Stranger than (Conradian) Fiction
First published in the Mekong Review May 2025
Joseph Conrad, the great Polish-British novelist, visited Singapore several times during his years as a merchant marine. His first visit was in 1883, after his ship, the Palestine, sank off the coast of Sumatra. His third visit was in 1887, following an injury caused by a falling spar. After recuperating at the Officers' Sailors Home near Singapore's busy riverfront, he secured a berth on the Vidar, a small schooner-rigged steamer with a "red ensign over the taffrail and at her masthead a house-flag, also red but with a green border and with a white crescent."
The red ensign belonged to the British Merchant Navy, while the house flag was that of Syed Moshin Bin Salleh Al Jufri, a prominent Straits Arab trader. As a Syed (or Sayyid) he claimed direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed and was held in significant regard by local Malays. Conrad left us with this lasting image of Mohsin in his 1917 novel The Shadow-Line: "An old, dark little man blind in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers. He was having his hand severely kissed by a crowd of Malay pilgrims to whom he had done some favour, in the way of food and money."
Between 1887 and 1888, Conrad undertook four voyages as first mate of the Vidar, travelling between Singapore and Dutch East Borneo. These journeys were more than commercially lucrative—they provided him with a trove of material from which he crafted several works of fiction.
Specifically, it was in the remote settlement of Berau (today's Tanjung Redeb in East Kalimantan) where Conrad encountered, either directly or by reputation, several figures later immortalised in his novels. Among them was Captain William Lingard, a British merchant-adventurer who the Malays nicknamed "Rajah Laut (King of the Sea)". There was Charles Olmeijer, a gone-to-seed Dutchman and Lingard's trading agent, and Jim Lingard, Captain Lingard's nephew and another of his agents, whom the Conrad scholar Norman Sherry believes contributed to the creation of the eponymous character in Lord Jim.
Another significant presence was Syed Abdullah Al Jufri, Mohsin's eldest son, who managed the family's trading operations in Berau and the neighbouring Bulungan Regency. He appears in Conrad's Lingard Trilogy as Syed Abdulla bin Selim—a pious Muslim, ruthless businessman and son of "the great Mohammedan trader of the Straits" who seeks to take over Lingard's trade monopoly. "Owner of ships, he was often on board one or another of them. In every port he had a household—his own or that of a relation—to hail his advent... In every port there were rich and influential men eager to see him," Conrad writes.
The real-life Abdullah led a peripatetic life, traveling through Bombay, Calcutta, the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal before taking over his family's far-reaching business interests. Today, he has direct descendants living in Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Malaysia and Singapore.
Rehen Al Jufri is Abdullah's great-great-grandson and a law student studying in Yogyakarta. He first learned of his ancestor a couple of years ago during an Islamic commemoration ceremony. The speeches in Abdullah's honour told of his business acumen, philanthropy and role in spreading Islam in the region. Intrigued, Rehen searched online to see what else he might learn.
"I was really surprised," Rehen says on discovering his ancestor's literary depiction. "There were all these people on the internet mentioning about my ancestor and Joseph Conrad. I never expected to have such a great person in my bloodline."
An uncle helped fill in the gaps, explaining how, in the late 1980s, Gavin Young, a British travel writer, tracked down members of his family in Berau and Bulungan. Until then, Abdullah's portrayal in fiction was entirely unknown to the family—as presumably it had been to Abdullah himself. Young also located Abdullah's descendants in Malaysia and Singapore, of which the Borneo Al Jufris had little knowledge.
"My grandfather [Abdullah's son] came to Malaysia while he was young," says Hashim Al Habshi, Rehen's relative living in Singapore. "So he never told us much about our relatives in Borneo. It was really Gavin Young who bridged our families together."
Rehen suggests Young had another motive for visiting his relatives: "First, I believe he wanted to find out if there were any descendants. But he also wanted permission to acquire a large sum of money belonging to my great-great-grandfather."
