffles me, which doesn't really seem to fit that humanitarian image that he has now and that we just helped support to with some of his accomplishments, right, I mean, it's the flip side of imperialism, right. We always sort of admire these adventures they go on and the wondrous things they do and they find out, and all the learnings that they bring back, but there's also this really good unsavory the side of it that unique rather, that's also something that needs to get out there. But so once Raffles had established British dominance, the British managed to set up a relatively functioning colonial society, but it wasn't exactly what he had wanted it to be. A lot of his reforms, for example, didn't exactly take In particular, his efforts to abolish slavery, which we mentioned before, were pretty much unsuccessful. They did ban the import of slaves and shut down the slave trading outpost at Batavia, but feudal bondage was so ingrained in the economy and society there Raffles couldn't get rid of it entirely. And as hillen Wood writes in an article for the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies regarding raffles intentions to get rid of the custom of bondage, quote, his grand schemes remained mostly on the page. So he wrote of this a lot he wanted to do it, but in practice, at least in Java, and it wasn't happening. So we alluded to a problem back home though with Britain when we were introducing this subject. The most controversial aspect of Raffle's time in Java, at least from the British perspective was his failure to get it out of financial trouble and make it profitable. Remember that was one of the things that was promised initially. At least Java will pay for itself, don't worry about that part. So Raffles tried to reform the land revenue system and replace it with a system similar to that used in India, in which farmers would pay rents based on the value of their land instead of their crops. He was hoping that this would finally get some cash flowing through the country, but it wasn't executed. The plan wasn't executed properly, and it failed, which was pretty bad news for Raffle. It was sort of his lasco at trying to make the island economically stable, and after it failed, he really had to face the music. Yeah, to make matters worse. In eighteen thirteen, Gillespie, who as you'll remember, was his military commander, had returned to England and filed formal charges sub team charges in fact of corruption and incompetence against Raffles. They had never gotten along, Gillespie and Raffles, that is, and we're apparently always at each other's throat. So that might have fueled Gillespie's actions a little bit and the sting a bit though to hear that you had all these charges filed again feedback in England. Yes, but Raffles also didn't really have a lot of positive financial results with which to defend himself, and Lord Minto had been replaced by a new Governor general in India, so he didn't have his buddy anymore. He didn't have anyone in the East to lobby for his cause, and by the end of eighteen fifteen, Britain had even less reason to try to hang onto Java than Napoleonic Wars had ended, and Britain decided to return Holland's territories. But before they could even do that, before they could even make the handoff, Raffles was fired from his post. They didn't even keep him around for for that short amount. I think it was a difference of like eight months or something, all right, So Raffles, after this disgrace, left for England on March eighteen sixteen, with his reputation and just completely tarnished. And on top of that, his wife Olivia had died in eighteen fourteen, which had really devastated him. And his health had begun to go south too, so at that point it seems like, you know, this would be the sad end of the podcast. He seems pretty down on his luck, but things turn around for him in a remarkable way once he gets back to England. Although we before he gets back to England, we should know de Lana did mention Napoleon. On the way back to England, Raffles actually got to meet Napoleon, who he had previously admired. It's been kind of a famous military leader to look up to, but when he actually met the man, he didn't really like Napoleon very much. According to that lecture in Asian Affairs that we mentioned, Raffles wrote to a friend, quote, believe me, this man is a monster. I saw in him, a man determined and vindictive, without one spark of soul, but possessing capabilities to and talents too in slave mankind harsh words. Yes. Indeed, he published his History of Java in eighteen seventeen, which became a standard work on the subject, and the Prince Regent liked it so much he summoned Raffles to be knighted after he finished reading it, which is how he became of course, Sir Stanford Raffles, so all of that work he was doing on history and natural science really paid off. This book seems like it was his his inn back into favor. It was. And after that he got married again to a woman named Sophia, and they soon set sail again for the East, this time to ben cool In on the west coast of Sumatra. And this was the one post that Britain had retained throughout the years when the Dutch dominated the East Indies, and he served there as Lieutenant Governor for about eight or nine years. So we don't want to go too much into his work after that, since the focus of this was really Java. But essentially