Ternate - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

TERNATE 24 TOPOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL DESCRIPTIONS
4. The number of Chinese had remained almost constant over the past half-century.
There are perhaps ten to fifteen real Chinese among them, but not a single woman who was
born in China. [p. 37] The others are peranakan Cina (people of Chinese descent born in
the Indies —Trans.); their language is Malay as it is spoken here, with very few Chinese
words in it. Hence the degeneration of the Mongolian [sic] customs, which may be observed
in the public school for Europeans where the Chinese element comprises more than onehalf
of the student body. At the end of their school training, to show that they have
successfully completed their lessons, the students often take the set examination for
government clerk. In their exam results, the Chinese students are far from being the
worst. The Chinese all work as retail traders, and if they are diligent they often do well,
although not many manage to rise above the average standard of wealth. They have a good
reputation and the failings of their national character are less noticeable here.
5. The figures for the native Christians are missing for two years; I presume that
they were subsumed into another category. The figure for the end of 1885, however,
definitely includes all the Christian natives in the whole settlement—of these, 231 belong to
the capital Ternate and 352 to Labuha on the island of Bacan. It is, in fact, very likely that
these two categories were always added together, and that Bleeker (1854) and van der Crab
(1860) considered the native Christians to be mestizos, since the increase in the number of
Europeans and those on the same level is otherwise difficult to explain. No. 142 of the 1861
statute book directs that population registers be started for the Native Christians, without
detriment to their right of registration in the civilian registry books. This formulation has
repeatedly led to confusion. According to some, it means that in these registers the label
“Native Christian” had to be added after the name, since the name alone was insufficient to
distinguish them from Europeans; on the other hand, others have argued that such a label
was forbidden, since not specified by the law. Whatever the original intention, for lack of
better information [p. 38] the assumption was later made that those children who were
registered in the civilian registry books should be counted among the group on par with
Europeans. As a result, a few came to occupy a privileged position, but others, less wellinformed,
remained natives. This situation was rectified later on for some people by the
equalization proclaimed in the statute book. Even now, however, the confusion remains,
and one sometimes sees a peculiar phenomenon wherein children considered as being of
European descent receive free education at the Dutch schools but their brothers or sisters,
considered as being of native descent, have to pay tuition. Since the Native Christians at
Ternate are counted as citizens in any case—i.e., exempted from statute labor and taxes,
and enrolled only in the civil army—they may as well be equalized with Europeans without
distinction. In that case there would be no question of favoritism: the one group would have
as many or as few rights as the others.
6. Europeans and those on a par with them form a minority at Ternate. There are
at the most twenty-five full-blooded Europeans in the whole of the residency. The number
of those on the same level as Europeans has increased because of the liberal application of
the statute discussed under 5, above. Many of those in this category are officials and
functionaries, others are retired officers and non-commissioned officers, some are traders,
while most live on the profits of their plantations or estates, which are usually enough to
meet their needs. Together they form a small society which is sequestered from the world
and completely indifferent to what happens outside Ternate. Indeed, the society more or
less vegetates, and its members are often at odds with each other due to their lack of
regular occupation. A little bit of good will could prevent a lot of quarrels, but since each
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