Article

Alexander Hare

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Alexander Hare

Alexander Hare (c. 1780s–1832/33) was a London-born merchant who established himself at Malacca by 1807, served as British Resident at Banjermassin in south-east Borneo from 1812 to 1816, and subsequently founded a settlement on the Cocos-Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean between 1826 and 1831. His career intersected with Sir Stamford Raffles’s early administration in the Straits, and his later life was marked by financial disgrace, expulsion from Dutch territory, and a bitter rivalry with the Shetland-born seaman John Clunies Ross over the governance of the Cocos-Keeling atoll. Hare’s significance lies in the light his career casts on the commercial and administrative practices of the British East India Company in the early nineteenth century, and on the complex dynamics of British-Dutch competition in the region [1, pp. 7–9].

Early Career and the Malacca Connection

Alexander Hare reached Malacca from Calcutta in or before 1807 and was, according to John Clunies Ross, the only English merchant in the settlement during the period 1807–1811 [2, p. 184]. It was during this period that Hare formed a friendship with Sir Stamford Raffles, who was visiting Malacca on sick leave in late 1807. Hare provided the young official with practical commercial intelligence and linguistic mediation that Raffles could not obtain from the Resident, William Farquhar, with whom he was on strained terms. His services extended to drawing Raffles’s attention to Banjermassin and to the information gathered by Joseph Burn at Pontianak, and he was rewarded with a role as agent between Raffles and the emissaries from Palembang, Aceh, and Bali during the 1810 preparations for the Java invasion [2, pp. 224–226].

The friendship between the two men cooled by 1816, when Raffles, returning from St Helena, wrote Hare a long letter describing his meeting with Napoleon—a gesture that Gibson-Hill interprets as evidence that the relationship had already become one-sided or uncomfortable [2, p. 226]. The estrangement was driven, in Gibson-Hill’s assessment, by Hare’s increasingly scandalous conduct at Banjermassin and the Cocos-Keeling Islands, which made him an embarrassment to Raffles’s rising official career [2, p. 224].

The Banjermassin Residency

Hare was appointed British Resident at Banjermassin through Raffles’s patronage in 1811–1812 and received a personal land grant of approximately 1,400 square miles from the Sultan [1, pp. 17–33]. During his tenure, he maintained a harem and received presents of girl slaves from neighbouring sultans, a practice that would later contribute to his reputation for scandalous conduct [2, p. 228]. The Banjermassin settlement ran a deficit of Java Rupee 556,770 over four years, and Hare’s failure to submit satisfactory accounts to the East India Company constituted the principal cause of his disgrace and eventual expulsion from Dutch territory [1, pp. 42–46].

The Dutch order expelling Hare from Java and other territories under Dutch jurisdiction was dated 5 March 1819 [3, p. 187, n. 10]. He reached Bencoolen on the brig Borneo, captained by John Clunies Ross, in early April 1820, and sailed for the Cape of Good Hope at the end of that month [3, p. 187, n. 10]. The East India Company’s auditing department was still awaiting an explanation of the deficiency of Java Rupee 556,770.4 in the final accounts of the Banjermassin settlement at the time of Gibson-Hill’s writing in 1954 [2, p. 191].

The Cocos-Keeling Settlement

The Cocos-Keeling settlement emerged from the rupture between Hare and Ross following the British withdrawal from Java in 1816 and the Dutch re-occupation of Banjermassin in 1818 [1, pp. 34–53]. Ross first entered the atoll’s lagoon in December 1825 aboard the Borneo, taking formal possession and planting seeds on the entrance islets. Hare, expelled from the Netherlands Indies in 1819 and living precariously at the Cape of Good Hope, arrived at the atoll in June 1826 with approximately 98 Asian followers—former slaves from Malacca, Borneo, and Java—whom he had retained in a state of quasi-servitude [1, pp. 57–70].

The two men’s incompatible temperaments and economic interests—Ross seeking a commercial entrepôt, Hare seeking isolation—produced an irreconcilable rivalry [1, pp. 57–70]. Ross’s petitions to the Governor of Mauritius in September 1829 and a Humble Memorial to King George IV in October 1829 for British recognition of the settlement were both refused by the Colonial Office in July 1830, which judged the islands of no strategic or commercial value [1, pp. 133–148]. The Dutch, initially alarmed by rumours of smuggling, dispatched the corvette Anna Paulowna in 1827, which failed to find the islands, and the civilian commissioner H. van der Jagt in October 1829; the latter’s report concluded that the islands were of negligible value, and the Dutch government subsequently abandoned any claim [1, pp. 80–83].

