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through his Parliamentary Speeches (Parlementaire redevoeringen,

18621866) today will find little that is politically relevant but will
be struck by Van Hoevell'Hoëvell's persuasiveness. His speeches
are logical and to the point. They are written, moreover, in a
stylized but vital language that shows continuous adaptation to the
spoken language. His speech concerning the culture system of
December 8, 1851, has often been called his apologia pro vita sua.
Its logic, clarity, and word choice are exemplary and this explains
its persuasive power. A textual study of some of Van Hoëvell's
Parliamentary Speeches would show the degree to which his
politics were a natural extension of his ethical principles, and how
little he was taken in by liberal dogma. It would also reveal how he
could first intuit the sensibilities and motivations of his opponents
and put himself in their shoes, only to refute their position in the
end. Anyone studying Van Hoëvell's style would do well to also
consider how he makes use of conscious understatement, for
example, by soft pedaling emotionally charged words, by adding
subordinate and major clauses, and so on, only to reveal his true
emotion in the right place, so as to underscore his argument at the
right moment.
Except perhaps for his novella "The Suspects," it appears that, as in
the case of his precursors, his power lies not in literature so much
as in his effective rhetoric. The stories in his volume About Life in
the Indies are essentially debates dressed up as stories. Some of
them accompany his other writings in literary disguise, as it were,
while others are basically descriptive, but they all share either his
social or moral criticism. His essay on "The Pedati" (a primitive
native cart with two massive discs for wheels) turns into an
indictment of the frivolity of the numerous "overly smart ladies and
gentlemen" in the Indies. They stand in sharp contrast to the
Javanese who have been using this vehicle for over five centuries.
The story of "The Japanese Stonecutter," which Multatuli must
have read in Netherlands Indies Magazine (Tijdschrift voor
Neerland's Indië) of 1842 and later on included in his Max
Havelaar, attacks the desire for ever greater riches in the Indies. Its
obvious moral is that one should be content with one's lot. His
''Slave Auction" ("Eene slaven-vendutie") complements his The
Emancipation of Slaves in the Netherlands Indies (De emancipatie
der slaven in Neerlands-Indië, 1848) and his speeches on the
subject of slavery in the House of December 23, 1851. The story
provides Van Hoëvell with an opportunity to illustrate his argument
with descriptions and scenes which he allows one of his characters
to call "immoral" and "disgusting." Similarly, his "The Privilege of
a European Education" is in fact inseparable from his plea for im-
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proved education. It is directed against the need for many parents
to send their children to Holland at an early age, which renders real
family life in the Indies impossible. His other stories deal with
more abuses, such as the arrogance of higher officials, extortion by
native chiefs, leasing of bird-nest harvesting, the disproportion of
heavy forced labor, and much more.
Van Hoëvell, still close to the preceding generation, was also
inclined to burden literature with a task really beyond its province.
His choosing to write literature at all was determined by its
effectiveness and its capacity to reach a wider audience. His
principal aim was to inform that audience about conditions in the
Indies, especially after he had come to realize, as he once
mentioned in the House, that the "most frightful enemy" was Dutch
ignorance of the colonies.
As a legacy of the eighteenth century, the first half of the
nineteenth century was much more a period of travel, exploration,
and discovery than subsequent decades were to be. People believed
that if one only knew the facts as well as possible and if only one
would get at the heart of them, then understanding and harmony
would naturally follow. Van Hoëvell's optimism ran very much
along those lines. He was a minister of the church in Batavia, and
although he read, heard, and studied a lot, he must have always
considered it a loss and a shortcoming that there were things he had
not personally experienced. In 1847, about a year before his
departure for the Netherlands, he made a trip which he reported on
as Journey through Java, Madura, and Bali (Reise over Java,
Madura en Bali). He had started writing it while still in the Indies
when his problems with its government were reaching a critical
stage. This explains the vehement tone of its first part. He
forwarded the manuscript to P. J. Veth, an expert on the Indies in
Holland. By the time part one was published, Van Hoëvell himself
had already returned to Holland. There he continued writing about
his trip. The work was first to consist of two, then three volumes.
As it turns out, he only wrote two, which appeared respectively in
1849 and 1851. The account concerning his trip to Bali began to
appear in 1854 but was never completed. Paul van't Veer is right in
saying in a recent essay about Van Hoëvell that this travelogne is
one of the best to have come out of the Indies.
