St. John’s (St. John’s Island) is an island about five miles from Singapore, mentioned in P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 in connection with the strategic reasoning of British officials immediately after the founding of Singapore in 1819.
A command of the Straits
The reference occurs in a letter from the harbour-master Carnegy at Penang, dated Penang, 27 July 1819, which Van der Kemp reproduces as his Bijlage 4. Carnegy wrote with enthusiasm of the establishment of Singapore and added: “We have a flag on St. John’s, and in war time, a few heavy guns on St. John’s will give us complete command of the Straits of that place. Sir Stamford Raffles has also made a treaty with the old king of Acheen which excludes all other Europeans and Americans.” Van der Kemp’s footnote laconically identifies St. John’s as “an island five miles from Singapore.”
The passage is significant in two respects. First, it shows how soon after Raffles’s occupation of Singapore the British began to think in terms of fortifying neighbouring islands so as to command the straits. Second, the same letter shows the contemporary British misunderstanding of the Acheh treaty as containing an exclusion of all other Europeans — a reading which Van der Kemp immediately contradicts by pointing out that the treaty nowhere contained “absolute exclusion of other European nations from trade at Acheh,” but merely forbade them to settle there. St. John’s thus appears in Van der Kemp’s narrative as a small but instructive datum of the sphere-of-influence thinking that accompanied the founding of Singapore.
See Also
- Singapore
- Straits of Malacca
- Carnegy
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Founding of Singapore
- Acheh treaty of 1819
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.