A Brill Calendar: July 5

Few men employed by the East India Companies of the Dutch or the British can be classified by posterity as ‘Heroes of Humanity’.

But one of them might be Stamford Raffles, born off Jamaica aboard a slave-trader captained by Raffles Senior, on July 6 1781 and dying the day before his 45th birthday in London, July 5 1826. His main claim to fame – invariably mentioned in general encyclopaedias – is his innovative founding of Singapore as a ‘free Port, and the trade thereof is open to vessels ships and of every nation, equally and alike to all.’ After landing on that rather nondescript small island near the Malayan Peninsula on January 29 1819 in a maritime region of South-Eastern Asia dominated by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Stamford Raffles saw to it – with consummate diplomatic skill – that ‘Nederlandsch Indië’ gave up any existing claim on Singapore in a Treaty signed on March 17 1824.

It is seldom however, that thumb-nail sketches like these honour Raffles as redeemer and saviour of the Hindu Shrine Borobudur, or as an autodidact scholar who found out, traced down and uncovered on Java Island in a hitherto unexplored jungle a deteriorating, overgrown, enormous jewel of indigenous architecture, in no respect dwarfed by Egyptian or Mexican pyramids.

Sir Stamford Raffles (knighted 1816) was a specimen of a rare breed: an idealist, indomitable opponent of slavery, a linguist of repute; and, not surprisingly perhaps, the first President of the London Zoo.