after returning to the East, it wasn't long before Raffles started looking for another port that would put the British in a position to rival the Dutch. So he still kind of focused on this idea and on his mind. So he set his sights on Singapore, of course, and realized that it was in the ideal position to create a successful trade rivalry, and he got permission from the then Governor General of India, Lord Hastings, to to do so, to try to set something up on Singapore. But when Raffles got to Singapore, he found that the sultan there had already signed a treaty with the Dutch. It seemed like, oh, he got there too late. But with a little bit of investigation, Raffles also found that the sultan the Dutch had signed a treaty with was the younger of two sons of the previous sultan who had basically surped the throne when his big brother was out of town. So what did Raffles do with this little family situation going on? He went and found the big brother, brought him back to the island, and helped him take back his rightful position. After that, of course, the new sultan, probably pretty grateful to Raffles for helping restore him, entered into a treaty with the British, and Raffles founded and established a settlement at Singapore. Raffles didn't stay long though. He knew with his reputation and failure at Java, that the East India Company officials wouldn't trust anything that he was too involved with, and he didn't want to damage the chances that Singapore would get to be an established colony, so he left destructions on how it should be set up and then returned to ben Coolon. In the intervening years, he had four kids, and he made several botanical discoveries, continuing that focus of his on natural history. Among the most famous of these discoveries he made was the largest flower in the world, at least it was at the time. I'm not sure if it still is. And it was named appropriately the Rafflesia Arnaldi, and it measured a yard across from pedal to pedal, but probably isn't something that you'd want to have in your house. It supposedly smells like rotten meat to attract the carrying flies that allow it to propagate. I'm wondering if a few years ago be it Atlanta Botanical Gardens had one of these. I know they were advertising some sort of stinky rotten meat flower. Really, I don't know how many how many there are in the world, but just brings little shop horrors to mind from Audrey too. Yes, but in addition to plants, he also had a love for exotic animals, which we also cover these exotic pet owners from time to time with our Historical Pets podcasts. And he kept pets like an elephant, monkeys, and tiger cubs. His kids supposedly had a real life Winnie the Pooh in their nursery. But the end of raffles life was marked by tragedy. Um you thought you were going to get away from that. Earlier in the episode, in the early eighteen twenties, three of his four children fell ill and died. Raffles and his wife were in pretty ill health too, and so they started to prepare to return to England. Before coming back, though, Raffles spent a few more months in Singapore doing city planning, preparing laws, the constitution and esta publishing a Malay school, among other things. They're really trying to set things um in order the way he liked him before he left. But on his journey back to England in eight four, he brought, of course, all of his life's work with him, all of the records, the papers, manuscript the books he was working on, dictionaries he had written of several languages, and all of these natural history collections. But there was a fire on board the ship and a lot of these collections and records were lost. And when Raffles got back, he went to the East India Company and he asked them for a pension to offset his losses from the fire, but they sort of turned the tables on him and said that he owed them money to repay salaries and expenses that he had incurred back East twenty two tho pounds to be exact. He didn't live long after this, though, so even though he was going to have to try to come up with a plan to pay it back, I don't think he ever actually had to. His health was getting much worse. He had been suffering headaches ever since, he had been for years now since he was been cool and and he died July five, eighteen twenty six, at the age of forty four. The autopsy showed that he had had a brain tumor, so that's why he had been having those headaches, even though at the time the doctors thought it was something to do with his liver. I think he was denied a plaque on his tomb because he had opposed slavery, and the vicar of the Hendon parish where he was buried owned an interest in a West Indian plantation. There is one good thing though, Right before he died, he helped establish the London Zoological Society and the London Zoo and was the zoo's first president. So if you've ever visited that zoo, you can think of Raffles a bit. Yeah, So with all that he did in Singapore and his accomplishments in natural history, it's clear to see why Raffles is mostly remembered for his positive accomplishments. He did a lot, and he did do a lot to sort of further the British Empire in the East. But Java wasn't a total loss either. After the Dutch took over again in eighteen sixteen, they actually ended up adopting a lot of Raffles reforms, including his basic idea about land rents, which had been such a disaster when Raffles