White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  The British government yawned complacently, but Dutch agents pricked up their ears. To them this sounded like that terrible man Stamford Raffles come back to life. According to the article, the final goal of this mass of geopolitical bar-room speculation was to be a private gentleman’s voyage of exploration and the collection of natural history. Yet the whole subsequent train of events in Sarawak is there to be read in advance, and messianic tones already shine through his discussion of the possibility of founding a settlement at Marudu and spreading ‘inferior posts over the Archipelago’.

  James also had views about the treatment of his crew. In an age where naval discipline was notoriously brutal, he preached kindness. He later summed up his views on discipline as follows: ‘It was necessary to form men to my purpose and, by a line of steady and kind conduct, to raise up a personal regard for myself and an attachment for the vessel …’10 This too would be Sarawak policy. As a young man, James was never unkind where it could be avoided.

  Kennedy and Wright of the Castle Huntley were aboard, a token that this was finally the realisation of the ‘schooner’ dream, but again it all turned sour. The voyage as far as Singapore took some five months, full of squabbles and bouts of seamanly drunkenness and petulance. James’s journal reads like the script of a soap opera, scored with stories of the crew’s wearying personal animosities.

  The two men were not suited to pull together. The Captain’s system of discipline irritated the men almost to mutiny and Brooke had many worries, small and great, disappointments and disagreements, that culminated at last in an open quarrel … James wrote to Cruikshank: ‘The story you want is a long one, and coming from one of the parties involved must be partial, but I can say that I do not think on the whole that the blame of any disagreement rests on me.’11

  After nine weeks in Singapore, they signed on some new crew, including eight sea gypsies, a Danish doctor and a half-Malay interpreter. On 27 July 1839, they set sail for Sarawak.

  Chapter 4

  First Impressions

  Borneo did not loom large in the British imagination at the start of the nineteenth century, having somewhat declined from its early position as candidate for the earthly site of El Dorado. There had been previous attempts to establish a presence in the huge ridge-backed island of green forests and brown rivers, but they had all faded dankly away and been engulfed by the endless mists and swamps. One Signor Pigafetta touched on Brunei in the north of the island in 1521 during Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe but the tardy British did not arrive until the end of the seventeenth century. In 1773 the East India Company had founded a settlement at Marudu, following their dramatic rescue of the Sultan of Sulu (Philippines) from a Spanish kidnapping, and this was the claim that James Brooke toyed with reanimating. A further vacillating British presence had flickered indecisively at Banjermassin to the south, generating the usual mixture of wars, corruption, debt and disappointment, while under Raffles the languidly uxorious and eccentric Alexander Hare had run a plantation with scandalous use of convict labour supplied from Java, before being evicted by the Dutch. What Borneo was known for was piracy, as James would find to his eternal cost. Local vessels being excluded from legitimate trade by Portuguese, then Dutch, monopolies, their crews had turned to the obvious alternative. Annual visits, using the monsoon wind, by Illanun marauders from the Philippines supplemented local efforts. During his rule of Java (1811–16), Raffles had mounted raids on the pirates of Borneo, but it was a credo of long standing among the English that the only real weapon against piracy was freedom of trade, and they were probably right.

  The northern half of Borneo was nominally under the rule of the Sultan of Brunei, though the Sultan of Sulu claimed Marudu as his own, and the rest of Borneo was under Dutch hegemony – but then the Dutch had sought to construct flimsy paper claims to the entire Malay archipelago in order to exclude outsiders. They still regarded Singapore as rightfully theirs, so they were especially suspicious of British intentions. After all, under Raffles the British had blandly walked into all the Dutch possessions and simply taken over, to prevent them falling into Napoleonic hands. Should they care to, they had the military power to do so again at any time.

  Rule, anyway, did not amount to very much, since authority was fragmented between the different rivers and their hinterlands as these were the only routes of communication. The typical pattern was to command the mouth of a river and so its trade – or rather the raids on the upriver inhabitants. In the devastated feudal economy, the best business to be in was simply taking money off others by violence. In the coastal towns, administration was largely in the hands of Malays, while commerce was split between Chinese entrepreneurs and an old Malay merchant class. Inland, the ‘Dayaks’, whom later ethnographers would shatter into a dozen distinct local peoples, were regarded more as a natural resource than a body of citizens. They lived by farming, collecting forest produce and warfare, and heeded or ignored the greater administration as they thought fit. The important distinction for James Brooke was that between warlike Sea Dayaks – to be broken – and pacific Hill Dayaks – to be protected. The royal house of Brunei, in the city known as Borneo Proper, divided its time equably between the traditional demands of fornication, murdering its relatives and Islamic piety. A ruler depended on male kinsmen for his power, yet on his death the throne often passed to the senior of these, cutting out his own son, so that the art of succession to Brunei kingship depended on choosing exactly the right moment to slit the throats of one’s brothers and nephews, i.e. when they ceased to be valuable supporters and became rivals. Within the royal house, discussions of kinship rapidly become unintelligible because of multiple in-marriage, but when James Brooke arrived the Sultan was Omar Ali Saif Udin, allegedly semi-imbecile and blessed with supplementary thumbs, nephew of the former incumbent who had been known as Api – Fire – on account of his incendiarist propensities.

