White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  A big case involved the Chinese charter granted by Hassim, allowing the San Ti Qu kongsi, a democratic community of Chinese under a ‘captain’, to mine gold and antimony on the right-hand branch of the river. They objected to plans to allow another kongsi, the Sin Bok, to do the same on the left-hand side, invoking infringement of the original agreement as grounds for complaint. Examination of the documents showed that the Chinese translation had cheerfully converted the simple permission to mine of the Malay original into a deed of gift of the whole interior. A few face-saving concessions were made, but the claims were dismissed. James must have been aware how closely the case might resemble one involving his own elastic agreement with Hassim. It was time to finally go to Brunei.

  He was accompanied by Princes Badrudeen and Marsale. James was himself moved to tears to see the grief of Hassim at parting with them. ‘It is part of our better nature to feel when we see others feel.’ Borneo Proper had sadly declined since first visited by Europeans on Magellan’s round-the-world voyage, when it was an opulent place of silk-hung elephants that traded in heaped spices, gold, diamonds and mythical ‘dragon’s blood’.

  On approaching the town, before the ebb had run long, it appeared to be a very Venice of hovels, a river Cybele rising from the water. For those who like it, the locality is not ill chosen. The hills recede from the river and form an amphitheatre; and several other rivers or streams flowing in, cause a muddy deposit on which the houses are built. At high-water they are surrounded; at low water, stand on a sheet of mud. On nearing it, we were encompassed by boats which preceded and followed us, and we passed the floating market, where women, wearing immense hats of palm-leaves, sell all sorts of edibles, balanced in their little canoes, now giving a paddle, now making a bargain, and dropping down with the tide, and again regaining their place when the bargain is finished. The first impression of the town is miserable. The houses are crowded and numerous, and arriving at the palace does not present a more captivating aspect, for, though large, it is as incommodious as the worst.8

  Although the population was assessed at some ten thousand, all seemed poor, and James was incredulous that this was the famed Borneo Proper about which such romantic tales had been spun, the lost paradise of sophistication for which Hassim pined while in Kuching. All silver objects turned black overnight from the noxious exhalations of the mud.

  For once, James’s aims appeared clear. He wanted to reconcile the warring Bruneian factions so that Hassim and his brothers and attendants could be safely returned to Brunei Proper and got off his hands and out of his hair. His major long-term aim was to strengthen the pro-British faction in the court and ultimately ease Hassim’s own passage to the Brunei throne. He also sought the release of British ‘lascar’ (Indian) seamen from another recent wreck. Above all, he desperately wanted a legal piece of paper, finally confirmed by the Sultan, giving him the widest rights possible in Sarawak.

  He also had a hazy plan to get British hands on the coal that was rumoured to be found on Labuan Island, off the Bruneian coast. Perhaps reparations for the mistreatment of the British seamen would be a painless and face-saving way of covering the transfer of the island, since James had taken over from Raffles the idea that shame is the one thing impossible for Malays to bear.

  St John, afterwards long resident in Brunei, describes Sultan Omar Ali as ‘a man of about fifty years of age, short and puffy in person, with a countenance that very obviously showed the weakness of his mind which, as indexed by his face, assumed a complex map of confusion, without astuteness, without dignity, and without good sense. He was ignorant, mean and avaricious, fond of low society and of stupid jokes … He was, however, full of pride.’9 The British never liked him very much.

  Nevertheless, most of James’s aims were achieved without opposition, even from Usop, the mooted ally of Makota. Sarawak’s yearly payment of $2,500 to Brunei was doubtless a powerful argument, so that the province was now ‘made over to Mr. Brooke (to be held under the crown of Brunei) …’.

  On their return to Kuching, according to Malay custom, the Sultan’s letters in their yellow silk envelopes were treated with great honour, respected indeed as manifestations of the Sultan himself.

  On their arrival they were received and brought up amid large wax torches, and the person who was to read them was stationed on a raised platform. Standing on the step below him was Muda Hassim, with a sabre in his hand; in front of the Rajah [Hassim] was his brother Pangeran Jaffir, with a tremendous kampilan, or Lanun sword, drawn; and around were the other brothers and Mr. Brooke, all standing, the rest of the company being seated. The letters were then read, the one appointing Mr. Brooke to hold the government of Sarawak last. After this the Rajah descended from the steps of the platform and said aloud, ‘If any one present disowns or contests the Sultan’s appointment, let him now declare it.’ All were silent. He next turned to the native chiefs of Sarawak and asked them – they were obedient to the will of the Sultan. Then the question was asked of the other Pangerans [royal princes], ‘Is there any Rajah that contests the question? Pangeran Makota, what do you say?’ Makota expressed his willingness to obey. One or two other obnoxious Pangerans who had always opposed themselves to Mr. Brooke were each in turn challenged, and forced to promise obedience. The Rajah then waved his sword and with a loud voice exclaimed, ‘Whoever dares to disobey the Sultan’s mandate now received, I will split his skull!’ At the same moment some ten of his brothers jumped from the veranda, and drawing their long knives began to flourish and dance about, thrusting close to Makota, striking the pillar above his head, and pointing their weapons at his breast. This amusement, the violence of motion, the freedom from restraint, this explosion of a long pent-up animosity, roused all their passions; and had Makota, through an excess of fear or an excess of bravery, started up, he would have been slain, and other blood would have been spilt. But he was quiet, with his face pale and subdued, and as shortly as decency would permit after the riot had subsided, took his leave. Had he been slain on this occasion, many hundreds, nay, thousands of innocent lives might have been saved.10

  James packed Makota off into exile. It would take Hassim two years to gather up enough resolve to move back to Brunei.

