A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia by Christopher Hale

Author:Christopher Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2022-11-10T08:11:02+00:00

Enforcing the System

Now British blood was up. Rumours of a Muslim uprising led by ‘ferocious and fanatical Malays’ spread like wildfire. Colonial administrators were haunted by the shock of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Indian Mutiny which had brought down the East India Company. Jervois demanded reinforcements, and soon 2,000 troops were on their way from India and Hong Kong to be unleashed in Perak.

It is most advisable, Jervois declared, ‘to make a show of power’. Like Raffles in Java and Brooke and his navy friends in Sarawak, he waged what historians like to call a ‘Small War’. Jervois ordered Royal Navy ships to blockade the Perak coast and banned the sale of gunpowder and arms. Commander Stirling, who led a brigade of navy soldiers, was said to be ‘spoiling for a fight’. Some of his men were enraged when they marched along the Perak River and found Birch’s boat, the Naga, abandoned near Pasir Salak. Vengeance came swiftly. Stirling boasted that ‘the village was fired, and the banks were for a mile and half ablaze.’ It was, Stirling reported to Jervois, a most satisfying act of vengeance carried out with no loss of life on the British side. Stirling’s commanding officer, Major General Francis Colbourne, now led troops north of Pasir Salak in pursuit of the Malay ringleaders who had murdered Birch. Village after village was razed to the ground. Private James George was thrilled by the ‘pretty sight of Rockets flying over the village…. The Malays were frightened to death very near for they all ran out of the village. Our men saw them running and fired into them, and killed a good number.’ Jervois used the word pacification, and this is what he meant. Another soldier described ‘killing another lot of Malays’ and burning another village to the ground. As the British soldiers burned and killed, the blockade began to bite. Rice supplies dried up. Pacification fell heavily on Malay villagers. Their homes were destroyed and their bellies emptied.

The Times of London gleefully reported on the British campaign. The blockade, British readers learnt at breakfast, had ‘prevented supplies being thrown into Perak’ and ‘contributed greatly to the success’. A force of 1,600 Indian sepoys, backed by an artillery regiment and a company of Bengal sappers, exacted revenge and made it abundantly clear that the Resident system would be ruthlessly enforced. The conspirators who had murdered Birch were all hanged. Abdullah and the other claimants to the succession were deported to Johor or the Seychelles. And Jervois appointed Yusuf Sharifuddin Muzuffar Shah (r. 1874–77), the outsider, as the new sultan of Perak. Later, Swettenham called the Perak War a ‘duty forced upon England as the Dominant power’. The Malays, he wrote ‘needed saving from themselves’.

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