Pulo Auro (modern Pulau Aur) is an island in the South China Sea, east of the Malay Peninsula, mentioned in P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 as a vantage point from which British warships could ride and observe the coast in time of war.
A naval lookout for Singapore
The sole reference to Pulo Auro occurs in the same letter of Carnegy, harbour-master at Penang, dated Penang, 2 July 1819, in which Van der Kemp also records the contemporary enthusiasm for the founding of Singapore. Reporting the rapid growth of the new settlement — from five hundred souls at the end of January to five thousand by mid-year, drawn from Malacca and Rhio — Carnegy concluded: “Our ships of war can ride there in war time, and run out off Pulo Auro, and see the coast clear, and back again in a week.”
The passage shows the maritime strategic imagination at work in the wake of Raffles’s coup. Singapore, with St. John’s Island five miles away and Pulo Auro farther out, formed in British eyes a system of mutually supporting naval stations by which the straits could be watched and, if necessary, commanded. Van der Kemp reproduces the letter (his Bijlage 4) both for the light it sheds on the immediate reception of Singapore and as part of his indictment of British encroachment on Dutch-claimed waters. Carnegy’s wife, he notes in a characteristic aside, “had to flee from Malacca on account of a murder story, while her husband was said to be on a journey to China.”
See Also
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159-239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.