Major Farquhar built a residency close to the edge of the east beach, a few hundred yards from the river. It was a humble affair with a bamboo frame, an attap roof and matting sides, although it was raised upon high pillars of brick, and contained an office, a bedroom, and a strong room with a military guard. Farquhar’s residency stood at the bottom of High Street, the road of beaten earth and sand that Lieutenant Ralfe had laid out between the shore and the foot of Bukit Larangan, on the eastern[1] side of the river.
As chief engineer, Ralfe continued to work like a man possessed. He remained in charge of the gun emplacements, the guards and the sentries, but he also supervised the laying out of the streets and the building of warehouses and temporary government offices. He constructed a masonry reservoir at the western end of Hill Street, which he had laid to make a T-junction with High Street, where it met the river at the foot of Bukit Larangan. A pipe ran out from the reservoir into the river, so that boats from the ships in the harbour could fill their empty barrels with fresh water. The reservoir was served by an aqueduct that Ralfe had built around the back of Bukit Larangan, which was fed by the stream that ran down from its summit, where the wives and concubines of the ancient rajahs of Singapura had bathed.
* * *
Mr Samuel Garland, the acting first assistant, had his work cut out for him. He was in charge of the commissariat, which provided the rations for the troops, and the Company’s warehouse, where its trading goods were stored. When the flotilla had first arrived, he had been forced to have most of the supplies from the Ganges unloaded on the beach, so that the ship could be winched into the shelter of the river, where it served as temporary commissariat and Company warehouse. But the flour had spoiled in the sun and rain, the rice and dahl had to be stored in a temporary shed, and most of the barrels had spilt their contents onto the beach. Even when everything was loaded back on board the Ganges, confusion reigned. The sergeant responsible for collecting and distributing the supplies to the soldiers could not read, and Garland had no weights or measures to record his inventory or estimate his disbursements, even though he was supposed to account to Bencoolen for every item. Soldiers who went directly to draw their stores from the deep holds of the ship created havoc as they spilt vinegar, oil and tamarind, which ran into the sugar, biscuits and tobacco.
Things began to improve when the stores were finally transported from the Ganges to the commissariat storehouse and general warehouse that had been built next to the residency, and finally, one day in late March, the Company’s goods were put on display for the merchants who had come to Singapore from Malacca, Penang and the neighbouring islands. The trade goods had been rushed down from Penang with the flotilla, and they were a sorry sight: a load of old and rusted iron, leaking barrels of pitch and paint, bails of cotton goods half-eaten by cockroaches and damp and moldy piles of sail canvas. Not the most auspicious start to the greatest emporium of the east, thought Garland to himself.
The merchants and the market traders from the bazaar on the plain wandered through the warehouse all morning. Most wandered right out again, some shaking their heads in disbelief. But around one o’clock Mr Garland had an offer. He was not very happy about it, however, and went off to ask Major Farquhar his advice, leaving the writer in charge of the store. He was not concerned about possible theft. ‘Who is going to steal this stuff?’ he thought to himself.
‘Major Farquhar, sir, I’ve got a Chinaman named Keat says he wants to buy two hundred and fifty hundredweight of that old iron. I’ll be glad to be rid of it, but he’s asking for three months credit.’
‘I dinna think that’s such a good idea, do you, Mr Garland? Remembering as how ye’ll hae to answer to Raffles’ secretary when he comes back to take on your job.’
‘I know,’ Garland replied, ‘but there’s an older Chinese merchant who looks very respectable and says he’ll stand surety for Keat, name of Tan Che Sang.’
‘Tan Che Sang, you say,’ Farquhar exclaimed, ‘well that’s a different matter altogether! I kent the auld fella back in Malacca, and hoped he would come down. Ye can trust him all right; he’ll be good for the loan and a lot more. I’ll come back with ye and say hullo.’
As they entered the warehouse, a Chinese merchant in a long black gown shuffled towards them, his hands folded into his sleeves. His black hair was flecked with grey, and drawn back tightly into his queue, which stretched down the length of his back. He was in his late fifties, and his body was bent, but he held his head high and proud, and his dark eyes flashed with warm recognition. He bowed to Major Farquhar, who greeted him warmly, and the two men discussed the prospects for the new settlement. Tan Che Sang joked that Raffles would need to do a lot better than these leftovers from Penang to start a commercial trading centre to rival Malacca and Batavia. Farquhar replied that many Chinese merchants had already come down from Malacca and were beginning to fill their own temporary godowns, and that he was expecting private European merchants and agents for some of the British and Indian companies soon. Tan Che Sang told Farquhar that he was setting up his own and was planning to act as a consignment agent for the junks that would come down from China in the new year on the northeast monsoon. Both men were pleased at what they heard.
