White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  A Chinese rebellion, over the border in Dutch territory, forced thousands of turbulent Chinese refugees into Sarawak and Kuching, where they invaded the new church, so that Frank had to drive them out like money lenders, while James, eager for their entrepreneurial skills, gave them food and tools. But there were new souls too. Ten of their children were delivered up to the McDougalls for ten years of free education, and by the end of the year the school numbered over thirty. The Borneo Church Mission objected that these were Chinese, not the Dayaks intended, but the McDougalls doted on their charges and could not bring themselves to give the children up. As long as necessary, they paid the costs out of their own pocket. Harriette sewed them neat uniforms and fed them breakfasts of rice pudding and treacle and whipped them when they were wicked. A proper Chinese teacher called Sing-Sing, who had illegally smuggled his wife out of China in a box, was engaged to teach them their letters, and Harriette trained them up as a choir that impressed visitors and remote villages alike. Meanwhile Frank, who had been in a winning Oxford crew, turned the boys into a rowing eight who enjoyed some success at the Sarawak regatta, which he had instituted to encourage the different peoples to make sport, not war.

  The McDougalls were less successful with the Rajah’s Dayak hostages, who fiercely resisted all attempts to lay hands on their children. James himself did his best to minimise the sufferings of children in the fighting, but many were very firm-minded. There was a little boy of eight, Ranjah, whose father and brother had been killed in the wars.

  For several days he seemed very happy with the Rajah, to whom he had been brought, and then he told him confidently that he knew a place where certain valuable jars belonging to his tribe were hidden, and that if he were sent there with a party of Malays he could point out the place. The Rajah believed the child, the jars were found, and taken on board the boat; then the boy again went to the Rajah, and bursting into tears, he said, ‘I have given you the riches of my tribe, and now in return, give me my liberty, set me down in a path I will show you in the jungle, give me some food, and in two days I shall reach my home and find my mother.’

  The Rajah answered, ’My poor child, I would willingly do as you ask me, but I fear you will be lost in the jungle, and will die before you reach your home; for how can such a child as you know the way?’ However, the boy persisted and the Rajah gave him whatever he wished for – a china cup, a glass tumbler, a gay sarong, and some food, and the little fellow set off, on the jungle path, with his bundle on his back, joyful enough; and as we afterwards heard, rejoined his mother and friends in safety.’24

  The original plan had been to send a catechist to every one of the forts James was erecting to safeguard the rivers, but there were never enough people and the converts continued to be mostly Chinese. James was undismayed, realising, in the usual architectural metaphors, that hasty evangelisation would be ‘building the superstructure on a foundation of sand’. Yet whenever Dayaks came to Kuching, the McDougalls offered them hospitality, with Harriette stoutly playing the harmonium and working the magic lantern. While they never stole, they begged her piteously for the cups and plates that were a Dayak obsession. ‘You have so many more than you could possibly want.’ Anyway, the mission’s scriptural tableaux were perhaps no match for the Rajah’s livelier pictures. In the astana, a favourite of the Dayaks was a magic-lantern scene of English bodysnatchers being pursued from a cemetery by skeletons who pelted them with skulls. They found it hilarious.

  Frank discovered a Javanese who could cast brass and bought up a hundredweight of broken gongs to melt down into a bell. But the principal effect of its ringing was to drive the Muslims to resume the discarded habit of calling to prayer, and even to increase the number going on pilgrimages to Mecca.

  Bishop Wilson of Calcutta was very different from his lissom great-nephew, William Brereton. He was seventy-two years old, huge and fat and eccentric and, by the obscure rules that govern Church geography, he was nominally in charge of the Sarawak mission. Like many deaf men he shouted and accused the rest of the world of mumbling and this excess of volume somehow strengthened his own opinions and made those of others seem pale and indeterminate and even more in need of his constant direction.

