White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  In Kuching, with a sword before him, Charles swore to avenge the deaths. The Datuk Patinggi Abdul Gaffur feigned horror and surprise, and Masahor swiftly had the ‘culprits’ put to death before they could talk. The fortmen were executed for leaving their post and a bloody but inconclusive battle occurred between Charles’s Dayaks and the Kanowits in which their fortification was fired.

  Now came the horrors of war indeed. Some were burnt, some killed, some taken prisoner, and some few escaped. So ended that fortification. Its roof fell with a crash, leaving only its smoking embers to tell where it had stood. Our Dayaks were mad with excitement, flying about with heads; many with fearful wounds, some even mortal. One lad came rushing and yelling past the stockade, with a head in one hand, and holding one side of his own face with the other. He had it cut clean open, and laid bare to the cheek-bone, yet he was insensible to pain for the time; but before five minutes elapsed, he reeled and fell exhausted. We then doctored him the best way we could, by tying his cheek on as firmly as possible, in the hope that it would unite and heal. This it eventually did, leaving a fearful disfigurement.4

  Later, Masahor’s guilt was revealed and he fled. In his boat, honest Dayaks found a kris of gold that they brought to their rajah. James sent it to the Great Exhibition in London, where it was stolen. Then the Datuk Patinggi’s involvement was made known and he was exiled – yet again. This time, the Brookes had been warned by the Malays. A much-eroded stone still stands down the hill from the old mission in Kuching, marking the death of Fox and Steel and the relentless punishment of those implicated in it. ‘Justice’, it reads, ‘was done.’

  Frank and Harriette McDougall did not like the look of things and departed on hasty home leave. It was all very well for the Brookes, Frank noted; they after all lived in well-guarded forts – which would later give James a chance to crow over Frank’s lack of courage and take his revenge for Frank’s witnessing his own terror during the Chinese insurrection. Harriette could scarce believe all this talk of plots. After all, the Datuk Patinggi was a dear old man who had been in the habit of dropping round to the mission so little Mab could read him fairy stories. The whole affair, involving as it did the Malays, gave the British community a considerable scare and further shook the confidence of the Brooke raj. The Governor of the Straits Settlements sent over a gunboat and a contingent of marines, but presumably they were merely to protect British interests; James, in a mixture of policy and spite, continued to negotiate with the Dutch for protection.

  In 1859, circumstances in Mukah deteriorated further. The British insisted on seeing this too as part of the machinations of Masahor, though one suspects that if Makota had been still alive he, instead, would have been discovered to lie behind it. James had left a permanently paranoid stamp on Sarawak politics. Trade was disrupted, the Sarawak flag fired upon. Brooke Brooke’s version of events was that he went with a small force to discuss conciliation and was attacked. In accordance with local ideas of warfare, he erected a stockade and waited for brother Charles and reinforcements. They were about to take the enemy fort when, to their astonishment, a British steamer under Governor Edwardes of Labuan, long hostile to the Brooke administration, appeared and announced that it would open fire on them unless they withdrew. Spenser St John, Edwardes’s superior, was in England and therefore unable to overrule him. There was nothing to be done. Adding insult to injury, Edwardes brought back Masahor. Brooke Brooke hesitated … and retreated. Sarawak could not afford to go to war with Britain. The boys had not done well. No wonder James, looking back on his life, groaned, ‘Not a single rising man in the service – not a man fitted to rule.’

  The prestige on which the whole bluff of Brooke domination rested had been fatally impugned, but St John, in London, did his loyal best to retrieve the situation. He quickly obtained an apology from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell. ‘Edwardes disapproved,’ he telegraphed James. ‘Return to Borneo November mail. Will you come?’ James roused himself from convalescence and sailed with him, though he had not the fare and had to borrow it from Angela Burdett-Coutts. Ever solicitous, she also bought him some secondhand guns, shells, rockets and powder.

  James might have made a new friend in Angela, but he was losing old ones fast. Those who had been loyal to him over the years noticed a further decline in his mental state, a growing unpredictability and sensitivity to opposition. St John was defensive:

  Hasty judgement sometimes, and often hasty speech, are two faults which perhaps produced his third – that is, great impatience. In manner he is often absent and careless, which, not being understood by strangers offends them; but I will add what he is – he is a man of noble thoughts and noble actions, generous, generally most considerate; affectionate, and therefore beloved by all who are intimately acquainted with him. In conversation and argument brilliant when in happy spirits, playful when playfulness is required, earnest and sincere on all great subjects.5

  His recent correspondence with British officials had been ‘not pleasant and ended in complete estrangement. Fortunately, public officials are not over-sensitive.’

  The real evidence of mental unbalance comes from James himself, in his extraordinarily vindictive reaction to comments made by John Templer and Frank McDougall about him. When their concern about his compos mentis came to his ears his first thought was to take legal action, and then to force the bishop to write a letter declaring that ‘It is with sincere pleasure that I now find him so well in mind and body, and I am most glad to be able to correct the impression I entertained and the fears I expressed concerning his mental condition …’ In fact, the only convincing argument against James’s growing senility was the suggestion that since the Singapore inquiry he had always suffered a sort of emotional lability. Henceforth, the intuitive alliance between Church and State was at an end, the shared experiences and struggles that held them together set at nought, and no issue was too petty for James to take advantage of in order to afflict poor Harriette and Frank.

