White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  A few days after, the general in command heard of a strong stockade being in front, and sent out Lieutenant Brooke to reconnoitre, but he was not able to return in time to prevent the advance-guard from falling into an ambuscade. As the foremost company turned a corner in the road, they were received by a volley which knocked over a number of men. In the midst of the confusion, Brooke came galloping up, and putting himself at the head of the men, charged and ‘foremost, fighting, fell.’ When the affair was over, and the enemy driven from their stockades, Lieutenant-Colonel Richards asked after Lieutenant Brooke, whom he had seen fall, and he was reported dead. ‘Take me to his body,’ was his reply, and they rode to the spot. ‘Poor Brooke!’ said the Colonel, getting off his horse to have a last look at him; and kneeling over him he took his hand. ‘He is not dead!’ he cried, and instantly had him removed to camp.5

  His active military career had lasted some two days; his convalescence would last five years.

  It might seem unnecessary to spend as much time poring over his medical file as scholars have, but there are two versions of James’s injuries, and the version chosen casts a slant over the whole of the rest of James Brooke’s life. The first has him wounded in his passionate parts, neatly explaining his lack of sexual interest in women, his failure to marry and produce an heir, his chaste ‘romance’ with the heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts, and provides an instant refutation of any suggestion of unconventional sexual tastes. Since all this follows from an honourable and tragic wound on the field of battle, early biographers passed rapidly over it with averted eyes and a little tutting over the missed opportunity for the love of a good woman. The other version has him shot in the lung, the slug not removed until he arrived back in England, where it was proudly preserved by his mother in a glass case on the mantelpiece. It is supported by anecdotal evidence from the family, some of the sources now lost, and by Spenser St John. Most of all it is supported by James Brooke’s own later recognition of an illegitimate son, whom he claimed to have fathered well after this incident – though this remained a family secret until the 1950s.

  The two explanations cross in the vexed question of James’s sexuality, which it is premature to discuss in depth at this point. But, to anticipate, if he was physically normal why was he not romantically involved? He had charm and wealth. Soon he would be a Byronic national hero. So he was not short of the standard aphrodisiac ingredients to stir the hearts of female admirers, but he was simply not interested. As family friend Kegan Paul put it with some astonishment, ‘He was one of those men who are able to be the close and intimate friends of women without a tinge of love-making.’6 For earlier biographers it was unthinkable that a hero of the British Empire could be homosexual, a skeleton to keep firmly in the imperial closet, so the issue has been demurely fudged and even recently ‘latency’ has been deployed like gauze over the lens to avoid focused discussion. It was even seriously suggested in 1960 that the choice of Sir Steven Runciman to compile an official history of Sarawak, including a life of James Brooke (The White Rajahs), was compromised by the writer’s own alleged homosexuality. Not only was James Brooke to be above reproach, so were his biographers.

  Yet it remains one of the tenets of the contemporary West that sexuality is at the heart of identity, so if James was homosexual we would wish to know it. But if he was, what were his motives in claiming to have fathered an illegitimate son and what was really going on offstage in the backrooms of his life? These are the reasons that James Brooke’s wound has so fascinated enquirers, albeit with a great deal of manly throat-clearing and evasion. Yet in a sense the interest is misplaced, for these are not either/or questions, nor can we blandly imagine, as an earlier age might, that the physical state of his loins directly determined that of his heart or his head. James Brooke could easily have been impotent yet heterosexually attracted. He could have been both homosexual and impotent through injury. He could have been homosexual and the physical father of a son. Yet other combinations are possible that belie the confidence of the simple generalisations. The question of James Brooke’s wound is, after all, something of a blind alley if we want to use it as a route to know the man. The real question is that of love. Did he fall in love? Who with? And what was the nature of that love?

  Many years later, in the 1920s and 30s, when the Brooke raj was firmly established, the Ranee, wife of Rajah Vyner – third, last and least of the rajahs of Sarawak – was a writer, permanently short of cash like all the Brookes, and a society flapper, if not indeed an out-and-out slapper. As a source of money, Sylvia Brooke wrote her life story, but lived so long that she was reduced to writing it again … and again, so that – to add novelty – each version had to be made slightly more scandalous than the last. In the final version, Queen of the Headhunters (1970), she reveals how she determined to write a treatment of the life of James Brooke for the motion pictures, of which she was an ardent fan. In her honour, her husband had constructed Kuching’s first cinema, the Sylvia, and opened it sensationally with a showing of King Kong.

  Sylvia wrote a synopsis of the life of James Brooke as The Great White Rajah and sold it to Warner Brothers. She was called to Hollywood. Arriving at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she found a large script personally rewritten from her draft by Errol Flynn and entitled The White Rajah.

  Flynn had turned my synopsis into a ridiculous story about a girl who dressed up as a boy and followed James Brooke through the jungles of Sarawak … The thing was an absurdity, and I wrote and told Warner Bros. so. They must have passed my letter on to Errol Flynn, because a few days later, I had a letter asking me to dinner.

