The Malay Archipelago has historically been a significant region for maritime trade and diasporic settlement. It encompasses a vast area of Southeast Asia, from the Philippines in the northeast, south to the Celebes Islands, Moluccas and New Guinea and west to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. This project focuses in on the region of the Strait of Malacca and Strait of Singapore, the seas adjacent the Western shores of Malaysia, northern Sumatra and Singapore and, to the east where the Riau Archipelago meets the Borneo coastline. The seas lay between the major trading zones of the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, marking a strategic midpoint in an historically vibrant, important trading route between India and China, through the spice roads of Southeast Asia. This position led to the development of many prominent trading entrepôt, including Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, the islands of Singapore Island and Penang Island and the north Sumatran Barus and Lamri. These centres had emerged as cosmopolitan hubs from as early as the seventh century, in some cases. By the time that European explorers arrived in the region to take advantage of the region’s spices, some of these entrepôt were already in decline and a period of commercial transition began, from Portuguese dominance to Dutch and, eventually, British hegemony.
This project focuses on the later era and the British Empire in the East. Britain gained control of Penang Island from the local Malay sultanate in 1786, and established Georgetown (originally Prince of Wales Island) in 1786, the island of Singapore in 1819, also through an arrangement with the Sultan of neighbouring Johore on the mainland in 1819, and Malacca was wrested from the Dutch in 1824. Together, these communities became the Straits Settlements from 1826. The original intent behind these settlements was to develop them as ports and military staging posts to protect British interests and shipping routes in this profitable region. Very quickly however, each developed into a township and the English East India Company (EEIC) who were nominally in control via a series of local governors, enabled land to be sold off at preferential prices to Europeans who began to clear large areas of land for agricultural plantations, experimenting with crops including coffee and spices. The EEIC was dissolved in 1874, and rule was transferred to the British government.
The ships included in this project all derive from the era of direct British governmental rule, via the colonial office, after the 1870s and until the 1940s. This was a period of immense change in British Malaya, where the population of the port towns grew exponentially and trade became dominated, not by spices, but by rubber, tin and pineapples. Singapore had become the capital of the Straits Settlements, and its world-leading port was an incredible hub of sights, sounds and smells. ‘Here’ declared traveller Isabella Bird in 1879 ‘are treasures of the heated, crystal seas – things that one has dreamed of after reading Jules Verne’s romances. Big canoes, manned by men in white turbans and loincloths, floated around our ship, or lay poised on the clear depths of aquamarine water … it is a drive of two miles from the pier to Singapore, and … a world of wonders opens at every step’. The docks were the main entry point to this tropical port, where goods and people from across the world could be found.
The earliest shipping lanes and docks led to the Singapore River, where small ships and vessels could berth and goods could be unloaded by ‘coolie’ labourers into adjacent warehouses. The New Harbour project was started in the 1850s, later renamed Keppel Harbour after Henry Keppel, a ship’s captain who discovered the deep-water anchorage between the small Sentosa and Brani Islands and the main Singapore Island. Many of the outlying islands became used as places for ships to refuel or to repair, or for quarantine. Later, other areas were opened up, such as the Tanjong Pagar docks further to the west, established through the private enterprise of Guthrie and Co., who were later to become one of the largest rubber plantation management companies in British Malaya. By the 1920s, the rubber boom had catapulted Singapore to being one of the largest trading posts through which Southeast Asian rubber and wealth flowed. Investment in shipping and naval facilities duly followed.
The Sembawang Naval Base, for instance, was the largest development during the period of this project. It was completed off Singapore Island in the 1930s to protect Britain’s Far Eastern assets and was a major part of British defence strategy during the interwar years until 1941, when it was taken over by occupying Japanese forces in World War Two. It became a repair facility for the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1941 to 1945 but, after Britain regained control in 1945, acted as Far East Fleet base until 1958.
The ships that called into these ports and dockyards all kept logbooks of their voyages. These logbooks had been a part of shipping protocol for centuries but, over time, had become more standardised. Not surprisingly, observations of the weather were a critical part of the logbook entries. From 1853, the Brussels Maritime Conference had established an initial framework for reporting ship’s observations. These were used to build charts of currents and of winds, important to sailing. As the quality and quantity of such observations grew in the later nineteenth century, they have been increasingly used by modern scientists to understand past weather patterns and to improve climatological models.
The ships featured in this project are all from the British Royal Navy and were imaged by Dr Clive Wilkinson over several years. They contain important and, as yet, undigitized and unused climatological information about ocean weather and, weather while ships were stationed in port in Southeast Asia. This is significant because these countries have a paucity of terrestrial information to understand their past weather.
Reading:
Peter Borschberg, The Singapore and Melaka Straits: Violence, Security and Diplomacy in the 17th century (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010).
Philip Bowring, Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago (London, New York: IB Tauris, 2019).
Nordin Hussin, Trade and Society in the Straits of Melaka: Dutch Melaka and English Penang, 1780-1830 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007).
Faizah Zakaria, Sembawang Naval Base, Singapore Infopedia: https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=98c30f8b-2804-4e83-9041-fb93be96c0e5
Clive Wilkinson et al, ‘Recovery of logbooks and international marine date: the RECLAIM project’, International Journal of Climatology (2011): https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.2102
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