Singapore: notes on the history of the old Strait, 1580–1850
C.A. Gibson-Hill (1954) traces the navigational history of the waterway now called Keppel Harbour from 1580 to 1850, demonstrating that it was the original “Old Strait” of Singapore — the primary European passage between the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea — and that its official renaming after Admiral Keppel in 1900 rests on a demonstrable error. The article corrects two earlier misidentifications (Barnes, 1911; Moreland, 1934) and reconstructs the sequence by which the strait was abandoned, forgotten, rediscovered, and misnamed.
Summary
The article addresses a persistent confusion in the historiography of Singapore’s straits: which waterway was the “Old Strait” referenced in early European sources? Gibson-Hill resolves this by anchoring his argument in Linschoten’s Reys-Gheschrift (1595), whose detailed sailing directions from Malacca to Macao describe a course running through the Selat Sembilan and then due east through the passage now known as Keppel Harbour, with specific landmarks (the sandy islet on Cyrene Shoal, the Batu Berlayar, the Meander Shoal) that can be matched precisely to modern charts (pp. 165–169). He then shows that de Eredia’s map of 1604 is the first document to distinguish two parallel passages south of Singapore Island — the “estreito velho” (Keppel Harbour) and the “estreito nouo” (a channel south of Pulau Blakang Mati, not the present Main Strait) — and that Peter Floris’s account of the Globe’s westward passage in November 1613 confirms the new strait was already in active use (pp. 171–175).
The abandonment of the old route is attributed to a political disruption around 1584, when the Sultan of Johore, in retaliation for Portuguese plundering, ordered junks sunk to block the strait. Do Couto’s Décadas records that Portuguese pilots subsequently found a new channel to the south, which they named the “canal da Santa Barbara” — a passage no longer than a “camelete shot” in length, consistent with the gap between Pulau Tekukor and the southern point of Pulau Brani (pp. 177–179). Gibson-Hill argues that this new passage, combined with the gradual development of the broader Main Strait, made the old route progressively less attractive, though it remained in intermittent use through the seventeenth century: John Weddell’s fleet of four vessels passed through it in June 1637, Dampier’s ship anchored at Pulau Blakang Mati in 1688, and Wilde’s manuscript map of c. 1680 plots tracks through both the old and new straits with soundings (pp. 179–185).
The strait’s effective disappearance from European navigational knowledge occurred in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Horsburgh’s authoritative directory of 1806 recognized only two straits (the Johore Strait and the Main Strait), and his chart of 1806 rendered the Keppel Harbour area as an impenetrable mass of rock and reef (pp. 191–193). Gibson-Hill then follows the rediscovery: Major Farquhar found the passage in August 1819 and announced it to Raffles as a “new harbour” on 2 September; Captain Daniel Ross surveyed it officially in 1827; and a series of proposals for its development as a coaling depot and dry dock ran from 1829 to 1846, the last of which (Clunis’s dry dock scheme, estimated at $80,000) failed for want of capital (pp. 193–207). Keppel’s visit in 1848, in which he scraped the Mæander’s bottom on the shoal that now bears her name, was the final event that triggered the 1900 renaming — an act Gibson-Hill demonstrates was based on a false premise, since Keppel was in command of the Mæander, not the Dido cited in the official notification (pp. 209–210).
Key Findings
- Linschoten’s Reys-Gheschrift (1595) gives the earliest detailed sailing directions through Keppel Harbour, recording a depth of 4½ fathoms at the entrance and identifying the Batu Berlayar (“Varella of China”) as the principal landmark on the north side (pp. 167–169).
- De Eredia’s map of 1604 (Folio 61R, Declaram de Malaca) is the first cartographic document to label both the “estreito velho” (Keppel Harbour) and the “estreito nouo” (a channel south of Pulau Blakang Mati, north of the St. John’s Islands), establishing that the new strait was not the present Main Strait (pp. 171–173).
- Do Couto’s Décadas (2: 210–11) records that after the Johore Sultan blocked Keppel Harbour with sunk junks (c. 1584), Portuguese pilots found the “canal da Santa Barbara” — a passage no longer than a camelete shot, at its widest 100 fathoms, and at its narrowest only 14 fathoms — which Gibson-Hill identifies as the channel between Pulau Tekukor and the southern point of Pulau Brani (pp. 177–179).
- Peter Mundy’s journal records the passage of Weddell’s fleet through the “old straightt” on 1 June 1637, noting depths of 3½ fathoms and, a “coites cast” further, not 10 feet of water, caused by the inexperience of their Portuguese-Eurasian pilot (pp. 179–181).
- Farquhar’s letter to Raffles of 2 September 1819 announces the discovery of a “new harbour” to the west of the settlement, describing anchorage from 15 to 4 fathoms and entrances narrow enough to be defended by batteries (pp. 194–195).
- Government Notification No. 401 of 1900 renamed New Harbour as “Keppel Harbour” on the false basis that Keppel first demonstrated its capabilities in H.M.S. Dido; in fact he was in command of H.M.S. Mæander in May 1848, and the only feature he “demonstrated” was the presence of the shoal first recorded by Linschoten in 1595 (pp. 164, 209–210).
Conclusion
Gibson-Hill’s definitive historical takeaway is that the name “Keppel Harbour” is an official error founded on a misreading of the Admiral’s own account, and that the strait’s true significance — as the original European passage between the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea, in continuous use from at least the 1580s until the 1690s, then forgotten for over a century before its rediscovery in 1819 — has been obscured by successive misidentifications. The renaming, he argues, should be reversed, and the waterway should be known by the name Farquhar gave it: “New Harbour.”
Context
- The study draws extensively on manuscript maps in the British Museum (Wilde c. 1680, Kempthorne 1688–90, Hacke c. 1690/1700, Eberard c. 1700, Blaeu 1667, Bowrey c. 1690), East India Company letter-books in the Raffles Museum Archives, and Hakluyt Society publications (Floris, Mundy, de Eredia).
- Historiographically, the article supersedes Barnes (1911) and Moreland (1934) by providing the first comprehensive synthesis of the strait’s navigational history, grounded in a personal re-traversal of Linschoten’s course by launch in 1951 and a systematic comparison of over thirty obsolete charts.