MEMOIR OF CAPTAIN LIGHT. 1 1 



much feeling in the controversy of his day. So also it must 

 be confessed did Mr. Secretary Anderson and the partisans 

 on the other side. 



The unfairness of this as affecting Captain LiGHT's action 

 is obvious: especially because the strongest argument for his 

 view of the independence of Kedah lay just in the fact that 

 the question of dependence was never raised at all in the 

 early days. In the later controversy, at a time when the 

 Siamese invasion was pressing and the Dutch power had 

 passed away from the Peninsula, it was forgotten that in the 

 eighteenth century things were different. Far more important 

 then than Siam stood out the other factor in the question — 

 the Dutch — who in 1783-5 were engaged in active hostilities^ 

 with Selangor and Rio. It is stated in ANDERSON'S "Consi- 

 derations," (1824) on the authority of a letter from LiGHT to 

 the Governor-General, that the Dutch in 1783 wrote to the 

 Rajahs of Kedah and Tringganu for assistance, and fearing 

 Dutch hostility when the Malacca siege was over, those Ra- 

 jahs made in 1785 spontaneous offers of a British settlement 

 in their respective States. 



One thing is certain — that in writing his criticism in 1848, 

 Colonel Low was ignorant of Captain LiGHT's despatch to 

 Lord CORNWALLIS in 1787; and in consequence misrepresents 

 the whole of the official negotiations respecting Salang and 

 Penang as though these had turned upon "whether the islands 

 formed a portion of the Siamese Empire." The printing 

 of this despatch in a later volume of Logan's Journal at once 

 made it clear that nothing of that kind came into the question; 

 its entire absence is in fact most noticeable. Captain LIGHT 

 explained fully the whole of the circumstances of his selecting 

 these islands in the official letter mentioned above, dated i8th 

 June, 1787 (published in LOGAN, Vol. IV, p. 634). This letter 

 shows that in 1780 Warren HASTINGS' Council sanctioned 

 "in a public letter" Captain Light's "plan for employing 

 subscriptions," already actually raised for a Settlement on 



*See S. A. S. Journal, Vol, XXIV, <'Raja HajVs War. 



