VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
I certainly didn’t come to Melaka intending to become this embroiled in thoughts about its nature and history. I suppose it happened mainly because I generally try to learn a little about any place that I visit. And in Melaka, I went out exploring and checked out all the main attractions and read all the historical signs. I even set aside entire days to visit some of the most notable museums. Add to that a walk and a bicycle ride up and down the river and a nighttime visit to Jonker Street, and you can say that you have “done” Melaka.
But then something odd happened. I started to find out that many of the things I thought I knew were completely wrong or badly distorted or at least incomplete. In fact, once I started digging a bit deeper, I discovered that in fact I knew NOTHING about Melaka. And I took that personally. I had taken the time to visit a whole bunch of museums. So it’s reasonable to assume that I had acquired some true knowledge about the city and its history. But suddenly, I realized that I knew next to nothing. And that bugged me. So I decided to start all over!
And then it turned out that there are layers to this history thing. Every time you go down one more layer and learn some new things, you discover that there is another layer under that! And another! If you start pulling on the thread of just one small fact, you suddenly unravel your entire understanding of the city, and you have to start all over again from the beginning. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing here in Melaka.
In this video, I focus on four more topics that rose to the surface when I was re-learning everything about Melaka:
1. The size of the fortress.
2. The guns of Melaka.
3. The size and nature of the Melaka bridge.
4. The extent of the Dutch moat defenses.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
The title of this video is very, very true. As the days go by, I find out there are lots more things about Melaka that I didn’t know. I’ve been shooting videos here in Melaka and doing a little bit of a deep to shallow dive into the history. And then every time I finish one of these videos and then I’m editing the video, thinking about the things that I said, things that I saw, and then replying to comments that people leave, giving me more information, I realize that that subject has another layer to it. Things that I totally missed the first time around and even the second time around. So, I actually have a little bit of a list of three, four, maybe five things that I wanted to talk about today. More things that I didn’t know about Melaka.
The first topic for today’s video is one of my favorite places in Melaka. I walk by it all the time. I’ve talked about it a lot. And this is the Middelburg Bastion which was added to the fort of Melaka that was built by the Portuguese in the 1500s. And when the Dutch took over in 1640, they expanded the fort, added bastions, and this is one of the bastions that the Dutch added to the original fort, the Middelburg Bastion.
There’s a fascinating story here that I talked about in my last video that back in I think 2006, I may have that date wrong, they were planning to build a large tower here, the Menara Taming Sari, the observation tower where the observation platform goes up and down and spins around. You can see it way off there in the distance. They were going to build that tower here, but when they started digging out the foundations, their excavators hit a bunch of stone under the ground, and they realized that they had uncovered some of the foundations of the original Portuguese and Dutch fort. So, they moved the site of the observation tower, that tourist attraction, and they recreated the Middelburg Bastion. And here it is an example of what the fort would have looked like under the Dutch in particular.
But something about it always bothered me. Mainly that it did not look imposing enough. I read so much of the history of how powerful this fort was, how difficult it was to conquer. When the Dutch fought the Portuguese over Melaka, they laid siege to Melaka and the siege lasted for 5 months. So I got this impression that the fort was impregnable. And yet when I came down here to look at the Middelburg Bastion, it didn’t look that intimidating to me. Someone who’s in pretty good physical condition could probably take a run at this and then kind of climb up, jump, and get a handhold there and they could climb over this wall. I couldn’t do it right now, but people who are athletic or younger, yeah, they could probably get up there pretty easily.
So I thought I don’t know is this really an accurate representation of what the fortress would have looked like and there is an interesting paragraph here that I want to point out. So when you come here as a tourist and you can read about its history says here excavations in 2006. So that is when they discovered the foundations here, revealed the site of the original fort and then they created this replica and it says the Middelburg was reconstructed based on archaeological evidence, written documents, reports and extensive discussions among local and foreign experts in the field of archaeology, history, architecture and geology.
I don’t know about you, but when I read that, I come away with the impression that man, they spent a lot of time getting this perfect long discussions with all the experts to make sure they got it right. But based on what I’ve been reading lately, what they don’t tell you is that in those discussions, they made a decision to make it smaller. They shrunk it because, of course, we’re in the middle of Melaka. We’re in the middle of a city and there are roads out there. There are streets where people are living their lives and there’s a street right out here for example. You can see cars going by. And if they recreated the fort wall and the bastion as it actually was, it would extend out over this whole area. It was much bigger than it is displayed here. But they couldn’t recreate it entirely because as you can see the foundations start extending underneath the road. They would basically to create a historically accurate section of this fort, they would have to take over this whole area and it would block the street. So they made a decision to make it smaller than it was originally.
