Earlier, in June 1831, Abdul Said, the Penghulu of Naning, had prepared to defend his small Muslim state against a British military expedition. Naning, with a population of barely 5,000, lay inland from the port of Malacca and had long enjoyed a treaty relationship with representatives of the Dutch Empire at that city. The Dutch and the British had argued about Malacca over the years, but in 1824 Britain was permitted to add it to the Empire - it joined Penang, acquired in 1786, and Singapore, occupied in 1819. Together, these small but strategically significant territories became known as the Straits Settlements.
A question mark hovered over Malacca’s hinterland of Naning, although the British assumed that an arrangement with the Penghulu, similar to the one he had had with the Dutch, would continue under their rule. The Penghulu had previously channelled his state’s tin production through Malacca, for which he had paid the Dutch a peppercorn transit tax. Now he was expected to pay the British, and this he refused to do.
He was soon faced with a military expedition prepared by Robert Fullerton, governor of Malacca, and made up from sepoys employed by the East India Company and a few locally recruited porters. The expedition’s British officers thought the march from Malacca to the Penghulu’s capital at Taboh would be a ‘picnic’, and they pictured the welcome they would receive from the Naning peasants, thought to be hoping for liberation from the alleged oppression of the Penghulu.
This was not so. The Penghulu was a popular ruler, believed by his subjects to have supernatural powers. The peasants showed no sign of welcoming the invading army; indeed they fled at the sight of it. Village leaders refused to provide messengers or porters to the advancing troops who came with fire and the sword. Lieutenant Peter Begbie, one of the participants, wrote of ‘the unsparing manner in which house after house had been subjected to the flames’, a measure ‘more calculated to exasperate, than conciliate, the population’.1
Morale was low among the sepoys, wrote Constance Turnbull in her history of the war, and even worse among the camp followers: ‘The porters took to wearing white flowers in their hair as a secret sign to the Naningites that they were friendly towards them, and gradually they slipped off into the jungle.’2 The British faced further trouble when their supply boats tried to move upriver. The channel was too shallow; the boats were obliged to return to Malacca.
When the sepoys came within striking distance of the capital at Taboh, only a handful of porters remained. The officers abandoned the campaign and began a humiliating retreat. The Penghulu’s soldiers retreated into the jungle to wage a guerrilla war, and Begbie described how they evaporated whenever the British approached and ‘poured unseen shots upon them from the jungle’. To block the road back to Malacca, they cut down trees across the track; guns and heavy baggage had to be left behind. Returning eventually to Malacca, the British found the town fearful of attack, with the inhabitants polishing rusty swords behind closed doors.
A year later, in March 1832, the defenders of the Penghulu at Taboh faced a second, better-planned expedition. A fresh sepoy regiment was brought in from Madras, with two companies of sappers and miners and some additional European help. Two British naval officers, Lieutenant Henry Keppel in HMS Magicienne and Captain Stanley Congalton in HMS Zephyr, were charged with blockading the river Lingy to prevent the Penghulu receiving reinforcements.3 Two months were spent in building twelve miles of military road through the jungle, eighty yards wide.
The Naningites harassed the road-builders and killed two officers, but victory eluded them. Taboh was captured by the British in June, although, as Turnbull notes caustically, ‘it had taken two campaigns with an army of some 1,200 to 1,400 men and an expenditure of ?100,000 to capture this miserable disease-ridden village of some thirty houses’
Abdul Said fled before the advancing army and surrendered in February 1834. He was eventually enticed to Malacca and provided with a house, an orchard, and a pension.4 He retained his reputation as a healer, and died there in 1849.
At the end of May 1836, three large prahus (boats) manned by sailors from the Arroa islands, off the coast of Sumatra, came under attack from a British war party sent out from HMS Andromache, commanded by Captain Henry Chads. ‘Refusing all quarter, and even using their arms in the water, [they] were destroyed, excepting a few that reached the island’, wrote Montagu Burrows, a young midshipman on board the Andromache.5 More than a hundred of those on the prahus were killed.
