Episode 134: The Divided History of Timor, Part 3

I wanted to produce a podcast episode in May, and here it is, on the last day of the month! Today we continue our extended look at the island of Timor, by covering its history in the nineteenth century.

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/132692167/episode-134-the-divided-history-of-timor-part-3/

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to Dante G., who made a donation to the podcast. Moreover, this isn’t the first time he contributed; Dante made more than one donation last year. Those of you who are long-time listeners will know that those who make one-time donations get their first names added to the Podcast Hall of Fame Page, and if they make donations in more than one year, an icon is placed next to their names, in special recognition. The first of those icons is the coveted Water Buffalo icon, so Dante, I have added Walter the Water Buffalo next to your name. In the part of the United States where I live, this has been a turbulent spring, with storms, high winds and even some tornadoes, so may the seasons be pleasant where you live, with fair weather helping you to achieve your goals. Now to everyone, let’s get started with the show!

Episode 134: The Divided History of Timor, Part 3

Greetings dear listeners, for the 134th time, from the hills of Bluegrass country in Kentucky! I will begin by apologizing for taking more than a month to get this episode to you. Again. Of course affairs in the real world got in the way, especially the need to make money to support my wife and myself. Besides that, the research for Timor has turned out to be a special challenge, because, as the title states, it is a divided island. For those of you just joining us, lately we have been looking at one of Southeast Asia’s easternmost islands, and one of the most complicated, when it comes to history and politics. Timor is a large island with more than 3 million residents, and throughout its history it has been divided; nobody has ever ruled the whole place, except maybe the Japanese, for a three-year period during World War II, and present-day Indonesia from 1975 to 1999. For most of the past four hundred years it has been divided into eastern and western parts. Before the late twentieth century, when Europeans ruled most of Southeast Asia, the usual arrangement was for the Portuguese to dominate the east side of the island and for the Dutch to dominate the west side. More recently, the west has been part of the Indonesian state, while the east has been a separate nation, called either East Timor or Timor Leste.

Anyway, because of that division, when doing the research, I have had trouble getting all the information I need in one place. Sources for the history are scarce, and when I find a source for East Timor it doesn’t talk about West Timor, and vice versa. Search engines like Google haven’t been very helpful, either; when I use one and give it a specific entry like, quote, “West Timor,” it pulls up pages on East Timor anyway. Maybe if I understood languages like Portuguese, Dutch and Bahasa Indonesia, I would have found all the sources I need more quickly.

To refresh your memory, since Episode #124 we have been touring the islands of eastern Indonesia, which I had largely neglected in the past when I covered Southeast Asia’s largest country. When it comes to Indonesia, most of the action has happened on three of the largest islands — Java, Sumatra and Borneo — so I tended to concentrate my attention there. Then with Episode #131 we came to Timor, and the podcast has been parked there since then.

In one way the Timor series of episodes reminds me of the science fiction comedy series, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Originally for that series, the author, Douglas Adams, wrote three books, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” and “Life, the Universe and Everything.” So far, so good, but he hadn’t run out of ideas, so later on he wrote two more books, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,” and “Mostly Harmless,” declaring them the fourth and fifth books of the Hitchhiker Trilogy. Now the same thing is happening to this podcast. I started with what I called a trilogy of episodes for Timor, 131 through 133. Now here is a fourth episode, covering those events of the nineteenth century that I haven’t mentioned already. If you include the episode I did three years ago on East Timor’s history in the twenty-first-century, Episode #117, this is actually the fifth episode so far.

If you haven’t listened to Episodes 131 through 133 yet, you know what your assignment is — go back to where you got this episode and listen to them, for crying out loud! Then you will be in better shape to follow what we cover today. Episode 131 was mainly a travel log, telling you what to expect if you ever visit Timor. Then with Episode 132 we began the history, starting with human migrations to the island in prehistoric times, and continuing until the Europeans first arrived. The Europeans came from three seagoing nations: Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. The Spaniards did not stay for long, so I won’t have to mention them again, but the Portuguese and the Dutch both wanted advance bases to get at the source of Indonesia’s spices, and both wanted a part of the local trade in sandalwood. Therefore the Dutch settled into Kupang, the port on the west end of the island, while the Portuguese built an outpost at Lifau, on the north coast.

For Episode 133, we went from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, chiefly covering the conflict between the Netherlands and Portugal over the island. But this wasn’t simply a case of battles between European armies and ships. Each side only directly ruled its outposts, while most of the island was divided between dozens of miniature kingdoms, ruled by native chiefs. The border drawn between the Dutch part of the island and the Portuguese part did not mark national frontiers, but the border between spheres of influence; on one side you had pro-Dutch kingdoms, and on the other side were pro-Portuguese kingdoms. For the battles, native warriors outnumbered European soldiers, and individuals of mixed European and Asian ancestry played an important role; we called them Topasses if they had Portuguese ancestry, and Mardijkers if they were partly descended from the Dutch. Sometimes the Portuguese side was even led by the Topasses.

