A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  But Isabella Bird, as a member of the Resident’s party, comfortably ensconced in a rattan chair on the deck of his yacht and later chewing her way through the tiger-steak at Ferney’s new bungalow, knew nothing of all this. As Emily Innes bitterly explains, ‘Miss Bird was a celebrated person and wherever she went she was well-introduced to the highest officials in the land. Government vessels were at her disposal and government officers did their best to make themselves agreeable, knowing that she wielded in her right hand a little instrument that might chastise or reward them as they deserved of her.’ This contains more than a taste of sour grapes, and a somewhat exalted notion of Isabella’s powers, but there is some truth in it, and probably Bloomfield Douglas was so attentive to Isabella mainly in the ‘hope of an eulogy’. In that case, he was to be grievously disappointed, for the ‘little instrument’ in Miss Bird’s hand is seldom more barbed than when it is describing the conduct of the bully Resident of Selangor.

  She attended a sitting of the local court, as she had in Sungei Ujong, and decided that ‘a most queerly muddled system of law prevails under our flag, Mohammedan law, modified by degenerate and evil custom, and to some extent by the discretion of the residents, existing alongside of fragments of English criminal law, or perhaps more correctly of “justice’s justice”, the Resident’s notions of “equity” over-riding all else’. She visited the gaol, where the prisoners were marshalled for her inspection – half of them in irons, and Douglas roaring at the Superintendent, ‘Flog ’em if they’re lazy!’ Standing on the Abdulsamaat’s deck, she watched Douglas strutting past the ‘usual pomp’ of his bodyguard and bellowing imprecations – Chilaka (worthless wretch) and Bodo (fool) – to everyone in sight. Describing this disgraceful scene, she adds a warning: ‘The Malays are a revengeful people. If any official in British service were to knock them about and insult them one can only say what has been said to me since I came to the native States: “Well some day – all I can say is, God help him.” But then if an official were to be krissed, no matter how deservedly in Malay estimation, a gunboat would be sent up the river to “punish”, and would kill, burn and destroy; there would be a “little war” and a heavy war indemnity and the true bearing of the case would be lost for ever.’

  In this case, fortunately, the very evident risk of such an incident was averted, for some disquieting memoranda about Selangor affairs were already accumulating in the files of the Straits Settlement government. Frank Swettenham, for instance, then Assistant Colonial Secretary, visited the State around this time and the reports he submitted to headquarters were most unsatisfactory. Most of the revenue collected from fishing stakes on the Klang River was being spent on arms for the ‘police’, uniforms for the bodyguard and refurbishing of the Abdulsamaat, Swettenham discovered. In the District Land Office, records ‘were conspicuous by their absence … There was no cash book, no register of permits and no rent roll.’ When, in the following year, the Residency was moved to the fast-growing up-river settlement of Kuala Lumpur, other administrative irregularities and inefficiencies came to light. These were investigated by Swettenham and by James Innes, who had resigned from the service in bitter disillusion. The upshot was that in 1882 Douglas was offered the choice of facing an enquiry or resigning. He chose the latter and thus escaped with his skin intact, which in Isabella’s view was almost more than he deserved. ‘I think,’ she wrote in a confidential letter to John Murray, ‘that Mr Douglas is the most fiendish human being that I have ever seen. After close study I failed to find a redeeming point in his character. The mis-government of the State was gross and brutal. I saw scenes in which the Resident was the chief actor of the most brutal description and heard more than I saw. It was a rule of fraud, hypocrisy and violence.’

  Considering all this, Isabella was extremely relieved to get away from the Selangor Residency, from the tense glitter of bayonets, the glare of sullen eyes under turban or highly-polished helmet, and above all from that awful bombastic florid man with his trumpeting voice and crawling inner terrors.

