Article

Islands

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Islands

The islands of the Malay Archipelago—scattered across the Straits of Malacca, the Southern China Sea, and the coasts of Johore, Pahang, Perak, and Sarawak—constitute a geographically diverse and historically layered region whose individual groups have been documented in the Society’s journals from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. The records span limestone karst archipelagos such as Langkawi, granitic island chains in the Riau-Lingga dependency, the Anambas, the Tambelans, and the smaller offshore groups of the Johore and Pahang coasts, each presenting distinct ecological, faunistic, and administrative profiles. These islands served as nodes in maritime trade networks, as sites of colonial jurisdictional contestation between the Dutch and the British, and as laboratories for early biogeographical inquiry into the faunal boundaries of the region [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

Topography, Geology, and Faunistic Character

The geological and physical character of the island groups documented in the records varies markedly. The Langkawi archipelago, situated off the coast of Perlis, exposes a Carboniferous sedimentary sequence intruded by porphyritic granite, with the highest point, Gunong Raya, reaching 2,880 feet and a quartzite range in the north-west of the main island attaining peaks over 2,000 feet [6, pp. 330]. The limestone is almost certainly Carboniferous in age, and the sequence begins and ends in shallow-water conditions with a prolonged deep-water phase in the middle [6, pp. 339–341]. Extensive sea-sand deposits and old beach-lines across the islands provide clear evidence of recent tectonic elevation, implying that the Langkawi group will eventually become united with the Perlis mainland as the elevatory movement continues [6, pp. 345–347].

In contrast, the islands of the Southern China Sea—Linga, the Tambelans, the Anambas, and their attendant islets—are predominantly granitic in formation. Linga, an island of irregular shape about 33 miles in length, is surrounded by smaller islands of various sizes and rises to a fantastically split peak of 3,921 feet, densely covered with jungle and scarcely ever free from clouds [3, pp. 54]. The Tambelan group, consisting of the three principal islands of Tambelan, Bunoa, and Wai, is massed fairly close together over thirteen or fourteen miles of sea, with Tambelan Peak rising to 1,300 feet and the remarkable Thumb Peak, a pointed hill of 950 feet, standing out prominently against the sky [3, pp. 60–62]. The Anambas archipelago extends over an area 65 geographical miles long north-south and 55 miles wide, with Jimaja, the largest island, covering perhaps 30,000 acres and rising to peaks between 700 and 1,530 feet [3, pp. 69].

The faunistic character of these islands has been the subject of systematic investigation. C. Boden Kloss demonstrated that the mammal assemblage of Batam Island is predominantly Sumatran rather than Peninsular in character, and that the island group of Batam, Bulang, Rempang, and Galang forms a distinct faunistic unit more closely allied to the western islands than to Bintang to the east [2, pp. 61]. The 10-fathom contour lines break the Riau-Lingga islands into distinct faunistic groups, with Batam, Bulang, Rempang, and Galang forming one of the largest such groups, connected to both Sumatra and the Peninsula by a bank of less than 20 fathoms [2, p. 71]. Kloss’s 1900 cruise through the Southern China Sea yielded numerous new insular species, including Macacus pumilus, Ratufa anambæ (a notably large form weighing 3¼ lbs with a total length of 33 inches, characterised by increase rather than the usual insular dwarfing), and multiple new species of Mus, Sciurus, and Tupaia [3, pp. 57]. He observed that in these China Sea islands, when a species of mammal occurs on a solitary island, however small, it is confined to that island alone, but when a species is present on an island of a group it will generally be obtained throughout the group [3, p. 76].

The islands off the east coasts of Johore and Pahang, visited by H. Goring Dalton in 1918, present a different physical profile: steep jungle-covered hills rising abruptly from the sea, with rocky northern shores built to withstand the north-east monsoon and sandy western beaches supporting coconut plantations [4, pp. 78–96]. Pulau Tinggi’s Gunong Tinggi rises to 2,000 feet and had a trigonometrical beacon erected in 1917 [4, p. 92].

