by Nigel Barley
He was careful to point out that he was acting against Makota, whom he replaced, not Hassim, whom he was protecting, and so in accordance with respect for Bruneian sovereignty. James always considered his actions to be genuinely for the benefit of locals – whether the locals realised it or not – so that his interests and theirs would naturally coalesce. It was a fundamental tenet of his rule that Brookes governed only by consensus, Bruneians by unprincipled oriental despotism. But this was hardly the free entreaty or ‘election’ by grateful natives that Brooke history would record.
Chapter 6
The Rule of Law
James Brooke was thirty-eight years old and finally had the country he had dreamed of and that he saw as his unquestioned right. He quite unlawfully assumed the title of Rajah – locals referred to him simply as the Tuan Besar – the Big Lord – and began his rule and his new life in a legalistic high moral tone. The hundred-odd wives and children taken as hostages at the end of the civil war were now released and restored to their families. Some had already been taken as wives by Hassim’s brothers – a great honour, James was assured – and he let that rest. He reappointed the state officials, the Datuk Patinggi, Datuk Temonggong and Datuk Bandar, who had gone into rebellion and determined that they should be paid an annual salary instead of filching for themselves. They were not particularly impressive individuals, but James always sought to cloak revolutionary change in the mantle of the restoration of tradition. And he owed them a debt for their support against the Bruneian faction. He had become the champion of the Kuching Malays against the Bruneians, but now he must do something for the Dayaks against the Malays. ‘“Divide and govern” is the motto. I must govern each by the other, and when I am rich enough, procure a body guard of fifty Bugis [Buginese from Celebes].’1
He set about demolishing the infamous system known as serah which weighed particularly heavily on the Hill Dayaks, who had been driven into disaffection along with the Malays. According to this, Bruneian and Malay nobles and their relatives had the right to appropriate any Dayak property they took a fancy to. They could confiscate a Dayak boat by cutting a notch in the gunwale. Should another Malay demand the same boat, the owner had not only to yield it up to the first but to pay compensation to the second for his disappointment. They could buy up forest produce at any price they saw fit, and if insufficient quantities were delivered by villagers they might seize their wives and children and sell them into slavery. Should they resist, other Dayaks would be set upon them – which might happen anyway, as part of the practice of issuing licences to devastate tribes beyond the reach of normal exploitation. This combination of practices had reduced the province to misery. Of course, the Hill Dayaks (Bidayuh) suffered more than the Sea Dayaks (Iban) as the latter were the principal devastators.
The Dayaks or wild tribe of the hills are, taking them generally, one of the most interesting and easily to be improved races in the world. You must be careful, however, not to confound these Hill Dayaks with the predatory tribes of the coasts, for although they likewise have many excellent qualities, yet they are great pirates and head-hunters. These, (the Hill Dayaks) are an industrious, quiet and strictly honest people, in which last particular they present a striking contrast to the South Sea Islanders. Their wars, one against another, do little mischief, even to themselves, save that the fear of surprise, prevents their cultivating an exposed ground … Though industrious, they never reap what they sow; though their country is rich in produce, they are obliged to yield it all to their oppressors: though yielding all beyond their bare sustenance, they rarely can preserve half their children, and often – too often – are robbed of them all, with their wives. This may appear to you somewhat an exaggerated picture, but I have not given it the colour which it merits.2
James determined that this was to end. Ancient laws were now to be respected and be protected from abuse. Native religion was to suffer no molestation – but this, in fact, only affected the Malays. Dayaks were held to be children of nature, without true religion, since their most cherished beliefs were dismissed in the eyes of civilisation as mere childlike superstition.
It was to be indirect government:
The experiment of developing a country through the residence of a few Europeans, and by the assistance of its native rulers, has never been fairly tried; and it appears to me in some respects more desirable than the actual possession of a foreign nation; for if successful, the native prince finds greater advantages, and if a failure, the European government is not committed. Above all, it insures the independence of the native princes, and may advance the inhabitants further in the scale of civilization by means of the very independence than can be done when the government is a foreign one, and their natural freedom sacrificed.3
It is also cheaper.
