Hendrik Pieter Nicolaas Muller (2 April 1859 – 11 August 1941) was a Dutch entrepreneur, diplomat and publicist. He started his career as a businessman, trading with East and West Africa. In his mid-twenties he travelled to Zanzibar, Mozambique, and South Africa for business purposes, but showed himself a keen ethnographer as well.
In 1896, he was first appointed consul and later consul general for the Orange Free State. Muller held this position all through the Second Boer War and his high-profile performance as European representative for this Boer republic won him considerable notoriety. After the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in 1902, Muller retired to a life of travelling and writing for some years, making Muller a household name with his travel books. In 1919, the Dutch government appointed him envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Romania, and later to Czechoslovakia.
Muller was a prolific writer. Over the course of his life he published well over two hundred articles, brochures, and books about his travels, South Africa and the Boers, and Dutch foreign policy. Muller gathered a large fortune with well appointed private investments. He bequeathed his considerable wealth to a private fund in support of academic research and cultural heritage.
Biography
Early life as businessman
Hendrik Pieter Nicolaas Muller was born in Rotterdam on 2 April 1859, as the third child and second son of Hendrik Muller Szn. and Marie Cornelie van Rijckevorsel. His father was a successful businessman based in Rotterdam and trading with Africa and the Netherlands East Indies. H.P.N. Muller's maternal grandfather, , was the doyen of the Rotterdam merchant community in the early part of the nineteenth century. Both his father and maternal grandfather were politicians as well, liberals who staunchly defended the principle of free trade, and both were at one time members of the Senate of the States-General of the Netherlands.
Muller's paternal grandfather was a German immigrant to the Netherlands and a Mennonite minister and professor of theology in Amsterdam. The Muller family was fairly prominent in the Netherlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with Christian ministers, professors of literature and history, archivists, antiquarian booksellers, statesmen and businessmen in their midst.
Muller was destined to step into his father's footsteps and become a businessman. He first attended the private institution Delfos followed by the Hogere Burgerschool (high school) in Rotterdam, before continuing his education in Germany, at the Hohe Real Schule in Frankfurt-am-Main, to specialise in trade and business. After finishing his studies with good results, he continued his training with internships in business firms in Liverpool, Manchester, and Marseille. His first serious job came when his father called him back to Rotterdam in 1882, to become interim manager of the Handels Compagnie Mozambique (Trading Company Mozambique), an ill-performing trading firm doing business in Mozambique. In 1882, Muller travelled to East Africa and visited all the trading posts and establishments of the firm, changing business practices. At the end of his trip he made an extensive tour of South Africa, visiting Natal, Zululand, Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Cape Colony. On his return to Rotterdam he advised the directors of the company on business opportunities. Subsequently, he was appointed co-director of the reconstituted company, now called the Oost-Afrikaansche Compagnie (East African Company), as well as deputy manager in his father's firm, Hendrik Muller & Co., which had important trading interests in Liberia and elsewhere in West Africa.
In the 1880s Muller was active for his businesses, and travelled to the Congo Conference in Berlin in 1884, to Portugal in 1886 and North Africa in 1889. In the same year he succeeded his father as consul general for Liberia in the Netherlands, a position he would hold until 1913. After a third business journey to Africa in 1890, now to Liberia and the Gold Coast, for Hendrik Muller & Co., he returned home seriously ill, and had to convalesce for months. In this period he fell out with his father and younger brother Abram Muller, about both personal and business matters. It was a personal break that would never be healed and with professional repercussions. In 1891, Muller left business for good and embarked on a totally new career.
Ethnographer and geographer Already in the 1880s, Muller had dabbled in ethnography and writing. On the basis of materials gathered on his journey to East Africa and South Africa in 1882/'83, he had held public lectures throughout the Netherlands and Belgium. He also published articles on his trip in Dutch magazines and newspapers, and collated these publications into a book titled Zuid-Afrika. It made him somewhat of a celebrity, and an expert on South Africa and East Africa. During his journey Muller had also collected a large number of ethnographic objects and artefacts, on which he published a richly illustrated study in 1892, together with Johannes François Snelleman, curator of the Africa collection in the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden.
Once freed from running the better part of two businesses, and financially independent, Muller went to Germany to study geography and ethnography. He attended lectures at the universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig before completing his doctorate at the University of Giessen in 1894, summa cum laude. His thesis Land und Leute zwischen Zambezi und Limpopo (Land and People between Zambezi and Limpopo) was mainly based on secondary material, rather than the materials collected and observations made by Muller himself during his time in East Africa. This limited the originality of the study, although in its time it was appreciated as an important piece of academic work, and was also published in a commercial version.