Settlement, Trade, and Colonial Administration

The islands documented in the records were integral to maritime commerce and subject to shifting patterns of colonial jurisdiction. The Riau-Lingga dependency, of which Linga was the administrative centre, was under Dutch control, with the Sultan of Linga receiving an annual income of approximately $80,000 from the Dutch and nominally ruling over neighbouring parts of Sumatra, all the islands between Sinkep and Singapore, and the various small groups in the Southern China Sea [3, p. 56]. The Chinese community on Linga was under a “Captain China” who collected a poll tax of $3 per head annually [3, p. 56]. The Straits dollar was the only coin current in all the islands of Kloss’s cruise, despite their status as Dutch possessions [3, p. 63].

The Anambas, situated in latitude 3° N, longitude 106° E, were inhabited mainly by Malays thinly scattered over the larger islands, with Chinese settlements in either group [3, p. 69]. Terempa, the chief kampong (village) of the Anambas on Siantan, was a thriving place with twenty or thirty Chinese shops, a Chinese cemetery, and a good proportion of its population Chinese [3, p. 69]. The Dato of Terempa showed specimens of black iron ore of which large quantities were said to occur in the hill behind the village [3, p. 70].

The Dindings—comprising Pulau Pangkor, Pulau Sembilan, and a mainland strip in Perak—passed from Dutch to British control through a sequence of cessions and treaties. The Dutch first anchored in the roadstead between Pangkor and the Perak mainland in 1666 to take on fresh water and firewood, and by 1670 had ordered the construction of a wooden stronghold with a garrison of one sergeant, three soldiers, and three sailors [5, pp. 36–39], [7, p. 169]. The garrison was massacred in 1690 by Malays under Panglima Kulup, after which the Dutch erected a stone pillar bearing the arms of the United East India Company and the United Provinces as a monument to their claim and withdrawal [5, p. 39], [7, p. 169]. A second garrison was established in 1745 but withdrawn in 1748 on account of the “insalubrity of the place” [5, p. 39], [7, p. 169]. The British cession of Pangkor and the Sembilan Islands by Perak in 1826 for the suppression of piracy was not effectively utilised until 1867, when a Kedah Malay named Haji Mahomed Akib obtained permission to settle on the island [5, p. 40]. The Pangkor Treaty of January 1874 formalised British sovereignty over the island and an additional 200 square miles of mainland, creating the administrative unit known as the Dindings [5, p. 40]. Timber exports from the Dindings reached approximately 2,200 tons in 1887, and the district was noted as the only part of the Colony with any extent of forest remaining [5, pp. 44–45].

The islands off the Johore and Pahang coasts, including Pulau Aur, Pulau Tinggi, and Pulau Babi, were characterised by modest but functional infrastructure: Customs houses, a single Chinese shopkeeper serving as middleman to Singapore, and the export of copra, dried fish, edible birds’ nests, and specific shell species [4, pp. 78–96]. Pulau Aur had approximately 200 inhabitants at the time of Dalton’s visit in 1918 and possessed four cannon believed to have been taken from a shipwreck; a Dutch silver coin dated 1792 was sold to Dalton by the Penghulu, suggesting the wreck may date to roughly a century prior rather than the 200 years claimed locally [4, p. 91].

Research and Documentation

The islands documented in the records have been the subject of sustained scholarly attention spanning geological survey, zoological collection, historical reconstruction, and ethnographic observation. The first systematic geological account of the Langkawi archipelago was published by J.B. Scrivenor and E.S. Willbourn in 1923, drawing on fieldwork conducted in 1919, 1920, and 1922; no prior published geological account of the group existed, making this the baseline reference for all subsequent work [6, pp. 338–347]. Their study demonstrated that the Langkawi exposures help resolve a classification problem on the mainland: some shales and quartzites previously mapped, for want of fossil evidence, as younger than the Carboniferous “Raub Series” may in fact belong to that series, because the Langkawi sequence shows no chert or coarse conglomerate that would indicate Triassic or Jurassic age [6, pp. 345–347].