It is more readable than his novellas, and it is also much more than
a mere travelogue or a description of people and places. It is the
continuous account of someone who not only describes events and
conditions but who also knows how to put them in a larger
perspective. Neither physical fear nor the fear of losing face
prevents the narrator from stating unpleasantries if need be, and
there is an ongoing polem-
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ic against certain individuals and established opinion. This makes
his first book, especially part one, so lively. He can lash out in
indignation when, for example, he hears it said that the Europeans
exert a moral influence, and he responds: "Do you want me to tell
you? Your moral influence . . . consists of your bayonets and
cannon."
A similar, maybe even sharper tone is heard in his pamphlet An
Epidemic in Java (Eene epidemic op Java, 1849), which he wrote
after having witnessed a cholera epidemic. It appeared under the
pseudonym Jeronymus, which he had used previously for several
of his stories. Neither this particular experience nor his reaction to
it was something he could ever hope to publish in his own
Netherlands Indies Magazine. The government had already been
keeping a close eye on it for years and there had been trouble
before. Professor Veth tells us in his "Disclosure in Colonial
Affairs" ("De openbaarheid in koloniale aangelegenheden," De
Gids 2 [1848]: 72)that nearly every issue of the journal caused
friction between Van Hoëvell and the government's secretary
general, who was apparently in charge of supervision. The first
issue of the Netherlands Indies Magazine must have been prepared
right after Van Hoëvell's arrival in the Indies in 1837 because it
appeared as early as April of that year. Gradually it evolved into a
widely read periodical that, after covering mostly scientific
subjects, the arts, and odds and ends, began to concern itself with
politics. It became the magazine for all those who did not want to
depend on what the government saw fit to dispense in the way of
information. Following Batavia's "May Movement of '48,''
publication was stopped, but continued in the Netherlands. There,
especially after the political changes of 1848, he felt less
constrained and this stood the magazine in good stead. It is an
indispensable source for Indies history of the times. He stepped
down as editor at the same time he resigned from the House in
1862, but the magazine existed until the end of 1902. Veth, who
continued to correspond with Van Hoëvell up to his death, informs
us that in the end little was left of Van Hoëvell's cheerful vitality:
"Disaster upon disaster, blow upon blow, and misery upon misery
hounded him in his final years." In 1873, following the death of his
son-in-law, he wrote Veth: "Time is supposed to heal all wounds
but I will never recover from this. Something has broken inside of
me." Three years later, his two eldest sons died, also in the Indies.
He must have welcomed death as a release, Veth adds. According
to his wishes, he was interred in all simplicity on February 12,
1879. "Van Hoëvell was one of the most endearing men I have ever
known," another friend said of him.
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2
Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn
Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (18091864) was anything but endearing,
nor was he a man principally motivated by a moral ethos as Van
Hoëvell had been. He was not stung into writing by a social
conscience either. Even so, Junghuhn was a fascinating character, a
man with the power to entice and, in the larger sense, an important
writer.
The most striking characteristic of his words and actions was his
independence. That enabled him to become a great naturalist as
well as one of the first militant freethinkers. Multatuli, a freethinker
himself, mentions his name just once, unfortunately, and that is in
his Ideas (Ideeën), but he does call him a "brother" there. Junghuhn
was Van Hoëvell's counterpart in more than one respect, having an
entirely different background and an entirely different slant on life.
He rejected the notion of Christian revelation and that of a
transcendental godhead. He formulated his creed as follows: "We
believe in the existence of an invisible, great, and reasonable spirit
inhabiting nature, and call it God. In order to understand God, one
first has to understand nature and study her laws with every
scientific means possible. I belong to a high-vaulted church, the
roof of which is strewn with stars, the church of the naturalists who
worship God and seek to know Him through his works."
His naturalist research, which was his life's work, is thus closely
related to his philosophy and was nothing less than an act of faith.
For example, in the midst of Java's natural grandeur, spending the
night in a village hut, he surveyed his instruments spread out on a
bench once more before going to sleep: "In front of me I had put on
display the symbols of my faith: a terrestrial and a celestial globe, a
sextant, artificial horizon, telescope, chronometer, thermometer,
psychometer, a compass, magnet, microscope, Nicholson's
airometer, a triangular prism, portable camera obscura, a
daguerreotype camera, a small chest for doing chemical tests, and
other such tools of applied science."
Anyone regarding nature and its study in this light will regard the
natural experience and nature itself on a decidedly higher level.