At first most of Timor, aside from Kupang, was considered to be in the Portuguese sphere of influence. The critical battle that changed this was the battle of Penfui, fought near Kupang in 1749. Here the Dutch won a total victory, and most of the kingdoms in the western half of the island switched their allegiance to the Dutch. Ever since that time, Timor has been split more evenly into eastern and western halves. The main exception is an enclave on the northwest coast, around Lifau, the first Portuguese outpost. This district, even today, has stayed with whoever ruled eastern Timor, though West Timor surrounds it on three sides and the fourth side faces the sea. I mentioned in the previous episode that I wasn’t sure how to pronounce the name of the enclave; the English name for it is spelled O-E-C-U-S-S-E. If I had ever visited Timor, I would know how to say it correctly. For the purposes of this podcast, henceforth I think I will call it O-ay-cusse, because the Dutch called it Uikusi, and that sounds too much like Oo-cusse, the alternate pronunciation I have tried.

I ended the previous episode by telling the famous story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. That story is only marginally related to the history of Timor; I told it because after the mutiny, Captain Bligh and the crew members who stayed loyal to him went to Kupang, and from there they eventually returned to Europe. On that note, let’s dive into today’s content.

<Interlude>

The early nineteenth century was a relatively quiet time for Timor, namely because both of the mother countries claiming to rule it were occupied by France, as part of the wars stemming from the French Revolution. France conquered the Netherlands in 1795, and after Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France, one of his military campaigns conquered Portugal in 1807. This turned the Southeast Asian territories claimed by the Dutch and Portuguese into French puppet states, and naturally they weren’t going to fight each other while the French ruled both. And just as unsurprising, Napoleon’s arch-enemy, the British, reacted to these conquests. As early as 1797, they tried to occupy Kupang, fearing that France would turn this port into a French base. But the local Dutch commander, with the help of native soldiers and slaves, managed to drive the British out again. You can call this the Dutch East India Company’s last hurrah, because as we noted previously, the Company went bankrupt in 1799, and with that, the Company’s assets in Asia went to the Dutch government, and whoever ruled it at any given time. In 1808 the British liberated the Portuguese homeland, and to make sure the Dutch part of Indonesia would not make any trouble, the Royal Navy returned to Southeast Asia in 1811, and occupied Java. We covered this campaign back in Episode 22. They also returned to Timor in the same year, captured Kupang, and in 1812, expanded British control over all of West Timor. Then in 1816, after Napoleon’s final defeat, the British gave Java and West Timor back to the Dutch.

Even before West Timor was returned to them, the Dutch troops stationed there became active again. They were having trouble with the rebellious Raja of Amanuban, a kingdom on the island’s south coast. He was a Christian ruler in West Timor who had been educated in Kupang, and in happier times, had visited the Dutch headquarters on Java, Batavia. The Dutch attempt to bring the raja under their control in 1815 failed. They launched a second military expedition in 1816, and this was a disaster, thanks to the Timorese using guerrilla tactics. Sixty Dutch soldiers were killed, while the natives only had six casualties. For the next century, until 1915, the Dutch sent military expeditions into the interior almost every year, to pacify unruly natives, mostly from the Amanuban Kingdom.

To deal with the Portuguese, the Dutch governor in Batavia, G. A. G. Ph. van der Capellen, realised that disputes between the two powers over Timor were bound to happen as long as they had no formal agreement defining who owned the territory, so in 1817 he tried to get the Portuguese to leave Timor by proposing that they sell their Timorese possessions, but the Portuguese were not interested. This would not be the only time the Dutch offered to buy East Timor in the nineteenth century.

The first of the disputes van der Capellen predicted was over the town of Atapupu, a port on Timor’s north coast, just west of the present-day border between West and East Timor. I casually mentioned this dispute in the previous episode; now here is a little more detail. Before Portugal and the Netherlands had their spells of Napoleonic occupation, the Netherlands had claimed Atapupu as being in their zone. However, because Portugal recovered from Napoleon first, the Portuguese planted their red and green flag in Atapupu and began collecting taxes from there. Consequently, when the Dutch sent a new official, Jacobus Arnoldus Hazaart, to manage Kupang, he attacked Atapupu twice, in 1817 and 1818. The second attack succeeded; here 30 Dutch soldiers overcame the Portuguese garrison in the town and replaced the Portuguese flags with Dutch ones.