Hare left the atoll for Bencoolen in March 1831, abandoning his followers to Ross [1, pp. 91–98]. His death, probably in 1832 or early 1833, went unrecorded [1, pp. 91–98]. His son Alexander Hare junior died at Batavia on 12 January 1834, aged twenty-seven, placing his birth at approximately 1807; the Java Register entry notes that his mother’s name was not known [2, p. 185].

Domestic Life and Personal Conduct

Gibson-Hill’s 1954 article provides the central evidentiary contribution to understanding Hare’s private life through the translation and analysis of a letter dated 16 August 1820, found in the Malacca Church Records, in which a woman signing herself “Johanna van Hare” petitions the Church Council for confirmation in the faith. She states that she receives a monthly allowance from “Mr Hare,” that she is separated from him, and that she has never lived with him as a concubine in the present [2, p. 186]. Gibson-Hill argues persuasively that she was Hare’s acknowledged mistress during his Malacca residence and the mother of his only recognised son, Alexander Hare junior [2, pp. 226–228].

The letter demonstrates that Hare’s domestic arrangements at Malacca were conventional by the standards of the period—Farquhar himself had kept a mistress and four recognised children—and that nothing in his private life at that stage would have caused Raffles any social uneasiness [2, p. 227]. Gibson-Hill contrasts this with Hare’s later conduct at Banjermassin, where he maintained a harem and received presents of girl slaves from neighbouring sultans, and at the Cocos-Keeling Islands, where his manner of living was so scandalous that the editor of a Calcutta journal omitted parts of the official report [2, p. 228].

Legacy and Documentation

The principal documentary record of Alexander Hare’s life is C.A. Gibson-Hill’s 1952 compilation of primary sources on the establishment of the Cocos-Keeling Islands settlement, published in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 25, No. 4/5), which presents an exhaustive collection of correspondence and official papers spanning 1825 to 1857 [1, pp. 1–306]. Gibson-Hill, who had lived on the atoll in 1941 and lost his original manuscript during the Japanese Occupation, argues that Ross’s later autobiographical writings—composed after his quarrel with Hare—systematically distorted the earlier, more neutral accounts, and that the political dynamics of British-Dutch competition over the islands have been consistently misrepresented by both Dutch and English secondary literature [1, pp. 7–9].

The principal manuscript sources are held in the India Office Library (Raffles Collection MSS, Vol. 14), the Public Record Office (C.O. 167/109 and C.O. 167/214), and the Singapore Secretariat (C.S.O. 167/214); typescript copies of Ross’s letters to Capel were held by Druces & Attlee, solicitors to the Clunies Ross family [1, p. 291]. Gibson-Hill’s access to the Clunies Ross family papers on Cocos in 1941 was limited by a locked room in Oceania House, said to contain early family correspondence, which was sealed after the death of George Clunies-Ross and whose contents were subsequently sent to Colombo, where their whereabouts remain unknown [1, pp. 7–8].

A further dimension of Hare’s legacy is the question of how his relationship with Raffles was recorded and subsequently edited. Gibson-Hill notes that Lady Raffles, in compiling the Memoir, silently excised the paragraphs of Raffles’s 1813 Batavia address that complimented Hare’s work in Borneo, and that the only party still publicly seeking Hare’s explanation was the East India Company’s auditing department, which had been waiting for an account of the deficiency of Java Rupee 556,770.4 in the final Banjermassin settlement accounts [2, pp. 190–191]. The full text of the 1813 address appears in Verh. Batav. Genoot. 7, 1813: 27 et seq. [3, pp. 190–191, n. 5].

The limits of the record should be noted: Hare’s death went unrecorded, his son’s mother’s name was not entered in the Java Register, and the early family correspondence that might illuminate the formative years of the Cocos-Keeling settlement remains lost or unlocated [1, pp. 7–8], [2, p. 185].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1952). Documents relating to John Clunies Ross, Alexander Hare, and the establishment of the colony on the Cocos-Keeling Islands JMBRAS 25(4/5): 1–306. Read on JSTOR
  2. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1954). Raffles, Alexander Hare & Johanna van Hare JMBRAS 27(1): 224–233.