  Api’s brother, Rajah Muda Hassim, both uncle and cousin of the new sultan, had been appointed Regent and was known as a mild, indecisive and highly agreeable person. It was him that James Brooke had come to see. Since the British were familiar with the term ‘rajah’, they assumed his name was Muda Hassim and called him such. Rajah Muda, however, ‘Young Rajah’, is a self-contained title for the heir presumptive, something like Crown Prince, just as Rajah Tua, ‘Old Rajah’, was the title for a ruler who had handed over power to a successor. In later years, the precise meaning of these terms would come to haunt James Brooke. Since the Malays were very polite and did not want to embarrass this foreign visitor who thought he spoke some Malay, it was years before they told the British what their correct names were.

  They arrived in Sarawak on 15 August 1839 and began a series of gun salutes that showed both their peaceful intentions and the size of their ordnance. Strengthened by breakfast, they were received in the audience hall that was little more than a shed on poles, open to one side and hung with cloth. It was very much a building in the Brunei style. The Brooke party was placed on the left and the local party of Hassim, twelve of his brothers, the governor, Makota, and local Malays on the right. Bruneians wore silk, Malays velvet. Seats were offered and the reception began.

  The dress of Muda Hassim was simple, but of rich material, and most of the principal men were well, and even superbly, dressed. His countenance is plain but intelligent and highly pleasing, and his manners perfectly elegant and easy. His reception was kind, and, I am given to understand, highly flattering. We sat, however, trammelled with the formality of state, and our conversation did not extend beyond kind enquiries and professions of friendship. We were presented with tobacco, rolled up in a leaf, each about a foot long, and tea was served by attendants on their knees. A band played wild and not unmusical airs during the interview, and the crowd of attendants who surrounded us were seated around in respectful silence. After a visit of half an hour, we rose and took our leave.1

  James was pleased. It had gone well.

  He had not come empty-ha
nded. The Royalist was stuffed with presents: gaudy silks of Surat, scarlet cloth, stamped velvet, gunpowder, a large quantity of confectionery – sweets, preserved ginger, jams, dates, syrups – and, a final afterthought, a huge box of Chinese toys for the children.

  Rajah Muda Hassim was very friendly. When the year before a British ship, the Napoleon, had come to grief on the rocks and her crew been driven to take refuge in the jungle, he had sent for them, housed and fed them, saved as much of their cargo as he could and returned them to Singapore at his own expense. This was not what might have been expected. According to British preconceptions about Bruneians, he should have murdered, enslaved or ransomed the crew, and stolen the cargo. This is exactly the policy that his nephew would later adopt towards British sailors. The astonished Singapore merchants had taken advantage of James’s voyage to send the prince a substantial present, together with the thanks of the Governor of Singapore for his humane behaviour. The basis of a very helpful misunderstanding, crucial to the Brooke raj, was being laid.

  James, desperate as ever for distinction, made much of the fact that the Royalist, ex-Royal Yacht Squadron, had the privileges of a man-of-war. It could fly the white ensign and receive a naval salute. With the vessel, James also bought the right to wear a special semi-naval uniform and was so proud of it that he later had his portrait painted flaunting it. His ship was heavily armed. He arrived with all kinds of official documents as a messenger from the British authorities – yet he claimed to be just a private person. St John comments, ‘It was natural for the Malay chiefs to doubt whether any man would give himself the trouble to make so long a voyage at so great an expense, merely to explore a country, survey its coasts and collect specimens of natural history. They expected every moment to hear that Mr. Brooke was an agent of the British government or at least the chosen envoy of the Governor of Singapore.’2

  Hence the strange conversations that followed with the Bruneian princes. Should they trade with the Dutch? Would the English send trade? If the Dutch attacked them would the English intervene? And – more poetically Malay – of the English and the Dutch, which was the cat and which the mouse? The Dayaks, with their own concept of bejalai – where young men, ‘brave bachelors’, go travelling in search of cash, adventure, and heads – would have understood exactly what James was about. He himself seemed to find it not at all odd to be asked his views on such arcane matters. He adored being interrogated on questions of state – he had his long Athenaeum article to quote at them – so he warned them, without the slightest hint of irony, that the Dutch should at all costs be avoided as they had never yet established themselves in a Malay kingdom without ending up taking it over.

  Rajah Muda Hassim was in Sarawak to put down a rebellion of local Malays. The rebel Malays just outside the town were alleged to be in alliance with the Sultan of Sambas, across the border in Dutch territory. A different version of the quarrel had it that Prince Usop, another uncle of the Sultan of Brunei and enemy of Hassim, had sold Sarawak to Sambas, so that the Bruneians of Hassim’s faction desperately needed a counter-alliance with the English to keep the threat of the Dutch and Usop at bay. They had no idea they were entering into a political alliance not with a government but with a spoiled young man from Bath squandering his inheritance.