Another witness, Lieutenant Colin Mackenzie, described the encounter in a letter to his wife:
The whole crew having in their desperation jumped into the sea, the work of slaughter began, with muskets, pikes, pistols, and cutlasses. I sickened at the sight, but it was dire necessity. They asked for no quarter, and received none; but the expression of despair on some of their faces, as, exhausted with diving and swimming, they turned them up towards us merely to receive the death-shot or thrust, froze my blood. . . The most pitiable circumstance of the whole was that two male children were killed by our fire.6
These off-shore peoples that British sailors disturbed that day had lived on the waters of the great archipelago south of Singapore for centuries. Sometimes they were described as ‘sea gypsies’, but the British called them ‘pirates’. They lived off the taxes they collected from passing ships, some operating independently, others provided with a licence to operate by the sultan of Johore, or other minor sultans controlling limited stretches of coastline.7
Their way of life and their means of sustenance, historically legitimated, involved exacting tolls from the passing trade. They ‘had been taught by long immunity to regard themselves as employed in a perfectly legitimate calling’, noted Burrows. They lived on and by the sea, and they certainly did not perceive it as a free channel through which anyone could pass at will. They saw it as a marine territory that they, as a nation, were fully entitled to possess and exploit. ‘The scanty literature’ of their nation, wrote Peter Begbie, another contemporary observer, ‘turns wholly upon. . . the exploits of some noted pirate of either ancient or more modern times, forming the theme of their legends or romances.’ The crew of their boats would be ‘nerved by songs of a similar description as they pull their long oar in chase of the trading boat, which passes their lurking place.’8
Their prahus were impressive constructions, designed to be fast and manoeuvrable. Usually over fifty feet long and fifteen wide, they were double-banked with thirty-six oars, eighteen on either side. Simply rigged, with two sails, they could carry as many as six brass guns. The boats served as the semipermanent homes of the crew, as well as a kind of customs control mechanism. Entire families often lived on board, sometimes accompanied by a Muslim priest. Mackenzie told his wife of the books and papers he had found, including ‘scraps of the Koran, love-letters, charms, accounts, and Malay poetry recounting the heroic exploits of the pirates of former times’. These, he explained, were ‘a sort of poetical history of the Malay islands and peninsula, proving that piracy is esteemed among that race quite as laudable a mode of obtaining a livelihood as it formerly was among more northern nations’.
Yet, however much British officers might honour the similarity between a Malay pirate nation and the Vikings of their own tradition, this age-old activity clashed with the trading ambitions of the British Empire and its need to have free seas on which to sail. ‘Piracy’, however defined, would have to be stopped, and the ‘sea gypsies’ would have to be killed, at whatever cost.
The participant-observers on the Andromache could not fail to notice that they were often obliged to fire indiscriminately on men, women and children.
‘There is an unpleasant circumstance connected with our pursuit of these Malays, Mackenzie explained to his wife. Since it was difficult to discover whether an individual prahu was a pirate ship, the sailors took no chances. Their practice was to force the crew of suspect prahus out of their boats and into the water, and there they would be slaughtered. These were Chads’ orders, according to Burrows, and sailors were forbidden to board the prahus. ‘They were to be conquered by our guns and muskets, and destroyed like vermin’ noted Burrows, though adding with some relief that these ‘ghastly orders’ did not apply ‘to nonresisting captives taken on shore’.
The mission of HMS Andromache was to exterminate the ‘pirates’ who lived on and around the Strait of Malacca, offshore from Singapore - a task perceived as an unavoidable necessity. ‘Nothing but the most rigorous measures. . . will tend to check the evil’, wrote a contemporary traveller through these seas, ‘even to the utter annihilation of those who may be caught in the act.’9 Captain Chads, formerly one of Nelson’s sailors, had commanded the naval expedition up the Irrawaddy River during the Burmese War of 1824. An observing Christian, he spent part of each morning and evening in Bible study and prayer.
Chads and George Bonham, the governor of Singapore, had been charged by the British authorities in India to crush the sea rebels operating in the waters around the town, and they set sail together. Chads was to deal with naval matters, while Bonham was involved in onshore politics, signing treaties of cooperation with minor Malay chiefs, and checking on the secret activities of Temenggong Ibrahim of Singapore, who had been favoured with a treaty relationship.
Before sailing from Singapore, Chads had issued a ‘proclamation’ informing all Malay chiefs that a British system of licences would operate in future on their seas, enabling all trading vessels to be readily identified. Boats without a British pass would be treated as ‘pirate’ vessels. The old system, whereby the local rajahs issued licences to the prahu operators, was now under threat.
The Andromache sailed down to Singapore from Madras to give support to two other British ships already working in the area: one of them, HMS Wolf, under Captain Edward Stanley, had already rendered ‘useful assistance’ to the military during Maqoma’s Xhosa rebellion in Cape Colony in 1835 (see Chapter 44 following); the other, HMS Zephyr, was commanded by Samuel Congalton, another veteran of the Burmese War and of the campaign against the Penghulu of Naning in 1831. HMS Wolf had been engaged in the task of exterminating ‘pirates’ before the arrival of the Andromache, as Mackenzie explained to his wife: ‘She had had a good deal of boat fighting with the pirates, and contrived to slay a good number without any loss.’
