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The busy trading hub of Malacca was to be consigned to history, until Stamford Raffles saw that history was one of its assets.
Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is known today as the founder of Singapore, but his first foray into statecraft came when he was still in his late twenties. In 1808, as assistant secretary to the Governor of Penang he penned an impassioned report which saved Malacca, modern-day Melaka in Malaysia, from oblivion.
Following the disastrous Seven Years’ War, France agreed to quit Canada and leave it to the British, which was not at all what the local tribesmen wanted.
In 1763, King Louis XV promised to leave the Great Lakes to the British, and French merchants duly went away south. The indigenous peoples were dismayed, for the easy-going French had always kept the surly English (and their prices) in check. So when Pontiac, leader of the Ottawas, heard a rumour that the French might return, he decided to help bring back the good times.
Canada’s Hudson Bay has been a cause of war and an engine of prosperity, but long before that it was the scene of cold treachery.
In the autumn of 1534, Frenchman Jacques Cartier reached what later became Quebec and Montreal, the first European to do so. Then in 1576 the English began to take an interest. Martin Frobisher went further north looking for a path to Asia, followed by John Davis; but both men missed a region tucked into Canada’s northern heart, which afterwards emerged as the foundation of her prosperity.
Many of Australia’s first cities were planned by British bureaucrats who had never been there, which may explain why they put them in the wrong places.
In 1835, John Batman (1801-1839) of Launceston in Tasmania set out across the Bass Strait in the schooner Rebecca to explore Port Philip, a large, sheltered bay on the southern coast of Australia. What he saw only confirmed what he had heard from others, and on June 8th he jotted down in his diary, next to a sketch of the place where the Yarra empties into the Bay: ‘reserved for a township and other purposes’.
Lord Cromer, a former Consul-General of Egypt, expressed his frustration at politicians who set too much store by Foreign Office briefings.
In an Introduction to Sir Sidney Low’s study of Egypt in Transition (1914), Lord Cromer (1841-1917), former Consul-General of Egypt, humbly recalled how momentous decisions were taken by men who knew next to nothing about the peoples and societies they were dealing with. But more dangerous by far were the decisions taken by men who had been thoroughly briefed by the Foreign Office.
When it opened in 1901, the Uganda Railway still wasn’t in Uganda, and Westminster’s MPs were still debating whether or not to build it.
Two years after Uganda became a British Protectorate in 1894, work began at Mombasa in British East Africa (Kenya from 1920) on a railway inland to Uganda. Thanks to African terrain and British bureaucracy, when Winston Churchill published the following assessment of it in 1908 the meandering line terminated at Kisumu, 660 route-miles away but still short of the Ugandan border.
English explorer Major Edmund Lockyer tries to buy a puppy in Queensland, but ends up paying the owner to keep him.
In September 1825, Edmund Lockyer (1784-1860) led an expedition through the upper reaches of the Brisbane River in what is now Queensland, reporting back to Sir Thomas Brisbane, Governor of New South Wales, on the possibilities for agriculture and mining. His contacts with the Aborigines were cordial, as this extract from his Journal confirms.