- SEARCH OUR SITE -  ABOUT US - ADVERTISING - SUBSCRIPTION  - CONTACT US - BUSINESS INDEX - PHOTO LIBRARY  - OTHER MAGAZINES -

 

VOL. 6.8

ARCHIVES:

In Raffles’ Wake A Write of Passage

By Steve Van Beek

After a night of storms, the sea is calm, the skies filmy but clear of lowering clouds. Two days sailing from Thailand’s Phuket island in the Andaman Sea have brought our 65 foot schooner, Third Sea, through the blue haze of a pre-dawn sky into the silence of Penang harbour. Through the gauzy mist, we can make out the twinkling fairy lights of Georgetown, a cake of stuccoed buildings and orange-tiled frosting topped by the giant candle of the 70-storey Komtar Tower. A passenger on deck almost 200 years ago must have experienced similar emotions on first viewing the island on which he would begin his illustrious career in the Orient.

The son of an impoverished ship captain, Stamford Raffles had joined the company as a clerk at the age of 14. At a near desk sat Charles Lamb. Each in his own way would become famous, Lamb as an essayist and Raffles as the founder of a city which, despite its small size, became a miracle of Asian development. The city was Singapore, the Lion City. But that was 20 years hence and a wealth of adventures lay before him.

Raffles was just 24 when he was plucked from the obscurity of the East India Company’s London office to serve as the assistant to the Chief Secretary of Penang. When he arrived, on a September morning of 1805, this young man “of medium height, with a broad forehead, well shaped head, high nose, rather hollow cheeks and slight stoop” looked at a very different Penang. The island, then called “Prince of Wales Island,” to honour the son of King George III (that thorn in the side of American revolutionaries), was a garden spot in Asia. Fifteen miles long, 10 miles wide, it was covered in thick jungle. It’s port city, Georgetown, held some 30,000 people, two-thirds of them Chinese; only a hundred of them European.

Despite his calm demeanour, he must have leaned, hands on the rail, in growing anticipation as he gazed past the tall ships and myriad of junks to the place where he would take up his first position. He’d come well prepared for his position. On his lips was the new language, Malay, he’d learned during the long sea voyage. In his mind was a wealth of knowledge for, though unschooled, he was self taught in a wide variety of subjects. At his side was his new bride, the lively, beautiful Olivia Fancourt, 10 years his senior, widow of an army officer, and destined not to survive 10 years in the rigours of the tropical climate.

Our own in-bound passage elicits little excitement; modern Penang is wrapped in its pursuit of commerce and has no time for our outmoded ship. In the rusty dawn light, freighters like russet hens are being unloaded onto tiny lighters that nestle like broods of chicks at their sides. Dropping anchor near the sea wall, we ride the dinghy to shore, complete Immigration formalities and head into town to buy supplies.

Strolling down Pitt Street, it is easy to imagine Penang in the first half of the 18th century. The upper floors of the orange-tiled buildings extending over the sidewalks, the interstices filled with bamboo awnings, look like they did 150 years ago. Were the awnings as bright with advertisements as they are now?

At cold storage, we buy ice and provisions, load them onto a rickshaw and head back to the dock where the sun has advanced past its zenith and into the afternoon. The moon, too, has been at work and the current which previously tugged gently at our anchor is now a powerful force threatening to tear it loose. To the south, the black cauldron of the skies is boiling and a wind is ruffling our hair. With a storm brewing and night descending, it is imperative that we hoist anchor and get clear of the ships in the main channel. The sweet mystery of Penang that lured us to linger may prove our undoing.

We stop briefly at a floating petrol station to refill our tanks. A slip of the hose and I am drenched in diesel. Sluicing myself with a bucket of seawater, I discover an aspect of sailing that differs little from Raffles’s day: the impossibility of cleaning oneself in salt water. The bar of soap has turned into a slab of marble. The only solution that will raise even a modicum of lather is dish-washing detergent and, even then, it takes many applications to cleanse one’s skin of the stinking diesel. Once dry, one wears a patina of salt, a white suit testifying to one’s days at sea. What did Raffles and his wife do before liquid detergent was invented?