  This was an evening I shall never forget … suddenly the staircase became brilliantly floodlit. On it there appeared Errol Flynn himself in a pair of white close-fitting trousers that showed every nerve and muscle of his body. Slowly and gracefully he descended, giving me plenty of time to appreciate his entrance – and him. He flashed a smile at me that would have sent a thousand fans into hysterics and then he started to make me a drink. The lights slowly dimmed and I could only just see him across the room. We had no time for conversation before the lights blazed on again, to herald the arrival of Lillie Damita. She also wore white; a gorgeous creature holding an enormous Persian cat in her arms. She greeted me briefly, and proceeded to lie on the floor and play with the cat. It was the most sensual and feline exhibition I have ever seen.

  After these preliminaries, we went in to dinner and I at last had a chance to ask him why on earth he had written such a fantastic story around James Brooke … He said that he had always imagined that the First White Rajah was like him – and I agreed that he was perfect for the part. I then asked him if he was aware of the fact that James Brooke had been severely wounded in India, and deprived of his manhood. That he had once become engaged to a girl who had thrown him over when he told her that they could never have any children. By this time, Flynn was frowning furiously.

  ‘Another thing,’ I said; ‘James Brooke was the first white man ever to set foot in Sarawak. Do you think for one moment that the primitive and savage Dayaks would have allowed an English girl to follow him through the jungle? They would have taken her head and smoked it, and there would have been an end of your story.’

  He took my criticism with a laugh and a shrug of his shoulders. ‘You cannot have a motion picture without love,’ he said.

  ‘And you cannot have James Brooke with it,’ I replied.7

  Love (or its absence) was central to the concerns of Somerset Maugham who confirmed the general view of James’s love life when he visited the senior Sarawak government officer, A. B. Ward, on a tour east of Suez.

  Mr. Somerset Maugham, the author and playwright, also came on a visit [to Sarawak]. He was said to be looking for ‘copy.’ He certainly found it in a manner he had not bargained for.

  Whilst returning from a trip to Simanggang [Sri Aman], by some inexplicable mischance the policeman in charge of his boat failed to take shelter from the approaching tide, and in about t
he most dangerous part of the river, they ran into the bore, a roaring wave at least eight feet high.

  The boat was instantly overwhelmed, and the occupants precipitated into the water. For nearly half an hour Somerset Maugham and the rest were whirled along with the tide, tossed and buffeted by the surging water, desperately clinging to the boat which turned over and over with the action of the current. At last, helped by some of the crew, Maugham managed to reach the bank utterly exhausted. Dyaks took the shipwrecked party into their house, revived them with drink and provided them with sarongs.

  Luckily all escaped injury, but English literature nearly lost one of its most brilliant writers that day. In conversation with Somerset Maugham I suggested that the history of Sir James Brooke would make a good film story. He said no; there was no love interest in the first Rajah’s life.8

  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The life of James Brooke was full of love, concrete and abstract, general and particular. He inspired love. He felt love. It entered into many of the crucial decisions he had to make. Love in its many forms will occupy us a lot in trying to piece together his life.

  Whatever its nature, the wound festered in James Brooke’s body as it has in the minds of scholars ever since. In 1825 he rejoined his parents in Bath. The most reliable version of events has the slug cut out through his back. Abscesses formed and so, in an age before antibiotics, the wound was kept open for a year by regular ‘probing’. The agony must have been indescribable. Powerful opiates were prescribed. He was awarded a pension of £70 a year for life by the Company, apparently written off as an invalid at twenty-two.

  His recovery was slow, relying on the devoted nursing of his family, especially that of his father. Later, like so much else in the empire, it would be attributed to the almost magically beneficial effects of an ice-cold bath every morning. How he spent his time is unclear, but from his later writings he must have started reading about the east and especially, perhaps, the work of Stamford Raffles, notably The History of Java. Raffles appealed as the enlightened and affectionate ruler of an island whose inhabitants he admired and whose well-being he saw as the only justification for empire. It is not clear whether the two ever met. Raffles repeatedly visited Company headquarters in Calcutta during James’s childhood, but no legend of their coming together exists. Either way, he would be the blueprint for James’s own rule; indeed, there would be an air of ‘following Raffles by numbers’ about the early years.

  But life was not all reading. Attempting to return to duty in India in 1829, James was shipwrecked off the Isle of Wight and suffered a relapse. His leave was extended by six months, but employees of the Company were forbidden to be absent from their posts for more than five years. He had to return by 30 July 1830 or forfeit his commission. First the weather conspired against him. Storms lashed the coast, preventing the departure of his ship, the Castle Huntley, until March. Then it was becalmed, arriving in Madras on 18 July, leaving only twelve days to reach Calcutta. But no ship was available. It simply could not be done. He applied for temporary employment with the Company in Madras as a way of getting around the regulations, but was refused. Unknown to him, his father was pulling strings with the directors in London and had persuaded them to allow a loose interpretation of the rule. But it was too late. Piqued and petulant, James had already resigned his commission in India rather than wait to be dismissed.

