Raffles and the massacre at Palembang
This short note by C. E. Wurtzburg is a postscript to his 1949 article “Raffles and the Palembang Massacre” (JMBRAS Vol. 22, pp. 38–52), in which he responds to Professor Coolhaas’s 1951 critique of his identification of a missing letter in the Raffles–Badru’d-din correspondence.
Summary
Wurtzburg concedes that he had intended to footnote the untenability of the dates Baud assigned to his letters No. 1 (December 1809) and No. 3 (March 1810) but inadvertently omitted the note. He now argues that the months are correct but the years are wrong by one: the letters should be dated December 1810 and March 1811. His reasoning is that Raffles was still Secretary to the Penang Government in 1809 and only arrived at Malacca on 4 December 1810 after being appointed Agent to the Governor-General with the Malay States following his visit to Lord Minto in Calcutta in the summer of 1810. It is therefore implausible that Raffles could have written to the Sultan of Palembang as Minto’s representative in December 1809 or March 1810, before Minto had even decided on the Java Expedition (p. 179). Wurtzburg maintains that his original identification of the India Office letter as the first letter Raffles wrote to Palembang—and his broader argument that Badru’d-din deliberately withheld it from Batavia—remains unshaken once the corrected dates are accepted (p. 180).