tried it, so for better for worse, who really did sort of lay the groundwork for colonial culture there. So, like a lot of characters in these episodes that we do about imperialist topics, he's a very gray sort of character. Although he is celebrated as a hero, he definitely has some things in his past that weren't necessarily that glowing. But just so we don't have to end this episode on kind of a down note, let's go to listener mail. So we mentioned our WC Minor podcast a little earlier in this episode, and we have a letter from Sally here and she has a little personal dictionary drama to share with us. She says, Hey, Sarah Dublina, Uh usually listen to your podcast while writing the tube into school. I'm an American studying in London, but I had returned to the States for Christmas and my parents anniversary. I was grateful that I am quick on downloading your podcast, because your WC Minor podcast kept me highly entertained in the emergency room and even distracted me from the pain. The reason I was in the are was because while helping my brother put some books away, he knocked a copy of the Greater Oxford English Dictionary onto my foot. It fell from the top of a fairly tall bookshelf, so we thought that it might have broken my foot. Thankfully it didn't, but I was enjoying the irony of the situation so much that the nurses kept checking if I was on morphine. I wasn't. When I got home and my parents asked what happened, I told them that that crazy WC minor came and pushed his work onto my foot while I am known in my family for quirky remarks like that, my parents insisted I go up to bed. I guess if you're talking up victims of WC Minor, you can count the poor brewery worker and one foot. Oh dear, that is the last book that you want to fall on your foot. Yeah, that's pretty unlucky. Yeah, Sally, you're lucky that it just didn't hit your head. Yeah, I'm glad we were able to keep you entertained while you're in the e er perfect timing. Thanks for sharing your story. If you have any personal stories, hopefully not that tragic, to share with us. Regarding podcasts, please write us. We're now at History podcast at Discovery dot com, not the old how Stuff Works dot com addressed anymore. We have switched over, we have migrated. We are however, still at missed in History on Twitter and we are on Facebook, which are both classic ways to contact that and if you're interested as we are and learning a little bit more about the phenomenon of people being able to learn languages very easily. We have a lot of articles about language learning in the culture section of our website, including articles that address whether young folks learn language is more easily than older ones, and um and so forth. So if you want to look up a little more about that, you can do that by visiting our homepage where at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blame a chuck for boarding and I'm Fara Dali and we touched a lot on British imperialism in this podcast and in the stories we usually tell, those pertaining to India in particular, the British tend to dominate and seem like the most powerful governing force in the East Indies. But the story that we're going to tell today is about the island of Java, which is now part of Indonesia, and in the late seventeen hundreds early eighteen hundreds or so when our story begins, it was actually controlled by the Dutch and their Dutch East India Company. So the Dutch had come to control most of the East Indies by this time, along with its very lucrative spice trade that was kind of the main attraction, and they set up a monopoly system that prevented other European ships from even coming into the area. That's how whore in the spice trade was to them. And the subject of this podcast, Sir Thomas Stanford Bingley Raffles, was one of the first to try to change all of that and to help the British Empire get more of a foothold in the East. Raffles is now best known as the founder of Singapore, but years before making a move into Singapore even entered his mind, Raffles successfully helped lead a mission to ouse the Dutch from Java and ended up serving as Lieutenant governor there for five years in a time known as the British Interregnum. So today Raffles is kind of almost celebrated as a kind of hero, someone who is reform minded, who fought against slave trading in Southeast Asia. He was also a celebrated naturalist who discovered several species of plants and helped found the London zoos. So he's got a very respectable resume, But during his lifetime he wasn't always so well thought of by everyone. In fact, his time in Java basically ruined his reputation with the British East India Company because there was one important thing that mattered, and that was making money. So we're gonna look at what happened there that would have such a ruinous result, and how Raffles managed to salvage his career actually have a successful career in spite of it. But first a little bit on raffles background, just because it makes what he did later even more surprising and impressive to me at least. Raffles was born into a modest middle class family. His father, whose name was Benjamin Raffles, was a merchant captain in the West Indies trade, and Stanford Raffles was actually born on board his father's ship off the coast of Jamaica on July six one, and Raffles is known as only having had a couple of years of formal