The Java journal of Dr Joseph Arnold. .S. Bastin
Dr. Joseph Arnold’s Java Journal, edited and annotated by John Bastin and published in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1973, presents the only surviving contemporary account by a European naturalist of daily life in British-occupied Java during the final months of that occupation. Arnold, a naval surgeon and Fellow of the Linnean Society, arrived at Batavia on 3 September 1815 and departed on 13 December, and his journal—written in the first person with characteristic brevity and observational precision—records his encounters with Raffles, his travels through the Priangan regencies, and the social, economic, and natural history of the island at a moment of political transition.
Summary
The publication comprises an introductory essay by Bastin, the full text of Arnold’s journal (3 September–17 December 1815) with extensive editorial annotations, a series of plates, an appendix containing Arnold’s separate description of Mount Tangkuban Perahu, a bibliography, and an index. The introduction situates Arnold within the scientific networks of early nineteenth-century Britain, tracing his connections to Sir Joseph Banks, Robert Brown, Dawson Turner, and the Hooker family, and explaining how his brief sojourn in Java led to the eventual naming of Rafflesia arnoldi—a species he never saw but whose discovery he reported to Turner from Benkulen in 1818 before his death from fever.
The journal itself is organised around Arnold’s movements: his initial fortnight at Raffles’ country house at Ciceroa (Tjisarua), his return to Batavia, the catastrophic burning of the Indefatigable in the roadstead on 22 October, his subsequent residence at Government House, Buitenzorg, and a 250-mile horseback tour through the regencies of Tjiandjur, Sukabumi, and Bandung during the rainy season. Throughout, Arnold’s observations range across the full spectrum of colonial Java—administrative structures, revenue systems, native court ceremonies, Chinese religious practices, Dutch merchant society, tropical medicine, and natural history. His annotations reveal a mind that was simultaneously a careful empirical observer and a somewhat isolated figure, self-describing as “a solitary animal” who seemed to live “without being perceived by any one” (p. 2).
Bastin’s annotations are the work’s principal scholarly contribution. They identify every person, place, and institution Arnold mentions, correct his occasional errors of nomenclature and geography, and supply contextual information drawn from the India Office Library and Records, the Mitchell Library in Sydney, the National Library of Scotland, and the Algemeen Rijksarchief at The Hague. The annotations frequently extend well beyond simple identification to provide biographical sketches of minor officials, explanations of Javanese administrative terminology, and assessments of Arnold’s claims against official records.
Key Findings
- The Indefatigable fire of 22 October 1815 destroyed Arnold’s entire personal collection, including “about forty volumes of books, most of them classical,” his insect collections from South America, New Holland, and Java, and public dispatches of the Supreme Judge of New South Wales; his total losses were estimated at £200 in goods plus irreplaceable specimens (pp. 39–41).
- Raffles reported to Arnold that Java’s annual revenue stood at “5 or 6 millions of dollars,” though Bastin’s annotation corrects this against official figures of less than 6 million Java rupees in 1813–14 and slightly over 7.5 million in 1814–15 (p. 14).
- The ryotwari land revenue system, introduced in 1814, required cultivators to pay approximately one-fourth of their rice or maize produce as rent; Arnold noted that “probably a million of people” paid money into the treasury, making collection extremely laborious (pp. 14–15).
- Arnold’s tour of the Priangan regencies covered over 250 miles on horseback during the rainy season; he was wet through three or four times daily, and the journey took him from Buitenzorg through Tjiandjur, Sukabumi, and Bandung to the twin craters of Tangkuban Perahu (pp. 52–66).
- The Sepoy mutiny at Surakarta, which Arnold records on 5 December 1815 as a “commotion in the island” arising from native princes’ dissatisfaction at the restitution of Java to the Dutch, involved a discovered conspiracy among sepoys to murder their officers; the garrison numbered not above 1,800 soldiers (p. 72).
- Arnold’s description of Tangkuban Perahu (Appendix II) documents two adjacent craters—one containing a boiling lake surrounded by reticulated sulphur, the other a cold lake tasting of diluted sulphuric acid—separated by a natural mound of cinders, and argues that the two had “no subterraneous communication” and had each “had its period of conflagration” independently (pp. 78–85).
Conclusion
Bastin’s edition establishes Arnold’s Java Journal as a uniquely valuable primary source for the British occupation of Java, not merely because it is the only such journal to survive but because its author occupied a peculiar vantage point: a medically trained naturalist with no administrative role, no language skills, and no political stake in the colony, whose observations are consequently unfiltered by the self-justifying rhetoric that characterises official dispatches. The journal’s value lies in its unselfconscious recording of the textures of colonial life—the cost of eggs, the behaviour of tigers, the mechanics of a Javanese wedding procession, the indifference with which the Sabbath was observed—offering a counterpoint to the grand narratives of Raffles’ reforms and the History of Java.
Context
- The primary archival collections underpinning Bastin’s annotations are the India Office Library and Records (London), the Mitchell Library (Sydney), the National Library of Scotland, and the Algemeen Rijksarchief (The Hague); the original manuscript journal is held at the Mitchell Library, Sydney (C720).
- The study’s historiographical contribution lies in recovering and contextualising a previously unpublished source that fills a gap in the documentary record of the British period in Java (1811–16), complementing the better-known journals of Travers, Taylor, and the official correspondence of Raffles and his staff.