  III

  Isabella travelled to Penang aboard the Abdulsamaat, and her arrival was duly recorded by a reporter of the local Gazette: ‘It may interest our Readers to learn that the distinguished litterateur (authoress) Miss I. Bird is on a visitation to these settlements and the Native States for the purpose of collecting facts and figures with a view to publication …’ Endowed with this formidable, dreary-sounding reputation, Isabella was invited to a breakfast in honour of the departing Governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir William Robinson. Colonial officials from all the native States were present for the send-off and much jockeying for position was going on. ‘There are people pushing rival claims, some wanting promotion, others leave, some frank and above-board in their ways, others descending to mean acts to gain favour, or undermining the good reputation of their neighbours; everybody wanting something, and usually, it seems at the expense of somebody else!’ Watching the men’s anxious, wary eyes, the veiled in-fighting, the assertive, deadly thrusts, Isabella felt a wash of relief that none of this concerned her personally. How interesting it all was from her neutral and privileged viewpoint at the Governor’s right hand; how dreadful to be sentenced, at that starchy breakfast-table, to a further indefinite period in an attap hut on the edge of a swamp without hope of leave or recognition of services so conscientiously rendered, or to hear that the other fellow had just been offered the post you’d been sweating your guts out for during the past twelvemonth!

  Among the officials present was William Maxwell, Assistant Resident of Perak, and Isabella’s companion for the next stage of her journey. He was pleasant, clever, combative, dogmatic, energetic and ‘thoroughly a gentleman’, she decided – also bumptious, without tenderness or self-indulgence and over-hasty with the Chinese, she added for Hennie’s benefit. But he was fond of the Malays and they, who had nicknames for all the British officials, called him the ‘Cat-Eyed One’. Maxwell’s (Assistant) Residency was in Larut, a swampy coastal province in the State of Perak, and she journeyed thither in the steam-launch Kinta, an unpretentious, peaceable craft unlike the Abdulsamaat and having, ‘to use an expressive Japanese phrase, “very sick boilers”’. Also aboard was none other than Mr James Innes who, with his wife, had now been moved from Langat, Selangor to Durian Sabatang, Perak. The change, as Emily explains later in her woeful tale, was scarcely for the better – a plague of rats in the roof of her bungalow merely added to her trials. Perhaps Innes had been one of those who had unsuccessfully sought preferment at the Governor’s breakfast-table, certainly he could have had no good news to cheer his melancholy spouse, for his manner, Isabella told Hennie, was ‘feeble and despairing’, his eyes ‘dull and unfocussed’.

  They left for Perak late at night: shadows of palm curved along the water’s edge, and blanched casuarinas drooped graciously; ‘the sea was like oil, the oars dripped flame, and seen from the water, the long line of surf broke on the shore not in snow, but in a long drift of greenish fire’. They sat on deck, lifting their faces towards the blissful hint of a breeze; Innes moped; one Captain Walker, just posted to Chief of Police in Perak, gushed over Isabella in ‘an A.D.C. manner’; Maxwell expounded in some detail upon recently turbulent events in Perak.

  Like its neighbours, Perak had been in a condition of near-chaos for most of the 1860s; it had been the first State to request and receive a British Resident – Mr J. W. Birch, appointed, with an Assistant, in 1874. The situation at that juncture, according to Frank Swettenham, was as follows: given: ‘a beautiful fertile State, rich in minerals, splendidly watered, almost within shout of the Equator; imagine it sparsely populated by a peculiar, sensitive, courageous, superstitious, passionate and conservative people; suppose that not six white men had penetrated into this country within memory; that there were only twelve miles of cart road in the State and those only in one Province where Chinese outnumbered the natives of the land by ten to one; add that these Chinese had for over a year been in open warfare
with each other, ignoring every authority, that they had burnt down every house; that all mining had ceased, that the only positions occupied were forts full of armed men, and coast villages the headquarters of pirates’; – to prove: ‘that two Englishmen guarded by a handful of Sikhs could change all this and bring prosperity, law and justice to the land’.

  As matters turned out it could be done more or less, but not by Mr Birch, who was a courageous, obstinate hothead, ‘an idealist in a hurry’, one modern historian suggests. After a month or so in office, Birch informed his superiors in Singapore that everything in Perak was ‘of such an irregular character as to require immediate alteration’, so he went bustling about telling the Malay headmen (through an interpreter) how they should levy taxes, keep records and spend the money thus obtained. Early one morning in November 1875 he visited an up-river village to post a proclamation announcing an increase of British control over local economic affairs; that afternoon he was stabbed to death in a bathhouse by a band of Malays. At that point all nuances were overlooked – as they would have been in Selangor had Douglas been assassinated. A British officer had been murdered while in pursuit of his legitimate duty; revenge must be exacted.

