Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles was born on the deck of a ship off the coast of Jamaica on 6 July 1781. His father was the master of the slaving vessel Ann; his mother was a passenger of unclear background. By the time Raffles died forty-four years later he had founded Singapore, governed Java, written the first English-language history of Java, established the Zoological Society of London, lost four of his five children to tropical disease, lost his fortune in a fire at sea, and been disowned by the East India Company in the year before his death.
He sat for a single oil portrait in 1817 by George Francis Joseph. He is depicted as he saw himself: holding a manuscript, with a Hindu-Buddhist statue behind him and a view of a tropical bay in the distance. He was thirty-six, recently knighted, and at the peak of his European reputation. He had nine years left to live.
The clerk
Raffles entered the London office of the East India Company at fourteen, as a junior clerk. He had no formal education. He educated himself in the evenings — French, Malay, the natural history of the East Indies, the political geography of Southeast Asia — at a level that would have been respectable for an Oxford graduate. By 1805 the Company had identified him as exceptional and sent him to its station at Penang, on the northwest coast of the Malay Peninsula, as assistant secretary to the lieutenant-governor.
He arrived at Penang at twenty-four. He stayed for five years, during which he established himself as the most informed English writer on Malay history and culture of his generation. His translations from Malay and his reports on the geopolitical situation of the Dutch East Indies brought him to the attention of Lord Minto, the Governor-General of India in Calcutta. In 1810 Minto invited him to Calcutta as the Company’s Agent for the Malay States; in 1811 Raffles helped Minto plan, and then participated in, the British invasion of Dutch Java.
The Napoleonic Wars had transferred Dutch overseas possessions to the temporary control of the French Empire. Java was, in the early 19th century, the wealthiest of the surviving Dutch colonial territories — the centre of the global coffee, sugar, and spice trade. The British landed in August 1811, defeated the small Franco-Dutch garrison, and installed Raffles as Lieutenant-Governor of Java. He was thirty.
Java
Raffles governed Java for five years. He abolished the existing Dutch system of forced cultivation, introduced a land-rent system based on direct British Indian models, abolished the slave trade, conducted the first systematic census of the island’s population, mapped its volcanic geography, and assembled the first scholarly Western collection of Javanese antiquities. He rediscovered the Borobudur temple complex, which had been buried under volcanic ash for several centuries, in 1814 and ordered the first excavations.
In April 1815 the volcano Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, several hundred miles east of Java, erupted with the largest explosion documented in the historical period. Raffles’s Java administration was the first to receive reports, the first to send observers to Sumbawa, and the source of most of the European documentation of the eruption. Raffles’s own description of the eruption, included in his 1817 History of Java, is the most cited contemporary scientific account. The eruption killed approximately 100,000 people directly in Sumbawa, Lombok, and adjacent islands. Java itself was buried in volcanic ash. Raffles’s own house at Bogor was knocked dark at midday for several days.
His wife Olivia died at Bogor in November 1814, of an undetermined tropical infection. Raffles was 33 and a widower with no children. The British returned Java to the Netherlands at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816, in accordance with the Treaty of Paris; Raffles returned to England in early 1817, where he wrote the History of Java, was knighted, presented at court, married Sophia Hull, and became the most fashionable East India Company official in London.
Bencoolen
In 1818 the Company posted Raffles to Bencoolen — a small, fever-ridden British factory on the southwest coast of Sumatra, in modern Indonesia. The position was Lieutenant-Governor; the salary was substantial; the location was punishing. Bencoolen sat in some of the worst malaria conditions in Southeast Asia. Raffles arrived in March 1818 with Sophia and the first of their children, Charlotte.
He spent the next five years governing Bencoolen, exploring central Sumatra, attempting to extend British influence northward against Dutch resistance, and building the only personal scientific collection of his career — botanical, zoological, ethnographic, and antiquarian. He became one of the early English students of orangutans, which he kept as house pets; he was a co-founder of the Zoological Society of London on his eventual return.