And once I figured that out, everything kind of clicked into place for me and things made a lot more sense. For example, if you look at this and then you measure the fort wall like from the ground up to the base of the top the parapet that looks to be maybe 10 ft call it 11 12 ft something like that 2 or like 3 m right. So you’re looking at a wall that extends from ground level to the base of the top area not to the top of the crenellation but to the parapet yeah you’re looking at about 3 m about 10 11 12 ft but when you read the historical documents they say that this wall was as high as 32 feet 32 feet high about 10 m the height of a three-story building. So, an accurate reconstruction would be nearly three times higher than what you’re looking at here.
I spent some time online, like going to original historic sources and gathered up as much information as I could about the actual dimensions of the fort of Melaka and the Middelburg Bastion in particular. And I took all of those numbers and then I worked with a couple of AI image generators and I’m working with the AI and we combined our knowledge and I asked the AI to create a realistic image of what this Middelburg bastion would have looked like back in the 1670s. And that image you see is what we came up with. And as you can tell, it is very very different from how it looks in terms of the replica you see in Melaka today.
So, switching back to the video of the Middelburg Bastion replica here in modern-day Melaka. Can you imagine a opposing navy sailing up here with their ships and their cannon and they’re coming to defeat whoever is holding the fort and they see this, I don’t think they would be that worried about it. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, we can take that. It doesn’t look that tall. It doesn’t look that formidable.” But now let’s switch back to the diagram of what I think it actually looked like. And now imagine facing that. The 32 ft measurement that would be taken from the bottom of the ditch because these walls and the bastion had ditches built around it as well and moats. So, if you go all the way down to the bottom of the ditch and then all the way up to the top, that’s where the 32 foot measurement comes from. And if we go back to the diagram, you can see in front of it, there’s a human and a war elephant for scale. And now imagine you’re a typical warrior or soldier standing at the base of the fort as it actually looked. Then you’re looking at something much more difficult to overcome.
I’m up on top of the Middelburg Bastion now, and from up here, I think you can also get a sense of what my initial problem was. I came up here with this idea of the impregnable fort of Melaka. So, I climbed up here, but then when you look around, even a modest two-story building like you see across the river, they’re kind of higher than the fort. And that just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. If you’re building an impregnable fortress, you don’t really want the surrounding buildings to tower above your fort. You would like it to be reversed. So, in reality, based on my amateur historical something, where I’m standing right now at this height is not really where the Portuguese and Dutch defenders would have been standing. Well, the Dutch in this case, because they built this particular bastion, but the Portuguese as well, they had their own bastions and fort walls. They would have been standing two to three times higher than this, giving them a commanding view over everything around them and the river and any opposing forces coming in their direction.
And when you walk around Melaka and see some of the uncovered ruins of the foundations of the fort wall and the bastions, you do get the impression of a relatively narrow wall. You just have to break through the wall. But in fact, the historical records tell you that yeah, this bastion and the walls were 32 feet high and 26 ft thick. So the standard fortress wall itself was 26 ft thick. And that is a much more formidable fortress to be facing than I think most we get as a tourist we get an impression of what the fort was like. But then when you think about it in reality, yeah, it was a much tougher fortress to conquer than you might think.
And I just want to emphasize one fact that I kind of glossed over very quickly. And that is when the Dutch came here to fight the Portuguese for the possession of Melaka, it took them five months to finally break through. And that alone can give you a sense of what the fort was like originally. The Dutch, a major military power, naval power at that time, they couldn’t just show up, break down the wall, and get into the city. They had to lay siege to Melaka. And that siege took 5 months before they finally managed to break through and defeat the Portuguese. And the only reason they were able to finally break through the defenses of the fort and defeat the Portuguese probably had much more to do with disease than with military strategy or firepower because the fortress was still holding up pretty well. But on both sides, soldiers were dying from malaria, from cholera, from dysentery. And in fact, based on what I read, more soldiers died on the Portuguese side and the Dutch side from disease than they died from the actual fighting.
The Dutch could not get through this fort because, as I said, it was two to three times higher than what you’re seeing here in terms of the outer walls. Much thicker. A very formidable fortress. And while they all they could do was lay siege to the city for 5 months and starve the Portuguese out. And of course the Dutch had their siege cannons and they were constantly blasting away at the walls and they brought down sections of it towards the end and then they were able to send soldiers inside. But yeah, just I guess if you’re a tourist coming to Melaka, I would say you’re looking at the Middelburg Bastion and imagining it as a powerful fort. Now picture what you see here, but picture it two to three times higher and much much bigger in area. And then you start to get a more accurate picture of what the fort was actually like back in those days built by the Portuguese and then expanded by the Dutch.
