THE MORNING AT FORT CORNWALLIS

  17TH DECEMBER 2022 ~ There was an old colonial fort located at one end of Padang Kota. The first time I went to Penang many years ago, this place was undergoing some construction work. I was excited to have the chance to get into one of the historical spots in the country.

The star-shaped Fort Cornwallis stands at the place where Francis Light and his crew landed in 1786 to "take possession" of Penang Island. At first a stockade made of nibong palm trunks were erected, but this was quickly replaced by a brick fort. In old paintings and postcards, Fort Cornwallis can be seen surrounded by a moat and containing a number of buildings within its walls. Of these, the Christiian chapel and a gunpowder magazine still stand. Fort Cornwallis is the best preserved fort in Peninsular Malaysia.

~ from the signboard at the Fort ~

Another longer history of the fort on the signboard:

[2nd paragraph] In 1803, the first batch of India's convict labours started work at the fort under the instruction of Sir Francis Light to rebuild the fort in bricks , without the approval of Bengal during the governorship of Robert Townsend Farquhar which involves a huge cost of total as much as $78682 (Spanish dollars) in the time period of half a month.

In 1804 to 1805, Garvenor Farquhar emphasized on extensive work on the fort. The fort was substantially rebuilt in 1808 and the construction of Fort Cornwallis was completed in 1810 during Norman Macalister's term as the governor with the cost approximately up to $80000 (Spanish dollars). During this period, the Malacca Fort was being demolished and William Farquhar, (employee of the English India Company) arranged for the shipment from Malacca to Penang, of large quantities of bricks, tiles and iron-stone saved from the ruins of the fort and public buildings (January 1808). It is thus probable that Fort Cornwallis and the embankments were partly rebuilt with the materials of both.

That should be at least an interesting fact that the fort was actually rebuilt from the remnants of the Portuguese colonization. The names of the people also rang a bell, which took me back into the history books of my secondary school era.

To put it in a nutshell, this is the place where colonization by the British first happened in our country - specifically on Penang Island. It was however something that we should not be proud of as it was the prologue to many sad tragedies that entailed.