The Incoming Mail Is Also A Great Event,
Though Its Public And Commercial News Is Anticipated By Four Weeks By
The Telegraph.
The Americans boast of the rapid progress of San Francisco, with which
the Victorians boast that Melbourne is running
A neck and neck race;
but, if boasting is allowable, Singapore may boast, for in 1818 the
island was covered with dense primeval forest, and only a few miserable
fishermen and pirates inhabited its creeks and rivers. The prescience
of Sir Stamford Raffles marked it out in 1819 as the site of the first
free port in the Malayan Seas, but it was not till 1824 that it was
formally ceded to the East India Company by the Sultan of Johore, and
it only became a Crown colony in 1867, when it was erected into the
capital of the Straits Settlements, which include Malacca and Pinang.
Like Victoria, Singapore is a free port, and the vexatiousness of a
custom-house is unknown. The only tax which shipping pays is 1-1/2 per
cent. for the support of sundry lighthouses. The list of its exports
suggests heat. They are chiefly sugar, pepper, tin, nutmegs, mace,
sago, tapioca, rice, buffalo hides and horns, rattans, gutta, india
rubber, gambier, gums, coffee, dye-stuffs, and tobacco, but the island
itself, though its soil looks rich from its redness, only produces
pepper and gambier. It is a great entrepot, a gigantic distributing
point.*
[*The exports and imports of Singapore amounted in 1823 to 2,120,000
pounds, in 1859-60 to 10,371,000 pounds, and in 1880, to 23,050,000
pounds! In the latter year, tonnage to the amount of three millions of
tons arrived in its harbor. It must be observed that the imports, to a
very large extent, are exported to other places.]
The problem of raising a revenue without customs duties is solved by a
stamp-tax, land-revenue, and (by far the most important), the sale of
the monopolies of the preparation and retailing of opium for smoking,
and of spirits and other excisable commodities, these monopolies being
"farmed" to private individuals, mostly Chinamen. It is rather puzzling
to hear "farmers" spoken of so near the equator. A revenue of nearly
half a million annually and a public debt of one hundred thousand
pounds is not bad for so young a colony. The prosperity of the Straits
Settlements ports is a great triumph for free traders, and a traveler,
even if, like myself, he has nothing but a canvas roll and a "Gladstone
bag," congratulates himself on being saved from the bother of
unstrapping and restrapping stiffened and refractory straps, and from
the tiresome delays of even the most courteous custom-house officers.
The official circle is large, as I before remarked. A Crown colony
where the Government has it all its own way must be the paradise of
officials, and the high sense of honor and the righteous esprit de
corps which characterize our civil servants in the Far East, and a
conscientious sense of responsibilities for the good government and
well-being of the heterogeneous populations over which they rule, seem
as good a check as the general run of colonial parliaments.
The Governor, Sir William Robinson (now Sir F. A. Weld), is assisted by
an Executive Council of eight members, and a Legislative Council
consisting of nine official and six non-official members, including Mr.
Whampoa, C.M.G., a Chinaman of great wealth and enlightened public
spirit, who is one of the foremost men in the colony. Then on the Civil
Establishment there are a legion of departments, the Colonial
Secretary's office with a branch office and Chinese Protectorate, a
Land Office, Printing Office, Treasury, Audit Office, Post Office,
Public Works and Survey Department, Marine Department, Judicial
Department, Attorney-General's Department, Sheriff's Department, Police
Court and Police Department, and Ecclesiastical, Educational, Medical,
and Prison Staffs.
It is natural that when the mail has been worn threadbare and no
stirring incidents present themselves, such as the arrival of a new
ship of war or a touring foreign prince, and the receptions of Mr.
Whampoa and the Maharajah of Johore have grown insipid, that much of
local conversation should consist of speculations as to when or whether
Mr. - - will get promotion, when Mr. - - will go home, or how much he
has saved out of his salary; what influence has procured the
appointment of Mr. - - to Selangor or Perak, instead of Mr. - - ,
whose qualifications are higher; whether Mr. - - 's acting appointment
will be confirmed; whether Mr. - - will get one or two years' leave;
whether some vacant appointment is to be filled up or abolished, and so
on ad infinitum. Such talk girdles the colonial world as completely as
the telegraph, which has revolutionized European business here as
elsewhere.
The island is far less interesting than the city. Its dense, dark
jungle is broken up mainly by pepper and gambier plantations, the
latter specially in new clearings. The laborers on these are Chinese,
and so are the wood-cutters and sawyers, who frequent the round-topped
wooded undulations. The climate is hotter and damper, to one's
sensations at least, than the hottest and dampest of the tropical
houses at Kew, and heat-loving insects riot. The ants are a pest of the
second magnitude, mosquitoes being of the first, the palm-trees and the
piles of decaying leaves and bark being excellent nurseries for larvae.
The vegetation is luxuriant, and in the dim, green twilight which is
created by enormous forest trees there are endless varieties of ferns,
calladiums, and parasitic plants; but except where a road has been cut
and is kept open by continual labor, the climbing rattan palms make it
impossible to explore.
My short visit has been mainly occupied with the day at the Colonial
Secretary's Lodge, and in walking and driving through the streets. The
city is ablaze with color and motley with costume. The ruling race does
not show to advantage.
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