schooling. He had to leave boarding school at age fourteen because his family was having some serious financial trouble, and at that time he got his first job with the British East India Company as a clerk, which something young, but I think that was kind of the norm. You would enter the navy at a young age and by extension at to like a trading company pretty young. But a couple of years after he did that, his father died and that put a lot of extra pressure on Raffles for having to support his mother and his four sisters completely on his own. But he didn't just you know, get down to work and forget about everything that he was interested in himself. Even though he never resumed formal schooling, Raffles continued to study the sciences and several languages on his own, and that's of course where his interest in natural history started. It kind of reminds you a little bit of James Murray from our English Oxford English Dictionary episode, somebody who was really self taught, and you remember how impressed we were by him. So when you see where Raffles accomplishes, you'll kind of understand why we thought he would make a good podcast subject. So you'd imagine someone who has thus much initiative would be pretty good at his job too, And sure enough, by eighteen o five, Raffles had impressed his superiors enough that they appointed him to be the assistant secretary for the new government of Penang in the East Indies. And as we mentioned, the Dutch had a pretty tight grip on the East Indies at this time, but the island of Penang was sort of on the periphery of their sphere of influence, and this was a British attempt to make their move, albeit very tentatively, into that region for something on the edges. Yes, So before Raffles left for the east. He married a widow named Olivia fan Court and they set off together on this five month sea journey to Penang. And this was no honeymoon cruise either. The conditions of the ship weren't great. They only made one stop in five months in the draw, so it's not like they were just lounging around getting to stop at very sport right. So again, not a good time, but Raffles managed to use his time wisely. He spent his time aboard the ship studying the Malay language, which was the major language of the area to which he was traveling. And as peers might have thought that this was a little weird, but Raffles seemed to have a natural knack for languages, and learning Malay happened to open up a whole new world for him. He was able to start reading Southeast Asian books, histories, literature, and so forth, and this gave him a better understanding of the Southeast Asian people. Yeah, so when he got to Penang, his knowledge of Malay helped him converse with the locals, and they were pretty impressed and happy that he bothered to learn the language and that he could converse with them in their own language. I'm pretty impressed that he was able to self teach himself so much on the ship with presumably just the books, I know what I mean, five months sounds like converse with them fluently exactly. I mean, five months sounds like a long time to be stuck on a ship, but it's really not that long to learn a language exactly. So this is probably partly though. This ability to learn this language and then his ability to converse so readily might be partly why Raffles has a reputation for having sympathy for the locals, because he could talk to them, He could hear their issues and get their point of view. Yeah, and he gathered from talking to them, Hey, these people are pretty smart. You know. They were probably stereotyped at the time by a lot of people coming over from other countries, a lot of foreigners, and he was able to kind of bridge that gap a little bit. And these qualities soon caught the attention of a Gilbert Elliott, better known as Lord Minto, the Governor General of India at a very crucial time. Okay, so we mentioned that the British were already trying to get a bit of a foothold in the East Indies because of all the lucrative trading going on there, but certain events were taking place back in Europe that convinced them that this was the time to make a more significant move to go for it. So in the mid seventeen nineties, Napoleon and his French Republican forces had invaded Holland and that meant in the eyes of the British, all Dutch controlled areas were now enemy territory. You know, they had a French connection. So the British wanted to invade Java pretty much right away to keep it from becoming a Napoleon power based But for years that was just kind of an idea, something that they were sort of talking about. And then finally around eighteen ten, Lord Minto got the orders from Britain to quote, proceed to the conquest of Java at the earliest possible opportunity. Get on at Lord Minto. So Minto, who by this time had met Raffles and was not only impressed by his abilities. I mean, there weren't a lot of foreigners who were well versed in Malay at this time, so he was pretty well known for the skill, but he also really related to him. Lord Minto did. They seem to have similar ideas about extending British influence in the East Indies and making reforms. So Lord Minto appointed Raffles to his staff and recruited him to participate in the attack on Java, and that happened August six, eighteen eleven. The British finally made their move. They arrived with a fleet of about a hundred chefs