  Chapter 7

  And So To War

  In 1843 in Penang, the Company island off the coast of the Malay peninsula, James met a red-haired British naval captain named the Hon. Henry Keppel, ‘whose energy and dash, and quick appreciation of the earnest purpose of Mr. Brooke, had so great an effect on the future of Sarawak’. One might add that he was hard up, Napoleonically short and Napoleonically ambitious. He was thirty-five years old but had held his first command at twenty-five and, in later years, royal favour did nothing to hinder his further advancement. He had a taste for danger and adventure that had been displayed in his recent deeds in China and was an ardent admirer of James Brooke’s attempts to impose order on the boisterous anarchy of Borneo. The two men rapidly established a coalition of intelligent interests based on mutual respect and admiration.

  James had already determined to solve the piracy question by belligerent means, and given his neighbours fair warning that slaving and headhunting raids on Sarawak would no longer be permitted. To his joy, inland tribes began to move down towards Kuching in search of his protection. Some had never seen the tidal bore on the rivers before and were afraid of it, refusing to drink this odd new kind of water. James loved them for their innocence and suffered them to come unto him.

  Construction of a small fleet of war canoes was started. He already possessed the Snake and the Dragon, manned by 140 crew and armed with swivel guns, and the Jolly Bachelor was under construction, but the pirate opposition could put fleets of 150 vessels into the field. Earlier, he entertained the Skrang pirate chieftains Matari (Sun) and his friend Bulan (Moon) in Kuching and found them thoroughly delightful. Matari was ‘as fine a young man as the eye would wish to rest upon – straight, elegantly yet strongly made, with a chest and neck and head set on
them which might serve Apollo, legs far better than his of Belvedere, and a countenance mild and intelligent’. Apart from the pagan splendour of bare Iban thighs and torsos, he was charmed by Matari’s boyish naughtiness.

  ‘You will give me, your friend, leave to steal a few heads occasionally?’

  ‘No,’ I replied; ‘You cannot take a single head; you cannot enter the country; and if you or your country men do, I will have a hundred Skrang heads for every one you take here!’

  He recurred to this request several times – ‘Just to steal one or two!’ – as a schoolboy asks for apples.1

  There had already been difficulty with headhunters. After a prolonged campaign in Singe, the dissident leaders were taken prisoner and briskly put to death by Hassim. It might be thought a minor matter, but these deaths would later be laid at James’s door by enemies in England, anxious to show him a sanguinary despot. Trouble was also brewing with Sherip Sahib, a notorious Arab-Malay sponsor of piratical raids on the Saribus River, where one of the local leaders had boldly hung a basket high on a tree and declared it ready to receive the head of James Brooke. Wild rumours of marauders lurking off the coasts chased each other around the small town and constantly threatened the infant state. James had failed to interest the East India Company ship, Diana, in taking action against pirates, but he would find Henry Keppel more flexible.

  James and Henry were immediately friends. They were close in age and both were men of considerable personal charm and masters of the arts of mess camaraderie. To both, fighting pirates was the stuff of boyhood and Castle Huntley dreams – a jaunt. Keppel’s official mission was the suppression of the Illanun and Balanini raiders of the Sulu Sea who preyed on British and other shipping, but James and Governor Bonham of Singapore suggested that this remit could reasonably be stretched to include pirates from the Borneo coast and that it was obvious that the only effective way of resolving such acts of piracy lay in the devastation of their secure home bases. James had already identified the interests of Sarawak with his own. Now he would add those of Britain. Since water was the universal means of transport in Borneo, anyone travelling there with malice aforethought immediately became a pirate, so that robbers, rebels and outlaws conveniently all disappeared to be absorbed in the new classification. Crucial in all this was legislation left on the statute books from the British anti-slavery squadrons of the West African coast. According to an act of Parliament of 1825, bounties were payable to officers and men on ships that took action against pirates. The terms were staggeringly generous: £20 for every pirate taken prisoner or slain, and £5 a head for every other piratical person estimated aboard at the time of the engagement. While the freed African slaves were reduced to a state of liberated destitution, the Navy had done very nicely out of British philanthropy, and fighting against pirates was extremely popular aboard Her Majesty’s vessels. Through his friendship with Henry Keppel, James Brooke effectively gained a navy to use against his enemies; and the fact that he kept no large standing army disguised the truth that his rule, as in every official British colony, relied on military force rather than that simple free choice of independent men that goes into the Brooke prospectus.

