To the east lay miles and miles of sandy beach, sparkling sheer white against the dark green of the jungle, and to the west lay mangrove swamps. The Indiana headed for a point in between, where James Pearl, the captain, had been told there was a river hidden behind a jutting strip of headland. The longboat was lowered and Raffles climbed down into it.
He was thirty-eight years old, still fresh-faced despite his past troubles and recurrent ill-health, a short but upright man whose bright eyes shone with a fierce intensity of purpose. He was dressed formally in clerical black, as if he were about to visit the offices of the East India Company[1] in Leadenhall Street.
Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles,[2] a servant of the East India Company, was Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen and former Lieutenant-Governor of Java. The man he had come to see was Temenggong Abdul Rahman, the hereditary prime minister of the Johor-Riau-Lingga Sultanate, who lived on the island with his followers.
Both men spoke for absent masters, and beneath the long shadow of the powerful Dutch merchants and their soldiers and ships that dominated most of the Eastern Archipelago. But Raffles and the temenggong were about to make history.
Lord Hastings, the Governor-General of India, had authorized Raffles to explore the possibility of establishing an East India Company base near the southern tip of the Malayan peninsula. This was to prevent the Dutch from gaining monopoly control of the Strait of Malacca, now that Malacca and other ports administered by the Company had been returned to the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic wars. The British needed a southern port to service their ships trading between India and China––the recently established British settlement in Penang was too far north to serve that purpose. Raffles had come down from Penang with a small fleet of ships––both armed cruisers and survey vessels––with a view to establishing a Company factory[3] on the Carimon islands. However, Captain Ross, who commanded the survey ship Discovery, had declared that the Carimon islands were unsuitable, given the lack of a deep-water harbour. Raffles had then ordered the fleet to Johor, which he had intended to explore if the Dutch had not already occupied it.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of the following day, the ships anchored off Pulau Sakijang Bendera,[4] a few miles south of the island of Singapore. When some local Malays came out that evening in their prahus to sell them fish and turtles, Raffles learned that Temenggong Abdul Rahman was resident on the island. He had resolved to visit him the next day.
From the verandah of his lodge, Temenggong Abdul Rahman watched the small fleet drop anchor off Pulau Sakijang Bendera. He’d been greatly relieved to recognize the distinctive black and yellow square-riggers of the East India Company. He had feared that they were Dutch ships come to drive him from the island. Temenggong Abdul Rahman ruled Singapore and Johor in the name of the sultan, but was less sure than Raffles who his master was.
When the old Sultan Mahmud Shah had died in 1812, Abdul Rahman had supported the claim of Mahmud Shah’s oldest son, his own son-in-law Tengku Long, whom Mahmud Shah had designated as his rightful heir. But the Dutch had moved in with their residents and soldiers and supported the claim of his younger son Tengku Abdul Rahman, a delicate boy who spent most of his time in religious devotion. In return the Dutch had been awarded exclusive rights to set up factories throughout the islands of the Johor-Riau-Lingga Sultanate, including the island of Singapore.[5] Temenggong Abdul Rahman had been forced to quit the royal court at Lingga, and remove himself and his followers to Singapore. There he had lived a peaceful existence for the past few years, spending his days in study and prayer, and adjudicating the minor disputes between his followers.
The temenggong derived a modest income from leasing out large acreages in the jungle to the Chinese gambier[6] and pepper farmers, but had known that it would all come to an end if the Dutch came to take over the island.
Major William Farquhar,[7] the former Resident of Malacca, had been preparing to return to his native Scotland on leave when Raffles had met with him in Penang and asked Farquhar to join him in his search for a site suitable for a southern factory. Farquhar had agreed when Raffles had told him that the Governor-General of India had authorized him to appoint Farquhar as resident for any new factory that they established. At the moment, Farquhar’s role was to introduce Raffles to Temenggong Abdul Rahman the following day.
Farquhar was forty-eight years old when he stepped down into the longboat to join Raffles. He was tall and erect in his military bearing, with a bald pate and thick flowing white hair and side-whiskers. That day he wore his dress uniform as major in the Madras Engineers: a bright red tunic with golden braid and epaulettes.
Raffles and Farquhar had known each other for many years.They had much in common. Both spoke fluent Malay and had a deep interest in the language, history and culture of the region. Like Raffles, Farquhar was an avid naturalist, who made a number of significant discoveries of new species, and corresponded with botanists and zoologists in Europe. He had kept a veritable menagerie in Malacca, which included monkeys and birds, and a tame leopard and tiger. And like Raffles, Farquhar was concerned to promote British interests in the region. In other ways the two men were quite different. Raffles was an Englishman full of enlightenment zeal, who dreamed of bringing the blessings of civilization and free trade to the Malay peoples. Farquhar was a more pragmatic Scot.
That morning they were joined in the longboat by another pragmatic Scot, Ronnie Simpson, the captain of the merchant ship the Highland Lassie. Ronnie had served in the Royal Navy, but had left after the War of 1812, and joined the merchant marine of the East India Company as captain of his own ship. With his savings and navy prize money, he had put down a substantial deposit on his own vessel, and he and his father planned to begin trading between Calcutta and Penang, hoping to be able to pay off the Highland Lassie with the profits from their first year.
