Penang Chronicles

The Straits is in crisis, beleaguered by the Dutch, the Bugis, and the clash between Siam and Burma. Enter Francis Light, country captain. We follow Francis through the Navy until he joins the Honourable Company and spends twenty years making his fortune in the Straits of Malacca, building strong connections with local rulers. His ultimate aim, however, is to establish a British outpost. Ultimately, he fails, but retains his local patronage and settles instead for fortune rather than fame, aided by a fortuitous marriage to a young local woman of noble birth. But he hasn’t yet forsaken his ultimate dream.

It began over twenty years ago when my husband and I lived for two years in Penang while he was working there as a consultant. After many years teaching and with three children at university in the UK, I found myself with an empty nest and at a loose end. Yet I had the advantage of freedom for the first time in years, so I spent the days alone, exploring the streets of Georgetown, becoming increasingly more fascinated by its history. My interest was particularly drawn to Martinha Rozells, the enigmatic partner of Francis Light about whom so little is known for certain. Perhaps I felt some sense of kinship to her at this time in my life as I adapted to my husband’s home, so different from my own in the north of England. How had Francis Light and Martinha Rozells negotiated their relationship more than two hundred years before if it was still a challenge today?

On the way, I must confess, I became intrigued with Francis Light himself whose life story is improbably rich in incident most of which is not generally known. Whatever we might think about the coming of colonialism and all its concomitant issues, men like Francis Light were an special breed who risked all to make their fortunes in the cosmopolitan trading world of the Straits of Malacca. Many died young of tropical disease, shipwreck or violence; it was a harsh environment in which to ply one’s trade. Most have disappeared into history and an early grave. To survive and succeed as Francis Light did, it required courage, ruthlessness and adaptability, all of which qualities he seems to have possessed in abundance. For an illegitimate boy from Suffolk to one day be the governor of a British port in the East was no mean achievement.

Thus my novel about Martinha grew and expanded its horizons, ultimately requiring a trilogy and a host of characters to tell the tale. But at the heart, this is still a story of a man and woman from very different worlds, the Dragon and his Pearl and the world they once knew.

And so the journey began. At first, as an historian, I toyed with the idea of writing a biography of Martinha, but evidence is so scant that it soon became abundantly clear that only a novelisation of her story was possible. Martinha would have to be fashioned from the ground up from the scant and contradictory references that are all we have and a healthy dose of imagination based firmly on the historical sources for the Malay Archipelago at the time.

To do justice to Martinha – and all the forgotten women whose lives were significant but are unrecorded in history – I would first have to bury myself in the period to soak up as many of its stories, events, attitudes and flavours as possible. What followed was a deep dive into a myriad of different sources, often so fascinating and obscure that I was in danger of disappearing down these virtual rabbit holes and never actually writing my novels.

Until along came Covid and I suddenly found myself, as did the rest of the world, in not-so-splendid isolation but with endless hours in which to bury myself in the late 18th century. Silver linings indeed, it would seem.