Hazaart had two other problems: unrest on the nearby island of Roti, and a lack of security for Kupang, which was surrounded by large uninhabited areas. Hazaart solved both problems by transferring natives from other islands, especially Roti, to the plains near Kupang. These newcomers established successful farming communities which provided a buffer for Kupang against raids from the interior. The settlers also provided a ready source of soldiers to meet any challenge from the Timorese kingdoms which still opposed the Dutch. Rotenese troops were used in military actions against the kingdoms of Sonbai and Amanuban in 1847, 1849 and 1857.

However, when the Dutch were not defending Kupang, they, like the Dutch in all of the Dutch East Indies in the early nineteenth century, were constrained by a government policy of non-interference. In fact, from 1869 to 1883, there were no Dutch military forces in West Timor. And after the garrison in Kupang was restored, the interior of West Timor was not effectively brought under Dutch control until military patrols were introduced in 1906.

*****

Two incidents convinced everyone of the need for a treaty for Timor. The first occurred in 1837, when two “English nationals” were killed in the village of Maubara. We saw in the previous episode that Maubara was on the east side of Timor, and the Dutch had captured Maubara in 1667 and 1790, but the Portuguese still claimed it as well, and neither side had done much to make their claims stick. Thus, when a British naval officer complained about the deaths to the Netherlands Indies government, those officials did nothing because they did not know if the territory was in the Dutch or Portuguese sphere of influence.

The other incident was an outbreak of fighting in 1847, on the islands of Pantar and Alor, two places north of Timor that were claimed by the Dutch. The local rulers sought help from the ruler of Oecusse, a Portuguese vassal. Here I will remind listeners that Oecusse, called Uikusi by the Dutch, is the isolated enclave on Timor’s northwest coast that was surrounded on three sides by the pro-Dutch part of the island, but remained under Portuguese domination; in fact, it is part of East Timor today. Anyway, the ruler of Oecusse came in force and soon restored order, but then declared that from then on the islands would fly the Portuguese flag. Of course the Dutch protested; they complained to the Portuguese governor in Dili, and while the governor agreed with the Dutch point of view on all this, he said he was powerless to act against the ruler of Oecusse. A Dutch warship went to the islands next, and the Dutch flag was raised there again. Here you can see the complexity of the local situation. Although the rulers of Alor and Pantar were vassals of the Dutch, they felt they would be best served by getting assistance from the ruler of Oecusse, because they had a traditional relationship that was formed before Europeans arrived in the islands. The fact that Oecusse was on Portugal’s side was not important to them.

Following this incident, the Dutch again offered to buy the Portuguese territories, but this was dismissed out of hand. However, the Portuguese governor, José Joaquim Lopes de Lima, was willing to form a joint commission to settle the borders between Dutch and Portuguese territory in the region. This commission met for the first time in Dili, the capital of Portuguese Timor, on August 1, 1851. They reached an agreement on where the colonial boundaries would run on Timor, declaring that the whole western half of the island, except for the Oecusse enclave, was now Dutch territory. In return, the Dutch delegation offered 200,000 guilders, of which 80,000 would be paid immediately in cash. This sum of money would today be worth $1,663,200 US dollars, if I did the math correctly. Apparently Governor Lopes de Lima accepted these terms because he was desperately short on funds, so the money the Dutch offered was quite attractive to him. In addition, the Dutch would give up their claim to Maubara, and the Portuguese would give up most of their claims on Flores and in the Solor archipelago. The only islands Portugal would keep, besides the eastern half of Timor, were the two offshore islands of Ataúro and Jaco. Because of its location, Ataúro was seen as essential for defending Dili against attacks from the sea, while Jaco was so small that it had no permanent inhabitants, and thus the Dutch did not care what happened to it. That is why both islands belong to the Republic of East Timor today.

*****

But the negotiations were done without authorization from Lisbon, and the homeland government objected. They tried to take away some of Governor Lopes de Lima’s power by putting him under another governor, the governor of Macao, but it did not have much effect. First, Governor Lopes de Lima died in the following year, 1852. Second, Lisbon could not undo the agreement. They ended up negotiating a new agreement to replace it in 1854. This became the treaty of Lisbon, which was signed in 1859, and ratified in 1860. The main feature of the treaty was that it specified which of the native kingdoms on Timor were in the Dutch sphere of influence, and which were dominated by the Portuguese. In addition, Portugal gave up its claim to the communities of Larantuka, Sicca and Paga on the island of Flores, Wouré on the island of Adonara, and Pamung Kaju on the island of Solor. In return, the Netherlands promised 200,000 guilders again, and paid it this time. Also, as in the first agreement, the Netherlands ceded the Timorese kingdoms of Maubara and Oecusse, and the offshore island of Ataúro. Finally, Portugal insisted that Catholics living on the Dutch side of Timor’s border be allowed to practice their faith, and the Dutch agreed to this. The treaty wasn’t a perfect solution, though. One small, pro-Portuguese kingdom, called Noimuti, lay in the middle of the Dutch zone, completely surrounded by pro-Dutch kingdoms and cut off from access to the sea.