and twelve thousand men near the Javanese city of Batavia, and they took that city without a struggle, pretty much no struggle at all, because they had been abandoned by the Dutch, and in fact, the British really didn't have any opposition at all at first. According to an article in History Today by Tim Hannigan, even though the Dutch had about eighteen thousand soldiers stationed in the area, they decided to just hang back, see what happened, and hope that the British would start dying naturally. I mean that sounds like they're kind of hoping for a lot there. But but Toby had a really fatal climate and Westerner would get sick there, get catch fevers and get thick pretty easily, and that's probably one of the reasons why there weren't a lot of Dutch in the area in the first place. It worked to a certain extent. Some of the British did die of fever in the first few days, but most of them were able to press on further into the island, and by August they were finally engaging the Dutch in battle. According to Hannigan's article, the Dutch actually had an advantageous defensive position in this battle, but their defenses chrome bold rather quickly, mostly because a lot of the Dutch troops weren't committed to the Napoleonic caused the big problem. Yeah, so when the British were rounding a prisoners, several of them even said, you know, quote, I am no Frenchman, but a Dutchman, and they'd trample on the French emblems on their uniforms. So they really did not want to be fighting for the French. By September seventeen, the Dutch governor general had surrendered and the conquest of Java was complete. They would think the British would at this point get to work setting up a new colony. You know, they bothered to go fight the Dutch in the first place, and they wanted to break into this area for so long, right, But the British at least initially had no intention of hanging around at all. Lord Minto's official orders were to drive out the Dutch quote destroy their fortifications, distribute their weapons and other supplies to the natives, and then evacuate all the British troops. It was basically get in there and then get the men out. So both Minto and Raffles had other ideas about Java. They didn't want to just immediately give up this place they had won. They thought it would be a mistake to abandon the area, and they had a vision of really turning it into some reformed, lucrative, promised land of sorts, so they basically ignored their orders. Minto appointed Raffles, who was only thirty years old at this time, lieutenant governor of Java, and Colonel ROLLA. Gillespie, who had led the invasion, was made commander of Java's military forces. So Minto returns to India at this point, and he tells the East India Company that he thought there might be serious consequences if they abandoned Java, and he promised that Java would at least pay for its own expenses. It's kind of justification for this move. They've just ye, it won't cost you anything, don't worry about it, and don't worry the dogs. Right. In reality, though, the Dutch had left Java completely bankrupt, so one of Raffles's biggest challenges during the British interregnum was to try to battle these economic problems, and he was left to do this pretty much entirely on his own. So Raffles did a lot over the next five years, as we mentioned in the intro. Nowadays, he's mostly remembered for his reforms and attempted reforms. Most of these reforms were targeted toward changing the Dutch colonial system that was currently in place. He made reforms in taxation, for example, tried to abolish slavery and feudal dues, and we'll come back to those a little later and talk about them more. According to a nineteen eighty one lecture by Michael Stewart, who's actually a descendant of Raffles, which appeared in the journal Asian Affairs, Raffles also made some more radical reforms, like introducing trial by jury. He also tried to eradicate smallpox by vaccinating the entire country, which is a rather modern idea, it is, and he worked hard to nobody can deny that much. His hours were from four am to eleven pm, and not all of that time was spent with these grand social plans like eradicating smallpox. Part of the time was spent cataloging Javas history and its natural landscape, and with the help of engineers and surveyors, Raffles really explored the island's Indian and Islamic influences and relics, and was planning on when he came home or just at some point writing a history of Java. But he also just really believed it was important for the British cause to examine all of this, to inquire into these areas. Uh. He was known to have said knowledge is power. Strangely enough, it reminds me a little bit of Napoleon in his invasion in Egypt. You know, part of it was military, part of it was government base, but there was also this huge scientific expedition going on because he really believed that was important. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's not so much of a coincidence, because, as we'll find out a little later, Raffles actually admired Napoleon so all that stuff that we just mentioned that was kind of the good stuff, the reform minded stuff, the positive part of fuls experience in Java. But there were alo a lot of controversial aspects of raffles time and Java, some of which seem to have been kind of glossed over throughout the years, probably because many of his other achievements were so laudable in hindsight. One questionable line you might see in brief biographies about him is that during his time in Java he quote reduced the power of native princes. But what does that really mean. I had to wonder about that and like dig around a little bit to learn a little bit more about it. And Hannigan goes into it in a lot more detail in his History Today article. Apparently, the British had only been in Java about a year when Raffles decided they needed to teach the locals a little something about the power of the British government. I mean, if you want your reforms to take I guess you have to make sure that right you establish yourself this one exactly, you have to make sure that the people you are reforming are paying attention. So part of this lesson was just delivered through raffles demeanor. Java was broke up into several native kingdoms, and the courts of these kingdoms were running in a very formal way. For example, they spoke a very formal high form of Japanese, which was considered the only language appropriate for conversing with kings. But on his first visit to Joe Jakarta, which was one of the most significant native kingdoms, Raffles spoke Malay, which really offended the court because it was considered very uncultured. He also did something that reminded me of a recent episode. He demanded to sit on the same level with the sultan, which was unheard of. Reminds me, of course, of Queen and Jinga me too. But even the Dutch had followed that standard protocol of of sitting on different levels in the sultan. But Raffles was trying to make a point when he came in about the British position there that they were in charge, that his reforms were worth making. So Raffles waited a while to take military action, but by June twe eighteen twelve, the British did attack Joe Jakarta, and even though the natives outnumbered them, the British overcame them and destroyed much of their kingdom. According to Hannigan's article, the Japanese were very superstitious. Their thoughts about power were very closely tied to the supernatural, and in this battle it almost seemed to them like the British had some sort of divine influence behind them or helping them. So maybe this is part of why they were so caught off guard by the attack. Well, and what happened next surely emphasized that belief. Raffles exiled the sultan and took the court archives, and his men looted the court, and when the new sultan was crowned, courtiers were made to kneel and kiss Raffles me, which doesn't really seem to fit that humanitarian image that he has now and that we just helped support to with some of his accomplishments, right, I mean, it's the flip side of imperialism, right. We always sort of admire these adventures they go on and the wondrous things they do and they find out, and all the learnings that they bring back, but there's also this really good unsavory the side of it that unique rather, that's also something that needs to get out there. But so once Raffles had established British dominance, the British managed to set up a relatively functioning colonial society, but it wasn't exactly what he had wanted it to be. A lot of his reforms, for example, didn't exactly take In particular, his efforts to abolish slavery, which we mentioned before, were pretty much unsuccessful. They did ban the import of slaves and shut down the slave trading outpost at Batavia, but feudal bondage was so ingrained in the economy and society there Raffles couldn't get rid of it entirely. And as hillen Wood writes in an article for the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies regarding raffles intentions to get rid of the custom of bondage, quote, his grand schemes remained mostly on the page. So he wrote of this a lot he wanted to do it, but in practice, at least in Java, and it wasn't happening. So we alluded to a problem back home though with Britain when we were introducing this subject. The most controversial aspect of Raffle's time in Java, at least from the British perspective was his failure to get it out of financial trouble and make it profitable. Remember that was one of the things that was promised initially. At least Java will pay for itself, don't worry about that part. So Raffles tried to reform the land revenue system and replace it with a system similar to that used in India, in which farmers would pay rents based on the value of their land instead of their crops. He was hoping that this would finally get some cash flowing through the country, but it wasn't executed. The plan wasn't executed properly, and it failed, which was pretty bad news for Raffle. It was sort of his lasco at trying to make the island economically stable, and after it failed, he really had to face the music. Yeah, to make matters worse. In eighteen thirteen, Gillespie, who as you'll remember, was his military commander, had returned to England and filed formal charges sub team charges in fact of corruption and incompetence against Raffles. They had never gotten along, Gillespie and Raffles, that is, and we're apparently always at each other's throat. So that might have fueled Gillespie's actions a little bit and the sting a bit though to hear that you had all these charges filed again feedback in England. Yes, but Raffles also didn't really have a lot of positive financial results with which to defend himself, and Lord