Heading: (Singapore)
Author: Neo, Tan Boey; Chang Jeun Chung; Tan Seeoo, and H. C.Cardwell (Clerk)
Title: Administration Bond of $300 indemnity
Place Published: Singapore
Publisher:United Company of Merchants of England, trading to the East Indies
Date Published: March 12, 1838
Description:

1 pg printed and handwritten document signed. 9½x15".

Singapore had become a British possession in 1824 by a treaty with the native ruler; in 1836 it became regional capital of the Straits Settlements, under the jurisdiction of British India.

Other than intriguing speculation, we have no historical evidence that the clerk who signed the document was the future California pioneer Henry C. Cardwell, later the first Postmaster of Los Angeles and a member of the first California Legislature, who had served in Fremont's California Battalion during the Mexican-American War. His 1859 Gold Rush obituary related only that he went on a whaling voyage in 1841, when in his early 20s, "visiting many ports of the Pacific". Might he have been already at sea three years earlier and somehow found his way to British Singapore?

Good.