  Templer fared even worse. James bombarded him with letters of outrage, shrugged off all attempts at reconciliation, sent affidavits from five doctors about his mental condition. Templer was unwise enough to be totally frank in explaining his view that

  the noble quality of sound judgement for which you were so remarkable had become impaired, and that I attributed it to the disease with which you had been stricken – that it had explained to me much that I found difficult to reconcile before with your former self, and I instanced the course you had taken with regard to [Reuben] George, by which you placed your friends and relatives in a false position. Then the Testimonial – the French question – the refusal to relinquish the Raj in Brooke’s favour – and still more lately, your line with McDougall and myself in this very case, strengthened the impression …6

  This was too much for James. After a little more snarling and posturing, their twenty years of loving friendship was brought to an abrupt end.

  James was received in Sarawak ‘as one risen from the dead’. The Sultan of Brunei, also alleged to be mad – though more widely and convincingly so than James – dropped the confrontational stance into which James’s nephews had driven him and was all sweetness and smiles. St John pumped up James’s flagging prestige by sailing to Mukah with him in a spanking new British corvette decked out with two hundred smart marines. Using the authority of the Sultan’s letters, he imposed peace, exiled Masahor – who eloquently protested his innocence – and arranged for James to purchase rights to the whole place. St John felt sorry for Masahor, an old chess opponent. Steel, he notes, had been ‘an ignorant and hard man’, while Fox was ‘brusque in manner’ from having had too much to do with the Chinese. His tone almost suggests that even if he did not doubt the reality of the Malay conspiracy, he was unconvinced about its extent. James moved in at Mukah and reorganised everything. It was a triumph of chequebook diplomacy.

  In Kuching, Brooke Brooke had remarried and was a little less hard to live with. His bride had had to travel o
ut to him, as he dared not turn his back on Sarawak and James again. Moreover, he now asked James to install him formally as Rajah Muda, heir to the throne, since ‘it will not only be a pleasing sign of your confidence in me, but will strengthen my hands in carrying on the government’. There is no doubt that he had been badly shaken by James’s many conflicting signals about his intentions, and compared his own situation to a ‘wretched Dwarf in the hands of some giant Fate who with one hand one day puts me on my legs, the next knocks me down again with the other’. The ceremony was carried out to everyone’s satisfaction and with a sufficiency of ritual and flowery language. It was allegedly Brooke Brooke – not James – who at the last received the salute of guns accorded a rajah. Only later would arguments develop about what it had all actually meant.

  James resolved to leave again for England, accompanied by St John, who had received promotion to Chargé d’Affaires in Haiti. He had, after all, rescued HM Government from a peculiarly embarrassing situation and this was his reward. James’s arrival was cheered by the news that Charles Johnson had finally put paid to ‘the rebel’ Rentap, leaving his hilltop fort ablaze like a volcano. Angela’s munitions, not needed at Mukah, had come in handy after all.

  James became briefly a tourist in Paris, but soon retreated from society back to the moors. As he memorably phrased it elsewhere, ‘I care nothing for penny trumpets and turtle soup.’ There he threw himself into farming, raised ponies, chickens, ducks and geese and made butter, but Burrator was also a place ‘where he was endeavouring to bring up two young cubs for the Sarawak service. But, as usual, these cubs remained cubs to the end, and were a source of trouble and mortification until they disappeared from the scene. Strange infatuation to believe that he could do anything with such materials when gentlemen cadets were to be had by the score.’7 What upset St John was not the presence of boys as such, but lower-class boys who did not know how to behave.

  One of the lads was William Blackler, thirteen years old when James made his acquaintance in rather odd circumstances in Totnes.8 James explains to Angela’s companion, Hannah Brown, how

  I used to take my invalid saunter in the meadows skirting the ‘Dart’. A party of boys were bathing afar off, as it appeared in forbidden water, when three fishermen in their seven-league boots, rushed upon them. They fled (very scantily clothed) excepting one, who having swum further than the others lost his clothes and was himself taken prisoner and led off to the fishing house. It was not in my nature to see this, so I went to the rescue and got the poor boy off. Thus was our acquaintance commenced. Afterwards, he was always pleased to see me and I was pleased with the attention, so we gradually became friends.9

  Another version describes poor William as shivering in soaked nakedness with the Rajah, naturally unfazed by his total nudity, detaining him in endless comradely chit-chat.

  But there is more to William.

