Emily & Tom

RAFFLES OF SINGAPORE (608 pp.)--Emily Hahn--Doubleday ($3.50).

In 1805, Tom Raffles, a clerk of the East India Company, took ship to the Indies, remarking casually to his aunt that he would come back a duke. "Ah, Duke of Puddle Dock," snorted the old lady (referring to a filthy slum in London's East End). When, 21 years later, the onetime clerk came home to die, he was Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, Kt., founder and administrator of the rich island-fortress of Singapore, an imperial hero of the stature of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, the man who put a stop to East Indian slave dealing and for whom one of the world's most famous hotels would be named: the Raffles of Singapore.

In her books (China to Me, The Soong Sisters, Hong Kong Holiday) impertinent, casual Emily Hahn proved that she was the only living person who could write about China as though it slept under her pillow. Raffles of Singapore has just the same chummy tone; few historical figures have ever been apostrophized so chattily, so personally--at times, Hero Raffles simply gets lost in the Hahn handbag, like a lipstick. Nonetheless, Raffles of Singapore is a lively, unconventional biography, which is also as formless as a conversation conducted by walkie-talkie.

Builder & Botanist. Author Hahn supports the theory that the British Empire was much more a collection of happy accidents (happy for the British) than the resuit of a long-range policy. But, like all previous biographers, she "has .no doubt about the empire-building ambitions of Raffles himself. "[He] saw the [East India] Company ... a part ... of the great divine plan of empire. He never doubted the final Tightness of empire; he merely doubted the Company's interpretation ... of Divinity's intentions. . . . He dreamed of a great British Empire in the Indies, with Java as the center"--and his French and Dutch enemies never gave him a scrap of the trouble that he met with at the hands of his businesslike, unromantic employers in London.

But not even the East India Company, which harbored more peculiar individualists than any stock-company in history, had ever had to deal with so strange an imperialist as Raffles. While his fellow nabobs made their fortunes in spices and property, or sank into fatty degeneracy under the stewing sun, Raffles immersed himself in tireless study of his surroundings--establishing a tradition of government research that has made Indonesia one of the best documented areas of the British Empire. Botanist, cartographer, linguist, historian, Raffles tramped the jungles of Sumatra, Java, Batavia--areas wrested from the Dutch by Napoleon and, in turn, taken from the French by the British Navy, Army, and young Raffles. When, after six years of labor, the young clerk thought he had attained his principal ambition by being made Lieutenant-Governor of Java, European politics smashed his dreams. Under terms laid down by the Congress of Vienna, Britain returned Java to the Dutch, and Governor Raffles' dreams of a British fortress in Indonesia collapsed.

Success in Singapore. Instantly, he set to work again--and this time, his eye fell on the ancient island of Singapore. Centuries earlier, a flourishing city had stood there, but it had become merely a negligible appendage to the Malayan Sultanate of Johore. Where Singapore city now stands were "four or five little huts, and six or seven coconut trees . . . and there was one house, a little larger where the [prime minister] lived." It seems to have occurred to no one but the sharp-eyed Raffles that by establishing a "free city" on this spot, Britain might drain the trade of the Malay peninsula and establish her naval power athwart the route to China.

In 1819, after five years of secretive, studious preparation, Raffles purchased from Johore's Sultan the rights of "protection" over Singapore island. When the news reached London, months later, the East India Company directors were outraged; they had already lost more money than they could afford in such wildcat schemes of trade expansion. But while they debated what to do, the new city of Singapore sprang almost overnight into what Raffles described as "the emporium and pride of the East." Within a year "it was a common sight to count 20 vessels at one time in the harbor"; nine years later, exports and imports had attained a combined value of nearly three million pounds.

His ambition attained, Raffles turned homewards. Of the five children his wife had borne him in these years, only one had survived the scourges of malaria and dysentery. Worn out and sick, he chartered a ship, loaded it with the products of some 20 years' research in the East--a priceless harvest of botanical and zoological specimens, cartological and climatic studies, thousands of pages of native histories and racial researches. One day out, the ship took fire and sank, a total loss.

Sir Stamford Raffles reached London with little more than the clothes he wore. At East India House, the Company directors handed the creator of Singapore a bill for expenses amounting to -L-22,000. A few days later, on the morning of his 45th birthday, Raffles was found at the foot of his staircase, dead of apoplexy. Said the physician in his report: "The sufferings of the deceased must, for some time past, have been most intense."

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