Consul general for the Orange Free State
After his return to the Netherlands, H.P.N. Muller settled down in The Hague, where he was originally only occupied with his consular duties for Liberia, his membership of the Commission for Consular Examinations (since 1890) and his writing. Early in 1896 Muller was appointed as consul for the Orange Free State in the provinces of North and South Holland, assisting the consul general Hendrik Antonie Lodewijk Hamelberg. He received the appointment on the strength of his publications about South Africa. After Hamelberg's death later in 1896 Muller succeeded him as consul general. It was an honorary position. In the following years Muller wholeheartedly set out to work for the Orange Free State and its interests in Europe. His predecessor Hamelberg had not only been consul general, but had on occasion also acted as special envoy to be able to negotiate treaties and accords with foreign powers. Muller also acted as special envoy and in this capacity inter alia enrolled the Orange Free State in the Universal Postal Union, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, and the Geneva Conventions, and negotiated treaties of friendship and trade with Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. He also strengthened the consular representation of the Orange Free State in Europe and inquired into all kinds of practical issues like a cure for rinderpest and improved methods of irrigation.
In 1898 Muller travelled to South Africa, where he visited Cape Town, the Orange Free State, and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. In Pretoria he attended the inauguration of President Paul Kruger, and in Bloemfontein, he struck up a friendship with the newly elected President Marthinus Theunis Steyn and his family. He also renewed his relations with other leading statesmen, like former President Francis William Reitz, government secretary Pieter Jeremias Blignaut, and chairman of the Volksraad, Cornelius Hermanus Wessels. In Cape Town, he was granted an audience with High Commissioner Sir Alfred Milner.
Once back in the Netherlands, the political situation in South Africa became tense very rapidly, and Muller did all he could to propagate the cause of the Boer Republics in the press and via diplomatic channels. Once the South African War broke out in October 1899, Muller set up an elaborate operation to support the cause of the war for the Orange Free State. He mobilised public support in the Netherlands, Germany and the United States of America and had public gatherings organised. Through his many contacts with the European press Muller saw to it that the Boer cause was extensively covered in the newspapers, usually in his own words, but published in the name of the respective editor. His office in The Hague was the hub of diplomatic and consular activity in this period, with several secretaries working continuously on the gathering of information and dealing with correspondence. In the war effort Muller cooperated with the Algemeen Nederlandsch Verbond in Dordrecht, the Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Vereeniging in Amsterdam, and of course the Transvaal's diplomatic representative in Brussels, Willem Johannes Leyds. Originally the relationship between Muller and Leyds was cordial, but with time it soured and turned into open animosity. Both men were strong personalities with strong convictions. The fact that Muller was only consul general and Leyds an accredited diplomat was not helpful and neither was that – at least in Muller's opinion – the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek received much more attention than the Orange Free State. The first time problems arose in the open was in 1900, when the Boer republics sent a joint Special Diplomatic Delegation to Europe and the United States, which was ill-prepared and for which Leyds had very different ideas than Muller.
In 1901, Muller travelled to the United States himself to mobilise support from President Theodore Roosevelt, especially on behalf of the women and children in the British concentration camps. He also held public lectures all around the country. While visiting Mexico, news reached Muller about the Peace of Vereeniging, making him jobless. Muller took the opportunity to turn his American journey into an expedition. On his return to the Netherlands in 1903 he published a book about it. In the years after the end of the South African War Muller maintained his interest in South Africa and the Afrikaners, both personally and professionally. In 1904 he supported the Steyn family when they were in Europe for the President's recovery of a debilitating illness. Until his death Muller was active for the Algemeen Nederlandsch Verbond and the Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Vereeniging.
Travel through Asia
Between 1907 and 1909 Muller travelled through Asia, a journey that produced several books and articles after his return, including a two-part report of his travels (Azië gespiegeld; Asia mirrored).A translation of selected chapters from part I was published by Carool Kersten as Dr. Muller's Asian Journey. Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Yunnan (1907–1909) (Bangkok: White Lotus 2004).Spies, 'n Nederlander, 252–262. Muller also published a scientific source publication on Cambodia and the earliest Dutch presence in French Indochina. The French government rewarded him for it with a knighthood in the Legion of Honour for the latter. The French colony Annam made Muller a knight in the Order of the Dragon for his contributions to the history of Vietnam.