RAFFLESSir Thomas Stamford (1781-1826), the son of a captain in the West India trade, was born at sea off the coast of Jamaica on 5tli July 1781. Returning with his mother to England, he was placed in a boarding-school at Hammersmith, where he remained till the age of fourteen, when he entered the East India House as an extra clerk. While employed there he occupied his leisure hours in particularly studying languages, for which he possessed great facility. In 1805 the directors of the India House having resolved to found a new trading settlement at Penang, Raffles was appointed assistant-secretary, and on his voyage out he acquired the Malay language. Owing to the illness of the chief secretary, he soon had to undertake the entire administrative labour of the new government. In 1808 he had to visit Malacca to recruit his shattered strength; here he enjoyed large opportunity of mingling with a very varied population, and, in company with the two Orientalists Marsden and Leyden, he began his elaborate researches into the history, laws, and literature of the Hindu and Malay races. In zoology he took special interest, and on his return to England became founder and first president of the Zoological Society. While in Calcutta in 1809, Raffles suggested to Lord Minto, then governor-general of India, the desirableness of wresting Java from the French. The governor-general took up the idea with vigour; a fleet of ninety ships dropped anchor before Batavia in August 1811, and in a short time the conquest of the island was effected. Raffles was made lieutenant-general of the new territory, and resolved to give to the island a pure and upright administration. There were three sources of abuse to eradicate—the revenue system, the system of police and public justice, and the slave ...trade. In a period of only five years Raffles had almost effected his design; his popularity was secured, and the revenue was eight times larger than it had been under the Dutch. The policy of some of his measures being, however, considered doubtful by the home authorities, he was recalled in 1816, but his conduct was approved. He published a valuable and well-illustrated History of Java, in 2 vols. 4to, 1817.
Having received knighthood, Sir Stamford Raffles set out for Sumatra as lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen, arriving in March 1818, and immediately recommenced the work of reform. In 1819 he induced the marquis of Hastings to annex Singapore. He again visited Singapore, his “political child,” in 1822, and occupied himself for nearly a year in laying out the new city, and in establishing its constitution as a free port. Java had been given up to the Dutch shortly after Sir Stamford left it, and now Bencoolen was granted to them in exchange for Malacca. On setting sail for England from Sumatra in February 1824 the ship took fire and the crew and passengers were with difficulty saved. The loss to Sir Stamford was beyond all repair. The whole of his drawings, all his collections in botany and zoology, all his multitudinous papers and manuscripts, fell a prey to the flames, his pecuniary loss amounting to more than ¿£20,000. During one of his excursions into the interior of Sumatra, in company with Dr Arnold, he came upon the largest and most extraordinary of known flowers, the Rafflesia Amoldi (see Parasitism, vol. xviii. p. 265). In 1820 he sent home a large collection of preserved animals, now in the museum of the London Zoological Society, described in the Transactions of the Linnean Society. He died of apoplexy at his house near London on 5th July 1826.
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