An obstacle looms ahead, the 13.5 km Penang Bridge, Asia’s longest. It has been six months since this ship passed under it on its northern journey and there is some doubt its tall masts will clear it at high tide. By this point, we are caught in the magnet of the current drawn to a southern lodestone and it is impossible to turn back. We drift helplessly with bated breaths as we strive to gauge the height of our tall masts against the underbelly of this great serpent. Above us, spectators make mental bets as to whether we can clear. As we come to the point of touching, the spectators cheer and we realize we will make it with several feet to spare.

For a brief moment, the sun breaks free of the clouds, filling the sky with salmon light. At sea, the clouds assume a million shapes and hues; no two sunsets are the same. For the sky watcher, a tropical sky during the monsoons is a daily lesson in the mutability and infinite variety of nature, the play of light and shadow across the great vault of the heavens; a Sistine Chapel with the sun as Michelangelo.

Once darkness has descended, the breeze picks up and blows away the clouds, revealing the stars. Matching the wonder of the daytime sky is the night sky. At sea, and on tall mountains, the firmament is blanketed in white. The Milky Way becomes a snowy band whose brilliance, mirrored in the dark water, is sufficient to guide mariners past islands. On shore, sheets of lightning testify to the ferocity of the storm we have been spared. Their flashes are also the navigator’s friend, for a brief second, illuminating the sea to the horizon and revealing ships and other moving obstacles. Confident we will have a night of calm, we raise the sails.

I throw my mattress on the deckhouse roof, and am lulled to sleep by the gentle roll of the waves and the starry sky with wedges of sail intruding. It is hours before I must stand the 4.00 am watch and I intend to put the time to good use. But the sea is fickle. A few hours later, fat drops of rain splat heavily on me and a new storm breaks.

I take refuge below but a leaky roof ensures it is a wet night inside as well as out. When I am called for my watch, I see that the crew has rigged an awning over the helm, but even so water puddles on the compass face. The wind can be surprisingly cold in a storm. Normally, we wear shorts and are adequately clothed. Now, I don foulweather gear simply to preserve body heat; I’ve long since abandoned the idea of keeping dry.

“The voyage was rough for it is as much as I can do to stand up against all the privations and annoyances of a vessel.” This from Raffles, who was born off Jamaica aboard the 260-tonne Ann, a four-gun West Indiaman slaveship captained by his father. An ambitious man in a region where history was being made at a blinding pace, it must have called him to spend so much time at sea. The sailing journey from Penang to Singapore takes nearly as long today as it did then: nine days. Flying requires two hours. One pictures eager young men pacing decks, impatient at confinement on a ship, spending time in travel which could better be spent in statecraft or business. Today’s businessmen chafe at the idea of 15 wasted hours in a plane from London to Singapore. Raffles’ second journey out from London took four and a half months, without calling at a single port. Imagine four months on what was essentially a cargo ship without any luxurious appointments. (Imagine four and a half months of bathing in salt water.)

Raffles spent two years as Assistant to the Chief Secretary of Penang and so distinguished himself that in 1807, at age 26, he was promoted to Chief Secretary. During this time, he pursued his studies in natural science, working with botanist and close friend, John Lynden, to assemble collections of plant specimens that would lead to later fame as a naturalist. He would also become co-founder and first president of the London Zoo in whose Lion House (appropriate for the founder of the Lion City) his bust rests today. Four years later, Raffles was named Agent to the Governor General in Malay and posted to Malacca. He made his journey through the same waters we now sail.

In the evening, all five sails are bellied out by a strong wind. Our repair of the jib seems to have been a success as the sail takes the full weight of the wind without complaint. We have shifted to 170 degrees as we begin to plane the scimitar curve of the Malay peninsula in a course that will soon take us due south-east.

As we watch the sun give another of its splendid performances before bowing behind a curtain of tall cumulus clouds, we hear the high pitched screech of what sounds like a flock of bats. “Dolphins!”, someone shouts and we all rush the rail. Eight dolphins are cavorting in our bow wake, effortlessly keeping pace, chattering to each other and us. Their sleek bodies reflect the gold of the setting sun as they leap out of the water, often over each other’s backs. In a moment, they veer away to the east and are gone. Dolphins will stay with the ship if it is moving quickly enough. If not, they refuse to slow down and head off by themselves. Apparently we are too slow for them.

Two days later, we enter the Strait of Malacca, the world’s busiest sea lane.

Light falls and few clouds cut the starlight and our visibility. About midnight, we hear an ominous drone and a dozen black power boats, each 15 meters long, loom out of the darkness. They are headed at right angles across our bow and none is carrying lights. Stories of pirates in the Strait immediately spring to mind but how we will counter them is uncertain since we are not carrying weapons. These black wraiths are making no effort to get out of our way and there is grave danger of a collision.