How Young discovered its existence remains a mystery. He makes no mention of it in his 1991 book, In Search of Conrad. Yet, according to Rehen's uncle, Young told the family about a significant sum held in a Swiss bank account under Abdullah's name and, for a share, offered to help recover it. According to Hashim, the amount came up to "tens of millions" of Swiss francs. Rehen puts the number at US$20 million—not accounting for a further thirty years' interest and inflation.
Much of what follows is based on family legend rather than factual evidence. But we can gather certain truths about Abdullah and his father, Moshin.
It's known that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arabs were among the region's wealthiest. By the 1930s—three decades after Abdullah's death—they were Singapore's wealthiest in terms of property ownership and assets per capita, despite constituting a fraction of the population.
When Mohsin died in 1894, the Singapore Free Press wrote in an obituary: "He first came to Singapore about 1840, as the... master of an Arabian trading vessel, and having then saved a few dollars he opened a small shop in Arab Street. In time he amassed a good deal of money and bought some steamers, and was a rich man; but his business did not continue to prosper, for times changed and the old systems of thirty or forty years before were no longer successful..." Indeed, by the time Conrad joined the Vidar, Mohsin was on the verge of bankruptcy and documents show the ship was about to be seized.
Although his inheritance had shrunk, Abdullah received his father's entrepreneurial talents in full: aside from trading in "gutta-percha and rattans, pearl shells and birds' nests, wax and gum-dammar", as Conrad describes, Abdullah is said to have owned a goldmine in Bulungan, shares in a gas works in Brunei and an oil refinery in Tarakan that now belongs to state-owned PT Pertamina.
Rehen shares this bit of family lore: "My great-grandfather told the family how his father went to wash his hands in the sea before prayer and noticed that the water was very dark. That's when Abdullah realised there was oil to be found."
Abdullah died in 1901 at the age of seventy. The oil refinery, Rehen says, was sold to the Dutch some time before that. No proof of prior ownership exists in the family today; Abdullah's Malay-speaking children had discarded their father's voluminous records, all of which were written in Arabic.
"I had expected Abdullah's grave to be elaborate, befitting his fame and his fortune; an affair of marble canopies, cupolas, domes and labyrinthine eulogies in the Arab script," Young wrote in his book. "But it was nothing like that. It was as unassuming as any Muslim grave could be, its site indicated only by an unremarkable wooden nisan—the usual peg-like Muslim equivalent of a headstone..."
An unassuming tomb for a devout Muslim seems fitting, but what became of his reputed wealth? His children in Borneo inherited land and Rehen has heard about a mansion in Palembang, Sumatra (not in Penang, like in the novels). Other assets were bequeathed to the public in accordance with Islamic tradition. But is there more outstanding? If so, how might it have ended up in a Swiss bank?
It's true that banks in the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya were less favourable to non-Europeans, and some were less stable. In 1884, for instance, the Oriental Bank in Singapore collapsed, an incident Conrad incorporates into the plot of his novels. Might Abdullah have remitted his savings to a Yemeni bank for safekeeping, one with links to a bank in Switzerland?
Whatever steps Young undertook to retrieve the money is also unclear. His proposal led to some disagreement among family members—many of whom have since passed away—who ultimately declined to pursue the matter. Young died in 2001 without renewing contact.
Rehen can't be completely sure but believes the unclaimed fortune to be mere fantasy. In any case, any retrieval effort would be a tricky affair. The family will first need official certification proving that they are indeed Syed Abdullah's direct descendants. Under Indonesian law, every heir must be accounted for—a difficult task, considering Abdullah had several wives and an unclear number of great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Rehen jokes that, even if they did get hold of this mysterious windfall, he'd probably only end up with "a few bucks".
Speaking more seriously, though, he isn't convinced that recovering such a sum—if it exists—would be a good thing. "Money can change people. I worry my family won't be the same." A dilemma Syed Abdullah himself might well have reckoned with—unlike, one supposes, the Abdulla of Conradian imagination.