Minto had been replaced by a new Governor general in India, so he didn't have his buddy anymore. He didn't have anyone in the East to lobby for his cause, and by the end of eighteen fifteen, Britain had even less reason to try to hang onto Java than Napoleonic Wars had ended, and Britain decided to return Holland's territories. But before they could even do that, before they could even make the handoff, Raffles was fired from his post. They didn't even keep him around for for that short amount. I think it was a difference of like eight months or something, all right, So Raffles, after this disgrace, left for England on March eighteen sixteen, with his reputation and just completely tarnished. And on top of that, his wife Olivia had died in eighteen fourteen, which had really devastated him. And his health had begun to go south too, so at that point it seems like, you know, this would be the sad end of the podcast. He seems pretty down on his luck, but things turn around for him in a remarkable way once he gets back to England. Although we before he gets back to England, we should know de Lana did mention Napoleon. On the way back to England, Raffles actually got to meet Napoleon, who he had previously admired. It's been kind of a famous military leader to look up to, but when he actually met the man, he didn't really like Napoleon very much. According to that lecture in Asian Affairs that we mentioned, Raffles wrote to a friend, quote, believe me, this man is a monster. I saw in him, a man determined and vindictive, without one spark of soul, but possessing capabilities to and talents too in slave mankind harsh words. Yes. Indeed, he published his History of Java in eighteen seventeen, which became a standard work on the subject, and the Prince Regent liked it so much he summoned Raffles to be knighted after he finished reading it, which is how he became of course, Sir Stanford Raffles, so all of that work he was doing on history and natural science really paid off. This book seems like it was his his inn back into favor. It was. And after that he got married again to a woman named Sophia, and they soon set sail again for the East, this time to ben cool In on the west coast of Sumatra. And this was the one post that Britain had retained throughout the years when the Dutch dominated the East Indies, and he served there as Lieutenant Governor for about eight or nine years. So we don't want to go too much into his work after that, since the focus of this was really Java. But essentially after returning to the East, it wasn't long before Raffles started looking for another port that would put the British in a position to rival the Dutch. So he still kind of focused on this idea and on his mind. So he set his sights on Singapore, of course, and realized that it was in the ideal position to create a successful trade rivalry, and he got permission from the then Governor General of India, Lord Hastings, to to do so, to try to set something up on Singapore. But when Raffles got to Singapore, he found that the sultan there had already signed a treaty with the Dutch. It seemed like, oh, he got there too late. But with a little bit of investigation, Raffles also found that the sultan the Dutch had signed a treaty with was the younger of two sons of the previous sultan who had basically surped the throne when his big brother was out of town. So what did Raffles do with this little family situation going on? He went and found the big brother, brought him back to the island, and helped him take back his rightful position. After that, of course, the new sultan, probably pretty grateful to Raffles for helping restore him, entered into a treaty with the British, and Raffles founded and established a settlement at Singapore. Raffles didn't stay long though. He knew with his reputation and failure at Java, that the East India Company officials wouldn't trust anything that he was too involved with, and he didn't want to damage the chances that Singapore would get to be an established colony, so he left destructions on how it should be set up and then returned to ben Coolon. In the intervening years, he had four kids, and he made several botanical discoveries, continuing that focus of his on natural history. Among the most famous of these discoveries he made was the largest flower in the world, at least it was at the time. I'm not sure if it still is. And it was named appropriately the Rafflesia Arnaldi, and it measured a yard across from pedal to pedal, but probably isn't something that you'd want to have in your house. It supposedly smells like rotten meat to attract the carrying flies that allow it to propagate. I'm wondering if a few years ago be it Atlanta Botanical Gardens had one of these. I know they were advertising some sort of stinky rotten meat flower. Really, I don't know how many how many there are in the world, but just brings little shop horrors to mind from Audrey too. Yes, but in addition to plants, he also had a love for exotic animals, which we also cover these exotic pet owners from time to time with our Historical Pets podcasts. And he kept pets like an elephant, monkeys, and tiger cubs. His kids supposedly had a real life Winnie the Pooh in their nursery. But the end of raffles life was marked by tragedy. Um you thought you were going to get away from that. Earlier in the episode, in the early eighteen twenties, three