It was from Bencoolen, in late 1818, that Raffles conceived the project that would define him. The Dutch had returned to dominance in the East Indies after 1816, and the British East India Company position in Southeast Asia was deteriorating. Raffles proposed the establishment of a free-trade port on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, at the entrance to the Straits of Malacca, that would break the Dutch monopoly on the Java-China trade.
Singapore
Raffles arrived at the island of Singapura on 28 January 1819, accompanied by William Farquhar and a small escort of Company sepoys. The island had a population of approximately 1,000 — mostly Malay fishermen, with a small Chinese community at the river mouth. The political situation was complicated by the existence of two competing Malay claimants to the sultanate of Johor, of which Singapore was nominally a dependency. Raffles negotiated with the local Temenggong (a senior Malay official) and then with one of the two sultan-claimants, Sultan Hussein Shah, in a series of meetings that produced a formal treaty signed on 6 February 1819. The treaty established a British East India Company trading post on the island in exchange for an annual pension to the sultan and the Temenggong.
Raffles left the new station under Farquhar’s day-to-day control and returned to Bencoolen. Singapore, declared a free port, grew explosively. Its population reached 10,000 by 1824. Its trade by 1830 exceeded the trade of Penang and Malacca combined. By the end of the 19th century it was the world’s busiest port.
Disaster
The five years between the founding of Singapore and Raffles’s return to England were the worst of his life. Of his five children with Sophia — Charlotte, Leopold, Marsden, Ella, and Flora — four died of dysentery, malaria, or unidentified tropical fevers at Bencoolen between 1821 and 1822. Only Ella survived to return to England. Raffles’s own health, never strong, collapsed.
On 2 February 1824, Raffles and Sophia and their surviving daughter boarded the ship Fame at Bencoolen, bound for London. Raffles had personally packed onto the Fame his entire Sumatran collection — 122 cases of zoological specimens, several thousand botanical specimens, manuscripts, drawings, antiquities, and the only surviving copies of his Sumatran research. The Fame caught fire and sank within hours of leaving harbour. The passengers were saved; almost nothing else was. Raffles’s entire decade of Sumatran scholarship was destroyed in a single night.
He spent the following six months in Bencoolen reassembling what he could from local sources, then sailed for England on a second ship in April 1824 and arrived in August.
England, the East India Company, and death
The East India Company’s reception of Raffles in London was hostile. Raffles had spent substantial Company funds on the founding of Singapore without explicit prior authorization, and the Company auditors had been chasing him for the previous five years. The Court of Directors voted in 1825 to charge him approximately £22,000 (a substantial fortune) for unauthorized expenditures and disallowed expenses. The judgment was financially devastating. The Company simultaneously refused him a pension, on the grounds that he had retired at his own request rather than been formally pensioned off.
Raffles spent his last year in England at his country house, High Wood, in Mill Hill, north of London. He founded the Zoological Society of London (the precursor of the London Zoo) in March 1826 and served as its first president. He worked on a History of Sumatra that was never finished.
He died at High Wood on 5 July 1826, the day before his 45th birthday. The official cause was apoplexy — a stroke, in modern terms, probably the consequence of long-standing tropical infections. The Anglican rector of Mill Hill refused to allow Raffles to be buried in the churchyard because the rector’s family had been wealthy slave-traders and Raffles had spent his career as a publicly outspoken abolitionist. Raffles’s body was placed in an unmarked vault beneath the church and the location was lost. It was rediscovered, accidentally, during church-building work in 1914. A memorial plaque was installed in 1920.
His widow Sophia spent the following decade producing the authorized biography (Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, 1830), which reconstructed much of his lost Sumatran and Javanese scholarship from her own correspondence and his surviving notebooks.
The Singapore he founded became, within seventy years, one of the largest ports in the British Empire. The Republic of Singapore that declared independence in 1965 retains his name on its hotel, its statue at the river landing, its school of medicine, and the flowering plant Rafflesia — the world’s largest single flower, named for him in 1820 by Joseph Arnold during the Sumatran expedition that produced almost none of the work that reached London.