The previous year, in March 1835, a large group of eighteen prahus, with a total of 700 people on board, had been attacked off the Dinding Islands by the Wolf and the Zephyr. Lieutenant Henry James on the Wolf noted in his diary that ‘the grape and musket shot fired from the pinnace must have killed many. . . Captain Congalton says that they have not had such a thrashing for years.’10
Part of the reason for the excessive violence lay in the fact that the British found it difficult to arrange a trial for captured pirates, let alone to secure a conviction. There was no Admiralty Court in Singapore capable of dealing with captured naval prisoners, and captured ‘pirates’ had to be sent on to Madras. Commanders often took the law into their hands. Lieutenant James noted the action of a boat commander of HMS Wolf who, knowing ‘he would not get them punished if he took them to the Government. . . coolly put stones about them and drowned them’1 2 Congalton of the Zephyr, wrote James, ‘always kills all, and his Malay crew glory in it’. Killing ‘pirates’ was easy money. Since 1825 the British had operated a bounty system. Anyone on board a ship sent on extermination duty received ?20 for every ‘pirate’ destroyed, whether captured or killed.
After its action off the Aru islands, HMS Andromache continued south past Singapore, destroying villages, burning boats, and killing people. Towards the end of June 1836, she arrived off Galang, an island in the jurisdiction of the Dutch Resident at Riau, and the sailors spotted a ‘pirate’ encampment. ‘We found it had been deserted on our approach’, Burrows recalled. ‘It was beautifully situated on a cleared space, with dense jungle behind, from whence there was some ineffectual firing; but we soon burnt the village and all the boats which were building.’
The presence of these boats, wrote Burrows, ‘and the number of houses (all on piles) confirmed our information that it was the centre of the pirates on this coast’ It lay at the mouth of a river, and soon the crew had found and destroyed another ‘very populous settlement’. The Dutch Resident at Riau complained at this high-handed British action, but to no avail. ‘As they sailed back to Singapore from Galang’, noted a contemporary Malay report, ‘they kept watch for native craft and, whenever they met one, it would be destroyed by cannon fire.’
Like tourists of a later era, the British officers could not resist collecting souvenirs. After an encounter with ‘pirates’ near Point Romania, Mackenzie wrote to his wife to describe how he had secured the severed head of a Malay chief to send to his friend, the editor of the journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal:
Head with the defunct’s own sword and wrap it up in a basket. I then possessed myself of his sword, spear, and dagger, which I send with his head. The human hair on the handle of the sword denotes the rank of the owner, and, I believe, is that of a victim. I am sorry I could not take the fellow’s immense shield, my canoe being too small.
Returning to the Andromache, Mackenzie found Captain Chads ‘overjoyed at our complete success. The pirates, who numbered nearly 130 men, lost at least one-third of their number, many more being so severely wounded as to be scarcely able to crawl to the jungle.’12
The campaigning continued, and at Siak, in the middle of July, on Bucalisse island off the coast of Sumatra, the ‘pirates’ fought back with determination. ‘Commanded by some unusually brave chiefs’, noted Burrows, ‘they made a stout resistance which cost our force the loss of seventeen men killed and wounded.’ The wounded chief of one of the prahus refused to surrender and had his boat deliberately blown up.
Yet stout resistance was at best suicidal, for British terror tactics carried all before them. The boats of Captain Chads, wrote Burrows, ‘struck terror into the whole population of either side of the Malay peninsula’. At the Aru islands, at Galang, at Point Romania and at Siak, they had ‘completely destroyed every piratical squadron they came across’, as well as ‘one important nest of these people’.
By the middle of September, Governor Bonham was ready to go ashore, leaving Chads to continue alone. The bloody work of the British ships was nearly done. ‘We had made treaties with some of these little Malay potentates, frightened others, and destroyed many pirates and their headquarters’, wrote Burrows. ‘The neck of the general enemy of mankind was broken, at least for a time.’13
The following year, 1837, the inhabitants of the inland rivers faced a new terror weapon. Charles Buckley, the Singapore chronicler, recorded their shock when six large prahus were first confronted by a steamship. Seeing the smoke, they ‘thought it was a sailing ship on fire’, and they ‘left the Chinese junk which they were attacking, and bore down on the steamer, firing on her as they approached’. To their amazement, ‘the vessel came close up against the wind, and then suddenly stopped opposite each praha, and poured in a destructive fire, turning and backing quite against the wind, stretching the pirates in numbers on their decks’. The ship, HMS Diana, was Captain Congalton’s new command, a steamship whose name commemorated the steamer that had first seen service on the Irrawaddy in 1824.
The campaign Britain undertook in the 1830s to suppress ‘piracy’ in the seas around Singapore continued for a quarter of a century, and was to seal the fate of the sea peoples; their political and economic importance began to decline. ‘By i860, the once proud sea rovers of the archipelago were reduced to a few scattered tribes of shy, nomadic peoples.’14 Britannia now ruled the waves, and no Malay ruler would ever again build a state based on the seafaring society of the archipelago. The pirates had been literally blown out of their island strongholds.
World History