  The first manifestation of this was his return to Kuching in HMS Dido, Keppel’s own ship, a smart three-masted sloop of 376 tons, bearing eighteen 32-pounders and served by a crew of 145 men. The Admiralty was so unfamiliar with Sarawak waters that, according to the best naval charts, the voyage involved sailing over the tops of mountains to a distance some eighty miles inland. Dido was by far the biggest vessel ever to enter the river, and its masts towered over the town and even most of the trees, with the sailors running up the rigging in white uniforms in thrilling displays of symmetry, the band playing and the biggest cannon ever heard firing a salute of twenty-one guns which shook the houses and echoed back and forth between the mountains. Everything was calculated to increase the prestige of the Brooke raj and Keppel – no fool – noted that the Malays now had gained such confidence that they brought out their children to greet the British. It was the visible sign of the new political order, clear proof to the locals that James’s claims to be a mere private citizen were nothing but diplomatic posturing. By good fortune, the British even encountered and captured their first pirates on the way – or maybe they only shot up some innocent boats belonging to the Sultan of Riau. Already the notion of piracy was becoming a little vague. But Keppel was enjoying himself.

  The next business was my visit of ceremony to the Rajah which was great fun. The band, and the marines as a guard, having landed, we all assembled at Mr. Brooke’s house, where, having made ourselves as formidable as we could with swords and cocked hats, we marched in procession to the royal residence. His Majesty having sent one of his brothers, who led me by the hand into his presence … His Majesty chewed his sirih-leaf and betel-nut, seated with one leg crossed under him, and playing with his toes. Very little is ever said during these audiences; so we sat staring at one another for half an hour with mutual astonishment; and, after the usual compliments of wishing our friendship might last as long as the moon, and my having offered him the Dido and everything else that did not belong to me in exchange for his house, we took our leave.2

  James made sure he enjoyed himself still more. A little Dayak tour was organised, complete with human heads and savage cabaret, just as for the tourists of today. He kept open house and wined and dined the officers in what, by day, was the lawcourt.

  On the arrival of Keppel, Makota finally left the town, but still cast a long shadow of intrigue, this time involving Dr Treacher, the new civilian medical officer.

  Dr Treacher received a message from a confidential slave, that one of the ladies of Makota’s harem desired an interview, appointing a secluded spot in the jungle as the rendezvous. The doctor, being aware of his own good looks, fancied he had made a conquest; and, having got himself up as showily as he could, was there at the appointed time. He described the poor girl as both young and pretty, but with a dignified and determined look, which at once convinced him that she was moved to take so dangerous a step by some deeper feeling than that of mere fancy for his person. She complained of the ill treatment she had received from Makota, and the miserable life she led; and avowed that her firm resolve was to destroy (not herself, gentle creature! but) him, for which purpose she wanted a small portion of arsenic. It was a disappointment that he could not comply with her request: so they parted – he full of pity and love for her, and she, in all probability, full of contempt for a man who felt for her wrongs, but would not aid in the very simple means she had prepared for redressing them.3

  The few opening skirmishes with pirates had already led to a marked drop in their activity. Respecting the letter of the law, James created a judicial paper trail, with a formal written request from Hassim, delivered by Badrudeen on the brass tray, in one of the yellow silk envelopes, begging Keppel to take action against pirates with the promise of Bruneian co-operation. James was even to be allowed to join the attack against the inhabitants, Dayaks under Malay leaders, of the Saribus River to the north-east. It would rely on mixed British, Dayak, Bruneian and Malay forces. Prominent among them was Subu Besi (Iron Anchor). ‘His [James’s] coxswain, Subu, we shall all long remember: he was civil only to his master, and, I believe, brave while in his company. He was a stupid-looking and powerfully-built sort of savage, always praying, eating, smiling or sleeping.’4 Subu would go on to be public announcer and executioner of the little state.

  The force of some thousand men ascended the river to the first village of Paku, the sound of gongs and cannon from the enemy announcing the preparation of resistance ahead. Cannon always counted for something in the male world of Sarawak. Even today the Iban slang for ‘penis’ is cannon. There were also spears, ululations and warriors dancing savagely on the rooftops, but this time there was no pausing and building of forts. Instead, Keppel and Brooke responded with a charge – waterborne. Like early surfers, they rode the tidal bore which swept them pa
st screaming warriors (Keppel: ‘No report from musketry and ordnance could ever make a man’s heart feel so small as mine did at that horrid yell’) and into a barrier built across the river. At the last minute, they spotted a gap and steered for it, avoided a fatal impact, but now found themselves alone on the other side and faced with fire from three forts. ‘The banks of the river were covered with warriors, yelling and rushing down to secure – what I suppose they considered me – their prize,’ wrote Keppel.

  I had some difficulty in getting my long gig round, and paddling up against the stream; but while my friend Brooke steered the boat, my coxswain and myself kept up a fire, with tolerable aim, on the embrasures, to prevent, if possible, their reloading before the pinnace, our leading boat, could bring her twelve-pound cannonade to bear … That evening the country was illuminated for miles by the burning of the capital, Padi, and adjacent villages; at which work, and plundering, our native followers were most expert.5