The negotiations for the Treaty of Lisbon cannot be taken completely seriously, because the Dutch and the Portuguese still did not exercise real authority in the lands that they defined as “Portuguese” or “Dutch” territory. The Portuguese governor at this time, Affonso de Castro, even admitted as much when he said in 1860, quote, “Our empire on this island is nothing but a fiction.” End quote. Both sides had led numerous expeditions into the interior to pacify the native kingdoms, and they would lead many more in the next few decades. The problem was that the borders did not define areas of authority, but rather defined the areas where each side could try to exercise authority, without interference from the other party. And the diplomats negotiating the treaty had to rely on the imprecise traditional borders of the native kingdoms, so there still were opportunities for disputes, leading to future wars.

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Affonso de Castro, who was in charge from 1859 to 1863, was the next Portuguese governor to make a difference. He divided East Timor into eleven military districts, setting a precedent for how Portuguese Timor would be governed for the following century. By now Timor was running out of the sandalwood trees that had been a source of profits previously. We saw previously that sandalwood is a slow-growing tree, so slow that those involved in the sandalwood trade found it more cost-effective to harvest the wood from wild trees, rather than trying to grow it. Unfortunately Timor does not have any volcanoes, and when volcanoes erupt, the ash they drop on the surrounding land improves the soil. Since Timor does not have this benefit, the island’s soil is poor, compared with nearby islands like Sumbawa and Lombok, and no crop could be found that generated as much of a profit as sandalwood did. In addition, Timor has one of the lowest rainfalls in Indonesia, with the rainy monsoon lasting just three months, from January to March, which will be bad for almost any kind of crop the farmers try to grow. Finally, Timor does have some gold and copper — gold was mentioned by Antonio Pigafetta, all the way back in 1522 — but there was never enough of those metals to justify a gold rush or a major mining operation, like what is being done nowadays in Western New Guinea. The Portuguese were determined to keep Timor, though, even with the sandalwood gone, because they had lost most of their other Southeast Asian holdings to the Dutch. For the sake of honor and prestige they had to hold on to this last vestige of their authority in the region.

De Castro responded to the sandalwood slump with some reforms the Timorese didn’t like: he increased the amount of the finta, the tax of local products collected from the natives, and he introduced forced labor. He was an admirer of the Culture Program, the controversial system of forced cultivation that the Dutch practiced on Java in the early nineteenth century; see Episode #22 for what I said about that. In imitation of the Culture Program, de Castro ordered the Timorese to plant coffee and give 20 percent of their harvest to Portuguese authorities. Farmers who continued to grow rice instead of coffee had to hand over 10 percent of their rice crop. Previously, Portuguese control over Timor had been limited to alliances with native kingdoms and the collection of the finta; now true colonial rule over the island began. Although de Castro set himself up as an advocate for local traditions and limited intervention, the new requirements triggered a new round of revolts that continued long after his term in office ended, culminating in the assassination of another governor, Alfredo de Lacerda e Maia, in 1887.

By now, the Portuguese were bringing in the newest weapons, giving them a clear advantage over people armed with only bows and arrows, spears, hunting rifles and old cannon. This led to severe repression in the area they directly controlled. But at the same time, they also introduced some new modernizations: the colony’s first library in Lahane in 1879, a lighthouse for Dili in 1881, streetlights fueled by oil in Dili in 1884, and the first public schools. But Portuguese influence was pretty much limited to Dili and the island’s “assimilated” minority. A census of natives practicing Catholicism in 1882 listed 23,000 worshipers, or about 8% of the colony’s population, while the rest continued to follow the old animist rituals.

The Dutch were always less concerned than their Portuguese counterparts when it came to bringing Christianity to the Timorese. A Protestant minister came with the Dutch to Timor as early as 1614, but his duties were confined to ministering to the servants of the Dutch East India Company. For the following two hundred years there were few resident ministers in Kupang and the most that the Christian community there could look forward to was the visit of a preacher from Batavia every few years. In 1701, however, the Church opened the first Dutch school on Timor in Kupang, and from then on it worked to spread Christianity in the community. During the rest of the eighteenth century, natives on nearby islands were converted as well, and schools were established on the islands of Roti and Sabu.

