Ahmat Majanu’s tombstone at Pengkalan Kempas and its Kawi inscription,
Sir William Hunter, Surgeon to the East India Company, composed this botanical manuscript during his visit to Penang (Prince of Wales Island) in the late 1790s, and it was edited and annotated by H. N. Ridley for publication in 1909. The work serves as both a topographical and climatic description of the island in its early colonial period and a systematic catalogue of its vegetable productions, organised according to the Linnaean sexual system. Its overarching significance lies in documenting the establishment of the East India Company’s spice gardens at Ayer Hitam and recording the first fruiting of nutmeg and mangosteen in Penang, thereby providing primary evidence for the early introduction of economically important plants to the Straits Settlements.
Summary
Hunter’s manuscript opens with a detailed physical description of Penang, including measurements of the central hill (1,192 feet), the harbour, the waterfall river, and the climate, supported by a ten-month thermometer register. He then surveys the island’s districts, population (estimated at 20,000, divided roughly into thirds of Chinese, Choolia, and mixed European/other), and the state of cultivation, noting that pepper was the chief agricultural product and that labour costs were prohibitively high for most other crops. The narrative is interspersed with observations on the East India Company’s spice plantations at Ayer Hitam, which Ridley identifies as the first Botanic Gardens in the Straits Settlements, and on the broader programme to break the Dutch spice monopoly through Christopher Smith’s 1796 expedition to the Moluccas.
The bulk of the manuscript is a plant-by-plant catalogue arranged in Linnaean classes and orders, with Hunter providing morphological descriptions, Malay names, habitat notes, and occasional ethnobotanical observations. Ridley’s editorial contribution, marked in brackets, updates the nomenclature to contemporary taxonomy and flags uncertain identifications. The most extended treatment is given to Piper nigrum, where Hunter records the full cycle of pepper cultivation on Penang: propagation by cuttings, the “laying down” process, the choice of support trees (Morinda citrifolia versus Erythrina corallodendron), bearing periods, harvest timing, and processing. A financial appendix calculates the projected returns on a 100-Oorlong plantation over twelve years.
The manuscript also records failed commercial ventures—sugar manufacture, gambier production, and indigo cultivation—all abandoned because the cost of labour exceeded the market price of the finished product. These failures, set against the success of pepper, illuminate the economic constraints of early Penang and the particular suitability of pepper’s low-labour, high-yield cultivation model to the island’s conditions.
Key Findings
- The East India Company’s spice gardens were located at Ayer Hitam; Christopher Smith was appointed Botanist in 1794 and dispatched to the Moluccas in 1796, from where he sent 71,266 nutmegs and 55,264 clove plants from Amboyna (p. 50).
- Pepper was planted at 1,000 vines per Oorlong (80 yards square, approximately 1⅓ acre); the three-year planting contract cost 225 dollars per 1,000 plants, and full bearing was reached at five to six years (pp. 62–64).
- Total pepper production on the island was estimated at 16,000–20,000 picols in the year of writing, valued at approximately 216,000 Spanish dollars at 12 dollars per picol; Penang pepper commanded a premium of about one dollar per picol over mainland and Sumatran pepper (p. 66).
- The central hill of Penang was measured at 1,192 feet perpendicular height; the temperature on the hilltop was consistently about ten degrees lower than on the plain (pp. 53, 58).
- The Government Botanic Gardens, also at Ayer Hitam, were founded in 1822 and placed under George Porter until 1834, when Governor Murchison sold them at a low price (p. 51).
- A twelve-year financial projection for 100 Oorlongs of pepper (100,000 vines) yielded a net profit of 184,038 Spanish dollars, exceeding the Superintendent’s earlier estimate by 31,000 dollars when interest was properly accounted for (pp. 66–68).
Conclusion
Hunter’s manuscript is a foundational document for the economic and botanical history of early Penang. It demonstrates that the island’s agricultural economy was shaped from the outset by the East India Company’s strategic objective of breaking the Dutch spice monopoly, and that pepper—rather than the spices themselves—became the island’s dominant cash crop due to its compatibility with local labour costs and soil conditions. The failed attempts at sugar, gambier, and indigo production underscore the narrow window of commercial viability in a new settlement where labour was scarce and expensive.
Context
- The manuscript was held in the British Museum and edited by H. N. Ridley, who added taxonomic updates in brackets and supplied the introductory note on the history of the spice gardens; several of Hunter’s original plant drawings are referenced but their whereabouts are unknown (p. 50).
- The work draws on the administrative records of the East India Company’s Penang settlement, including a letter from the Superintendent dated 12 November 1796, and on the published observations of Rumphius, Loureiro, Roxburgh, and Marsden, situating it within the broader late-eighteenth-century programme of botanical survey in British Asian possessions.