Within three months after the purchase of the ground from the Sultan of Johore, Raffles wrote to Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor:—
“We have a growing colony of nearly five thousand souls,” and a little later one of his successors wrote apologetically to Lord Auckland, discussing some project relating to Singapore finance;—
“These details may appear to your Lordship petty, but then everything connected with these settlements is petty, except their annual surplus cost to the Government of India.”
To-day the city and colony has a population of over one million, and a revenue of five million dollars—a magnificent monument to its founder’s foresight!
From a commercial and strategic stand-point, the site of the city is unassailable. When the English and the Dutch divided the East Indies by drawing a line through the Straits of Malacca,—the English to hold all north, the Dutch all south,—the crafty Dutchman smiled benignly, with one finger in the corner of his eye, and went back to his coffee and tobacco trading in the beautiful islands of Java and Sumatra, pitying the ignorance of the Englishman, who was contented with the swampy jungles of an unknown and savage neck of land, little thinking that inside of a half century all his products would come to this same despised district for a market, while his own colonies would retrograde and gradually pass into the hands of the English.
Singapore is one of the great cities of the world, the centre of all the East Indian commerce, the key of southern Asia, and one of the massive links in the armored chain with which Great Britain encircles the globe.
A Fight with Illanum Pirates
The Yarn of a Yankee Skipper
The Daily Straits Times on the desk before me contained a vivid word picture of the capture of the British steamship Namoa by three hundred Chinese pirates, the guns of Hong Kong almost within sight, and the year of our Lord 1890 just drawing to a close. The report seemed incredible.