  When the bishop made his first visit, Frank had struggled into unaccustomed ecclesiastical black and gone downriver to pilot in the boat. He normally did this anyway if it was anything more than a small local craft. It was one of the reasons the McDougalls always ended up housing the junior officers of visiting warships – some of them quite ungodly men – which task might more properly have fallen to the Rajah. And if it wasn’t the Navy drinking up the medicinal port, it was the Dayaks gobbling the rice. Later would come wild-eyed, haggard men from the out-stations whose clothes had rotted away on their backs and who had to be wooed back to civilisation. Frank called it ‘docking and tinkering’ and worried that these men, so irked and chafed by unaccustomed shirts, looked more like pirates than churchmen. Money and supplies were a constant headache. And now the Bishop of Calcutta. Well, they would all have to be filled up with heavy puddings and the remains of the Christmas venison. The mission house was too far from the landing stage for Bishop Wilson to walk, so he had to be borne in triumph on an improvised palanquin by muscular Chinese coolies, trained in the transport of rice sacks and the occasional procession of joss-house figures. By the time they struggled up the curving path to the mission house, their thin blue trousers and shirts were soaked in sweat and clung to their bodies to the point of indecorous physical revelation. From the top of the hill Harriette could hear the bishop at the bottom favouring Frank with his views on the Indian castes, cattle-raising and the problems of ecclesiastical marriage, and ear-trumpeting back shouts of ‘Eh? What? Who? How much?’

  He had not come unattended. He had a physician, Dr Beale, and the Rev. Moule from Singapore, both good eaters. There was Archdeacon Pratt, accompanied by his tall, icy wife. The Malays stared at her in awe. White women were still a novelty in Sarawak, a new species whose general characteristics remained to be defined and generally agreed. Over the next weeks they would flock to the house, not to see the bishop, but simply to look on Mrs Pratt’s white throat, set off by jet beads and flounced bodice. There was something about that throat that strangely stirred and fascinated them. Having silently stared their fill, they would go home nodding, quietly satisfied. There was a pale young missionary, Mr Fox, paper-skinned and trembly from a recent attack of fever, who would be led into debauchery with local women by that ill-named hound St John and later defect to a purely secular administration.

  Frank proudly showed the bishop around the mission. The soil had been too thin and sour for the projected fruit trees so there was now only grass that fed the cattle and provided milk for the little ones. They were tended by a Hindu syce. Harriette had never told Frank how, one afternoon, going into the cowshed, she had come upon Abdullah engaged in an act of blatant and absorbed adoration, prostrate in the semi-darkness before the placidly munching and garlanded Brahma bull, muttering prayers and whispering strange and melodious incantations.

  Bishop Wilson had come to consecrate the bright new church of St Thomas. It was not finished, of course, but the funds were and it would serve. Frank had found a Chinese craftsman in the bazaar who could do gilding, and godly words gleamed out against the darkening wood. Almost all the letters were the right way up. The flag of Sarawak shone bright in a stained-glass window and the building was decked, not with seasonal boughs of holly, but palm fronds and lush banana leaves. It was trim and tight and purposeful and its little Tyrolean tower stood firm against the wind and the rain like one of Frank’s boats. As the last nail was driven home, the termites had arrived and swarmed over every surface in a complete tour of inspection. Satisfied that there was nothing to eat, they withdrew.

  The bishop and his party were less fastidious than the ants. They installed themselves in every available room of the mission house, driving the McDougalls into a small unused corner. The Indian s
ervants took over the verandahs and talked loudly all night while the Malays came to see Mrs Pratt all day. Perfidious Rev. Moule crept into the mission library and that of the Rajah and declared them to be hotbeds of doctrinal subversion. By the time of the consecration, Harriette and Frank were worn to a frazzle. It was as much as he could do to struggle through the service, which lasted from eleven in the morning to half-past two in the afternoon. Yet when the spirit was upon him and he was preaching, he struck the pulpit so hard with his hand that the gentle Datuk Bandar feared violence from this strange new faith and fled. That was against protocol. After all Brooke Brooke was there, representing the Rajah, and diplomatic protocol decreed that he had to leave first.