So yeah, that was point number one for the new things that I learned about Melaka. The second thing that I’ve learned about Melaka is all about the guns of Melaka. And just like the Middelburg Bastion, this is something that has always bothered me because I would go into museums and I would see two things side by side. In fact, I saw this exact setup at that museum behind me. And these two things side by side just didn’t make sense to me there. Something was off. So, I started doing my own research and my own digging and I uncovered a lot of interesting facts and factoids about the actual history of the guns of Melaka.
And for this portion of the video, I was going to start it inside this museum because as I said, there’s a display in there that illustrates it perfectly. But my luck is holding true, meaning that it’s closed. I have this habit in my life of everywhere I go, the one day I want to go somewhere, it turns out that that place is closed. So, I’m unable to show you the display that would help you understand what I’m talking about, but I’ll put in pictures and I’ll just tell you about it.
So, inside that museum, there was a display talking about what the Portuguese discovered when they came to fight the Melaka Sultanate and eventually defeating them. There’s a lot of records kept by the Portuguese themselves in their diaries, in their journals, in their military reports, in their historical reports that they were surprised at how many guns there were in Melaka. And there’s a display in this museum on the wall that I was reading and it said it was like written in a Portuguese diary from the battle that they found somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 cannon in Melaka. And then right beside that display, you saw a massive multi-ton cannon essentially looking very similar to one of these. These are from the Dutch East India Company VOC. So these are massive siege cannons that you would have seen coming out of Europe, you know, back in those centuries.
When I saw that figure, like even take it at the low end where they said that the Portuguese seized 3,000 cannon and then right beside it was one of these monsters. And I was thinking, “Wow, they had 3,000 of these cannon defending Melaka in the days of the Melaka Sultanate.” And I’m doing the math in my head and I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t seem quite right to me.” So when I started digging into it, I discovered that this misunderstanding was kind of a language confusion thing that the original Portuguese words were translated into English as cannon, but in fact that’s not what they meant. A more accurate translation would be something like guns. So they did have these thousands of weapons in Melaka, but they were not cannon like this. They were much smaller weapons that even one person could carry. I think they’re called historically cetbang, kind of like a swivel gun. You might think of it as a bit of a beefier shotgun.
And back in the days of the Melaka Sultanate, they didn’t have siege warfare like in Europe. In Europe, they needed guns this big to blast down castle walls and fortress walls. So, they had siege guns and their ships were outfitted with these huge siege guns. But at the time of the Melaka Sultanate and then this is quite an interesting difference as well. The Melaka Sultanate was not a major world power at the time because it took over everything militarily. Its true strength came from its role as a center of trade. They were open to anybody in the world to come here and trade freely. So they established a safe and secure place where anybody in the world could come with their ships and trade with other nations around the world. And that’s where Melaka’s true strength came from. And they offered inexpensive duties and customs things like that were quite low. It was essentially a free trade port which is what made it so attractive. It was in a shipping lane, of course. That’s another reason Melaka grew so rapidly and became so important. And they offered this safe and secure place to do their trading, but they also offered security out at the Melaka Strait.
So, the Melaka Sultanate had ships out there, but they were not engaging in these massive naval battles like you imagine from Hollywood movies about Europe at that time. They were fighting against pirates. And what they had mounted on their boats, on their ships, the Melaka Sultanate ships were these swivel guns. And they were designed to shoot at pirates on the deck of the opposing boats. So they were anti-personnel guns. They were not designed to blast through fortress walls to blow holes into ships. They were designed, they were lightweight guns that could be carried around, mounted easily on all the ships and they would fire at people, at opposing pirates, things like that. So these were the weapons that Melaka had.
And now this started to make sense to me because I was reading about the first day of the 40-day major battle between the Portuguese and the Melaka Sultanate. And buried in the text was this line that at the end of the day, I mean, the Portuguese were beaten back on the first day of the battle. They had to retreat to their ships. They actually managed to take the bridge, which I’m going to be talking about in a minute. But the Portuguese couldn’t hold the bridge, so they had to give up on the first day and retreat back to their ships. And it says that the Portuguese brought back with them 50 cannon that they seized.
