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Updated: June 18, 2025
The island of Singapore, which is included in the British Straits Settlements, is nearly seventy miles in circumference, with a population of about one hundred thousand, one-half of which is Chinese, the remainder Malays, Klings, Javanese, Hindoos, and every other Eastern race under the sun, I believe, and a few Europeans.
There are a good many Portuguese, who act as clerks and shop-keepers. There are also Arabs and Klings of Western India, who are Mohammedans. There are also Parsee merchants, while the grooms and washermen are mostly Bengalees. These, with numerous Javanese sailors, as well as traders from Celebes, Bali, and numerous other islands of the East, make up this curiously mixed population.
There was a general stampede ashore as soon as we moored, and gharries covered spring carts drawn by active little Sumatra ponies, and driven by natives of Southern India, known as Klings, were immediately requisitioned, but nothing came of it apparently, and when I came back at sunset I found that, after an hour or two of apparently purposeless wanderings, all my fellow-passengers had returned to the ship, pale and depressed.
Not a Malay or a Kling has raised himself either as a merchant or in any other capacity to wealth or distinction in the colony. The Klings make splendid boatmen, they drive gharries, run as syces, lend small sums of money at usurious interest, sell fruit, keep small shops, carry "chit books," and make themselves as generally useful as their mediocre abilities allow.
It was a 50×95 Express and I had perfect confidence that one ball to a pig was sufficient. The yelling grew nearer until, with a sudden deploy, one hundred Klings and Malays dashed out into the open, close on the heels of a dozen wild pigs. We could just see their black backs above the grass, as they broke down a little ravine in single file, led by a big, hoary boar with tusks.
The Klings, still the principal Hindu traders in the Far East, visited the Malay Archipelago in the first or at any rate the second century after Christ, and introduced their writing and chronology. But their early histories are meagre and unsatisfactory in the extreme.
He bates a little, but not so much as the Klings, who almost always ask twice what they are willing to take. If you buy a few things from him, he will speak to you afterwards every time you pass his shop, asking you to walk in and sit down, or take a cup of tea; and you wonder how he can get a living where so many sell the same trifling articles.
Every Oriental costume from the Levant to China floats through the streets robes of silk, satin, brocade, and white muslin, emphasized by the glitter of "barbaric gold;" and Parsees in spotless white, Jews and Arabs in dark rich silks; Klings in Turkey red and white; Bombay merchants in great white turbans, full trousers, and draperies, all white, with crimson silk girdles; Malays in red sarongs, Sikhs in pure white Madras muslin, their great height rendered nearly colossal by the classic arrangement of their draperies; and Chinamen of all classes, from the coolie in his blue or brown cotton, to the wealthy merchant in his frothy silk crepe and rich brocade, make up an irresistibly fascinating medley.
As I made preparations to leave the vessel and stood on deck waiting, I saw Pondicherry sneaking about in the background. I said farewell to his old serang, and the Malay quartermasters, who were all fine men, and to some of the meaner outcast Klings, and then Pondicherry darted up to me. I knew quite well what was in his mind. It was in his very eyes. I was now going, and should be seen no more.
The usual morning gathering of Rajahs and their followers, with Klings and Sikhs, was there, and I suspect that they thought adult Europeans very foolish for being amused with these harum-scarum antics. A follower had brought a "baboon," an ape or monkey trained to gather cocoa-nuts, a hideous beast on very long legs when on all fours, but capable of walking erect.
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