Pirates of the Negara Selat
Despite the passing centuries traversed by the pendulum of time, some things in Southeast Asia never seem to change: piracy is one of them. Once in a while, it grabs a 21st-century newspaper headline; two hundred years ago, however, it was the persistent, recurring and ongoing issue of the times.
The larger-than-life character of Captain John Dill Ross appears in the fourth chapter of Palace of Ghosts. He achieved near celebrity status among the residents of Singapore when news broke about his almost calamitous encounter fighting off an against-the-odds pirate attack off the coast of northwest Borneo in the middle of the 19th-century. Piracy had long been the scourge of shipping in the region and was an ever-present topic of conversation over dinner. When Captain Ross’s skirmish hit the newspaper headlines, it was the talk of the town for months!
Captain Ross is important to the story because he was the first person to build a grand residence on the plot of land that was eventually to host Istana Woodneuk. In many ways, he was the antithesis of William Napier: whereas Napier represented the early establishment of the Singapore settlement, Captain Ross was the outsider, the pioneering, risk-taking adventurer who opens new markets and brings in the money. This distinction between types of Singapore resident is still very much apparent among today’s working population. Among city’s plethora of cultures and races involved in international business in some way, all there to make money in one way or another, there can be a broad categorisation into two groups: those who toil behind desks with endless meetings and overflowing inboxes of emails, and those who get their boots on, throw caution to the wind and go out there to seek a fortune.
Captain John Dill Ross (mid 19th-century)
Captain Ross was a merchant adventurer and trader who certainly fitted into the second category. He was a well-known and respected businessman whose passions were to sail and trade. Born in Dutch Batavia into a world of trading and shipping, he eventually became wealthy and lived very comfortably at Woodneuk. But even in later life, he was loath to delegate, preferring to be at sea himself, jousting with the monsoon winds as he scurried across the Malay Archipelago with his valuable cargoes. The sea, the monsoon winds and sailing boats had been at the centre of his world since boyhood. Piracy, to the likes of Captain Ross, was what you might call an occupational hazard.
Whether it is Robert Louis Steven’s Treasure Island from 1883, Errol Flynn’s cinematic performances during the 1930s and 40s, Roman Polanski’s 1986 flop Pirates or the box office-shattering Pirates of the Caribbean series during the first two decades of the 21st-century, pirates and piracy have never been far from the public imagination. Glamourised and merchandised, the reality is, of course, far more sordid and violent. Moreover, it is far from being a distant chapter of history as depicted in the movies.
Piracy in Southeast Asia is no exception. An article in Time magazine from 2014 referred to maritime Southeast Asia as “The Most Dangerous Waters in the World” and points out “Asia’s seas offer rich pickings for marauding pirates who steal oil and supplies worth billions of dollars every year.” In the misplaced romanticised public perception, it is the Caribbean pirates who tend to have a hold on the imagination. In the news, however, it might seem to be Somalia and the Horn of Africa as the epicentre of modern-day piracy. According to the UN, however, the most perilous seas today are those of Southeast Asia.
Although careful planning is required by the pirates, it seems that some of the attacks are not entirely unexpected by the captains and crews of the victims. Some shipping companies have been targeted multiple times, suggesting collusion between either the shipping company or members of the crew, and the pirates. Nicholas Teo, a former commander in the Republic of Singapore Navy says, “We believe that there is some insider information,” citing the circumstances surrounding some of the attacks.
The setting for Palace of Ghosts–the southern coastline of Johor, Singapore, and the islands of the Riau archipelago, referred to as Negara Selat–sees more than 120,000 ships traverse its waterways each year. Southeast Asia was the location for 41% of the world’s pirate attacks between 1995 and 2013. The shipping lanes account for a third of the world’s marine commerce. It is this sheer volume of shipping traffic that attracts the pirates, and as it is today, so was it 240 years ago when the Palace of Ghosts begins.
Piracy in the Malacca Straits, the Singapore Straits, including the seas around the Riau Islands, and the South China Sea is as old as the Southeast Asian maritime trade itself. 14th-century Chinese chroniclers were well aware of the scourge of piracy and the constant threat it represented to their trading fleets well before the Europeans showed up in the area. Their trading ships would safely pass through in one direction but then be accosted on their return journey when their heavily laden hulls would be at maximum capacity with newly acquired merchandise.
The main sea lanes were obvious trading highways, but the hundreds of rivers that fed into them, the miles of mangrove swamps, and the countless maze of islets, reefs, and shoals provided ample sanctuary for the region’s pirates living their amphibious lifestyles. Swarms of these experienced sea-faring villains in their highly manoeuvrable "praus" (war vessels) frequently raided passing ships, seizing their cargo before vanishing upriver to their hidden, stockaded villages.
The title of Troki’s 1979 exhaustive and definitive work Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore 1784-1885, is intended to be ironic. Piracy was a problem that even local Malays, Bugis, and others were impacted by. But the success of the Port of Riau, Singapore’s predecessor, and the subsequent colonial interests that depended on working relationships with the leaders of these local communities, could not have happened if all indigenous peoples were merely a bunch of rowdy pirates. Troki is careful to make this point as a counterweight to the all too frequent colonial depiction of the various local chiefs and their followers as being in fact no more than pirates in disguise–all of them!