And I kept looking at that line and thinking 50 of these, you know, at the end of the day, they’re exhausted. There aren’t that many Portuguese soldiers. There is no way they’re carrying 50 siege cannons back to their boats. So, we’re actually talking about these cetbang. And then when the Portuguese were talking about how they recovered 3,000 to 8,000 cannon, it’s that type of weaponry they were talking about. And again, from what I read, even that figure is a bit misleading because I was imagining the Melaka Sultanate had 8,000 of these guns mounted all around the city blasting away at the Portuguese. But that’s not really what happened because a lot of the guns that the Portuguese captured were in storage. So they found huge stockpiles of these guns in the palace in the local foundries up and down the river. So when they talk about seizing 3,000 guns, it wasn’t meaning that there were 3,000 guns facing them. They found 3,000 guns in the city and a lot of them were in the foundries and they had been piled up and they were waiting to be distributed to ships, sold to other traders so that they could mount on their ships.
So, you see what I’m getting at is that when I went into that museum and on the wall it said that there were as many as 8,000 cannon and then they showed one of these cannon right beside it. I thought that’s what they were saying, that there were 8,000 giant siege cannons arrayed around Melaka, but I was 100% wrong about that. And in fact, that big cannon, the one that’s on display over here, it’s a replica, it is a very famous cannon here in Melaka that I didn’t know anything about. In fact, that cannon is unique. It was in fact the only siege cannon that they found in all of Melaka. And being unique, it even has a name. I didn’t know this at the time when I was going through the museums. Every time I saw that cannon, I thought it was an example of the type of cannon that they had in Melaka. But in fact, that cannon is a replica. All the ones I see in the museums here, it’s the same cannon being reproduced over and over again. And I believe it is called the Peca de Melaka Portuguese the piece of Melaka. And when the Portuguese defeated the Melaka Sultanate and they started looting the city, they were amazed to find that cannon, but it was the only one they found here. And they were so amazed by it, they brought it all the way back to Europe. And the original Peca de Melaka is on display at the military museum in Lisbon. It still exists, the original cannon and it’s actually in a museum in Lisbon. And the ones you see here are replicas of that. And in fact, that cannon, it wasn’t forged here in Malaysia or in Melaka. It was a gift. And for me the history got a little bit confusing but I think it was a gift from a kingdom in India at that time and it was a gift from them to the Sultan of Melaka because here in Melaka they did have foundries. They had skilled metal workers who could make these cetbang and bronze guns of different types. I think they were mainly Japanese in origin, but their metal working techniques were entirely different from the ones you use to make these cannons. It was like wax where they carve the gun out of wax and then pour in molten bronze. It’s like mold casting using a wax model. And that was suitable. That was the technique that they developed over a very long time. And you use an entirely different forging process to make one of these huge cannon that you see here. And here in Melaka, they weren’t using that type of technology. And as I talked about, well, they didn’t really need it because they weren’t conducting warfare at that level. The guns they made here were anti-personnel guns for sweeping the pirates off the deck of a pirate ship, things like that. And they were small, lightweight guns.
So yeah, that’s something else to think about when you visit Melaka and you see cannon like this and then you go to a museum like that and you start reading about how there were 3,000 cannon opposing the Portuguese, you have to understand that that was actually just a language problem, a translation error, and they didn’t really have 3,000 cannons like this they had 3,000 to 8,000 guns. These cetbang that I’ve been talking about. One way to think about these numbers is that if Melaka actually had 3,000 cannon like these ones you see behind me, I mean, you can’t fire one of these cannon alone. You need a team of skilled soldiers to run, operate, and fire one of these cannons. So if you had 3,000 of these defending the city, you would need a force of like 20,000 men just operating the cannon. And that is obviously that doesn’t make any sense at all because I think the total forces on the Melaka Sultanate side during the battle was about 20,000 soldiers. So they didn’t have an army of 20,000 men operating 3,000 of these big cannon. The numbers just don’t add up.
So that is something else that I learned while I was here in Melaka over the last few days. And yeah, it made a lot of sense to me cuz as I said, everything I’d read about the guns of Melaka, they didn’t really add up in my mind. It just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But now after a bit of a deeper dive, you know, some of the facts are clicking into place and I understand things quite a bit better.
The next thing I want to talk about and the next thing that I learned a lot more about in recent days has to do with what I’m looking at right there. And that is the main bridge here in Melaka. And I think the modern visitor thinks of that bridge pretty much as how you get to Jonker Street. Over here is a Dutch square. Over there is Jonker Street. And oh, to get to Jonker Street, we have to walk over the bridge. And that’s probably as far as most visitors go in terms of thinking about that bridge. But in fact, that bridge is far more important than that. In fact, in a way, it is the key to unlocking the entire history of Melaka. In fact, if you wanted to learn about Melakan history, it’s not a bad idea to start with that bridge and then work your way outward from there.
