Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird (1831–1904) was a British travel writer whose five-week visit to the Malay States in early 1879 produced one of the most vivid English-language accounts of the region’s colonial administration and natural environment. Her published work, The Golden Chersonese (1883), drew on letters written to her sister Henrietta during the journey, and remains a primary source for the political and social conditions of the Straits Settlements and the Malay States on the eve of the Resident system’s consolidation [1, pp. 113–114].

The 1879 Visit

Bird arrived in Singapore on 18 January 1879 aboard the Sindh, having just completed a journey among the Ainu of northern Japan. She was forty-eight years old, stood four feet eleven and a half inches tall, and had intended only to break her passage before continuing to Ceylon. Cecil Clementi Smith, then Colonial Secretary in Singapore, persuaded her to extend her journey into what he described as the terra incognita of the Malay States; she accepted within five minutes [1, p. 113]. From Singapore she travelled by steamer to Malacca, then on to Sungei Ujong, Klang, and Penang, before proceeding by steam launch to Kertang (now Port Weld) and onward into Perak [1, p. 113].

The Perak portion of the journey proved the most significant. Bird spent time with Hugh Low, the British Resident, who was then fifty-four years old with thirty years’ experience in the East, much of it as police magistrate in Borneo. Low worked fourteen hours out of the twenty-four, lived in a two-roomed house, and spoke Malay fluently. He was the father of the naturalist Pope-Hennessy and a long widower [1, p. 113, Sheet 17, p. 2]. Bird’s letters record Low’s frank political assessments, including his view that the Resident of Selangor, Bloomfield Douglas, would be assassinated before a week in Perak, and that approximately two thousand Malays had migrated from Selangor into Perak to escape Douglas’s “reign of terror” [1, Sheet 17, p. 2].

Manuscript and Print

The original letters to Henrietta, preserved by the publisher John Murray, allow a direct comparison between Bird’s first impressions and the published text. Gullick’s source-critical analysis shows that Bird rewrote and re-drafted her material without altering its general drift, but that she omitted or toned down franker comments on her hosts and companions [1, pp. 116–117]. The Selangor letters did not survive because they contained very harsh criticism of Douglas; the Sungei Ujong letter is also missing [1, p. 116]. The Perak letter, comprising twenty-nine complete sheets each folded to four sides, is intact, and a footnote in the 1883 edition claiming a missing page describing Low’s apes is incorrect [1, p. 117].

Among the omissions most notable is the political commentary Low shared with Bird, which it was obviously not proper to publish. Bird also expressed her personal view that outright annexation of the Malay States would have been a better policy than the Resident system, a position that was certainly not Low’s [1, p. 117].

Observational Method

Bird’s powers of observation had been trained from childhood by her father, who drew her attention to every feature of the landscape during rides in the countryside [1, pp. 114–115]. This discipline is evident in her Malayan writing: during an elephant ride between Taiping and Kuala Kangsar she identified one hundred and twenty-six differing trees and shrubs, fifty-three trailers, seventeen epiphytes, and twenty-eight ferns, and went on to describe individual plants in detail [1, p. 114]. She also recorded that a Malay grave is dug to the depth at which the gravedigger’s ear is level with the ground [1, p. 114].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on Isabella Bird is represented principally by Gullick’s 1979 centenary tribute, which introduced a source-critical method of comparing the original letters against the published text. This approach recovered suppressed political commentary on the Perak and Selangor administrations of the 1870s and established the letters as a more candid record than the book [1, pp. 113–119]. Two biographies are cited as foundational: Anna Stoddart’s 1906 volume, a conventional tribute strong on personal and family detail but less satisfactory on the travels, and Pat Barr’s 1970 A Curious Life for a Lady, which offers deeper insight into Bird’s complex character [1, p. 114]. The archival basis for further work remains the collection of original letters held by John Murray, to which Gullick was granted access for re-reading and photocopying [1, p. 119].

MBRAS Sources

• J.M. Gullick (1979). Isabella Bird’s visit to Malaya: a centenary tribute. JMBRAS 52(2): 113–119

References

1. J.M. Gullick (1979). Isabella Bird’s visit to Malaya: a centenary tribute JMBRAS 52(2): 113–119.