We shine torches on our sails to show our position and size. We call to them to get out of the way as, with all sails up, we lack their manoeuvrability. Their answer is laughter. Laughter from a void is frightening and only heightens our anxiety. But they are not stopping nor are they turning to parallel us preparatory to boarding.

But neither are they veering away. One passes our bow only seconds before we would have sliced it in half, likely sinking both of us. As they move on, trailing laughter across the night, we realize, first with relief, then with anger, that it is a fleet of fishing boats on its way to the fishing grounds, their lights doused for visibility. Or invisibility. To sneak up on the fish?

It is a long time before our heartbeats return to normal. At that moment, a luxury liner passes at a distance, blazing with lights. It’s entire power output must go into illuminating this floating chandelier. It is a class or two above us and, more than likely, above Raffles’ ship.

With the dawn comes a Turneresque sunrise. The sea lanes off starboard are beginning to fill with behemoths laden with oil or cargo containers. Operated by small crews utilizing a computerized navigation system, their captains often have tunnel vision, aware of nothing around them. There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, of tankers arriving in port and their captains being questioned about the masts wedged in their anchor chains. “What mast?”, the captains ask. Apocryphal the stories may be, but we will give them wide berth.

We drop anchor off Malacca and ride the dinghy from the blue waters of the sea into the thick brown waters of the river swollen by the previous night’s storm. Passing Glutton’s Corner, we dock at the Imigrasi office, check out of Malaysia, report to the harbourmaster and set off to get supplies and see some of the sights.

Raffles came here in 1810 to assume his new post. It was only 15 years after the British had taken over the town from its Dutch ally founders, to keep it from falling into French hands. The city then was confined to the tulip Hollanders from the heart of Haarlam to this bleak outpost on the southern bank of the Malacca River.

But Raffles had little time to tarry. As the East India Company agent, he left almost immediately for Java on a British mission to oust the French. His principal contribution to Malacca was to come later when he officially acquired it for Britain by giving Bencoolen in Sumatra to Holland thereby drawing a line between the Dutch and English spheres of influence and, in the process, ensuring the existence of Singapore as a British possession.

Raffles’ mission in Java was accomplished with relative ease. For his work, he was appointed Java’s new lieutenant-governor. One of his first acts was to free all slaves, thereby horrifying the colonial administrators but endearing him with the populace. The new position took five years of Raffles’ life and all of Olivia’s. He held it from September 1811 to March 1816; Olivia died of illness here on November 26, 1814 at the age of 43, childless and far from the comforts of home.

Replenished with supplies, we move from the muddy waters of the Malacca River to the blue of the sea and, turning towards the ship roads, follow a silver road lit by the glare of an afternoon sun.

One of the crew members is down with tonsillitis. There is an old sailor’s belief that if one comes on board a ship healthy, he will stay healthy because there are no germs at sea to infect him. Raffles may well have wished he had lived entirely at sea. Although today, the Malaysian coast looks benign, in his day, there were pestilential mangrove swamps in whose depths death buzzed or hummed ominously.

Life was so fragile it is with wonder that we look upon these 19th century colonists who, knowing full well the dangers, chose careers in the East. It is one thing for a government to impose a police of colonization; it is quite another for an individual to enter service from his safe shores in the full knowledge that disease may end his life. Raffles’ friend, John Leyden, died at age 36. Olivia died at age 43. Raffles would marry a second wife, Sophia, and settle in Bencoolen on Sumatra’s west coast where tragically, his first three children, at ages 4, 2½ and 1½ would die over a period of six months. Raffles himself would die of a brain abcess at age 44, weakened by the accumulated ravages of diseases contracted over the years.

After the storms of the previous nights, the night is gentle. A sliver of moon sketches a broad road across the waves, so bright it is possible to see other crew members’ faces. There is a soft breeze but no hint of a storm, not even the ever-present lighting. Standing on the bow, one can feel the ship gently surging through the water. When the moon drops below the horizon, the ship’s wake before and after glows with phosphorescent plankton, the nautical, tropical equivalent of the aurora borealis, and no less entrancing.