And again, for this part of the video, I was hoping to start it over there at that museum because they have a model inside the museum of the Melaka Bridge. Like, it’s a museum exhibit that says, “Oh, here is the bridge of Melaka.” And it was so interesting that I wanted to start with that image from inside the museum and then go outside to where I am now. But because the museum was closed, I can’t show you that. I’ll show you the photograph. So, there’s the picture that I took of that exhibit in the museum. And then what you see is basically a small wooden walkway, very similar to what you might see in a village, anywhere in Asia, out in the fields, a little bridge going across a creek, something like that.
And for this story, once again, you have to go back to the original documents recorded by the Portuguese when they came here and they saw the bridge and they wrote down descriptions of it. And what the Portuguese wrote about was essentially a marketplace because the original bridge under the Melaka Sultanate was kind of what they call an inhabited bridge. The Portuguese describe how wide the bridge was and on either side of the bridge it was lined with shophouses. So the bridge itself had market stalls and shophouses selling all the variety of products available in Melaka. Money changers things like that lining both sides of the bridge with covered roofs going across. And then it had big wide open lanes in the middle, big enough for military troops to cross, war elephants, things like that. So based on the historical descriptions, this bridge was huge. The comparisons you can make are things like the bridges in London from medieval times. There are a couple of famous ones. There’s one in Venice. I’ll put some photos, screenshots up on the video here. Here you can see what I’m talking about. And that’s more what the Melaka bridge would have looked like at that time.
And it was an interesting piece of engineering because on both sides it was lined with all of these shops like a bustling market. In fact it was described the bridge itself was described as one of the most bustling markets in East Asia which is quite interesting because you don’t think of a bridge as being a market lane but that’s essentially what it was but it had some interesting engineering because the center portion of the bridge was removable because occasionally they had to move big ships up and down the river and to get by the bridge they would dismantle the center of the bridge, remove all of the wooden planks, remove the giant timbers, the ships would sail through, and then they rebuild the center span again.
And this was a key part of the military fight for Melaka between the Portuguese and the Melaka Sultanate. I’m up on the modern bridge of Melaka right now. And then based on what I read, the original bridge of the Melaka Sultanate would have been a little bit wider than this one. Somewhere between 15 17 m across. So wider than what we’re looking at here, but that whole side would have been covered in shophouses. And then this side as well, vendors and shophouses. And then the middle span would have been open for all of the traffic flowing back and forth.
And one of the reasons it was so important is that Melaka was a divided city. Half of it was on each side of the river. So this side of the river contained basically the Melaka Sultanate palace, the mosque, it was basically the royal court and the government was all on this side of the river and then all the traders and the people the Chinese, the Gujaratis, the Javanese, all of the people who come here to Melaka to trade with their ships, they all lived on this side of the river and there was a constant flow of important traffic going back and forth between the two halves of the city.
And something else it’s important to remember, at least based on what I’ve read and all the research I’ve done, the river itself would have been much wider back in the days of the Melaka Sultanate. This modern version of the Melaka River is much narrower. Back in the old days, it would not have had, of course, these cement walls on each side. It would have been a much wider river with muddy flats and mangrove sorts of areas on both sides. And getting across that river would have been a major challenge. So, in terms of the width of the river, the bridge had to cover a much wider span as well. So it would have been much larger relative to the modern bridge because here the modern river has gotten much narrower than it was in the past. This in fact was essentially the mouth of the river, the river delta opening up onto the Melaka Strait. So this is actually the point where in those days the river would have been meeting the sea. And of course we all know think of any river meeting the sea. It’s always a much much wider part of the river than when you go inland. And all the land reclamation has moved the shoreline much much further away. But back under the Melaka Sultanate, this would have been the opening to the open ocean basically.
It’s a pretty hard to mentally picture everything that I’ve been talking about. Of course, even for me. So what I did, just like I did with the fortress walls and the bastions, I assembled all of the information I had gathered about the Melaka bridge and I started chatting with some AIs with Gemini and ChatGPT, things like that. And they pulled all their information based on historical records about the bridge and we created this image that I’m going to show you right now. So based on everything I read, all the facts and figures and the historical records, this is more what the bridge would have looked like underneath the Melaka Sultanate. And you can see it is a completely different animal compared to the one that you see on display inside the museum. And if you’re reading about the bridge and its role in the battle for Melaka, this is the bridge you have to keep in your mind. And this I think this illustration is much closer to reality and it shows you just how important this bridge really was.