Compared to Junghuhn's observations and descriptions of nature,
all others pale. He goes well beyond noting, as Van Hoëvell did,
the "beauty and loveliness of the landscape," or "splendid, although
rugged and wild, natural vistas." Junghuhn unfailingly prefers his
landscapes rugged and wild, and majesticmajestic in her great
silences and majestic in her forces; and alive too. He often
describes nature in terms of animal shapes or human emotions. A
motionless vol-
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canic lake can momentarily be stirred by such passions as to
destroy overnight what it took years to grow, much the same way
man will let his emotions destroy his own happiness. This seems to
come close to a personal confession. But there is more to nature
than this recognition of an affinity: its spectacle is so all
encompassing that it almost defies description. He does so
nonetheless, and despite the fact that he was German-born and
learned the Dutch language only later in life. Indeed, like someone
who can suddenly cause a stone to spark, Junghuhn time and again
manages to convey his sense of joy, elation, and relief while
looking down some "labyrinthine landscape" that looks "torn" and
"gutted." Similarly, he conveys being overtaken by a thunderstorm
in the jungle or out in the open, or finding himself in the elephant
grass, looking down on an ice cold, moonlit night into a bottomless
canyon, its trees topped by a silvery sheen, with no sound audible
other than that of the caprimulgus, a small nightbird "whose regular
tapping resounded like clashing blows on an anvil throughout the
valley below." Profounder observations he finds more difficult to
put into words: "Where does one find the words to describe so
much beauty? Mine are inadequate where beauty is mostly felt and
observed.'' Junghuhn observed constantly, jotting down his
observations right away with pencil into tiny notebooks. His rule
was, he says, "to immediately commit to paper all natural objects
and views before their impression could be erased by new objects."
This explains why some of his descriptions can be overly detailed
but the attendant emotion always comes across in fresh images and
words. Even while only describing a natural phenomenon or listing
varieties of plant and animal life, including their Latin names, or
taking down temperatures, or measuring longitude and latitude, he
still betrays the fact that these are his sole means of decoding
nature's secrets. Junghuhn tells us nature is also indifferent and
"pitiless," and not just majestic or powerful. It also destroys the life
it creates in an unending cycle, as he illustrates in his account of
nocturnal fights between turtles, wild dogs, crocodiles, and tigers,
which concludes with vultures circing high above the battlefield
the morning afterwards. That description is as unforgettable as that
of the population's orgy of vengeance one night on a tiger they
have killed.
Typical are those passages where natural description and
philosophy are so interwoven as to sum up Junghuhn's own basic
philosophy, that of the brotherhood of every living thing on earth.
Seated near the edge of a mountain lake one night, the lake's
surface without a ripple, the deadly calm interrupted only by the
cries of a flying fox or galeopithecus, Junghuhn writes: "Filled with
wonder I looked on, and it seemed to me I sensed the relationship
and sympathy binding all
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living creatures . . . as I got up from my rocky promontory, I said
good night to the moon, the stars, the lake, the ducks, the forest
with its millions of flowers, buds, and fruits, the galeopithecus, and
all the other animals. Good night. To nature fair and inexhaustible,
animated by God's breath, good night!
The same book from which we have quoted so far, and wherein
nearly every single page testifies to the "unceasing revelation of
God" was curiously enough to become a manifesto for freethinkers
and atheists alike. The anonymous publication of Images of Light
and Shadow from Java's Interior (Lichten schaduwbeelden uit de
binnenlanden van Java, 1854) was a bombshell. In the first place, it
created a lot of bad feeling which impeded but could not prevent its
appearance in the Netherlands. In the Indies, the book was what we
would now call a best seller. A critic wrote that "many people felt
confirmed in their stand against Christianity, while the book threw
others into doubt." The book was attacked by the Indies preacher J.
F. G. Brumund, about whom more later, who launched a pamphlet
called Several Remarks Concerning Images of Light and Shadow
Written by the Brothers Night and Day (Eenige opmerkingen over
licht- en schaduwbeelden van de gebroeders Dag en Nacht, 1856),
which appeared in Batavia. Junghuhn's book was prohibited in
Austria and in several German states and principalities because of
its alleged ''denigrations and vilifications of Christianity."
In the Netherlands, its appearance not only gave new impetus to
changes already well under way, but it also led to the foundation of
an actual movement. Without quite completing his book, Junghuhn
had to break off his European furlough and return to Java. The first
edition of his book announced a sequel, which was never written.