* * *
Tan Che Sang was born in Canton,[2] the capital of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, in 1763. He left home at the age of fifteen, and made his fortune trading in Riau, Penang, and then Malacca, during the period that Farquhar was resident there. When he heard that Farquhar had been appointed resident of the new British factory at Singapore, he had sold his godown in Malacca, and arranged for most of his goods to be shipped down to Singapore. When he set sail from Singapore, he shared a berth with Lim Guan Chye, another Malacca merchant who had sold up and shipped his goods south.
Lim Guan Chye was a wealthy Hokkien merchant who had taken a Malay bride. He was a Peranakan or Straits Chinese, a member of the Chinese community that had been in Malaya since the fifteenth century, and which was well integrated with Malay society.[3] The Peranakans maintained the dress and beliefs of traditional Chinese, but absorbed many aspects of Malay culture. They spoke a distinctive Peranakan patois, which was a mixture of Hokkien, Malay, and a smattering of English words drawn from business and commerce. They also developed a distinctive cuisine, which combined Chinese ingredients such as rice, noodles, and stir-fried dishes with Malay staples such as coconut milk, green chillies, lime and lemon grass. Given their established links with the Malay community and the good relations they had developed with the British in Malacca and Penang, they were ideally situated to mediate commercial relations between the Chinese, British and Malay communities in Singapore, and many seized the opportunity to reestablish themselves in the new free port governed by the former Rajah of Malacca, whose generosity and fairness were legendary. Many other Peranakans followed Tan Che Sang down from Malacca to Singapore, dodging the gunboat that the Dutch authorities had stationed in the Malacca Strait to discourage immigration.
On the same boat on which Tan Che Sang and Lim Guan Chye travelled was Tan Hong Chuan, another Hokkien born in Malacca. Hong Chuan’s parents had emigrated from China at the beginning of the century, but both had died of smallpox when the boy was only eight years old. A local Chinese merchant had let him work in his shop-house, and allowed him to sleep in the storehouse at the back of the shop. With the little money he had saved, he had set himself up at age fifteen as a hawker of poultry, fruit and vegetables; now at age twenty, he had his own roadside stall, which was doing good business. From an early age he had recognized Malaya as a land of great opportunity, where a clever and hard-working man like himself might make a lot of money. Having heard the stories about the thriving new settlement at Singapore, he had decided that this was the place he ought to be. He sold off his remaining stock, packed up his street-hawking pole and baskets, and bought himself passage to Singapore.
The boat on which the three men had travelled managed to elude the Dutch gunboat, and they reached Singapore in safety. Others were not so lucky. A party of forty Malaccan Malays in a prahu transporting supplies to Singapore managed to avoid the gunboat, but they were surrounded by pirates in the strait, and slaughtered to the last man. The women and children were taken away and sold in the slave market at Bultmgan in north Borneo.
* * *
It was time, Farquhar decided, to explore Bukit Larangan. He organized a party of Malay men who had come down with him from Malacca, and whom he could trust to do his bidding. He sent a message to the temenggong asking him if he could send some of his followers to clear the trees and undergrowth, and to help his men drag one of the ten-pound guns up the hill. The temenggong politely replied that he regretted that he could not, because his men were afraid of the ghosts that walked upon the hill and beat upon their drums.
When Farquhar heard this, he roared with laughter. ‘I wid like tae see these ghosts! I’m no afraid of bogey-men!’
He tried to enlist the orang laut and the local Malay fishermen, including the quiet giant of a man who lived with his Chinese wife in a cottage close by the sepoy cantonment. They all refused. They all feared the ghosts, and the sounds of war and lamentation they said could be heard at night, and sometimes even during the day. Shaking his head, Farquhar ordered his Malacca men to cut through the undergrowth and drag the ten-pounder up the hill. They did not refuse him, but obeyed with great reluctance. About halfway up the hill the advance party came upon an abandoned keramat, and immediately downed their parangs and axes. When Farquhar came up to investigate the delay, they told him they had disturbed a royal tomb. Some said it was the tomb of Iskander Shah, the last rajah of ancient Singapura, and founder of Malacca. This surely proved that ordinary men were forbidden to walk upon the hill, and that an evil fate would befall them if they continued to offend the ghosts of the dead.
Farquhar was patient but persuasive. He promised them that the tomb would be respected and not disturbed, but insisted that they keep clearing the hill. He had them cut a path all the way from the plain to the summit of the hill, where he planned to build a small fort. When the work was completed, he had the gun hauled to the summit, and a flagpole erected. When Lieutenant Ralfe arrived with a party of gunners, he gave orders for the Union Jack to be raised, and the cannon fired twelve times.
‘That should scare off any ghosts!’ Farquhar declared, satisfied with his day’s work. He then instructed Ralfe to begin laying a road from the cantonment to the summit of Bukit Larangan.
The cannon fire seemed to have the desired effect, at least for the moment. The fear of Bukit Larangan was dispelled, and even the orang laut and the local Malay fishermen were sometimes seen to walk upon it. Some brought flowers to the keramat, and decorated it with yellow ribbons, the colour of Malay royalty. But others still maintained that they could sometimes hear the din of ghostly battles, and stayed away.