In fact, the bridge was so important to the city under the Melaka Sultanate in the sense that it divided the city into two halves that Afonso de Albuquerque, the leader of the Portuguese forces, he immediately realized that he had to take the bridge. And in fact, that was his main goal in his military campaign. He realized that if he could seize the bridge, take it from the Malay defenders, then he had control of the city because he would be dividing the sultanate forces in half and the forces on that side of the river were cut off from the leadership and the other forces on the other side of the river. So the battle for this bridge was the key battle back in 1511 between the Portuguese and the Melaka Sultanate.
I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating just how dramatic the fight for Melaka was between the Portuguese and the Melaka Sultanate. Again, this is something else that I learned about Melaka that I was completely unaware of is that the battle itself lasted for 40 days. It took the Portuguese 40 days of intense fighting in order to finally defeat the Melaka Sultanate. It wasn’t as a lot of people imagine it. I think I’ve seen it talked about online where people say, “Well, the Portuguese showed up with their ships and their cannons and they blasted the city and they defeated the Melaka Sultanate as if it was all over in a day.” But it was a long drawn out campaign full of strategy on both sides that lasted 40 days before the Melaka Sultanate finally realized they weren’t going to win. And the Melaka Sultanate gathered up his entourage, his soldiers, his court, and all of his treasure that he could carry with him. And they retreated out of the city and then continued fighting from Johor. They went out into the countryside and continued the fight from there and gave up the city to the Portuguese. But it took 40 days.
And a lot of that fighting, as I said, centered on this bridge. Both sides were fighting for possession of the bridge. And on the very first day, as I already mentioned, the Portuguese landed a bunch of soldiers on both sides of the river, attacked from two different directions, and they actually seized the bridge. So by the end of the day, the first day of fighting, the Portuguese were in possession of this bridge, but then they came under such heavy counterattack that they had to retreat. They had to give up the bridge and then go back to their ships. Every time the Portuguese would try to move away from the bridge and kind of attack the royal court, the Sultan palace that side, then all the soldiers would come and flank them and then flank them from the back and start attacking them. And the Portuguese were exhausted by the end of the day. They were dealing with the psychological fear of poison darts and poison arrows, things like that. And eventually the Portuguese, even though they took the bridge, they had to give up and they retreated back to their ships to regroup and then plan for their next attack.
And then as I talked about in other videos, the Portuguese came up with this ingenious strategy with the help of some of the local people because the Chinese community here in Melaka was not entirely happy with the sultan at that time and the treatment they were getting. So they made a deal with the Portuguese and they supplied them with I think five large junks like the large Chinese ships and the Portuguese used those Chinese junks for landing their troops but they also took one of them and basically turned it into a siege tower. The high end of the ship they reinforced it mounted as many guns as they could. Put a bunch of soldiers on the ship and then they floated the ship up the river at high tide and then they beached the ship right beside the bridge. So it essentially gave the Portuguese an elevated position on this reinforced ship and they could fire down on all of the defenders on the bridge. And they kept that ship there, I think, for nine days, constantly shooting and shelling at the defenders on the bridge. And that was one of the key elements of the eventual Portuguese victory.
And to add to the drama, I was reading that the Malay forces, the local Melaka Sultanate forces, took local boats, filled them with tar and other flammable material, set them on fire, and then floated these flaming boats down the river, hoping to snag the Portuguese siege boat, you know, this giant Chinese junk that they were using as an elevated fortified position. And they floated these flaming boats hoping it would hit this ship, set it on fire and of course burn it down to the water line. So yeah, you can imagine how dramatic that scene must have been. And this whole battle for Melaka, I think someday somebody is going to make a big budget movie about the battle for Melaka. I think it would be. It’s an amazing story and not many people seem to know much about it.
So, I just walked over the bridge heading towards Jonker Street and I’ll leave you with that image that I created using my AI buddies of how the bridge possibly looked back in the days of Melaka Sultanate because I think that image says far more than a thousand words.
And here is the entrance, the archway into Jonker Street. And I’m heading in this direction because there’s something at the end of Jonker Street here, which I have never seen before. And it connects with the final topic that I wanted to talk about. Something new that I learned about Melaka quite recently.
