The Pirates of Singapore

Lately the news that Chow Yun Fatt will be playing the leader of the Singapore Pirates in the upcoming final instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise has made a little blip in the local press. Is depicting Singapore as an 18th century pirate's den insulting to Singaporeans in the same way that the depiction of Persians as blood-lusty warriors with a sexually ambiguous and cruel king in the movie 300 is supposedly a sly swipe at Iranians by Hollywood-the-media-arm-of-the-decadent-West? The local paper Life! took a straw poll of several Singaporeans and found that most, simply put, couldn't care less. Either it was seen as being part of the distant past which had no relation to Singapore now, or that it wasn't true anyway, that Singapore was never a pirate's den and the movie just made it up for entertainment, just like everything else. However, contrary to what most Singaporeans think they know about Singapore's past, pirates did lurk in our Straits even up to the early days of the modern settlement in the 19th century. The present-day pirate problem in the Straits of Malacca, often ranked as one of the more pirate-infested waters in the world, can be viewed as part of the heritage of indigenous piracy in the Malay Archipelago that hid and thrived in the innumerable islets and coves of present-day Indonesia and Malaysia.

In the 14th century, the Chinese Yuan dynasty traveller Wang Dayuan wrote the Daoyi Zhilue, an account of his travels in the southern seas, and among his traveller's tales is a description of a place called Longyamen, or the Dragon's Tooth Gate, identified with today's Keppel Harbour, and Danmaxi, or Temasek. He noted that

"...when junks sail to the Western Ocean the local barbarians allow them to pass unmolested but when on their return the junks reach Ji-li-men [Karimun], the sailors prepare their armour and padded screens as protection against arrows for, as a certainty, some two or three hundred pirate perahu will put out to attack them for several days. Sometimes [the junks] are fortunate enough to escape with a favouring wind; otherwise the crews are butchered and the merchandise made off with in quick time."

Pirates were a menace in the waters of Singapore right up to Raffles's time. According to Munshi Abdullah, Raffles's Malay tutor and a chronicler of the period,

"at this time [soon after Raffles's arrival] no mortal dared topass through the Straits of Singapore. Jins and Satans were even more afraid, for that was the place the pirates made use of, to sleep at and divide their booty, after a successful attack on any ship's boat or prahus. There also they put to death their captives, and themselves fought and killed each other in their quarrels on the division of the spoil."

It was not just the waters surrounding Singapore that were full of piracy. Singapore itself bore traces of this gruesome profession. Littering the beaches were the skeletons and skulls of pirate victims, some with hair still clinging to them. This was sure evidence that pirates had used Singapore as one of their dens, one of the countless bases from which they would spring out of to attack passing ships, and to which they would retreat to kill their victims and divide their loot. Under instructions from William Farquhar, the skulls and bones on the beaches were collected up and disposed of at sea, possibly to help make Singapore a little more conducive to the conduct of trade.

Raffles himself was fully aware of the pirate problem. In his letters he made mention of them, and in 1823 he applied for a vessel from the government to sail the waters near Singapore and ward off pirates. By March 1827, "a gunboat armed with lelahs and muskets was fitted with native sails and went out to cruise near Singapore against pirates." Prior to the arrival of the British and the Dutch in the region, the indigenous trade that passed through Singapore and its surrounding waters would have been primarily between the Riau-Lingga islands to the south and peninsular Johore. Today's political boundaries between Malaysia and Indonesia were the result of European colonialism, whereas in the past, the boundaries of the former Johore-Riau empire were a more accurate reflection of the economic and trade links among these islands and its peninsular hinterland. Piracy attacked these boats that travelled between Riau or Lingga and Singapore. Generally, the smaller indigenous (and some Chinese) traders, mostly in prahus and junks, were at greater risk and were the main targets. But pirate vessels could also be formidable. Buckley's Anecdotal History contains a description of one such pirate prahu:

"Malay piratical prahus were from six to eight tons burden and from sixty to seventy feet long. They carried one or two small guns with four swivels or ratankas on each side, and a crew of twenty to thirty men. When they attacked ships they put up a strong bulwark of thick planks. They had, of course, spears and krises and as many fire-arms as they could procure."

Many local rulers were also involved in piracy, and even the rulers in Singapore were accused at one point by Raffles of having dabbled in it, though this was probably just an outburst in a fit of frustration about their reluctance to personally do trade with the British. At that time, the pirates were not afraid to attack even European vessels, which were presumably larger and better armed than local ones. Most ships stood little chance because the pirates did not act alone but in fleets, using tactics and sailing expertise honed from a lifetime at sea and a tradition of piracy.

In 1832, the pirate situation was so bad, and the Government seemed to be doing so little about it, that the Chinese merchants of Singapore took up subscriptions to equip and arm four trading boats to launch their own anti-pirate operations, independently of the Government. They promised to pay a reward for every pirate boat destroyed, and a sum of compensation to the family of every Chinese seaman killed in the operations. This vigilante fleet managed to sink a number of pirate vessels, though a few Chinese were killed in the process. This embarassment and public indictment of its weakness spurred the Government to order two gunboats from Malacca to combat pirates.

It was a miserable and dangerous time to be a sailor. Victims of pirates drowned trying to escape, were put to the sword on the spot, were taken away to the pirate lair and then killed there, or enslaved by the pirates to be manual labour for them. But being a pirate was also to live life within a hair's breadth of the sword, musket, or hangman's noose. Pirates when caught were treated just as was shown in the Pirates of the Caribbean, hung up at the beach as a warning to all who dared engage in piracy. By the 1830s, more naval vessels were coming down to patrol the Straits and to engage with pirates. Among the more famous and successful was the sailing sloop, the Wolf. The first steamship (hitherto all had been sailing vessels) to engage with a pirate ship was the EIC ship Diana. When it approached several pirate boats attacking a Chinese junks, the pirates, seeing the smoke, thought that the Diana was a trading ship on fire, and turned to attack it. To the pirates' surprise, the Diana bore down against the wind and returned fire, killing many of the pirate crew. With the arrival of the steamers, (other famous boats being the Nemesis and the Hooghly), the pirates soon became much less significant a threat, and their attacks became less frequent and less outrageous.

So it is quite clear that pirates and other unsavoury characters, for long periods of Singapore's history, did lurk on our island and in our waters. Certainly the movie stretches the truth considerably. No pirate would have dressed so magnificently at sea, and most of them were Malay, not Chinese. Of course, there is some evidence for Chinese banditry in the South Seas, because the Nanyang has traditionally been a haven for outlaws fleeing the Chinese imperial authorities via the Southern Coast of China. During the Qing dynasty, for instance, some survivors of the Amoy Small Knife rebellion fled to Singapore and Riau, as did remnants of the Taiping Tianguo rebels after their movement was wiped out by the imperial troops. Countless petty criminals surely had also made their way down South in the centuries before. The pirate problem still has repercussions today, in the form of modern piracy in the Straits of Malacca, which persists for similar reasons as in the past, viz. a complex shoreline with many hiding places, economic depression in undeveloped coastal areas, and a tradition of seafaring that lent itself well to both legitimate trade and illegal piracy. Those combating piracy today should certainty take a leaf from the lessons of the past, in order to wipe out this menace to shipping once and for all.