  Chapter 10

  The Inquiry

  As part of his wider duties as British Commissioner in the east, James was requested to try to re-establish good relations with the Thais. The King had recently expelled all foreign traders in petulance at being sold a leaky cruiser. James hung around in Bangkok for week after week, behaving with considerable haughtiness and bad temper, which he justified by a claimed specialist knowledge of ‘oriental ways’. The old King simply prevaricated with royal elegance and finally James admitted defeat. The mission was a total failure, without even the usual meaningless piece of paper to show for it. The voyage added, however, to Sarawak royal pomp. The Crown Prince had been met and a basis laid for future good relations. James declared him ‘a highly accomplished gentleman for a semi-barbarian’ and recommended the British simply put him on the throne. He would later, as King, without British interference, send to Sarawak a copy of the heavily carved and gilded Thai royal barge to be used as James’s own formal vessel. One other thing came of it. The Borneo Company, founded in 1856 to develop Sarawak, became involved in Siam and the King asked them to send him an English governess, which they most famously did.

  The Liberals’ campaign against James Brooke – ‘sometimes styled Rajah Brooke’ – would rumble on like chronic indigestion for years. In March 1850 there was the battle over the payment to the Navy. The lack of British casualties was invoked as proof that this was no normal warfare but a one-sided massacre. Unfortunately, despite his own liberal and humanitarian programme, James’s military conquests naturally attracted the support of just the sort of reactionary Queen-and-country Conservatives he abhorred – which, in turn, further inflamed the Liberals. The northern merchants would favour him as would the major ports as ‘good for trade’, so that humanitarians would also accuse him of having sordid commercial motives; he would point in vain to having invested £10,000 in Sarawak without obvious hope of return. In short, every faction in the House might find him useful for their own agenda.

  In July, Hume rose again. Matters were worse than he had thought. He was now convinced, he revealed, that the alleged pirates massacred by James Brooke were actually a part of the royal navy of China. A few weeks later, when funds for Labuan came up in the House, he was on his feet again, quoting awkward extracts from James’s letters, provided by Wise. Once more he was voted down and Lord Palmerston wrote to James expressing government support.

  Then, out of the blue, came a letter from the American President requesting a treaty of friendship with Sarawak. It called James Brooke ‘Great and Good Friend’, and ‘Your Highness’. James was delighted and referred it back to Palmerston, eager that he should know all about it and its unqualified acceptance of Sarawak sovereignty.

  It was time to go to England in person. James was in delicate health, largely from the diseases that pullulated on Labuan, whose salubrity he had lauded. He needed to convalesce. Anyway, he always wanted to meet his enemies face to face. Passing through Singapore, he was outraged to hear that his old foe, Woods of the Straits Times, had been appointed Deputy Sheriff. James tried to use his influence with the Governor and get him fired, but failed. In response, Woods promptly got up a petition among the Singapore merchants demanding a sweeping inquiry into all the doings of James Brooke.

  James arrived in England in May 1851, and this time he would stay nearly two years. There would be dinners in his honour and expressions of regard and support from the highest in the land, and the comfort of renewed acquaintance with friends. But his coming stirred Hume anew to heights of righteous fury. Twice in the next few months he raised James’s actions in the House, first using the petition of the fifty-three Singapore merchants raised by Woods, and then other doubtful letters from traders in the east who had suffered at James’s hands. Colonel Thompson scored a definite hit when he declared in the House that James Brooke might act like St George but he himself did not believe in the dragon. But Henry Drummond, MP for West Surrey, was a powerful and well-prepared defender of the Rajah. Of particular importance were the charges of a merchant of Labuan and Singapore, William Henry Miles. Drummond was crushing in his mockery. ‘Mr. William Henry Miles is a gentleman who follows the occupation of a butcher, to which he unites the more honourable occupation of a boxer. It so happened that, owing to a little misfortune, he went abroad at the Queen’s expense. Lord Bacon said that there were two ways of making a man wise – by books and by travel –. It has been Mr. Miles’s fortune to profit by the latter.’1 The total discrediting of the characters from whom Hume’s missives derived – that they were convicted felons, bigamists, pimps, thugs, even the fact that one was most inconveniently decapitated by the pirates Hume claimed did not exist – in no way stilled his strident voice and his busy pen. ‘The fact is,’ wrote St John, ‘that H.M.’s officers in half-civilized countries are brought in contact with wandering ruffians whose only object is to make money – honestly if they can, but at all events to make money; and where we endeavour to check their illegal acts, we are exposed to shameful abuse, which sometimes finds an echo at home.’2