Ronnie was tough and lean, with a muscular frame and angular features. He had curly brown hair, which he tried to keep under control beneath his old-fashioned tricorn hat, with long pointed sideburns and sharp blue eyes. Ronnie had a modicum of ambition––to own his own vessel, to make a success of his trading business with his father, and to find himself a wife and live in the Far East. He had wanted to spend his life in the Far East since as long as he could remember, or at least since his mother had read him stories from a book about the Spice Islands. He wanted to live among the palm trees and frangipani, and to say goodbye forever to the frigid winters––and summers––of Ardersier, the village on the Moray Firth where when he had been born. He was proud of his Scottish heritage, but having spent part of his naval service liberating French possessions in the Caribbean and the Maldives, he could never understand why any man with the opportunity to live where the sun shone bright and warm all year long would chose to live in any place where it did not. He did recognize that his desire to live in the Far East conflicted with his desire to find himself a wife, for he knew that women, or at least white women, were very thin on the ground, even in a British settlement such as Penang. He supposed he would be content with some dark-haired Malay, or perhaps an exotic Chinese, although he had recently learned that they were also thin on the ground, at least in Penang. Still, what’s for me won’t go by me, he thought to himself, remembering his mother’s old saying.
He had had very little education in the one-room village school in Ardersier, but sufficient for him to read and write. He also had a good head for figures, which was useful for his business, and possessed a natural gift for languages. He had picked up the old Gaelic language from a fisherwoman in Ardersier as a child, and the languages of the French and Spanish prisoners taken after successful naval engagements. Since arriving in Penang some weeks before, he had already mastered the rudiments of Malay, the lingua franca of the British settlement.
Ronnie had been in Penang trying to rent some space in a merchant godown,[8] before returning to Calcutta to pick up his father, who was on his way out from Scotland. Before returning to his ship one evening, he had dropped by a hostelry on the waterfront, where he had met and shared a few drinks with another trader, Captain James Pearl of the Indiana. When Ronnie began asking him questions about Penang, Captain Pearl told him there might be better prospects further south, and that he was taking Sir Stamford Raffles out the following evening to meet up with Colonel Farquhar and a small fleet of armed cruisers and survey vessels. He was sure that Sir Stamford would not mind him coming along, since he was just the sort of merchant adventurer that Raffles wanted to attract to his new settlement.
Ronnie had followed the ships out of Penang the following evening. When they rendezvoused at the Carimon islands, Ronnie had been introduced to Raffles, who welcomed him to their company. He had followed the ships down to Johor, where they anchored off Pulau Sakijang Bendera. When he visited Captain Pearl aboard the Indiana that evening, Raffles invited Ronnie to join him and Colonel Farquhar when they visited Temenggong Abdul Rahman on the island of Singapore the following day. Ronnie was twenty-seven years old when he joined Raffles and Farquhar in the longboat. He wore an old-fashioned black frockcoat and his tricorn hat, but thought he looked no more absurd than Raffles in his clerical black. He looked out across the bay to the shimmering silver sands of the island of Singapore, and licked his lips in anticipation. Ronnie Simpson knew he had made the right decision when he joined this expedition. He could feel it in his bones. He could almost taste it in the sweet salty breeze blowing from the island.
It was the twenty-ninth of January 1819.
The sale of these spices brought huge profits to those captains willing to risk the passage round Cape Horn and across the Indian Ocean. On Pulo Run, one of the tiny Bata Islands at the eastern tip of the Malay Archipelago, where the Company’s ships anchored in 1603, ten pounds of nutmeg could be purchased for less than half a penny; back in Europe, the same amount could be sold for over one and a half pounds sterling—a fabulous profit of nearly 32,000 per cent! Over the years the Company established factories around the world as depots where their goods could be unloaded and exchanged. The officers—or factors––in charge of these depots found that their trade frequently developed into land acquisition, which in turn led them into inevitable wars with local populations and competing trading powers such as France, Portugal and Holland. In this fashion the East India Company and its paid armies came to dominate and control most of the sub-continent of India, administered by a governor-general in Calcutta, which was itself a new city that had been created as an administrative centre for the Company. ↵
For eight years Raffles worked to master the intricacies of the Company’s operations and bureaucracy, in the hope of one day being able to make his fortune in India, which was now the centre of the Company’s trade. His diligence earned him promotion and a modest increase in salary. Then he met and fell in love with Olivia Marianne Fancourt, a widow recently returned from Madras, and the daughter of an Irish father who had disgraced his family by marrying a Russian Circassian Muslim while serving in India. Raffles had begged William Ramsay, the First Secretary of the East India Company, to secure him a position in India so that he could afford to marry. Ramsay could not do so, but had offered him a position as assistant secretary to the Governor of Penang Island, on the Malayan Peninsula. Raffles had accepted the position, and he and Olivia had married soon afterwards. On the six-month voyage out, Raffles learned the Malay language with the help of some Malay sailors on board.
Raffles quickly established his reputation as an able administrator, earning him promotion to the rank of Chief Secretary to the Governor. Raffles took part in the invasion of Java in 1811, led by Lord Minto, then Governor-General of India. For his services he was appointed Lieutenant-General of Java, where he tried to institute a wide range of reforms inspired by his enlightenment ideals and progressive economic theories. He was recalled from his position in 1818 after being accused of financial mismanagement and corruption, although he was later cleared of the latter charge. ↵
During the British invasion of Java in 1811, Farquhar served as chief coordinator of guides and intelligence. For his services he was promoted to the rank of major and offered the Residency of Yogyakarta in southwest Java, but he turned it down in order to return to Malacca. He was married to Nonio Clement, a French-Malay beauty who gave him six children.
While he was still the British Resident in Malacca, Major Farquhar had gone to Lingga to negotiate with Muda Rajah Ja’afar, and had secured his permission to explore the potential of the Riau islands for a British factory. However, Muda Rajah Ja’afar had also intrigued with the Dutch, who in return for acknowledging Abdul Rahman as the legitimate heir had secured exclusive rights to set up factories throughout the Johor-Riau-Lingga Sultanate. They had nullified Farquhar’s agreement by sending in their own Resident and troops to Riau, and laid claim to all the islands of the Johor-Riau-Lingga group, including the island of Singapore. ↵