The antimony mines whose control lay at the bottom of the vexed war were taken over by James to pay for government, together with a rice tax. Although he dreamed of mineral wealth – gold, diamonds – and had already sent home ‘the Brooke Diamond’ (which turned out to be not a diamond at all but a relatively valueless opal), he was ironically unaware of the value of the noxious crude oil that seeped from the ground far to the north, ruining the soil. The Victorian age, after all, lubricated its smoke-belching engines with green, renewable palm oil, not fossil poisons. Anyway, this area was not yet part of Sarawak, which at the moment comprised about three thousand square miles of profitless swamp, jungle and river. Expansion lay in the future, notably under the next Rajah, Charles, but from the first James had an eye on the border. And mineral wealth was only thought of as a source of salvation in much the same way as a man dreams idly of winning the lottery, for Sarawak had precious little to offer the world and, in the early years, James alternated between wildly talking up his province’s resources and a more sober acceptance of its financial situation. Moreover, his own fiscal management scarcely represented an advance.
Mr. Brooke calculated that the revenue of the country was about £5,000 a year. How he arrived at this estimate, I do not understand, as the whole income of the country consisted of a few hundred bushels of rice, a little profit from opium and the net proceeds of the antimony. I can readily imagine that he was incorrectly informed by his treasurers, who were such poor accountants, that on examining his books, I found that all expenditure was put under the head of revenue … Dollars valued at 4s 2d and reals worth 3s were treated as equivalent coins, and added together … Thus Mr. Brooke never really knew what was the true state of his affairs. What he did know was, that every now and then he was informed that there was a balance against him, and he drew bills on his private fortune, until it began gradually to vanish to nothing.4
James would be more or less broke for the rest of his life. Whatever colonial model he fits, it is certainly not that of self-seeking commercial exploiter.
Yet the imperial ambition is there to be read between the lines. He sent home fretting that he had no knighthood, he asked for a rifle with eight barrels (‘with Dayaks it would be invaluable’) and a magic-lantern show of Napoleon on his white steed at Waterloo. James often seems to talk most clearly about himself when writing of others. Thus he gave advice to his mother on moving house, but it is hard not to feel he was writing about his plans for Sarawak. ‘I would rather have a cottage, a freehold of my own, and all entirely mine own, than a mansion and park on lease for five hundred years, with a vile landlord somewhere or other, with big prying eyes, and an intelligent agent, close at hand to see you did not convert oaks into firewood.’5
He was, as yet, still a mere tenant of the Sultan of Brunei, but that tenure would soon be changed into freehold. James Brooke described his takeover of government in terms of resigned altruism, noblesse oblige, selflessness, the urge to do good. Likewise with his Dayak boy, Situ. James writes:
Last night I received a strange and embarrassing present, in the shape of a young Dayak boy of five years old – a miserable little prisoner, made during this war, from the tribe of Brong. The
gift causes me vexation, because I know not what to do with the poor innocent; and yet I shrink from the responsibility of adopting him. My first wish is to return him to his parents and his tribe; and if I find I cannot do this, I believe it will be better to carry him with me than leave him to become the slave of a slave: for, should I send him back, such will probably be his fate.
