Munshi Abdullah’s account of the Malacca Fort. A.H. Hill
A.H. Hill published this article in 1950, presenting a translation and critical commentary on Munshi Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s eyewitness description of the Malacca Fort as it stood during its demolition in 1807. Hill’s central argument is that Abdullah’s account—written between 1843 and 1846, more than thirty years after the events—retains sufficient accuracy to be cross-referenced with Governor Bort’s 1678 handing-over report, thereby illuminating the fort’s plan, bastion layout, and internal structures for a period over which official records are otherwise silent.
Summary
The article opens with a full translation of the relevant passage from Chapter IV of the Hikayat Abdullah, in which the eleven-year-old Abdullah describes the granite blocks, sloping bulwarks, eight bastions, four gates, three drawbridges, the moat, the church on the hill, the Governor’s residence, and the prison with its torture instruments. Hill then undertakes a systematic comparison of each element with the documentary record, principally Bort’s 1678 report (published in Bremner, 1927) and the earlier Portuguese sources of Godinho de Eredia (1613 map and Declaracam de Malacca) and Barretto de Resende (c. 1638). The result is a reconstructed ground plan showing the positions of all eight bastions—identified by both their original Portuguese names and the Dutch names adopted after 1641—along with the four gates and three bridges.
A significant portion of the article is devoted to resolving discrepancies between Abdullah’s description and the earlier sources. Hill demonstrates that the four gates Abdullah saw in 1807 were not the original Portuguese gateways but the two large double-doored gates built by the Dutch in 1669, plus a small Portuguese-era gate on the Bukit China side and the surviving Santiago gateway. The moat, drawbridges, and outer breastwork with projecting stakes are all attributed to Bort’s programme of 1673–74, undertaken in response to the Franco-English naval threat in India. The church on the hill is traced from the Jesuit Nossa Senhora do Monte (built 1566–1590) through its Dutch renaming as St. Paul’s to its eventual abandonment around 1753.
The most vivid section concerns the prison called “Miskurdi” (from Portuguese Misericordia), which by Abdullah’s time housed the “Terongko Gelap” (Dark Dungeon) and the “Teratu”—a room containing instruments of torture including a branding iron, a nailed barrel, and a raised slab for breaking limbs. Hill traces the building’s history from its origins as a Confraternity of Mercy church to its conversion into a penal and torture facility under the Dutch, noting that all instruments were destroyed on Lord Minto’s orders during the 1795 British occupation.
Key Findings
- The fort’s perimeter measured approximately 1,100 yards in 1605 (de Eredia) and approximately 1,400 yards after Dutch strengthening in 1678 (Bort); Abdullah records wall thickness of about fifteen feet and a height of about sixty feet to the top (pp. 84–89).
- The moat, begun in 1673 and completed in 1674, was 183½ rods long, 2–4 rods wide, and 12 feet deep (Rhenish measure), with two stone sluices admitting fresh and salt water; Abdullah records it as about thirty feet wide and as deep (pp. 85, 91).
- Governor Bort’s 1678 report records forty-one pieces of artillery (twelve to forty-four iron shots, all bronze except nine iron) mounted in the bastions; Schouten’s post-1641 survey noted 70 very heavy and 40–50 smaller metal guns in the citadel (pp. 88–89).
- The two large double-doored gates with wickets were built in 1669 to replace older, inadequate gateways; the surviving Santiago Gate (between S. Jago and Onze Mille Virgines bastions) is the sole remaining vestige of the entire fortification (pp. 90–91, 99).
- Abdullah records that demolition crews had dug down forty-five feet without reaching the foundations, though the foundations were rumoured to be sixty feet deep (p. 85).
- The Hikayat Abdullah was written between 1843 and 1846; Abdullah was eleven years old in 1807 when Farquhar’s demolition began, placing the events approximately 125 years after Bort’s report and over 300 years after the Portuguese completed the original fortress in January 1512 (p. 84).
Conclusion
Hill concludes that Abdullah’s account, remarkable for its accuracy of detail given the thirty-year gap between observation and composition, provides the only surviving eyewitness description of the fort’s appearance at the moment of its destruction and fills a substantial gap in the documentary record between Bort’s 1678 report and the late Straits Settlements records. The article establishes that the fort Abdullah described was essentially the product of Bort’s 1670s strengthening programme layered over the Portuguese original, and that the comparison between the two sources yields a coherent reconstruction of the fort’s plan that no single document could provide alone.
Context
- The article draws on the Hikayat Abdullah manuscript, Governor Bort’s 1678 report (as published in Bremner, 1927), Godinho de Eredia’s 1613 map and Declaracam de Malacca (as translated by Mills, 1930), Schouten’s post-1641 survey (as published in Leupe, 1936), and Barretto de Resende (as published in Maxwell, 1911), alongside the work of Father Cardon on Portuguese Malacca.
- Historiographically, the article represents an early attempt to integrate a Malay-language primary source with European administrative records for the reconstruction of Malacca’s military architecture, a task that subsequent scholars of the Malacca Historical Society have continued and expanded.