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Singapore Johore Sultanate
When the Portuguese captured Malacca in 1511, the
reigning
Malaccan sultan fled to Johore in the southern part of the
Malay
Peninsula, where he established a new sultanate
(see
fig. 2).
Singapura became part of the new Johore Sultanate and was
the base
for one of its senior officials in the latter sixteenth
century. In
1613, however, the Portuguese reported burning down a
trading
outpost at the mouth of the Temasek (Singapore) River, and
Singapura passed into history.
In the following two centuries, the island of Temasek
was
largely abandoned and forgotten as the fortunes of the
Johore
Sultanate rose and fell. By 1722 a vigorous seafaring
people from
the island of Celebes (modern Sulawesi, Indonesia) had
become the
power behind the throne of the Johore Sultanate. Under
Bugis
influence, the sultanate built up a lucrative entrepôt
trade,
centered at Riau, south of Singapore, in present-day
Sumatra. Riau
also was the site of major plantations of pepper and
gambier, a
medicinal plant used in tanning. The Bugis used waste
material from
the gambier refining process to fertilize pepper plants, a
valuable
crop, but one that quickly depletes soil nutrients. By
1784 an
estimated 10,000 Chinese laborers had been brought from
southern
China to work the gambier plantations on Bintan Island in
the Riau
archipelago (now part of Indonesia). In the early
nineteenth
century, gambier was in great demand in Java, Siam, and
elsewhere,
and cultivation of the crop had spread from Riau to the
island of
Singapore.
The territory controlled by the Johore Sultanate in the
late
eighteenth century was somewhat reduced from that under
its
precursor, the Malacca Sultanate, but still included the
southern
part of the Malay Peninsula, the adjacent area of Sumatra,
and the
islands between, including Singapore. The sultanate had
become
increasingly weakened by division into a Malay faction,
which
controlled the peninsula and Singapore, and a Bugis
faction, which
controlled the Riau Archipelago and Sumatra. When the
ruling sultan
died without a royal heir, the Bugis had proclaimed as
sultan the
younger of his two sons by a commoner wife. The sultan's
elder son,
Hussein (or Tengku Long) resigned himself to living in
obscurity in
Riau.
Although the sultan was the nominal ruler of his
domain, senior
officials actually governed the sultanate. In control of
Singapore
and the neighboring islands was Temenggong Abdu'r Rahman,
Hussein's
father-in-law. In 1818 the temenggong (a high Malay
official) and some of his followers left Riau for
Singapore shortly
after the Dutch signed a treaty with the Bugis-controlled
sultan,
allowing them to station a garrison at Riau. The
temenggong's settlement on the Singapore River
included
several hundred orang laut (sea gypsies in Malay)
under
Malay overlords who owed allegiance to the
temenggong. For
their livelihood the inhabitants depended on fishing,
fruit
growing, trading, and occasional piracy. Large pirate
fleets also
used the strait between Singapore and the Riau Archipelago
as a
favorite rendezvous. Also living on the island in
settlements along
the rivers and creeks were several hundred indigenous
tribespeople,
who lived by fishing and gathering jungle produce. Some
thirty
Chinese, probably brought from Riau by the
temenggong, had
begun gambier and pepper production on the island. In all,
perhaps
a thousand people inhabited the island of Singapore at the
dawn of
the colonial era.
Data as of December 1989
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