  His father is a stone mason in the town, his grandfather, with whom he lived, and four uncles, shipwrights, well to do in the government dockyards. He was to be a shipwright too and spoke with pride of his lot. I saw the father who was a really respectable man of the lower order – manly, intelligent, upright, struggling cheerfully to bring up a young family. So it ended. I gave the boy a tip and not till the other day did I think of inquiring about my young acquaintance. He had not been on the sunny wall of fortune – children had increased and wages were low. His grandfather was out of work and so the lad had returned to his father. His uncles had families and could not get him into the dockyards as apprentice … so I thought I could be in the way of helping him and have determined to send him to school for a year or two and, when he has thoroughly mastered book keeping, to send him to Sarawak as a clerk in the revenue department. I am now inquiring for a fitting school. I hope even to do something for the father who is a man one likes to meet – independent but respectful – knowing his place and acknowledging the pains and privations [?] of a life of labour without shrinking or discontent.10

  He returns to the subject with characteristic rapidity: ‘The father of the lad is a mason by trade and I should like to give him aid (not charity) to become a Master. Do you know any schools where I could put William Blackler – the son? To give him a substantial education and thorough knowledge of accounts and book keeping is my object.’11 But he is anxious that he ‘not remove him from his proper sphere, excepting in a proper degree’.

  Soon, James is seeking more concrete forms of assistance from Hannah Brown: ‘If you would lend Richard Blackler [William’s father] £25 – without interest – it would be a great kindness to a good man and if the Missus [Angela Burdett-Coutts] is rich i.e. has more money than her other good works demand – she will perhaps make the sum up to £50 – a handsome capital to start with and which I think would be repaid in a few years.’12

  How this extraordinary request went down with Angela is not recorded, but we can be sure how it was received in Sarawak. Brooke Brooke had suffered greatly from the stream of useless, wayward boys sent his way by his uncle over the years. In 1861 he wrote to him in some irritation, ‘If you send out new hands let them not be boys but men.’13 Nevertheless, Blackler did end up in Sarawak until dismissed from the service by Charles in 1867.

  It is interesting that we are finally able to compare James’s own characterisation of the Blackler family, as the deserving poor, with the assessment of his own administrative officers. For James’s relationship with this boy seems to go far beyond anything consistent with previous biographers’ claims that his sexual interest remained merely latent, and there is little doubt that at this period of his life he was carnally involved with the rough trade of Totnes. He not only accepted physical manhandling, he invited it. St John summed up the whole business with a sad shake of the head:

  The Rajah all his life was on the lookout for an ideal which he never found either in man or woman and his singular infatuation that virtue and honesty and simplemindedness were more the attributes of the lowborn than of others receives many singular illustrations in the relations he held with such ruffians as Prout, Blackler and May or such incapables as Penty [his steward], Read [his Singapore solicitor] etc., etc. I shall not easily forget the visit Miss Coutts and Mrs. Brown paid us at Burrator, when Blackler pushed the Rajah off the sofa on which he was reclining, in order to have the couch himself. I often expressed my surprise at his permitting such conduct towards himself but he thought it proved great independence of spirit. These were however, but spots on the sun. Still they were curious in a man of as great a refinement of mind.14

  There were even crude blackmail attempts. Arthur Crookshank, James’s deputy, was at Burrator when Blackler arrived demanding entry. When refused, he wrote ‘the most impudent and threatening note to the Rajah saying he was bound to provide for him and must do so or if it came to the worst he (Blackler) had letters which were sufficient to make him do so when necessity required him to shew them. We have advised the Rajah not to take any notice of him, but if he writes again to answer him through a lawyer. He’s a bad lot!!’15

  Another lad, May, seems to have been a sailor friend. After James’s death a letter was found among his papers demanding £100 ‘as he was on shore instead of at sea, which did not agree with his health or pocket’. May (‘that wretched boy’) ended up, perhaps appropriately, as an inspector of police in Sarawak.16 In his will James left him £52 per annum, as well as to William Reed (in Crookshank’s words, ‘an encumbrance which should never have existed’), who is regarded as living at Burrator.

  And yet, either through sheer innocence or driven by his demons, James remained throughout his life resolutely ‘on the lookout’. There was an earlier protégé, Richard Lawford, shipped out to Sarawak in 1858. He is a foundling, ‘intelligent, fairly educated, a good musician’, awarded two medals in the army by the age of eighteen but discharged suffering from consumption. Perhaps this was a simple humanitarian act, for James was frequently genuinely moved by the troubles of boys and young men; but it is of
ten the case that his compassion trembled on the brink of lust, and the two might compound powerfully together into something even fiercer and more corrosive that clouded his vision and exposed him to ridicule and terrible risk.

  Chapter 15

  The Crusading Bishop

  Like many small places, Sarawak assumed many of the characteristics of a soap opera. The same few characters reappeared in all possible combinations of relationships, became cardboard cutouts, abruptly disappeared or returned implausibly from near death. There were petty jealousies inflamed by climate and proximity, feuds, treacheries. There was a need for black-hearted villains to account for all the misfortunes that bred with tropical exuberance. After the departure of Makota and Sherip Masahor, the Brookes had only the British government to hiss at, but bitterness had so seeped into James’s heart that, over the next few years, he began to turn ever more on those about him.