  There followed a period of exploration. James was so obsessed with the fact that his were the first European feet to touch this spot that he foolishly walked barefoot. Quite soon the European feet would swell up with infection and he would be lame. Never mind. James’s reluctant hosts took him, by river and sea, to meet some of the exotic headhunting and piratical Dayaks he had been hearing about. He was charmed by their openness, frankness and wildness. The women were bold and bare-bosomed; the almost naked men had fine muscular figures and suffered themselves to be measured. Even his first encounter with smoked human heads in his first longhouse seemed simply exotic and no more than a little naughty. The savagery of the practice, he assures us with instant expertise, is exaggerated. His infatuation with adolescence was being fatally extended to include whole supposedly ‘child-like’ peoples. They were all becoming midshipmen under his especial care and already he was leaping to judgement, forming the stereotypes that would anchor Brooke rule. The Malays were natural gentlemen but, when bad, could be sinuous and duplicitous, and they were lazy. The Dayaks were naturally honest, chaste, passionate and faithful, people of the land, not the town. It was like the difference between cats and dogs. Repeatedly, the Dayaks are explicitly compared to hunting dogs with a bad master. The master may be changed for a good one but the dogs will take time to learn not to snap and bite. But they were a good breed and would be won by kindness.

  He saw his first Chinese settlement and immediately knew all Chinese to be thrifty and industrious rather than poetic. The pink and white lotus flowers whose beauty enthralled him were grown to feed pigs.

  And there is no reason to think that the judgements of locals were not just as rapid and their friendliness not as genuine. James was not the first westerner to be entranced with the warmth and politeness that is the idiom of social exchange in the Malay archipelago. He became firm friends with Hassim, somewhat revising his first haughty opinion that he was a ‘semi-savage’, exchanging knives with him as though they were both little boys; and while he would later come to see the cruelty and rapacity of Prince Makota, he at least appreciated his intelligence and culture. Makota, after all, wrote four-line, pantun poems, even about James Brooke. Sarawak was beginning to civilise James a little, to make him a little less unthinkingly English. Foreigners were no longer all rogues or fools, as they had been when seen from the Castle Huntley.

  James believed Hassim’s statement that there was no war, just ‘a little child’s play’ among his subjects. While it was being sorted out he would complete his exploratory programme with a short trip to the neighbouring islands of Sulawesi and Singapore. On the last night, the Royalist sailed downriver to leave on the early tide, accompanied by a small boat of Malays. During the night the boat was attacked by Dayak pirates and several Malays were wounded. Having frightened off the pirates, James took the wounded back to Kuching, where Hassim was so overjoyed at his return that he served an allegedly ‘English dinner’, clearing the plates and pulling the corks with his own royal hands.

  James would be absent some six months. After the warmth of Sarawak, Sulawesi proved a disappointment and the inhabitants a sad contrast with ‘his’ fine Borneans, though, since Raffles had collected natural history and found relics of ancient Hinduism, James needs must do the same here. Raffles had been interested in orang-utans. So for James too orang-utans became something of a fixation in his writings. On board was Betsy, a specimen presented by Hassim. The Dayaks had worked out a theory that orang-utans were once people who had fled to the forest because they had been terribly shamed as men and there declined from the state of humanity. He sailed on.

  And then, in Singapore, Raffles’s city, out of the blue, he found the recognition he had so long craved. He was lionised by the merchants. ‘I am really becoming a great man, dearest mother; the world talks of me! The rulers of England threaten to write to me! Newspapers call me patriotic and adventurous! The Geographical Society pays me compliments! Am I not a great man?’3 But the Governor, Mr Bonham, was not about to pay compliments; indeed, he was upset to hear of James’s civilian dabbling in politics and James – ever ready to fly off the handle – sulked, fretted, reverted to the propounding of wild schemes. He would go to Manila, to China. Instead, in August 1840, he abruptly clapped on sail and steered for Sarawak again.

  Chapter 5

  Change

  When James Brooke returned to drop anchor in the Sarawak River, little had changed. The town of Kuching was still a sad and dilapidated collection of thatched huts under the temporary occupation of a vast and useless retinue of Bruneian nobles and their servants. Some of the Dayak troops had come over from the rebels to Hassim, and a useful contingent of Chinese had arrived, but the war still
dragged on. The Bruneians intrigued to lure James into the fighting on their side, and he agreed to visit the front. He received their Dayak allies on board. ‘They ate and drank, and asked for everything, but stole nothing.’

  The war was perhaps not a very honourable one. Its basic cause was the rapacity of Prince Makota. Pangeran Indera Makota was to play the villain in James’s drama, largely because, as the existing governor, he stood in the path of the Brooke raj and so was required to embody all the wickedness it was to replace. The British, following James, referred to Makota biblically as ‘the Serpent’. It is noteworthy that in their relations with Borneo the British switched easily between their two dominant biblical myths of the wild – the notion of Sarawak as a paradise to be preserved from corrupting ‘outside’ influence, and as a wilderness to be roundly civilised. Dayaks fitted neatly within the first myth, Chinese within the second. Makota had been such a corrupting influence, squeezing trade and exploiting the poor inland Dayaks till there was no room left for the Malays to do the same. So, they went into rebellion.