  His ever-dutiful father petitioned the Company again and it was agreed that the decision could be reviewed. But James never bothered to take this up, and he never expressed the least regret over this business of the botched absence note. ‘I toss my cap into the air and my commission into the sea,’ he wrote happily, ‘and bid farewell to John Company and all his evil ways.’9 Like many a man before and since, he cordially detested his employer and was glad to have an excuse to go. ‘I am like a horse that has got a heavy clog off his neck … Here goes a puff of my cigar, and with it I blow the Company to the devil or anywhere else so they trouble me no further!’10 Perhaps he had ingested this anti-Company feeling, like so much else, from Stamford Raffles, himself betrayed and persecuted by small-minded Company officials. Anyway, he had other reasons to stay aboard the Castle Huntley. Captain Marryat, who knew him later in Sarawak, wrote in hushed tones, ‘If the private history which induced him to quit the service, and afterwards expatriate himself, could with propriety, and also with regard to Mr. Brooke’s feelings, be made known, it would redound still more to his honour and his high principle; but these I have no right to make public.’11 Sadly, he gives no clue of what this ‘private history’ might be.

  James now gleefully set off on a jolly cruise to the Far East. He was young, newly restored to health – in fact back from the dead – financially secure and, Somerset Maugham’s later views notwithstanding, perhaps a little … in love?

  Chapter 2

  The East

  Hitherto we have known a deal about what James Brooke did and the milieu he moved in, but his own thoughts and views have been lacking. It is at this point, at the beginning of one of the longest ‘gap years’ in history, that he gains a voice of his own, for he became a prolific letter writer and journal keeper. Henceforth we are deluged with his words, and the sudden explosion of documentation reflects that strange sense of his contemporaries that James Brooke the man was so little prefigured in James Brooke the boy. The new James, indeed, had opinions on just about everything and felt moved to share them with just about everyone. The shyness of his youth melted away before this new public persona and increasingly in these letters and journals he now wrote in the declamatory and opinionated language of the election address. The journals especially, as published later by Henry Keppel and Rodney Mundy and drawn on by early biographers Gertrude le Jacob and Spenser St John, are revealing. We should not think of them as simply a dumping ground for the public person’s subjectivity and the secret location of his sense of privacy. They are much more than that, and constitute a sort of deliberate mirror in which he can posture and dramatise himself Byronically, as a passionate creature of delicate scruple. Their later partial publication argues that he always saw them as such, as does their style, steeped in public self-consciousness. They are full of ringing phrases and fervent declarations of principle.

  The journey took him from Madras to Penang, to Malacca, to Singapore, to Canton, and everywhere James Brooke looked and larked and opined how bad it all was. It would be spring 1831 before he rejoined his family in Bath, whence came not one word of paternal reproach. In Madras, the Europeans are scorned as ‘provincials’, while ‘The natives are despicable, and here, as at every other place I have seen, have been corrupted by their intercourse with Europeans. They lose their particular virtues arising from their habits and their religion, and become tainted with the vices of those around them … No rational Englishman can observe the deterioration of the native character arising from their intercourse with the whites, without a blush.’1 The notion that locals must be protected from Europeans would become part of Sarawak thinking.

  On the Company island of Penang he visited the water-powered Chinese bakery, one of the great sights of the place, and found it ‘rude and clumsy’. The island should be developed by European settlers, he decided, or if not by land grants to natives. Once again it was the short-sightedness of the Company that was at fault. ‘It appears to me pretty certain that territorial possessions of the East India Company are considered as second to their China trade – the revenues of India are confused with the accounts of tea, the resources of India are not fully developed, or at any rate are imperfectly known, the grasp of monopoly stunts improvement, and the exigencies of war and the necessities of peace are readily defrayed from the profits of commerce …’2

  In Singapore, the island colony founded by Raffles, he looked for evidence to bolster the stance of disliking the Chinese that he had assumed from the literature.

  They are the first race of people I ever met with whose appearance positively displeased me. The
ir habits are the most filthy, their faces the most ugly and their figures the most ungraceful of any people under the sun. They appear cut out of a log of wood by the hand of some unskilful savage. Their mouths are wide, their noses snub, their eyes small and set crooked in their heads. When they move they swing arms, legs and body like a paper clown pulled by a string; and to sum up, all their colour is a dirty yellow, nearly the colour of a Hindostani corpse. Yet with all these drawbacks, they are industrious and good tempered, cheerful and obliging.3

  In short, the world afforded him ample grounds for a growing sense of his own superiority, further bolstered in Canton, where the resident British traders were confined to their factory (trading station) by those ‘ignorant and presumptuous barbarians’ – the Chinese. Again, the supine Company was to blame. ‘The maxim seems to have been to pick up any crumbs the Emperor may bestow, and bear kicks, insults and degradation to any extent he may command. What indeed is national honour, or national independence when compared to tea?’4 A jape involved himself and shipmates disguising themselves as Chinese at the Feast of Lanterns, in order to penetrate the city, declared out of bounds to Europeans. ‘Being once in, the whole party threw off disguise and broke some of the lanterns, which were accounted precious. They barely escaped with their lives, and how escape was possible is the marvel.’5 James would always have a high tolerance for such japes.