And, later:
Situ, my Dyak boy, seems content and happy; and judging by his ways and his fondness for tobacco, he must be older than I at first supposed. In pursuance of my desire to restore him to his parents, I made every enquiry as to their probable fate; but I have learned nothing that leaves me any hope that I shall be able to do so … Supposing my endeavours to restore the child fail, I have resolved to keep him with me, for many reasons. The first is, that his future prospects will be better, and his fate as a freeman at Singapore happier, than as a slave in Borneo; the second that he can be made a Christian. I can easily provide for him in some respectable household, or take him to England, as may hereafter be most advantageous for him: and at the former place, he can always be made a comfortable servant with good training. Yet with all this, I cannot disguise from myself that there is responsibility – heavy moral responsibility – attached to this course, that might be avoided: but then, should it be avoided? Looking to the boy’s interests – temporal, perhaps eternal – I think it ought not; and so provided always I cannot replace him where humanity and nature dictate, I will take the responsibility, and serve this wretched and destitute child as far as lies in my power. He is cast on my compassion; I solemnly accept the charge; and I trust his future life may bear good fruit, and cause me to rejoice at my present decision.6
All this is very noble. But it is written by James in those oddly public journals – both to himself and to the world – in elaborate self-justification, at the time when he is deciding whether or not to quit Sarawak or to stay. Such minute, late-night examinations of conscience, blind to the major unconscious issues that we would see lying beneath them, are characteristic of James Brooke. They are as much a façade as a self-revelation. His relations with Situ are cast in exactly the same terms of chest-beating morality as his relations with the whole of poor, suffering Sarawak. He will take in the devastated, orphan province, protect it, train it up, give it the means to earn a living – if only as a servant – and give it back its self-respect, regardless of the cost to himself. Above all, he will give it love. ‘And the greatest of these is love.’ No wonder, then, that it becomes a matter of deep concern whether Situ and other boys were – as claimed – objects of selfless love or active lust to James Brooke. To debauch Situ would be to metaphorically debauch innocent Sarawak in general. He would be no longer the founder and protector of a model state but the abuser of innocent trust. ‘Sarawak, indeed, is like a foundling which at first you protect with hesitation and doubt, but which foundling afterwards repays you your cost and your trouble.’7
We will never know whether, as Rajah, James boiled daily in the clammy sheets of unrequited lust, engaged in a little vague scoutmasterly fumbling, sublimated desire under a stiff rictus of avuncular benevolence or reached a sensible standing arrangement with one or more of his young men. Even if nothing ‘actually happened’ in those long, steamy Sarawak nights it does not get James off the hook for a modern reader, who sees him quivering on the brink of either sexual exploitation or the imperial egotism it represents. In a post-Freudian age a conscious thought denied merely invites us to look for an unconscious one that is deeper and more ‘true’. For contemporary biographers, goodness can rarely be accepted at its face value; it has to be unmasked as something else, the lower the better, and James apparently anticipated this. ‘It requires a man of enlarged mind to confide in the generosity and disinterestedness of his fellow mortals,’ he noted. The post-imperial Westerner, having lost his epistemological nerve, no longer has that enlarged mind and is prey to uncertainty in a way that James never was. It cannot be denied that James Brooke really did seek to do good as he saw it, but his lack of self-doubt may arouse discomfort nowadays. For there is a form of extravagant self-abasement – which he himself termed ‘that species of pride that apes humility’ and shared by such as Albert Schweitzer and the late Diana, Princess of Wales – that is also a mark of self-obsession and of arrogance and that is hard for us to understand except as the other side of a terrible guilt. It is quite probable that he was able, to a greater or lesser extent, to use his lust to fuel his higher altruism. As he served Sarawak, he publicly tamed and civilised the dark side of himself. But his letters still read like those of a man who burned.
The writing of laws was among the first regal acts, the declaration of the openness of trade, the introduction of a system of weights and measures and the start of that long process of finagling for the status of a British protectorate that St John characterised sharply as ‘the great error of his life’. James, typically, thought that if only he had a steamer all would be well. He wrote long summaries of his doings, to be published in England. He knew more than most the value of public opinion and urged friends and relatives to agitate and appeal to England on moral, commercial and religious grounds. But for seven months there was another priority.
