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Alexander Hamilton: Loose in Southeast Asia, 1689-1723

© John Walsh

Travellers' tales are often one of the best ways we have of understanding remote peoples and times. The skilled writer is able to highlight both similarities and differences between someone with whom we can empathise and those who are being observed. In Alexander Hamilton, we have a fascinating character whose accounts of his journeys in the east at the end of the C17th and the beginning of the C18th describe Asia from the Red Sea to Japan. A forthright and apparently rather blustering character, his writing is direct and often both amused and amusing. He has little time for religious or for organisations such as the East India Company: he has little more time for practices in East Asia which he considers inferior to his own homeland. Here, for example, is his dismissive opinion of the people of Johor:

"The inhabitants are lazy, indolent, perfidious and cruel. The country is very woody, being daily refreshed with showers and breezes of wind. It abounds in tin, pepper, elephants' teeth, gold, agala-wood and canes, but the inhabitants are such drones that they sow very little rice or other grain." (p.73)

Their king is if anything worse, being "corrupted by adulation and flagitious company" (p.74) and much inclined to having handsome young boys delivered to his palace for his pleasure.

In Java, he observes the settlements of the Dutch and their success in extracting wealth from the local economy, together with the attitude of local people towards them:

"The goodwill the natives bear to the Dutch may be conjectured from their treatment, when they find an opportunity, for if an Hollander goes but a musket-shot from their fort, it is five to one if he ever returns, for they are dextrous in throwing a lance, or shooting of poisoned darts through a wooden pipe or trunk; and the king never redresses them, pretending the criminal cannot be found." (p.113)

The cruelty of the regime to which the extraordinary Greek Constantine Phaulkon aspired to become first minister of Siam and the perils contained within it are evoked by the description of Phaulkon's secretary:

"Mr Bashpool, who, on his master's death, was clapped up in prison, and lay three years with his neck in the cangue, which are a pair of stocks made of bamboos, and was never taken out but in order to be severely whipped, to make him accuse rich men whom the usurper had a mind to destroy, that he might seize their estates under the umbrage of justice and law." (p.166)