  Details of the ‘Perak War’ that followed are tragical-farcical. Frantic alarmist telegrams shot off in all directions from the Straits Settlements Government (one read: ‘Send ships and reinforcements; the whole Malay peninsula is rising’), and soon there arrived in disordered defenceless Perak a number of Sappers and Miners from Madras, with a hundred miles of field telegraph; a contingent of 5th Royal Artillery Battalion with four mounted seven-pounders, two 5½ in. mortars, a hundred rounds of ammunition and two hundred rockets; officers and men of Her Majesty’s 80th Regiment from Hong Kong; a contingent from Her Majesty’s “Buffs” and some Gurkhas from Calcutta. Perak’s quiet green coastline prickled with ships – H.M.S. Modeste, Thistle, Philomel, Ringdove and Fly. Between them the troops managed to flush a few fleeing Malays out of the jungle and burn down a few villages, and then most of them withdrew. Later the complicity of some Malay chiefs in Birch’s murder was proved to British satisfaction, one or two were executed, others banished to the Seychelles. A Regent, Raja Yusuf, was inducted as puppet-ruler of Perak, and in 1877 new British officials were given the ticklish posts of Resident and Assistant Resident. They were Mr (later Sir) Hugh Low and Mr (later Sir) William Maxwell, with whom Isabella chatted that night aboard the steam-launch Kinta.

  The following morning, Maxwell and Isabella were still swishing along the Larut River. Blue-tailed bee-eaters with pale chestnut throats and stomachs full of beetles, flies and (presumably) bees, flashed overhead, and golden-husked palm nuts drifted downstream – but you didn’t reach for them as you might get your fingers snapped off by a passing alligator. On landing at the filthy little pier of Teluk Kartang, the men went off to inspect the Customs Post, and Isabella waited in an office ‘where there was a chair, a table dark with years of ink splotches, a mouldy inkstand, a piece of an old almanac and an empty gin bottle. Outside, cockle-shells were piled against the wall; then there were ditches or streamlets cutting through profuse and almost loathsome vegetation, and shining slime, fat and iridescent, swarming with loathsome forms of insect and reptile life, all rioting under the fierce sun and among them, almost odious by proximity to such vileness, were small crabs with shells of heavenly blue. The strong vegetable stench was nearly overpowering, but I wrote to you and worked at your embroidery a little and so got through this detention pleasantly as through many a longer, though never a hotter one.’

  When the men returned, Isabella and sombre Innes were fitted into a ‘Larut gharrie’ and went bouncing away over the buffalo tracks. These double-wheeled, low-roofed carts, just big enough for two, were usually owned and driven by Kling Indians, lithe harmless fellows who wore Turkey-red turbans, white loin-cloths and heavy jewelled rings in their noses. As a gharrie-passenger, ‘you put up your feet on the board in front, and the little rats of fiery Sumatran ponies, which will run till they drop, jolt you along at great speed’. And in this fashion she came to the Assistant Residency – a substantial hill-top building with high-ceilinged rooms and an immense verandah ‘like the fore-cabin of a great Clyde steamer’.

  For the verandah and its marvellous view, the present incumbents could thank Maxwell’s predecessor at the post, one Captain Tristram Speedy, as flamboyant a character as his name suggests, with a flowing blonde beard and a swashbuckling air that did not endear him to his superiors. The then Governor of the Settlements wrote in a dispatch to the Colonial Office: ‘Captain Speedy is an altogether inferior order of being. He has apparently a delight in dressing himself in a gorgeous leopard skin with a grand turban on his head and still further exciting the curiosity of the natives by playing the bagpipes, an instrument on which he performs with much facility. If you have seen his elephantine frame, you will be able to judge what figure he would present under such circumstances.’ Perhaps the natives enjoyed a bit of a show, certainly Speedy managed to impose some kind of order on the turbulent Larut region, centre for tin-mining, by establishing a magistrate’s court and the nucleus of a police force. But he was accused of being inefficient and reckless with public funds – hence the size of his Residency and the lack of roads leading to it – and in 1877 he was more or less obliged to resign.