C. Boden Kloss’s two major contributions—the 1904 account of his Southern China Sea cruise and the 1908 study of Batam Island—represent the first naturalist investigations of these island groups’ faunas [2], [3]. His 1904 cruise, conducted aboard the schooner Terrapin with Dr. W. L. Abbott, covered approximately eleven weeks and yielded the first records of the animals and birds found in the Anambas, the Tambelans, and Linga, with taxonomic descriptions later formalised by Gerrit S. Miller, Jr. [3, pp. 53]. His 1908 study of Batam, conducted with the assistance of the Dutch colonial administration, established the island’s faunistic distinctiveness and described two new taxa: Tupaia ferruginea batamana and Mus batamanus [2, pp. 68–69].

The historical documentation of the Dindings rests substantially on E. M. Merewether’s 1891 synthesis, which drew on the Malacca records (Dutch archival correspondence), Dampier’s Voyages (1699), Schouten’s voyage log, Crawfurd’s 1822 account, and the official journals of the Superintendents of the Dindings [5, pp. 35–47]. W.E. Maxwell’s 1883 note on newly discovered documents in the Malacca records further illuminated the Dutch occupation, fixing the date of the re-establishment of the Perak river post and identifying a 1746 mission by under-factor Ary Verbrugge that led to the agreement of 25 July 1747 with the King of Perak [7, pp. 169–170].

The 1804 French naval campaign in the region, documented in the journal of Charles Duclos-Legris and translated by C. Northcote Parkinson in 1952, provides a rare first-person account of the islands’ strategic significance in the context of Anglo-French maritime rivalry [1, pp. 68–83]. The manuscript, held in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, comprises sixty-seven pages of French text and seventy-seven illustrations, nine in watercolour [1, p. 68]. Parkinson’s footnotes draw attention to the contrast between Duclos-Legris’s description of the inhabitants of Pulau Aur as armed with poisoned daggers, thievish, and cruel, and Horsburgh’s Directory (1817), which characterised the same natives as “shy of strangers” but “generally found to be inoffensive” [1, pp. 71].

W.E. Maxwell’s 1887 account of Pulau Langkawi, written from the deck of the Sea Bird, functions as both a geographical survey and a brief ethnographic note, recording the island’s coastal geography, place names, and the legendary cave of Goa Cherita as observed during a single-day cruise [8, pp. 27–33]. His treatment of the cave’s Malay inscription, tentatively dated to A.H. 1060 (circa 1650 CE), and his critical observation that successive generations of Kedah Malays had localised a legend originally set in Langka (Ceylon) onto their own island, remain the earliest published scholarly engagement with the site [8, pp. 20–21]. H. Goring Dalton’s 1928 travelogue of the Johore and Pahang offshore islands, undertaken in 1918, provides a rare first-hand account of the ghost-ship festival at Pulau Aur, a ceremony occurring only once every eight or nine years, which was already becoming rare by the 1920s [4, pp. 78–96].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. C. Duclos-Legris and C.N. Parkinson (1952). The journal of a Frenchman in Malayan waters, 1804; . C. Northcote Parkinson JMBRAS 25(1): 68–83. Read on JSTOR
  2. C.B. Kloss (1908). Some visits to Batam Island JSBRAS 50: 61–71. Read on JSTOR
  3. C.B. Kloss (1904). Notes on a cruise in the Southern China Sea JSBRAS 41: 53–80.
  4. H.G. Dalton (1928). A visit to some islands off the east coast of Johore and Pahang JMBRAS 6(3): 78–96.
  5. E.M. Merewether (1891). Outline of the history of the Dindings from the 17th century to the present time JSBRAS 23: 35–47.
  6. J.B. Scrivenor and E.S. Willbourn (1923). The geology of the Langkawi Islands: with a geological sketch map JMBRAS 1(2): 338–347.
  7. W.E. Maxwell (1883). Dutch occupation of the Dindings, etc JSBRAS 11: 169–170.
  8. W.E. Maxwell (1887). Pulau Langkawi JSBRAS 19: 27–33.