I’m now at the site of the fourth thing that I learned about Melaka recently, or at least I learned a lot more about it. I had an inkling of this topic, but I didn’t have a whole lot of details. And then one day I was rummaging around on Google Maps, satellite view as I often do, and I spotted something called the Dutch Moat. And I’m standing on top of the Dutch moat right now. And there it is. Not very impressive from this angle compared to the other sites that you might find in Melaka. Over here, just in that direction is Jonker Street. And this is one of the other major historical laneways of Melaka right there. And you’re going to see incredible museums and architecture and history all through that area. And compared to that, this little ditch may not seem that important, but in fact it is quite important because the Dutch, as we know, and I’m very much aware because I have a Dutch heritage, the Dutch were masters of water engineering, and when they defeated the Portuguese and took over Melaka, they set about expanding the fortress in particular. Making it bigger and stronger, adding bulwarks, but they also developed a set of moats around the city adding to the defenses.
So when you’re looking at this moat here, this was dug under the Dutch administration and this would have been the outer boundary of the city itself. So as I said, Melaka was essentially divided into two sections by the river and the fortress, the Melaka Sultanate Palace, the government administrative centers were all on the south side of the river and this side, the north side was the city itself where all of the regular people lived and the Dutch were defending both halves and around the edges of the city half. They built a series of moats like this that would have been defended by soldiers at the time. So there would have been military stations along the ditch along the moat as well. And this would have been their outer line of defense for any armies that were attacking from the land. They would first have to get over these defended moats.
So yeah, I just thought it was kind of interesting to see marked on Google Maps the Dutch moat. So I wanted to come in this direction and take a look at it. And you can see it’s a pretty major construction. Surprises even me how like who knows what it would have looked like back in the Dutch days. I imagine this would all would have been cleared land for easy visibility to see enemy forces coming. And this would have been slanted on both sides to make it more difficult for an invading army to get down and then make it across the water and then up the other side and they could fire on the enemy as they’re trying to cross the moat. So there was this entirely different set of defenses, water defenses that the Dutch built and the moats over here on this side of the city still exist, which is pretty amazing.
So to get here, I walked the full length of Jonker Street and then once you leave Jonker Street behind, do a little bit of a left turn and a right turn, then you get here to the moat. And off in that direction, this would have been the city, the historic city of Melaka on the other side of this defensive barrier.
I’m glad I took the time to walk out here. It is actually more extensive and more impressive than I was expecting. I saw the pin on Google Maps and I thought it would just be a small location, but in fact, it’s much more extensive. You can see just how long it goes. And I suppose if you wanted to make a whole day of it, you could just walk and walk and walk and try to go as far as you can, but there’s no pathway following it. You’d end up hitting private property and having to go around and around. So, it’d be a major undertaking to follow the entire moat, but it’s enough for me today just to see this part of it and get a sense of what the Dutch built.
Of course, listening to myself, I have to stop and make a comment because you end up saying, well, the Dutch built this and the Portuguese built that. But it would be more accurate to say that this moat line of defense was built under Dutch occupation because it’s not like there were thousands of Dutchmen out here stripped down to the waist and digging this moat. No, this was all done, of course, with local labor, conscripted, forced, even slave labor to build a lot of this, the building of the Portuguese fortress and the Dutch fortress. That was all done by local labor. And I think that that is something that often gets overlooked when you’re just sort of talking in general terms. And I think it’s important to point that out.
Whoa. And I guess my voice disturbed one of the local residents now living in the moat. You probably can’t see him, but there’s quite a large monitor lizard down there. Just got into the water and is looking around.
And I wanted to come out here in particular to talk about the Dutch use of moats and water for defending Melaka because the main part that I read about before it doesn’t exist anymore. So this is the moat part of the moat system that was built on the city side. But on the fort side of the river where A Famosa, the major fortress and the Melaka Sultanate was located, they also built a huge moat defense line over there as well. And it would have been probably quite a bit larger than on this side. And if you go into the historical maps and the documents, you can see it where the area of Melaka where the fortress sits, it’s defended on one side by the river, on another side by the Melaka Strait and then the Melaka Strait again where it kind of goes on an angle. But then there was one whole side that was accessible by land and that was a weak point for the fortress. So what the Dutch did was they built a giant moat going all the way from Melaka Strait around the edges of the fortress and then connecting with the river. And by digging that moat, they essentially turned the Melaka fortress into an island. It had water on every side of it. The Melaka Strait, the Melaka River, and then they built the canal, the moat, a defensive line of water going from the river down to the Melaka Strait. And as I said, they essentially created an island, adding one more line of defense. But that moat, which probably would have been much more impressive, doesn’t exist anymore, as far as I’m aware. All of it has been filled in. And now it is just land and roads and houses and you don’t see any remains of the Dutch moat anymore like you do down here. So this is a very cool place to come and take a look at.