of his four children fell ill and died. Raffles and his wife were in pretty ill health too, and so they started to prepare to return to England. Before coming back, though, Raffles spent a few more months in Singapore doing city planning, preparing laws, the constitution and esta publishing a Malay school, among other things. They're really trying to set things um in order the way he liked him before he left. But on his journey back to England in eight four, he brought, of course, all of his life's work with him, all of the records, the papers, manuscript the books he was working on, dictionaries he had written of several languages, and all of these natural history collections. But there was a fire on board the ship and a lot of these collections and records were lost. And when Raffles got back, he went to the East India Company and he asked them for a pension to offset his losses from the fire, but they sort of turned the tables on him and said that he owed them money to repay salaries and expenses that he had incurred back East twenty two tho pounds to be exact. He didn't live long after this, though, so even though he was going to have to try to come up with a plan to pay it back, I don't think he ever actually had to. His health was getting much worse. He had been suffering headaches ever since, he had been for years now since he was been cool and and he died July five, eighteen twenty six, at the age of forty four. The autopsy showed that he had had a brain tumor, so that's why he had been having those headaches, even though at the time the doctors thought it was something to do with his liver. I think he was denied a plaque on his tomb because he had opposed slavery, and the vicar of the Hendon parish where he was buried owned an interest in a West Indian plantation. There is one good thing though, Right before he died, he helped establish the London Zoological Society and the London Zoo and was the zoo's first president. So if you've ever visited that zoo, you can think of Raffles a bit. Yeah, So with all that he did in Singapore and his accomplishments in natural history, it's clear to see why Raffles is mostly remembered for his positive accomplishments. He did a lot, and he did do a lot to sort of further the British Empire in the East. But Java wasn't a total loss either. After the Dutch took over again in eighteen sixteen, they actually ended up adopting a lot of Raffles reforms, including his basic idea about land rents, which had been such a disaster when Raffles tried it, so for better for worse, who really did sort of lay the groundwork for colonial culture there. So, like a lot of characters in these episodes that we do about imperialist topics, he's a very gray sort of character. Although he is celebrated as a hero, he definitely has some things in his past that weren't necessarily that glowing. But just so we don't have to end this episode on kind of a down note, let's go to listener mail. So we mentioned our WC Minor podcast a little earlier in this episode, and we have a letter from Sally here and she has a little personal dictionary drama to share with us. She says, Hey, Sarah Dublina, Uh usually listen to your podcast while writing the tube into school. I'm an American studying in London, but I had returned to the States for Christmas and my parents anniversary. I was grateful that I am quick on downloading your podcast, because your WC Minor podcast kept me highly entertained in the emergency room and even distracted me from the pain. The reason I was in the are was because while helping my brother put some books away, he knocked a copy of the Greater Oxford English Dictionary onto my foot. It fell from the top of a fairly tall bookshelf, so we thought that it might have broken my foot. Thankfully it didn't, but I was enjoying the irony of the situation so much that the nurses kept checking if I was on morphine. I wasn't. When I got home and my parents asked what happened, I told them that that crazy WC minor came and pushed his work onto my foot while I am known in my family for quirky remarks like that, my parents insisted I go up to bed. I guess if you're talking up victims of WC Minor, you can count the poor brewery worker and one foot. Oh dear, that is the last book that you want to fall on your foot. Yeah, that's pretty unlucky. Yeah, Sally, you're lucky that it just didn't hit your head. Yeah, I'm glad we were able to keep you entertained while you're in the e er perfect timing. Thanks for sharing your story. If you have any personal stories, hopefully not that tragic, to share with us. Regarding podcasts, please write us. We're now at History podcast at Discovery dot com, not the old how Stuff Works dot com addressed anymore. We have switched over, we have migrated. We are however, still at missed in History on Twitter and we are on Facebook, which are both classic ways to contact that and if you're interested as we are and learning a little bit more about the phenomenon of people being able to learn languages very easily. We have a lot of articles about language learning in the culture section of our website, including articles that address whether young folks learn language is more easily than older ones, and um and so forth. So if you want to look up a little more about that, you can do that by visiting our homepage where at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.