  Hume then produced another forged letter of complaint from the Sultan of Brunei. Despite the unstinted support for James Brooke from both the government and the House, Hume twice returned to his theme in March of the following year and bombarded the government with letters in a tireless moral crusade. James was philosophical: ‘I have been held up as a prodigy of perfection, and I have been cast down as a monster of iniquity.’ He avenged himself on Wise and the ‘calumniators’ by taking them to court and voiding the charter of their Eastern Archipelago Company. He toyed with the idea of a libel action, but thought better of it, and then with becoming an MP, the better to defend himself. And then in early 1853 the government fell and was replaced by a patched coalition that included the troublesome Liberals. They were no longer a mere butt of oppositional humour but crucial allies who had to be placated. Nineteenth-century British governments were notoriously more interested in power than policy. Hume would have his inquiry.

  Three times the proposal for an inquiry had come up in Parliament. Three times it had been heavily defeated. James had already resigned his governorship of Labuan in the hope of an appointment to a clearer administrative position, and was packed and about to embark for Sarawak. He heard of the reversal of the government’s position only days before he was due to sail. Since Lord John Russell had told the House, a mere two weeks before, that no inquiry would be instituted by him before the Rajah’s return, he was now convinced that the plan had been to get him out of the country before announcing the decision, and he regarded this stealthy change as an act of fearful political treachery. Moreover, it seemed that the inquiry would be held in Singapore, not London, by the Governor-General of India, thus making it impossible to call major British figures to testify, and yet it would not bother to visit Sarawak, whose condition James saw as the real issue and his greatest justification. Once more the British government seemed to be insisting on total power over his sovereign state while accepting no responsibility whatever for its fate. He had a markedly free and frank discussion on the subject with Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary, who would not forget or forgive what was said to him or the language in which it was put.

  *

  James arrived back in Aden to troubling
news. A letter from Brooke Brooke revealed that the recalcitrant Skrang chieftain called Rentap had attacked Brereton’s fort. In the ensuing pursuit, Lee, a government officer from Lingga, had been slain and his head lopped off. The good news was that most of the Dayaks under his old enemy and new friend, Gasing, had remained loyal, attacked Rentap and forced him to retire to a hilltop fort in Sadong. It would take the rest of James’s reign to winkle him out again. Charles Johnson, James’s younger nephew, was sent out to replace Lee. Sarawak was becoming a family business. Charley Grant joined James in Singapore, where ‘the papers teemed with letters and articles; the Free Press upholding him, the Straits Times denouncing him. His name was like a shell thrown on any dinner table, and questions in the Chamber of Commerce were decided by Brooke or anti-Brooke majorities.’3

  Woods had published a letter from Hume revealing that he had known about the decision to hold an inquiry weeks before James had been told. Government treachery it was, then. The word was like a flare in James’s mind. As soon as possible he sailed for Sarawak, straining for a sight of the honest mountains of Santubong. But as they hove into sight, with the welcoming flotilla of little boats, he was suddenly taken ill. It was smallpox.

  Frank McDougall was in England and everyone else was at a loss what to do. James sent away all who had not had the disease, went to bed and sent for Sherip Moksain, a local healer, a man so modest of his own skills that he several times confidently announced James’s imminent death at his hands. Meanwhile he was cared for doggedly by Inchi Subu (the public executioner), three Malays, the indefatigable Arthur Crookshank and the Rev. Horsburgh, a new and very anxious missionary. Horsburgh wrote:

  I got another note from him [Brooke Brooke], asking me to come over and nurse the Rajah. Sherip Moksain had said that he was dying, and suggested that it should be given out that he had gone back to Singapore, that so the change of Government to Captain Brooke might take place without any disturbance. This, however, I did not then know.