Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 2 - How European Sail Power Changed Everything
Chapter II is called “Wings of Canvas,” which is honestly a great title. It captures this moment in the 1400s and 1500s when Europeans figured out long-distance sailing and suddenly showed up in Asian waters like uninvited guests who never left.
Perry walks us through three big phases here: the Portuguese and Dutch arriving first, the British muscling in, and then Raffles founding Singapore. Each one builds on the last, and by the end you see how a jungle-covered island nobody cared about became the most important dot on the British trade map.
Europeans Show Up Uninvited
The Portuguese got to Southeast Asia first. They seized Melaka in 1511 and built a stone fortress called A Famosa. But here’s the thing. Most of the local population just packed up and left for other port towns. Melaka started declining almost immediately. The fortress looked impressive, but it was basically all show. Portuguese power only extended as far as a cannon could shoot.
Perry makes an interesting point about the Portuguese. Bold sailors, terrible businessmen. They wanted trading outposts, not territory. But they couldn’t actually make the business work.
Then the Dutch showed up. In 1603, right off the coast of Singapore Island, a Dutch squadron attacked a Portuguese ship called the Santa Catarina. This massive floating city was carrying cargo worth half the entire capital of the Dutch East India Company at the time. Silk, porcelain, sugar, spices, musk, gold-embroidered cloth. The Dutch disabled her by shooting at the sails instead of the hull. Smart. They wanted the stuff inside, not a sunken wreck.
What’s wild is what happened after. The Dutch hired a young lawyer named Hugo Grotius to write a legal defense of the seizure. His argument for freedom of the seas and against trade monopolies became the foundational text of international maritime law. A piracy incident off Singapore’s coast produced one of the most important legal documents in history. You can’t make this stuff up.
The Dutch eventually took Melaka from the Portuguese in 1641 and dominated the spice trade. They focused on Java and the Indonesian archipelago. But here’s the problem. They were locking down both the Melaka and Sunda Straits, which annoyed the British enormously. Perry notes that English dislike of the Dutch even made it into the language: “Dutch treat” (the guest pays), “Dutch uncle” (a strict disciplinarian), “Dutch metal” (fake gold). That’s some deep cultural grudge.
The British Want In
The British were late to Southeast Asia. They were obsessed with India first. In 1703, a Scottish sea captain named Alexander Hamilton actually turned down an offer of Singapore Island from the Sultan of Johor. The British just didn’t care about the Melaka Straits yet.
But tea changed everything. As Britain’s appetite for Chinese tea grew, they needed a route to China. And that route went through the straits.
Perry highlights a pattern that kept repeating: the British always looked for islands. Islands could be defended by ships. Britain had ships but not large armies. So islands it was. Penang in 1790 was the first grab at the western end of the straits. But Penang was too far west to really control the passage.
There’s a fascinating bit about American pepper traders from Salem, Massachusetts muscling into the Southeast Asian trade around this time. Tiny Salem was contributing 5 percent to the entire US federal budget just from pepper import duties. One American trader who died abroad was shipped home in a coffin filled with pepper. Years later they opened it and reported he “still looked very natural.” Whether anyone used the pepper after that, Perry notes drily, was not recorded.
Enter Raffles
So here’s what happened with the man whose name is now plastered across half of Singapore.
Thomas Stamford Raffles was born at sea in 1783. His father abandoned the family and died in debtors’ prison. Young Tom had to drop out of school before age fourteen to support his mother and siblings. He started as a humble clerk at the East India Company headquarters in London. No wealth, no connections, no fancy education.
But the guy was relentless. He taught himself French well enough to write poetry. On the voyage to his first posting in Penang, he learned Malay and turned out to be better at it than the official interpreter. He studied Malay arts, culture, marriage customs, trade practices. His British colleagues couldn’t be bothered, but Raffles was genuinely fascinated.
Perry is honest about Raffles. The man was brilliant but also a shameless self-promoter. He took credit for ideas that weren’t his. He called Singapore “my colony.” He acted without authorization and then informed his superiors after the fact, knowing that mail between London and Asia took nearly two years round trip. That kind of communication lag gave colonial officials enormous freedom to do whatever they wanted.
In 1818, Raffles talked the Governor General of India into letting him establish a base in the straits. He drafted his own orders. When his first choice of islands didn’t work out, the group turned to Singapore. Perry emphasizes the decision was collective, not just Raffles acting alone. William Farquhar, who actually stayed and managed the settlement for years, deserves shared credit. The Singapore Museum now carefully says as much.
The Founding and the Hustle
The Malays thought they were leasing trading rights to the British. The British chose to interpret the deal as a gift of territorial sovereignty. Perry doesn’t sugarcoat this. The rajas wanted to use the British as pawns in their own power struggles. The British outfoxed them.
Then came the anxious waiting. The Dutch protested. The East India Company objected. London debated. For four years, nobody knew if Singapore would survive as a British settlement. It wasn’t until the Treaty of London in 1824 that the Europeans carved up Southeast Asia: the Dutch got the archipelago, the British got the peninsula. This split the Malay world in half for the first time in history.
And that’s why it matters. This arbitrary European line drawn through Southeast Asia created boundaries that still exist today. Indonesia on one side, Malaysia and Singapore on the other.
Meanwhile, Singapore grew at insane speed. Within three years of founding, the population exploded from a few hundred to over ten thousand. Ships from everywhere crowded the harbor. The secret? Free trade. Raffles insisted on zero import duties, following Adam Smith. No customs hassles, no immigration barriers, no slavery. People and goods just flowed in.
Raffles the Person
Perry gives us a surprisingly full portrait of Raffles as a human being. He kept a tiger cub in his nursery. Birds flew freely through his house. He had an orangutan dressed in a hat, coat, and trousers wandering around. He drowned scorpions and snakes in barrels of alcohol to preserve them as specimens.
But his ending was tragic. On his final voyage home, a fire destroyed his ship along with 122 crates of books, specimens, and manuscripts representing years of work. He’d already lost four of his five children and his first wife to tropical diseases. Back in England, the East India Company accused him of financial mismanagement. On the eve of his forty-sixth birthday, he was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs, likely from a brain tumor.
Today his statue sits in Westminster Abbey next to William Wilberforce. The London Zoo, which he helped found, has a lounge named after him. But it’s Singapore where his name is truly everywhere. Hotels, roads, hospitals, quays. No former British colony honors a colonial figure like Singapore honors Raffles.
Perry’s chapter title is perfect. “Wings of Canvas” captures the fragility and the power of what sail technology made possible. Wooden ships, canvas sails, and the ambitions of a few determined men drew lines on the map that shaped the modern world. Singapore was one of those lines. Next chapter, we’ll see what happened once the colony got its footing.
Previous: Chapter I: Origins | Next: Chapter III: Queen of the Further East