Raffles, Alexander Hare & Johanna van Hare
C.A. Gibson-Hill’s 1954 article in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society examines the relationship between Sir Stamford Raffles and the merchant Alexander Hare during the early British period at Malacca (1807–1811), and uses a newly identified Dutch-language letter from 1820 to reconstruct the domestic life of Hare and his acknowledged mistress, Johanna van Hare. The overarching thesis is that Hare served as Raffles’s informal commercial and linguistic adviser at Malacca before the Java expedition, and that the subsequent estrangement between the two men was driven by Hare’s increasingly scandalous conduct at Banjermassin and the Cocos-Keeling Islands, which made him an embarrassment to Raffles’s rising official career.
Summary
Gibson-Hill begins by tracing the friendship between Raffles and Hare, which formed during Raffles’s first sick-leave visit to Malacca in late 1807. Hare, the only English merchant in the settlement at the time, provided Raffles with practical commercial intelligence and linguistic mediation that the young official could not obtain from the Resident, William Farquhar, with whom Raffles was on strained terms. Hare’s 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. The friendship cooled by 1816, when Raffles, returning from St Helena, wrote Hare a long letter describing his meeting with Napoleon—a gesture that suggests the relationship had already become one-sided or uncomfortable.
The article’s central evidentiary contribution is 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. 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 (born c. 1807, died at Batavia 12 January 1834). 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.
Gibson-Hill then 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 (1826–31), where his manner of living was so scandalous that the editor of a Calcutta journal omitted parts of the official report. The article closes with a pointed observation 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 a deficiency of Java Rupee 556,770.4 in the final Banjermassin settlement accounts.
Key Findings
- Alexander Hare reached Malacca from Calcutta in or before 1807 and was, according to Clunies Ross, the only English merchant in the settlement during 1807–11 (p. 184).
- The younger Alexander Hare 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 (p. 185).
- Johanna van Hare’s letter, written in Dutch and preserved in the Malacca Church Records (Vol. 32, ff. 17 & 18), is dated 16 August 1820 and confirms she received a monthly allowance from Hare and was publicly acknowledged by his name (p. 186).
- The Dutch order expelling Hare from Java and other territories under Dutch jurisdiction was dated 5 March 1819; he reached Bencoolen on the Borneo (Capt. John Clunies Ross) in early April 1820 and sailed for the Cape at the end of that month (p. 187, n. 10).
- The East India Company’s auditing department was still awaiting an explanation of a deficiency of Java Rupee 556,770.4 in the final accounts of the Banjermassin settlement at the time of writing (p. 191).
- Raffles’s 1813 address to the Batavia Society, as reprinted in Lady Raffles’s Memoir, omits paragraphs containing complimentary references to Hare’s work in Borneo; the full text appears in Verh. Batav. Genoot. 7, 1813: 27 et seq. (pp. 190–191, n. 5).
Conclusion
Gibson-Hill’s definitive takeaway is that the Raffles–Hare friendship was a natural and mutually useful alliance between two self-made men of similar social origin, and that its dissolution was not caused by anything in Hare’s Malacca conduct—which was unremarkable by contemporary standards—but by the corruption of absolute power at Banjermassin and the subsequent scandal of the Cocos-Keeling period, which rendered Hare an embarrassment to Raffles’s ambitions. The article also implicitly critiques Lady Raffles’s editorial omissions in the Memoir, suggesting that her devotion to her husband’s reputation led her to suppress evidence of his indebtedness to a man whose later life she would have found distasteful.
Context
- The primary archival source is the Malacca Church Records (Vol. 32), from which the Dutch letter was translated by Dr. P. S. de Josselin de Jong; supplementary evidence is drawn from the Java Register (via Prof. Coolhaas), Clunies Ross’s correspondence, and Hare’s own letters to James Du Puy (1828).
- The article is part of Gibson-Hill’s ongoing series on Alexander Hare (see JMBRAS 25(4), 1952) and contributes to the historiography of Raffles by challenging the Memoir’s sanitised account of his early career at Malacca.