Raffles, Thomas Stamford Bingley

RAFFLES, THOMAS STAMFORD BINGLEY

(b. at sea off Port Morant, Jamaica, 6 July 1781; d. London, England, 5 July 1826)

natural history.

Raffles was born on board the ship Ann, of which his father, Benjamin Raffles, was the master, on a voyage from Jamaica to England. He grew up in London; but when the family lost its money, he went to work in 1795 as a clerk for the East India Company, studying languages and natural history in his spare time. In 1805 Raffles was sent to Penang as assistant to the chief secretary of the company; and before leaving he married a widow, Olivia Fancourt. During the voyage he learned Malay, an accomplishment rare among the company’s staff, and was so competent an administrator that he was promoted to chief secretary in 1807. In 1807 and 1810 he visited Calcutta to meet Lord Minto, governor-general of India, and was appointed agent to the governor-general of India in Malaya, based at Malacca. From there Raffles planned the invasion of Java and was appointed its lieutenant governor, based at Batavia; this was politically expedient but not entirely welcomed by the East India Company, for new territories were expensive to administer. His government was both efficient and humane, but he suffered from overwork and tropical diseases. In 1814 his wife died and accusations of corruption were brought against him.

Raffles was not able to return to England until 1816; but once in London, he had great success. He was friendly with the prince regent, Princess Charlotte, the duke and duchess of Somerset (to whom some of his most important letters were written), and also scientists including Sir Joseph Banks. Raffles cleared himself of the charges laid with the court of directors of the East India Company, traveled in Holland, wrote his History of Java, was elected fellow of the Royal Society, and was knighted. He married his second wife, Sophia Hull, and returned to Bengkulu, Sumatra, in 1817, taking with him the botanist Joseph Arnold.

Back in the East, Raffles planned and executed the taking of Singapore and supervised the setting up of the new community there. He returned home in 1824, his health seriously damaged and four of his five children dead of tropical diseases. He was active in founding the Zoological Society of London and was its first president until his death.

Raffles’ importance in the history of science is as a facilitator rather than as a discoverer. He went on long trips of exploration wherever he was based, surveying the country, customs, and natural history. In a letter of 1818 to the duchess of Somerset he described the parasitic plant later named Rafflesia as “perhaps the largest and most magnificent flower in the world” and sent home specimens from which Robert Brown published descriptions. He wrote on the little-known tapir and dugong, and sent specimens of these and many other animals and plants to the Indian Museum in Calcutta and to Banks in 1818, 1820, and 1824.

The collecting was organized at Raffles’ own expense, first informally and later by scientists he brought out, including Arnold, the American Thomas Horsfield, and two Frenchmen, Pierre-Médard Diard and Alfred Duvaucel. He was highly regarded as a naturalist by scientists in England and abroad, including Wallich and Hardwick in India. The botanic gardens at Malacca and Bengkulu were planned and largely tended by Raffles himself; and he commissioned many drawings, some of which survive in the India office library. Most of the specimens passed to the Zoological Society and then to the British Museum (Natural History).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Raffles’ most important work is his History of Java (London, 1817; 2nd ed., 2 vols., 1830; new ed., 1965); chs. 1 and 3 cover the geography, flora and fauna, and agriculture. Raffles acknowledges: “For all that relates to the natural history of Java I am indebted to the communications of Dr. Thomas Horsfield.” His scientific papers are not easy to trace and are not listed in the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers. They include “Discourse to the Batavia Society of Arts and Sciences in 1813 on the State of Science in Java,” in Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch genootschap van kunsten en wetenschappen, 7 (1814), 1–35; “Some Account of the Dugong,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 110 , pt. 1 (1820), 174–182, a detailed description, including measurements, food, habitat, and dissection; and “Descriptive Catalogue of a Zoological Collection, Made…in the Island of Sumatra and Its Vicinity…With Additional Notices Illustrative of the Natural History of Those Countries,” in Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, 13 (1821), 239–340.

II. Secondary Literature. The description of Rafflesia was first published by R. Brown, “An Account of a New Genus of Plants Named Rafflesia,” in Transactions of the Litinean Society, 13 (1821), 201–234, and 8 plates; he quoted Raffles’ own description and a letter from William Jack, and used the drawing of a specimen brought back by Horsfield to give the formal Latin description. Brown later published “Description of the Female Flower and Fruit of Rafflesia Arnoldi. With Remarks on Its Affinities,” in Transactions of the Linnean Society, 19 (1834), 221–247 and 8 plates, with a synopsis of the Rafflesiaceae.

There is abundant material, both MS and published, mainly on Raffles’ work as a colonial administrator. The first biography was Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles … and Selections From His Correspondence, 2 vols. (London, 1830; new ed., abr., 1835), the best published source of letters. The definitive biography is C. E. Wirtzburg, Raffles of the Eastern Isles (London, 1954); M. S. Collis, Raffles (London, 1966), is short and readable. Both have good bibliographies, including sources of MS material, of which the India Office is the most important. A Malay clerk in Raffles’ office, Abdullah, wrote a personal account of Raffles’ scientific work, first published in 1874; the best translation is by A. H. Hill, repr. as Abdulla bin Abdul Kadir, The Hikayat Abdullah (Kuala Lumpur, 1970). There is a scientific memior by Sir William Jardine in his The Natural History of Game Birds (Edinburgh, 1834), 17–88. Raffles’ role in the early Zoological Society may be found in P. Chalmers Mitchell, Centenary History of the Zoological Society of London (London, 1929), 1, 7, 30, 61; and in John Bastin, “Dr. Joseph Arnold and the Discovery of Rafflesia Arnoldi in West Sumatra in 1818,” in Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, 6 (1973), 305–372. Bastin has also published “Raffles the Naturalist,” in Straits Times Annual (Singapore, 1971), 59–63, and is editing his papers.

Diana M. Simpkins