St John's Island

St John's Island, southern island, famous for having been a penal settlement but now a holiday resort.

St John's Island has a significant history tied to Singapore. Sir Stamford Raffles, sailing on the Indiana actually anchored off this island on 28 February 1819 before taking a small ketch to get to the shores of Singapore the next day. By February 1823, the island had the signal flagstaff moved there from Pulau Tambakul (Goa Island, then later renamed Peak Island). When hordes of immigrants began making their way to Singapore bringing not only wealth but sicknesses, St John's Island was the station for the "report boat" for the Marine Department (1823) to bring news of immigrants until the cholera epidemic of 1873 which saw 357 deaths prompted the Master Attendant, Henry Ellis to call for a lazaretto to be built at St John's. The plans included a floating police station, a hospital at St John's and a quarantine burial-ground sited at Peak Island. The lazaretto was completed in November 1874 at St John's, just in time it seems, to attend to more than 1,300 cholera-infected Chinese coolies brought in by the S. S. Milton. Victims of beri-beri were also brought into St John's lazaretto beginning in 1901. Such was the fame of St John's lazaretto, that by 1930, she had gained world recognition as a quarantine centre screening Asian immigrants and pilgrims returning from Mecca.

When the mass immigration was closed, the island was used to house detained political prisoners and ringleaders of secret societies. Later the holding areas were converted into a drug rehabilitation centre and in 1975, it became a holiday campsite popular with schools and students.

Currently, St John's is going through another major change. At least 1/3 of the island on the eastern end has been acquired by the Prisons' Department for the setting up of a Prison Detention Centre for illegal immigrants and drug addicts. The western end, on the other hand, has been given a facelift with the construction of the S$30 million Marine Aquaculture Centre where the marine research facilities would take another 1/3 of the island. The work on this, the first of Southeast Asia's deep-sea fish farm, which began in April 1997 is expected to finish in April 2000.

Variant Names
Malay name: Sekijang Bendera or "deer flag".
Chinese name : Qi Zhang Shang meaning "Mount Qi Zhang" refering to a hill (189 feet) in the island's centre, a Chinese reinterpretaion of Sakijang.



Author
Anu Bala

 

References 
Makepeace, W., Brooke, G. E., & Braddell, R. St. J. (Eds.). (1991). One hundred years of Singapore (Vol. 1, pp. 8, 57, 478, 492, 506, 512). Singapore: Oxford University Press.
(Call no.: RSING 959.57 ONE)

Joanne Lee. (1999, February 25). Barbed wire, fences go up at St John's. Straits Times, Home, pp. 28, 29.

Joanne Lee. (1999, February 25). History of St John's. The Straits Times, Home, pp. 28, 29.

St John's to have marine research centre (1999, February 11). Straits Times, Home, p. 32


Further Readings
Urban Redevelopment Authority (Singapore). (1996). Southern Islands planning area: Planning report 1996. Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority
(Call no.: RSING 711.4095957 SIN)