Musing on the past
23 January 2017(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 23 January 2017 issue)
My wife wants to go on holiday overseas. I put my foot down and told her absolutely no way. So we compromised and now we are going on holiday overseas. Where is a nice place to visit?
Perplexed traveller
It is early in the morning and I am back in Kuala Lumpur now. I can hear the sound of frogs and cicadas that will soon be drowned out by the noise of rush hour traffic. But just two weeks ago, I was walking along the South Bank of the River Thames in a rainy London. I was on a mission to find a fabled venison burger when, near to the newish reproduction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, I came upon a modern replica of the Golden Hind. It sounds like it must be something rude but a hind is a deer and the Golden Hind was the first English ship to circumnavigate the world in an epic journey between 1577 and 1580 (when Shakespeare was only a teenager). The ship is tiny, only 30m long, but in it were crammed 80 men, of whom only 56 returned to England. Sir Francis Drake, the ship’s captain, has become a legendary figure for the English because he commanded the fleet that annihilated an attempted Spanish invasion of England, the Armada of 1588. He is not remembered so much for his voyage around the world, perhaps because the modern English do not care much for the outside world or perhaps because he was not the first European to visit the coasts of South America, Asia and Africa. Wherever he went had already been visited and claimed by the Spanish — and long before them the Portuguese — and Drake’s three-year mission was not to boldly go and explore strange new worlds or to seek out new civilisations but to steal gold from the Spanish. Drake was a privateer (a state-sanctioned pirate) and the journey’s financial backers wanted him to make a profit. He stole so much Spanish gold that he garnered them a profit of 4,700%.
Nobody in Asia or England who saw the tiny ship on the seas in the 1570s could possibly have imagined that it was the harbinger of what would become the pre-eminent global financial and imperial power, even if only for a couple of hundred years. Evidence of Britain’s maritime commercial success was all around the modern replica of the Golden Hind in the form of warehouses. They have been converted into very expensive apartments but throughout the 19th century and up until the 1950s, these five-storey buildings and the whole river would have been bustling with activity. In Asia, portside warehouses were called “godowns” but in the tight spaces of London, the goods did not go down but went up. Sailors who might have been from China, India or Malaya (your long-lost and long-forgotten great-great-great-great uncle who never came back) would have offloaded cargoes of tobacco, pepper or rubber directly from the river that would have been winched up the building and hauled in through what were once doors but are now windows with magnificent views along the river. London and the River Thames was once the busiest port in the world with the sailors of a hundred ships rotating their way in and out. The ships would dock on their portside (the left hand side) and, after the goods had been offloaded, a tugboat might have to pull them backwards to go astern, or gostang. Now there are hardly any boats on the river, and certainly no sailors on its banks. Instead there is a modern replica of the Golden Hind and a lot of foreign tourists enjoying the collapsing British currency, and among them was a Malaysian searching for a fabled venison burger.
A few days after my quest in London, I visited Lisbon, where the European voyages that have shaped all our lives began. In Portugal, I came across many familiar words like bomba (actually, the Portuguese call their fire-brigade bombeiros but it’s close enough), escoula, limau, mentega, pao, gereja and a cake called queijada (not exactly kuih, but close enough). And in the Portuguese Maritime Museum, I came across a painting of Alfonso de Albuquerque. As surely every Malaysian knows, he was the man who conquered Malacca in 1511, but in Portugal, he is remembered as the Viceroy of India and his exploits in Malacca are not mentioned at all. This is perhaps because it is no longer fashionable in Europe to proclaim a heritage of rapacious imperialism or perhaps because the Viceroy of India sounds grander, even if that meant he was the governor of the tiny outpost of Goa.
Portugal was never a rich or well-populated country but, in the late 1400s, when the rest of Europe was distracted by religious wars, Portuguese sailors were steadily improving their ships for ever-longer sea voyages and edging their way along the unknown coasts of Africa and Asia. The Portuguese imperial doctrine was to conquer established port cities in order to win control of key marketplaces. Malacca was one of many but its position made it the greatest prize in Southeast Asia. After their conquests, they were fairly benign rulers who did not venture far inland. They married the local women and Portuguese loan words in Malay would suggest they introduced things like butter, shirts, balls, forks, as well as egg tarts and deep frying food in batter.
I know many Malaysians who see the British Empire or the Portuguese conquest of Malacca as the darkest moments in history. How should I, as a Malaysian, have reacted when I saw England’s first Imperial ship or the painting of Alfonso de Albuquerque? Should I have shaken my fist in rage, or just viewed them as colourful figures from our shared past? I usually fail but I try not to view figures from deep history as either heroes or villains because our present-day values and nation states are so different from theirs. They did what they did and I want to understand why and what are the long lingering effects, bad and good. And I also enjoy the swirling of shared pasts where, for example, pisang goreng, fish and chips and tempura all have their roots in Portuguese cuisine.
Reprinted with the kind permission of
