Letters tell of life on the island in the 18th century

An English lad who sailed to Penang two centuries ago left behind letters that reveal fascinating aspects of the local population.
TEENAGER John Adolphus Pope never had the benefit of Facebook to share his adventures in the East Indies but the young mariner left behind a lasting legacy letters that vividly described his stay in Penang in the late 18th century.
Addressed to his friend George, the letters he wrote while sailing along the coast of Burma, the Straits of Malacca and China between 1785 and 1788 reveal fascinating observations of Penang before and after the early Sultan of Kedah ceded it to Britain on Aug 11, 1786.

Barbara Watson

According to Barbara Watson Andaya, a history professor at the National University of Singapore, the letters passed down through generations and were now in the possession of independent researcher Anne Bulley, who featured them in her book, Free Mariner: John Adolphus Pope in the East Indies 1786-1821.
“John was merely 14 years old when he was appointed Third Officer on the Princess Royal ship in 1785. He had predicted Penang would be a bigger trading port than Malacca, at that time the most important port in the Straits of Malacca,” said Andaya, one of the speakers at the recent Penang and the Indian Ocean Conference (PIO) 2011 in George Town.
When John first went ashore in May 1786, he described Penang as “an uninhabited island” although he saw a “deserted hut” and expressed initial fear of meeting Malays “who would not fail to murder us all”, Andaya related.
But by December the following year, John was singing praises about “our new settlement of Pulo Penang.”
Several country captains, he wrote, gave a “very flattering account of the fertility (of the) population” as people flocked to the island.
“Not less than 1,000 Chinese have settled here,” John chronicled.
After three years of interacting with the local community, John changed his opinion of the Malays. “Those who accuse them of moroseness, selfishness and a long catalogue of other vices are wrong and have never lived among them.”
He also wrote about religious tolerance and how he was treated with kindness and generosity. The locals were described as happy people, “always serene, temperate to an excess in their living and in their passions.”
Andaya said she believes that John might have started to work almost immediately after leaving school and never got to enjoy his teens.
“In the 18th century, there probably was no category for teenagers as he no longer was a child and had to assume the role of an adult. Even though we see him as a boy in his writings, more often he was an adult,” she noted.
She also observed that John was sometimes self-conscious, as if he knew his letters would reach a bigger audience than just his friend George.
For the most part, John's letters revealed his genuine pleasure in mingling with the locals and a sense of loyalty towards those he befriended.
During his voyage, John drew sketches and collected shells, rice, pepper, specimens of wood, a bow of the mountaineers, a spear and three arrows, as well as a “lump of gold” from a Malay friend during a visit to Kedah in 1786.
John also described the betel nut (pinang) tree as “a species of palm about six inches in diameter, straight as an arrow of about 20 feet and 30 feet high, its fruits hanging in clusters round the body of the tree. The fruit when arrived to maturity is enveloped in a fibrous covering of yellowish colour.”
Andaya pointed out that as e-mail and Facebook have now replaced journals and diaries of yesteryears, people these days wrote shorter messages.
“I think our powers of observation and visual perceptiveness have declined now that we depend more on photographs.
“What strikes me about John's letters is that this boy could look at things and describe everything he saw in great detail. This was before the advent of photography when people were trained to see in a way that we do not see any more.” By DERRICK VINESH