Article

The date of Munshi Abdullah’s first visit to Singapore

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

The date of Munshi Abdullah’s first visit to Singapore

C.A. Gibson-Hill’s 1955 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 28, Pt. 1) is a focused piece of source criticism that re-examines the arrival date of Munshi Abdullah (Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, 1797–1854) in Singapore. Drawing on the Hikayat Abdullah alongside independent administrative and missionary records, Gibson-Hill demonstrates that Abdullah’s own claim of arriving “about four months” after the founding of the settlement is irreconcilable with the documentary evidence, and that he most likely reached Singapore no earlier than the second quarter of 1821.

Summary

The article addresses a specific but consequential problem in early Singapore historiography: the reliability of Abdullah’s account of the settlement’s founding. Abdullah, writing decades later in the 1840s, credited William Farquhar alone with establishing Singapore and portrayed Raffles as making only a single brief visit in 1819. Gibson-Hill explains how this distortion arose naturally: Raffles’s first visit lasted only nine days (28 January to 7 February 1819), during which he likely slept aboard the Indiana and could not have established quarters ashore. The Malacca Malays who formed the principal contact between the new settlement and the old port knew Farquhar well but had little or no knowledge of Raffles, so the brief visit was easily forgotten. Farquhar’s well-known reconnaissance journeys of 1818 further reinforced the impression that he was the settlement’s sole founder, and the fact that several administrative details remained unresolved until Raffles’s return in June 1819 compounded the confusion.

The crux of Gibson-Hill’s argument is that Abdullah’s internal references to events in Singapore prior to his arrival are anachronistic. He mentions Captain Flint as harbour-master, Bernard as magistrate, Methven’s stone house, and a bustling port with junks from China, Annam, and Siam—none of which existed in 1819. By cross-referencing these details against dated arrivals and administrative milestones, Gibson-Hill shows that Abdullah could not have been present before mid-1820 at the earliest. The final dating is anchored to the missionary record: Johanna Hare’s letter confirms that Rev. C.H. Thomsen (whom Abdullah misnames “Thomson”) was in Malacca in August 1820, and the earliest reference to Thomsen in Singapore dates from May 1822, when he began building a house on Beach Road. Since Abdullah states he arrived with Thomsen, the two men must have reached Singapore between the second quarter of 1821 and mid-May 1822.

Key Findings

  • Raffles’s first visit to Singapore lasted only nine days (28 January – 7 February 1819); his second visit ran from 31 May to 28 June 1819, after completing his mission to Aceh (p. 192).
  • Captain William Flint, Raffles’s brother-in-law, did not reach Singapore until 24 April 1820, and his lot at Tanjong Singapura was not reserved in his name until June 1820 (p. 194).
  • Captain Cathcart Methven arrived on 9 March 1820; his stone and timber house was not ready for occupation until September 1820, and it was not converted into a police station until early 1823 (p. 194).
  • The police force (initially twelve constables) was not instituted until March 1820, and the first magistrates were not appointed until February 1823; Bernard never held the title of magistrate (p. 194).
  • The first Siamese junk arrived in April 1819, but the first Chinese junk (from Amoy) did not anchor in the roads until February 1821, with only four arriving that year (p. 194).
  • Rev. C.H. Thomsen was in Malacca in August 1820 (per Johanna Hare’s letter), and the earliest reference to his presence in Singapore dates from May 1822, when he began building a house on a lot previously allocated to Rev. Dr. Milne (pp. 194–195).

Conclusion

Gibson-Hill’s definitive takeaway is that Abdullah’s absence from Singapore during its critical founding period rendered his account of those events fundamentally unreliable. Because he arrived no earlier than 1821—more than two years after the settlement was established—he was dependent on second-hand Malacan narratives that had already conflated Farquhar’s role with Raffles’s. Gibson-Hill cautions that this error likely extends beyond the founding narrative to other events preceding Abdullah’s arrival, making the Hikayat Abdullah a valuable but chronologically compromised source for the earliest years of Singapore.

Context

  • The article draws on East India Company records (EIC. Rec.), the Hikayat Abdullah (A.H. Hill translation, JMBRAS 28(3), 1955), Johanna Hare’s letter, and the diary of Lt. John Crawford (via extracts made by Cmdr. C.R. Wylie in 1938).
  • The study contributes to the historiographical correction of early Singapore’s founding narrative by demonstrating how the absence of a key witness (Abdullah) from the events he described produced a persistent and influential distortion in the Malay-language historical record.

References