Despite these successes, by the beginning of the twentieth century, there were still only small isolated Christian communities in the Dutch part of Timor. Christianity began to spread after the so-called “pacification” of the interior, but it was only after World War II when one could say that a majority of West Timor’s population had become Christian. And because the Netherlands has been a Protestant country since the Reformation, more than half of the Christians of West Timor are Protestant as well. As for Catholics, today they make up 36% of West Timor’s Christians, and they are the descendants of those natives converted by the Portuguese.

Christianity and animism are the only religions well represented on Timor. There are a few Balinese Hindus, and among the ethnic Chinese residents, there are Buddhists and Confucianists. Even Islam, the predominant religion across most of Indonesia, is mainly limited to government workers, merchants and fishermen — people who came from other islands originally.

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We are running out of time for today, so I’ll finish by talking about the efforts around the end of the nineteenth century to give Timor better frontiers. The political boundary between East and West Timor has never followed the lines drawn by nature; it does not follow rivers or mountain ranges, like the boundaries drawn elsewhere. Nor does it follow ethnic lines; today there are people from the same ethnic groups in both East and West Timor. Nevertheless, the border that the Dutch and the Portuguese agreed to in 1916 is still followed today, long after all Europeans left the island. As one political geographer, J. R. Short, put it, quote, “The passing of time tends to give borders, like accumulated wealth, respectability, regardless of their shabby or bloody origins.” End quote.

Anyway, the Dutch and the Portuguese signed a treaty in 1893, wherein the two parties expressed their desire to achieve a clear and accurate definition of the borders on Timor and to make the enclaves “disappear.” The treaty also banned the importation of firearms into Timor, except to supply the armies of the two colonial powers. This was added to keep the natives from getting modern weapons, and to limit the bloodshed in the petty wars between Timorese kingdoms. The most important part of the treaty was an agreement that would have the Europeans work together on a border survey to decide, once and for all, where the border should run. This survey began in 1898, when the Dutch surveyors arrived in Dili. However, 1898 was also the year of the coronation of eighteen-year-old Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and understandably, the Dutch took time off to celebrate that event. According to the account I read of the survey, the celebration took place in Atapupu, and the pro-Dutch rulers of the native states were invited. Those who came were taken aboard a Dutch warship, where they got a demonstration of the ship’s guns in action. This was meant to impress them with Dutch military might, and the account said it left the rulers, quote, “crawling with fear.” End quote.

In some cases, the surveyors let the natives tell them where the border should run, showing a leniency that neither colonial power would permit later on. The two parties signed another treaty in 1904, which made the border changes up to that point official. But after taking years, the survey was not complete. There were clashes between Portuguese and Dutch soldiers in two client states, Bikomi and Lakmaras, in which some were killed and others were captured. And the border of Oecusse was the hardest part to agree on; both sides wanted a 57-square kilometer area that contained sandalwood trees. The surveyors came back to finish the job in 1909, and in 1913, they submitted the results to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. That court ruled on the remaining disagreements, in favor of the Dutch, in June 1914. Those of you familiar with European history know this was just before World War I broke out in Europe, but fortunately, both the Dutch and the Portuguese stayed neutral in that terrible conflict, allowing them to finish what they had started. A joint Dutch-Portuguese team did a final reconnaissance of the border in 1915, during which the Dutch cut down the sandalwood trees closest to the border, so that the Portuguese could only have the sandalwood in areas that were indisputably theirs. With that, the final border issues were settled, and the treaty guaranteeing this was signed in 1916.

<Kutut>

I’ll stop here, because I don’t want to take any longer than I already have to produce this episode. With both this episode and the previous one, I mentioned a lot of names, both of places and people, in languages I don’t speak, so I will apologize here for unintentionally mispronouncing any of them. We are up to the twentieth century in our narrative, and much of Timor’s twentieth century history has already been covered in other episodes. I don’t plan to go over that ground again, so maybe I will finish Timor’s history with the next episode. Join me then to see how far we will go. And then after that, I am planning at least two more episodes to finish our tour of eastern Indonesia. I’m looking forward to a great summer; how about you?

If you enjoyed this episode and are enjoying this podcast, consider making a donation to support my labor on it. You can make a one-time donation through Paypal. Just click on the links I have provided, either on the podcast’s Blubrry.com page or on the podcast’s Facebook page. You can also become a monthly donor through Patreon; I have included links to the Patreon page in the same places as the Paypal links. Finally, you can help by spreading the word about this show, to anyone you know who listens to podcasts, or who might be interested in Southeast Asia. Thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

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