Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia

6: Discourses of Difference: The Malaya of Isabella Bird, Emily Innes and Florence Caddy

Discourses of Difference 99 Isabella Bird’s The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883), Emily Innes’ The Chersonese with the Gilding Off (1885) and Florence Caddy’s To Siam and Malaya in the Duke of Sutherland’s Yacht ‘Sans Peur’ (1889) are narratives written by three very different women who were in Malaya under varied circumstances. By the time Bird embarked on her five-week visit to Malaya in 1879, she was already the renowned author of The Englishwoman in America (1856) and The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875), while Unbeaten Tracks in Japan was to be published the following year. In contrast, the name ‘Emily Innes’ would most likely have faded into obscurity if she had not written her book. She was the wife of James Innes, a junior colonial official who lived in remote parts of Malaya from 1876 to 1882. Florence Caddy set out in 1888 for Siam and Malaya as a guest on the Duke of Sutherland’s yacht. While the ostensible purpose of the Duke’s journey was to recuperate from an illness, he had also been invited by Prince Devavongse of Siam to submit a bid for a railway construction project.1 The visits by Bird and Caddy to Malaya were part of an extended trip. Bird’s journey included visits to Japan, Hong Kong, Canton, Saigon and Singapore. She was hosted by prominent colonial administrators of the day, and it was during her stay in Singapore that an invitation was extended to her to venture northward into the Malay Peninsula. Caddy’s journey lasted four months and included stops in India, Singapore and Siam, returning via Malaya, Ceylon and Egypt. She was hosted by the Duke of Sutherland who was in turn hosted by Thai and Malay aristocrats in Siam and Malaya. In contrast to 6 Discourses of Difference: The Malaya of Isabella Bird, Emily Innes and Florence Caddy Eddie Tay 100 Eddie Tay Bird and Caddy, Emily Innes lived in isolation (and misery, according to her narrative) in Malaya for close to six years. As Susan Morgan puts it, within the hierarchy of British colonial administration, ‘the wife of a junior government servant is the lowest position in the imperial hierarchy, her husband occupying the second lowest’.2 A significant portion of Innes’ The Chersonese with the Gilding Off is devoted to the plight of her husband, who was forced to resign from the colonial service for having refused to issue warrants for the arrest of runaway slaves and for having accused his immediate superior, William Bloomfield Douglas, of withholding income from the Sultan of Selangor. James Innes was denied a significant portion of his compensation: Everything was refused — the compensation for six years’ service, the compensation for privilege leave, and the passage-money . . . As, however, the passage-money had been paid, the Government . . . did not ask for it back again.3 Thus, much of the way Malaya is represented in Innes’ text is filtered through her and her husband’s bitter experiences with the colonial administration. In Discourses of Difference, Sara Mills makes the point that since imperialism is constituted by an investment in ‘constructing masculine British identity’, women who wrote about their travels to colonised regions ‘were unable to adopt the imperialist voice with the ease with which male writers did’ [italics in original].4 If the imperialist voice belongs to a masculine subject, then it is not a tone or style a woman might be able or willing to strike. Given this, ‘how was [colonialism] negotiated in texts by women who were conventionally seen not to be part of the colonial expansion?’5 This chapter engages with this question in relation to the writings of Bird, Innes and Caddy on Malaya, exploring the extent to which their works conform to the idea that women’s travel writings might be considered as constituting ‘discourses of difference’. It also makes the point that, apart from gender, there are other internal distinctions to be made within the ‘discourses of difference’. These include differences in terms of class, marital status and the particular circumstances that brought these women to Malaya. Isabella Bird: The ‘Worlding’ of Malaya Even though it was in 1826 that Malacca, Singapore and Penang formed a single administrative unit called the ‘Straits Settlements’, it was the signing of the Pangkor Engagement in 1874 which marked the formal beginning of Discourses of Difference 101 British expansion in the Malay Peninsula...