In 1818, Raffles was asked to find an island the southern end of the Malacca Strait where Britain could control trade between Calcutta and Canton. It was proposed that Rhio, 20 miles south of present-day Johore Bharu, be adopted. Marco Polo stopped there in 1284 on his journey homeward from the courts of Kublai Khan.

Unfortunately, before the British could make a move, the Dutch got wind of the plan and fearing that its hegemony in the area could be threatened, quickly moved in to occupy the island. Raffles then chose Singapore, arriving on its sandy beach on 29 January 1819.

Singapore had little to recommend it. Forty-two by 22 kilometres and separated from Jahore by a half-kilometre strait, it was flat with few knolls, swampy, densely jungled and sparsely populated. At that time, succession to the recently-deceased Sultan of Johore’s throne was disputed by one son backed by the Dutch residing in Rhio and a second son, backed by no one, in Johore. Raffles cut the Gordian Knot by installing the second son on the throne, promising him British protection and 5,000 Spanish dollars as rent for Singapore.

Knowing the Dutch were sure to protest and perhaps to attack, Raffles moved quickly to fortify the island, and act which would anger his East India Company Superiors who were fearful of risking a war with Holland. Within the space of a week, Raffles constructed Fort Canning on rising ground behind a small village and installed 12 ship cannons atop it. On 6 February 1819, he formally installed the new Sultan and raised the Union Jack over what he decreed to be British territory. At the dedication ceremony, he declared that Singapore would be a free port with no levy of customs duties.
Three years later, he and Sophia retuned from Bencoolen to a Singapore that had changed even more radically. It was now inhabited by 10,000 people of all races and 2,839 vessels had entered and cleared its port. In 1822, it recorded a turnover of 8,568 million dollars, more than Penang and Malacca combined, forever establishing its dominance and vindicating Raffles for his rash action in securing it for the British. Raffles would have been stunned had he been in our bows. For over and hour we have been threading our way among some of the world’s largest ships, moored just out of the seaway as they are unloaded. Those areas not taken by anchored vessels are occupied by oil derricks. And as yet we have not entered the main harbour nor can we see the skyscrapers of the city itself.

We move down the seaway, turning the corner and heading along the channel between Singapore and Sentosa islands. Ours is not destined to be a smooth entry. On the final leg, we’ve been hit by three small squalls in quick succession and have had to scramble to stow everything and don foulweather gear. Scudding clouds trailing sheets of grey rain are obscuring the horizon but even then we can see that ships of every type and size are filling the roads of the world’s largest port. We are a mere moth among these behemoths.

In 1823 Raffles wrote to a friend regarding the prospects for the new city: “I had everything to new-mould from first to least… looking a century or two ahead so as to provide for what Singapore may one day become: [a great commercial port and]… the only place in Asia where slavery can not exist….and as the cultural centre of the Malay race.”

Singapore showed its appreciation on 5 June 1823. In a public ceremony, the new governor, Sir John Crawfurd, presented Raffles with a silver tube containing an address signed by leaders of the Chinese, European, and Malay merchant community. It was due, it said “to your unwearied zeal, your vigilance, and your comprehensive views we owe at once the foundations and the maintenance of a Settlement…” But once back in England, Raffles found that the acclaim showered on him in Singapore was not shared by his employers. Though he was knighted, the directors of the East India Company had not forgiven him for his brinkmanship that could have plunged England into war with Holland.

In their niggardliness, they gathered receipts for all the advances Sir Stamford had signed to finance Company ventures and demanded that they be repaid in full. They were never to get the satisfaction of seeing him humbled for he died one day short of his 45th birthday. That did not stop them from demanding that his widow pay the amount in full from the estate. To add insult to injury, Raffles, an agnostic, was given church burial but denied a headstone by the vicar who, it was said, had holdings in plantations worked by slaves and who treated with chilly disdain the man who advocated abolishing slavery.

Appalled by the shoddy treatment given by Raffles, his friends in 1832 erected a statue of him in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey that stands today. Singapore honoured him with two statues, one that surveys the city from in Front of the Victoria Concert Hall, and a second on the bank of the Singapore River.

Like Raffles’ journey, ours is finished. Preparatory to checking into Immigration and Customs, we drop anchor at Finger Pier under the towering monoliths of this stupendous city. We marvel at the skyline, testament to an energy that matched Raffles’ own in creating it.

But our reveries are cut short by a stiff cold wind that signals another storm approaching. We have other things to tend to, our own city to secure.