And that brings me to the end of the four items that I learned about Melaka recently. And I could say of these four things, it’s also to an extent four more things that I got completely wrong about Melaka. So this really expanded on my understanding of the city and its history. I’m down here at the Melaka River to end this video. This is where the dragon boat races were taking place recently. That was very cool to watch. But yeah, in terms of everything that I said about the fortress and the Middelburg bastion, the size and scale of the fort walls and the bastions, and then the guns of Melaka, the bridge, and then the Dutch moat, the water, the river systems of defense, all of that. I mean, I wasn’t reading from a script. I didn’t have notes in front of me with exact details, so I could have gotten things completely wrong. If you know a lot more about the history, well, absolutely sound off in the comments. I’d love to hear your perspective and the things that you know that I don’t know.
But another side to it is a growing reality that you really have to question everything you see, everything you read. And that extends to museum exhibits, even historical records, things like that. So, as I talked about, when it comes to the guns of Melaka, you end up in a situation of mistranslation from Portuguese into other languages where it gets translated as they had 3,000 cannon when in fact they had 3,000 guns. And then when you go to the museum and you read about the 3,000 cannon and right in front of it is a massive multi-ton siege cannon, your brain automatically thinks, “Wow, they had 3,000 of these.” But then you find out after doing some digging that that cannon, the Peca de Melaka, that was the only one in all of Melaka. And it was so unusual, it was unique, in fact, that the Portuguese shipped it back to Europe and now it’s in a museum in Portugal. So you have to be careful with that sort of thing.
And even if you go all the way back to original documents that as I did and you’re reading things that Afonso de Albuquerque, the leader of the Portuguese forces and his son, I believe, and other Portuguese members of that naval expedition, things they wrote. Well, you think, well, they were there. They must know exactly what’s going on. But you can’t quite trust what they write either because they don’t understand what they’re looking at in Melaka and they have a reason to exaggerate. They won a victory and now they want to elevate their victory. They’re sending letters, reports back to the king of Portugal and they want to make their victory sound much more grand perhaps than it really was. So perhaps some exaggeration creeps into their reports and they know that they had war elephants here in Melaka that they were fighting against. But maybe in their reports they’ll say, “Oh, they had a thousand war elephants as big as houses, right? They’ll exaggerate the scale of the opposing forces to make their victory look even grander to the king of Portugal, right? That creeps into their reports. So you have to question everything you see.
And even when you see something like the Middelburg Bastion, which according to the sign was recreated very carefully by experts to match the historical records, but according to what I read, what they didn’t tell you is that this is a miniature version. It’s not to scale. So maybe the look of it, the design of it, the use of laterite matches the historical record, but because of space limitations, they had to make it much shorter and smaller than it was in reality. So you as a visitor, you have to look at that recreation and imagine it three times bigger, and now you’re getting a truer picture of what it was actually like built by the Dutch.
So yeah, it’s a very interesting experiment. I’ve gone through here in Melaka learning not only about the history of Melaka but how to think about history itself and where do you go to get actual factual statements. It’s a very interesting process. Anyway, that’s it. One more look up and down the river for you here in Melaka. Beautiful day as always. The river boats are running again and gorgeous weather. Very very hot though. And that is it. Shutting down for today. And yeah, shout out to the Crunch Club. You made it all the way to the end of the video. Thank you very much. Crunch Club members. Put CC in the comments to let me know. I always love to see that. And thank you for everyone that’s continuing to support the video production here on Planet Doug without your support through Touch and Go, through PayPal, of course, and through the buy me a coffee platform, any of those platforms. Without that help, I couldn’t make these videos. I wouldn’t have the time and I wouldn’t have the resources. So yeah, thank you very much to all the supporters of Planet Doug. So that’s it. Shutting down for now and I’ll see you in the next video.
Hey, For the first couple of topics that are on my mind, we have to revisit this museum. I’ve been in there a couple of times already, but there’s an exhibit in there that is going to help illustrate what I want to talk about. So, let’s pop inside.
If you missed my previous two videos that started here, this is a museum that I discovered only recently. I noticed the building many many times, but I had no idea that it was even a museum. And this is the name of it, the Gallery Warisan Kota Melaka, the Heritage Gallery of Melaka. And this building used to be a bank. There was a comment on one of my previous videos from someone who says they came here in the 70s and they actually cashed in travelers checks here in this building. It was a HSBC bank location back then. So yeah, let’s head inside.