Fight against pirates has
historical echoes By Andrew
Symon
SINGAPORE and KUCHING, Sarawak - The
connection between Hollywood's Pirates of the
Caribbean set in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries and the still-pirate-infested seas
surrounding modern-day Singapore is more than just
the fancy of US screenwriters.
Placed in
its historical context, the film serves as a
perhaps unintentional allegory for modern-day
efforts by the United States
to
exert its influence in strategic Asian waters.
In the latest installation of the
blockbuster series, viewers find Captain
Barbarossa (and his followers in the Singapore
lair of Captain Sao Feng) looking for a map and a
vessel to reach the end of the world. Eluding
British authorities, they hope to rescue comrade
Jack Sparrow from "the other side" - a kind of
Hades on the beach. How Jack got there and what
happens later are convoluted and beyond the scope
of this article.
But there is a real and
relevant link between the Caribbean and British
efforts to stamp out piracy there and the
subsequent spread of British imperial power in
Singapore, the nearby Riau islands and northern
Borneo after 1819 - when modern Singapore was
founded by East India Company administrator Thomas
Stamford Raffles.
British laws that gave
the Royal Navy (RN) extensive powers to deal with
the real Jack Sparrows and Barbarossas in the
Caribbean were never made geographically specific
and hence were also applied in the seas around
Singapore.
At the time, piracy was
disrupting growing trade in the South China Sea
and Malacca Strait. The first resident of British
Singapore, William Farquhar, was greeted by a row
of skulls - the trophies of Malay Riau island
pirates - when he stepped ashore in September 1819
at what is now Labrador Park on the inner
southwest coast.
Singapore merchants later
petitioned the RN, and so under a law originally
designed to deal with pirates in the Caribbean, a
bounty was also placed on the head of every pirate
killed or captured in the South China Sea. When RN
captains, who were on a long leash anyway, heard
the potentially lucrative call to combat piracy,
they were only too pleased to assist.
The
most famous of the Admiralty's captains was Henry
Keppel - the namesake of Singapore's still-active
Keppel group of companies, Keppel Harbor, and
Keppel Road. Keppel, who was a bit of a pirate
himself, was locally nicknamed Rajah Laut or "King
of the Sea". He became an admiral, was knighted
and was a favorite of Queen Victoria.
Today, at the eastern end of Labrador
Park, looking across to Sentosa Island and the
entrance into Keppel Harbor, there is a plaque
recalling those bad old days:
From the earliest times these
pirates preyed on merchant ships in these
waters. They would attack in fleets of large,
heavily armed boats, sometimes in clear view of
the harbor, and quickly escape with the booty
into a labyrinth of islands. By the 1830s, the
menace had become so serious that it was
believed to threaten the Asian trade with "total
annihilation".
While Keppel would go
on to project British power across the seven seas,
his greatest legacy while stationed in Singapore
was in aiding English adventurer James Brooke in
instituting his rule as the "White Rajah" of
Sarawak in northern Borneo.
Brooke, born
in India to a father working as judge for the East
India Company, was a mixture of idealistic dreamer
and "freelance imperialist", as Australian
historian Bob Reece describes him in his recent
book The White Rajahs of Sarawak: A Borneo
Dynasty. He arrived in Sarawak in his sloop,
the Royalist, at a time when the sultan of Brunei,
whose sovereignty then extended over all of
northern Borneo, faced rebellion by Malay and
Bidayu tribes around today's city of Kuching on
the island's northwest coast.
The sultan's
representative, Raja Muda Hussein, enlisted
Brooke, and the threat of the Royalist's cannons
subdued the rebellions. In return, Brooke was made
rajah of the Kuching area in 1841, in return for
an annual tribute to the sultan. Thus a century of
rule by the White Rajahs began: three generations
of Brookes, ruling independently of London -
Sarawak was never formally a part of the British
Empire.
However, the so-called Pax
Brookania of later decades was not achieved
without the guns of the Royal Navy and plenty of
bloodshed in the name of fighting piracy. On the
eastern front, there was opposition by Malay
leaders, drawing on support from armed bands of
headhunting Iban tribesman. There were also the
ferocious Ilanun seafarers from the southern
Philippines.
Keppel came to Brooke's aid
in 1843 and 1844. Joining with Brooke's own Malay
and Iban followers, Keppel's HMS Dido sailed along
the Borneo coast and up rivers, burning their
enemies' strongholds. Keppel himself wrote what
proved to be a publishing hit in England when it
appeared in 1846 - The Expedition to Borneo of
HMS Dido for the Suppression of Piracy:
The punishment we had inflicted was
severe, but no more than the crime of hatred
horrid piracies deserved. A few heads were
brought away by our Dayak followers as trophies
... The destruction of these places astonished
the whole country beyond description.
How many of the enemy were really
"pirates" is, of course, a moot point. Iban and
Illanum raiders were feared, roaming as far as
Java and Sumatra, in search of plunder and slaves.
But there is no doubt many of those killed were
simply resisting Brooke and the British flag.
Reports of massacres published in journals
such as The Illustrated London News stirred
concerns in London and led to a commission of
inquiry in Singapore in 1853. While the actions of
Brooke and the navy were exonerated - they had the
support, among others, of Singapore merchants - it
led to the end of the pirate bounties.
Now, more than 150 years later, that old
Western strategy of taking the fight to pirates'
lairs has had new appeal in the US-led and
British-assisted "global war on terror".
Washington has in recent years warned that Islamic
terrorist groups might move to disrupt global
trade flows by attacking crucial seaports,
including an alleged foiled plot to ram
explosive-laden ships into Singapore.
Citing that commercial and security
threat, then-US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
suggested in 2005 that the US Navy could hunt down
shadowy pirates-cum-terrorists in the nearby and
narrow Malacca Strait - a bottleneck through which
more than 70% of China's imported oil flows and
which US gunboats could conceivably choke in a
future US-China conflict.
While US ally
Singapore was partial to Rumsfeld's proposal, it
was quickly rejected by Malaysia and Indonesia.
They perhaps recalled the history of just what can
happen to a country's, and a region's, sovereignty
and stability when Western navies come calling in
the name of combating neighborhood piracy.
Andrew Symon is a
Singapore-based journalist and consultant.
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