  From Speedy’s verandah, Isabella looked down upon the villages where Chinese miners lived, pits of stagnant water where some mines had been abandoned, a sparse yellow-leaved coffee plantation that wasn’t doing very well and, at all the distances, ‘miles of treetops as level as the ocean over which the cloud shadows sail in purple all day long’. She could see too the thin red lines of Sikh and Pathan soldiers parade every morning in the barrack square, ‘classic’, ‘colossal’ ‘splendid-looking’ men they were in scarlet coats, white trousers and blue turbans under which they tucked the ends of their long black plaited whiskers.

  This colourful contingent was under the command of another colourful character, Major Paul Swinburne, of whom Isabella had already heard. His reputation as ‘a brilliant, fascinating and altogether misplaced person’ resounded ‘in Japan, China, Singapore and all along here,’ she told Hennie; when she left Malacca, Captain Shaw had said, ‘“When you see Paul Swinburne you’ll see a man you’ll not see twice in a life-time”. So yesterday’ Isabella continued, ‘when a tall slender aristocratic-looking man, who scarcely looks severable from the door-step of a Pall Mall Club, strode down the room and addressed me abruptly with the words, “The sooner you go away again, the better; there’s nothing to do and nothing to learn,” I was naturally much interested.’ Refusing to be either overawed or offended by this opening gambit, Isabella soon found that Swinburne was indeed ‘good company’, ‘a brilliant talker, dashing over art, literature, politics, society’, though totally regardless of ‘the equities of conversation’. He was a cousin of Algernon Charles Swinburne and took a somewhat uncharitable pleasure in describing his talented relation as ‘a gifted wastrel, rich with all that life can offer within his grasp, but living for spirit-drinking and opium, in which, doubtless, some of his poems have found their inspiration’.

  He and Maxwell were firm, fierce friends who spiked the lassitude of the tropical environment with inventive, vehement rows. Swinburne’s habit was to begin ‘in an aggravating tone … upon some peculiarity or foible, real or supposed, of his friend, with a deluge of sarcasm, mimicry, ridicule and invective, torments him mercilessly, and without giving him time to reply, disappears, saying Parthian-like, “Now, my dear fellow, it’s no use resenting it, you haven’t a friend such as me in the world – you know if it were not for me you’d be absolutely intolerable!”’ The noise on these occasions was apparently appalling, fists thumped down, plates rattled, but afterwards they all felt better. So piquant and amusing was the company, so restful the hours Isabella spent alone in the large drawing-room where there were ‘no women to twitter’ as she ‘read up the Native States in Blue Books
, etc.’ that she hated to leave. But she need not have minded, for the most joyous, exciting, extraordinary experiences of her entire journey in the Golden Chersonese still lay ahead – and began as soon as she left Larut for the main Perak Residency at Kuala Kangsa.

  Maxwell escorted her for the first tramp through the jungle. Gaudy butterflies and monkeys cavorted among the trees, amber-and-turquoise bundles of humming-bird vibrated, and under the great glass-green leaves leeches listened for the rustling movements of an intruder so that they could stretch to their full extent and latch themselves firmly upon any passing flesh. Delicate coral-flecked spikes of orchid thrust at her, egg-yellow trumpets of blossom scrambled overhead among steely blue aspleniums and an unknown creeper of salmon-orange scalloped around velvet-black. Burnished gingerworts shone, red lilies flared, creamy oval fruits dangled, ferns, with serrated fronds six feet long, bowed, and she found three varieties of nepenthes, the blotched purple ‘monkey-cups’. The lid of this pitcher-shaped flower was gilded with a nectar that attracted insects which flew into the cup, slipped on the smooth-as-satin interior walls and drowned in the quantity of water held in the base. Each grisly pitcher was packed ‘with skeletons of betrayed guests’ from which the insectivorous plant had extracted its food.