Troki says: “The so called “native trade” was the lifeblood of early Singapore and it remained so until the 1870s, and all the free trade in the world could not have created it out of thin air. The trade, and the many important Malay and Chinese trading networks already existed before 1819, and they simply moved to Singapore and made it their base after 1819.”
The individuals involved in such trading networks were skilled managers and officials, not pirates. That’s not to understate the frequency of pirate incidents, only that Temenggong Daeng Ibrahim, the most senior of the local leaders in the 2nd and 3rd decades of the new Settlement was not one of them. Even those who did engage in such activities were quite often itinerant or temporary participants. As one of Singapore’s leading historians Dr P.J. Thum points out in his excellent 2015/2016 History of Singapore podcast, that for many locals in the region when trading was good the locals engaged in trading: when they fell on hard times they sometimes resorted to piracy.
Having said that, Raffles pointed out in his 1817 book The History of Java that the practice of piracy was romanticised in Malayan folklore and regarded as an honourable occupation worthy of pursuit by princes and nobles. Hardcore, committed pirates, who had no other occupation, were probably not as common as popular belief held them to be. That didn’t stop stories swirling widely around the communities and sensationally reported in the press at the merest whiff of a piratical incident. There were, however, some who did dedicate most of their time to the pursuit of piracy and one of these makes a notable appearance in Palace of Ghosts in his encounter with Captain Ross.
One group of sea peoples called the Iranun did make piracy their business, and in fact, pushed the boundaries of their criminal activity to include slave trading and the provision of mercenary services as well. Even today a derivation of their tribal name, Ianun, actually means “pirate” in the Malay language. They originated from a broad arc of maritime territory stretching from Mindanao in what is today the Philippines to the east to northern Borneo in the west of the Malay Archipelago. It was a hired Iranun force that defeated the Dutch in the 1780s and then finally snuffed out the last vestiges of the old Johor-Riau Sultanate, launching in its wake an era of chaos.
An Iranun Pirate (19th-century)
An Iranun war “prau” used by pirates in the Malacca Strait in the late 18th-century
One might even argue that had it not been for the Iranun pirates precipitating the final collapse of the Johor-Riau Sultanate in the Riau Islands, it would have been unlikely that those 18th-century trading networks of the Malay, Bugis, and Chinese that Troki refers to would have had no incentive to transfer their hub to the newly established trading centre of Singapore. Those networks may well have had piratical elements within them. It was British suspicions of continued piratical activity emanating from Daeng Ibrahim’s father’s compound by the Singapore River (i.e., that of Temenggong Abdul Rahman) that resulted in its relocation to Telok Blangah in 1824. It is telling that Mr Nicholas Teo’s 21st-century observation that collusion between onshore and offshore crews and pirates that are suspected in present-day piracy was exactly the reason the British compelled Temenggong Abdul Rahman to relocate his compound away from the Singapore River 200 years earlier.
It was also the Iranun who were involved in the epic battle, described in Palace of Ghosts, between the pirate chief Si Rahman and Captain Ross, that propelled the latter to legendary status within the Singapore Settlement.
An Iranun attack on a European vessel (19th-century)
Between 1826 and 1836, the topic of piracy and how to deal with it became one of the main topics on the minds of those living and trading in Singapore. Traders of all ethnicities and nationalities feared it could become a toxic force that might undermine the very success of the new entrepôt before it could even establish itself as the new regional trading hub. There were sustained periods of pirate hunting, where high-profile individuals such as Raja James Brooke and Straits Settlements Governor Sir George Bonham launched anti-piracy campaigns, the latter doing so after signing an agreement in 1836 with Temenggong Daeng Ibrahim to cooperate in suppressing piracy. In fact, up until this date, the new Temenggong Daeng Ibrahim had been accused several times of sheltering, or turning a blind eye, to pirates connected in some way to his community in Telok Blangah.
“The Attack of Two Lanoon Pirate Proas on the Proa Jolly Batchelor, belonging to Rajah Brooks of Sarawak and manned by the crew of HMS Dido off Datto Point on the coast of Borneo at 3 a.m. May 21 1843 which ended in the blowing up of one Proa and the destruction of the crew of the other”, by Lieutenant James Hunt, 1845
Piracy remains a problem today in the sea lanes around Singapore, but we residents don’t hear much about it, despite it being a major contemporary law enforcement issue for the three countries that now occupy the area. Two hundred years ago, and for centuries before that, it was a much more discernible issue, the dark side of trade and commerce, and an ever-present worry for merchants, traders and administrators. In much the same way that in the present omnipresent themes such as the pandemic or terrorism plague our consciousness, so was piracy during those decades of the 19th-century when Europeans, Asians, and more local indigenous peoples were trying to come to terms with each other. Today, the threat appears to have subsided somewhat, but as we see in news reports, Coast Guard and UN reports, it is far from being eliminated totally.
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