Hello r/Singapore! I have a big interest in early piracy in southeast Asian waters, and I enjoy reading up on famous pirates and all that. Is there a museum or attraction specifically about Singapore’s experiences as a “pirate port”? I’ve done some research on possible activities but a lot leads me to places like Sentosa which obviously is not where I, a grown adult, want to be at, lol. Thanks so much.
Posted Sep 19, 2019, 3:16 AM UTC
I think it is mostly books and I have done some research on the early days of Singapore and about piracy in the malacca straits when I was doing a research for a documentary (but was never put in the documentary because I think there are a lot of things that can’t be filtered down to just 15 mins of air time considering the documentary wanted to cover a few stories).
But from the amount of research that I have done back, I think reading up books like Seven Hundreds Years: A History of Singapore and PJ Thum’s Podcast “History of Singapore” to start with. It can be a rabbit hole just so you know.
That said there is a lot of context during that era. You must know that this happens in the 1800s which:
Pirates was a colonial term and there are a few native people such as Orang Lahut who mainly stayed in the seas and they were the navigators in the sea around the region. However they were misplaced but they have descendants around the region.
we were kind of considered to be under the Dutch colony before the British’s East India Company (EIC) until the treaty Anglo-Dutch Treaty and the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance which was signed in 1824
The Malacca Straits was at war at that period of time.
There were no borders until there were 3 different treaties that was signed.
-The 1819 treaties that was signed between Raffles, Temenggong Abdu’r Rahman the then Sultan of Johor, Hussein Shah which allows the British to set up factories here. However this angered the Dutch because the Dutch thought that it is not lawful since they thought the land belongs to them when Sultan mortgage the land to the Dutch.
-Anglo Dutch Treaty which was signed by the Dutch and the British which caused the border to be drawn which Singapore and upwards belongs to the British and below from Dutch East Indies (currently known as Indonesia) belongs to the Dutch
There is a lot of reading to do and if I am not wrong my facts are right at least I trust my facts with 90 percent faith. My facts comes from a professor in NUS. So if I am wrong, it will be either I misunderstood the facts or it will be the facts aren’t complete at that point in time.
Singapore was never really a pirates port. The Malayan peninsula wasn’t really pirate-ish until recent times. The most notable pirates are Ching Shih and the Wokou pirates that’s about it.
Ching Shih. 'Nuff said.
What’s wrong with sentosa?
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It seems like it is more of a tourist attraction aimed at children, not really a place to learn about history. Is that not the case?