For the British, rule is law and law is history. As the mark of rule, a lawcourt was held almost every day. It was a fine and typical Brookean blend of declared modesty – the restriction of interference to the impartial application of ancient laws – and unaware arrogance – the assumption that James obviously knew better than anyone else in Sarawak what real justice was about and could overrule the law if need be. The most important thing, he concluded swiftly, was not the administering of oaths, which were lightly treated, but the preventing of one witness hearing the testimony of the others. Inadequate rehearsal made their lies more revealing than their truths. Like the kings of old, he was Brooke the law-giver. He drew up a list of all the laws he could think of and had all eight printed in Singapore. It was a start. But he never realised that he did not just give the people justice. In a small town starved of regular diversion, he also gave them theatre.
The court sat in Brooke’s own house, a rustic but imposing structure across from the Chinese bazaar. Fifty-four feet square of plank and thatch, it had been put up by Hassim in shamefaced haste, with a cutting of corners that would have been the pride of any London jerry-builder. Like many Kuching buildings, it was built on posts of the nibong palm that the English called ‘kneebone’, driven into the mud so that at high tide water flowed under it as at Borneo Proper. James calculated that in a year it would collapse, but then it had not been made to bear the weight of justice being seen to be done. (He was right. He ended up falling through the bathroom floor and nearly drowning.)
The Royalist had been stripped of fittings to trim the house so that nautical chairs accommodated Judge James and such of Hassim’s fourteen brothers as could be spared to sit on left and right. The private rooms were enhanced with sofas, books and paintings. Rajah James had an artistic way with soft furnishings that was much remarked upon. He either did not know or did not care that the night-time scent of chimpaka – gardenia – that haunted his rooms, conjured up in Malays the terrors of the terrible pontianak ghost which lured men by its irresistible sexual attraction and then tore them apart. In the days of his successor, Rajah Charles, the courtroom chairs would be replaced with an agonising iron bench, an implacable symbol of unbending judicial virtue, but then Rajah Charles was a little mad on the whole subject of effeminacy, sewed up his sons’ trouser pockets and imposed fines on his young officers if he caught them in unauthorised possession of upholstery. Health, he would declare, was all a matter of how a man ‘held himself’.
Across the room were the three great ministers of the Kuching Malays, the Datuks Temonggong, Bandar and Patinggi, at their feet the litigants on cunningly crafted mats, and behind them, crammed in against the walls and spilling outside, what might be viewed either as the citizenry or the mob: betel-juice-spitting Malays, hawk
ing Chinese, wild-eyed Dayaks – all men.
Languages criss-crossed: Malay, English, Iban, Bidayuh, obscure tongues of the Baram River, contesting dialects of Chinese. Williamson, the Eurasian interpreter brought from Singapore, sweated and laboured and hacked a rough path of sense through as many as he dared. Languages did not so much translate as overlap a little in meaning.
The stories began to form a familiar pattern. Little men were oppressed by the great, who were in turn protected by the greater. The Bruneians were so rooted in dishonesty that many of them would rather cheat themselves than be honest. Little men’s weakness was transformed into debt, debt into slavery, slavery into every form of moral and physical wrong. And the slim brown backs that ultimately bore this mass of human unhappiness were those of the innocent Hill Dayaks. They spoke their wretchedness in a pure poetry straight from the pages of Ossian – of big birds pecking little birds and sharp thorns hidden in bunches of lush bananas – that brought tears to his eyes. Anger began to kindle in James Brooke and he determined to bring all, including the Bruneians, within the law.
The Chinese attended his courts and paid great attention to the proceedings. They counted on his support for protection against the Malays and it was only after he encouraged Chinese immigration in the 1850s that Sarawak would finally begin to pay its way. Better, they alone in Kuching had a liking for cold impersonal cash while others bartered in produce, and they were excellently taxable, with their taste for gambling, opium and alcohol. But James never knew that part of the fascination of his courts was not the business of justice being done, but the gambling made possible by the outcome of cases. It was even alleged that suits were wholly concocted and pressed solely to provide an outlet for this passion. And the Chinese, of course, ran the gambling and gambling was illegal. When the ex-pats of the local dramatic society happily performed Gilbert and Sullivan in later years, the exotic and absurd plots were always dangerously close to the reality of Kuching.