White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  Once safely across the border in Dutch territory, the Chinese began a heated internal debate concerning their recent policy, fell on each other and further slaughter ensued. In all, some 1,500 Chinese probably perished in the insurrection. The Dutch disarmed the survivors and, unexpectedly good neighbours, sent their booty back to Sarawak. Since it was hard to know what was loot and what was not, the Dutch simply sent everything. Much was stuff that had never been seen in Kuching before.

  Harriette McDougall had undergone a rather different adventure, sailing downriver with the children in the hope of an escape to Singapore aboard a Chinese trading vessel. Fortunately, the bishop’s boat had been kitted out with supplies for an imminent journey so they had both wine and tinned soup. At the last moment Miss Coomes, an aged spinster attached to the mission, had gone back for essential items of jungle dress and returned mysteriously with a set of stays and a black silk apron. Some of the tinned food, Harriette noted, tasted as though prepared for a voyage in the Ark, but they were more oppressed by heat and mosquitoes – and the demands of etiquette. The Malays were, as always, impeccably polite and hospitable, so Harriette was obliged to indulge in social niceties, including going to greet her old friend, the scribe Inchi Buyang, a man so vast that normal Malay houses could not accommodate his weight. He advised them strongly not to try to return to Kuching, but they did so anyway and their arrival coincided most unfortunately with the return of the Chinese. They fell downriver again to Jernang and sought, with difficulty, to persuade the Malays to take in the mission Chinese. Finally, they were joined by Frank and all determined to sail for the fort at Lingga, where both they and the mission Chinese would be safe.

  The night was very dark and wet, and the deck leaked upon us, so that we and our bags and bundles were soon wet through. But we neither heeded the rain not felt the cold. We had eaten nothing since early morning, but we were not hungry; and although for several nights we could scarcely be said to have slept, we were not sleepy. A deep thankfulness took possession of my soul; all our dear ones were spared to us. My children were in my arms, my husband paced the deck over my head. I seemed to have no cares, and to be able to trust to God for the future, who had been so merciful to us hitherto. I remember, too, when Mrs. Stahl opened the provision basket, and gave us each a slice of bread and meat, how very good it was, although we had not thought about wanting it. We lit a little fire, and made some hot tea, but soon had a message from the Rajah’s boat to put out the fire lest we should be seen. The only thing that troubled me was a nasty faint smell, for which I could not account; but the next morning we found a Chinaman’s head in a basket close by my corner, which was reason enough! We had taken a fine young man on board to help pull the sweeps, and this ghastly possession was his. He said he was at Kuching, looking about for a head, and went into the court-house. Hearing some one in a little side room, he peeped in, and saw a Chinaman gazing at himself in a bit of looking-glass, which was stuck against the wall. He drew his sword, and in one moment, stepping close behind him, cut off his head: and having obtained this prize, was naturally desirous of getting away from the place; so he came off as boatman in one of the flying boats, bringing the head in a basket, which he stowed in the side of the boat. It entirely spoiled my hand-bag, which lay near it; I had to throw it away, and everything in it which could not be washed in hot water.9

  They all ended up in Charles Johnson’s house in Lingga and then moved on to Banting to the house of Chambers, the missionary, though they were irked not to be fetched by the Rajah for several weeks. He seemed to have forgotten them entirely.

  One day we were invited to a feast in one of the long houses. I said, ‘I hope we shall see no heads,’ and was told I need not see any; so, taking Mab in my hand, I went along with Mr. Chambers, and we climbed up into the long verandah room where all the work of the tribe goes on. This long house was surrounded with fruit trees and very comfortable … We were seated on white mats, and welcomed by the chief people present … As we English folks could not eat fowls roasted in their feathers, nor cakes fried in cocoa-nut oil, they brought us fine joints of bamboo, filled with pulut rice, which turns to a jelly in cooking and is fragrant with the scent of the young cane. I was just going to eat this delicacy when my eyes fell upon three human heads standing on a large dish, freshly killed and lightly smoked, with food and sirih leaves in their mouths. Had I known them when alive I must have recognized them, for they looked quite natural. I looked with alarm at Mab, lest she should see them too; then we made our retreat as soon as possible. But I dared say nothing. These Dayaks had killed our enemies, and were only following their own customs by rejoicing over their dead victims. But the fact seemed to part them from us by centuries of feeling – our disgust, and their complacency. Some of them told us that afterwards, when they brought home some of the children belonging to the slain, and treated them very kindly, wishing to adopt them as their own, they were annoyed at the little ones standing looking up at their parents’ heads hanging from the roof, and crying all day, as if it were strange they should do so! Yet the Dayaks are very fond of children, and extremely indulgent to them. Our school was recruited after the war by the children of Chinese, bought by Government from their captors. This was my first and last visit to a Dayak feast.10

  When they finally returned, Kuching lay in ruins, the very trees scorched from the flames. The Rajah’s fine residence, his papers and journals, and – worse – his great library, were all burned, as were the other European houses. In the ashes James found the scorched medal presented him by the Royal Geographical Society in the days of his popularity. He sent it home to John Templer. Another loss was the bullet that was dug from his Indian wound and served perhaps as an alibi for sustained bachelorhood in after-dinner moments of male confidence.

  The Malay kampongs were devastated. The church had been stripped of furniture and the harmonium broken, the mission house dusted with gunpowder ready to be fired. The dispensary was smashed, the piano had maliciously been filled with earth and backgammon counters and the silk lining cut from Frank’s cassock. The Bishop of Calcutta would send replacement ecclesiastical vestments so bizarre and grotesque they could not be worn. Many of the Kuching Chinese had fallen victim to the prejudices of both sides and now the Dayaks took great satisfaction in smoking Chinese heads in front of them. Twelve Bau Chinese were found hiding in the town, and arrested. One was tried and executed.

  Miss Coomes was oddly disturbed by all the upset and her exposure to the close proximity of strapping Dayak manhood in a state of near nudity. Later she would turn up at meals in her underwear and keep pigs in her room. Frank eventually totally despaired of lady missionaries.

  The Dutch sent a steamer and troops to help in any way they could. The Borneo Company sent a vessel of arms, supplies and money. The British sent HMS Spartan with orders to protect British citizens and interests but do nothing that might inflame the opposition at home, so they did nothing at all. The sailors, in an unofficial gesture of support, at least turned Harriette’s piano upside-down to empty it of debris and so restore it to a playable condition. Henry Keppel was unable to help his friend directly but ordered out a warship to huff and puff helpfully along the coast.

  After the trouble, tragedy and deprivation came in many forms. The Chinese taste for European silver cutlery had stripped the town of it so that eating now involved the inconvenience of passing a spoon and fork round the table. Harriette’s aged Hindu syce triumphantly returned to her a lump of melted-down silverware the Chinese had given him as his share of the mission booty, but he grieved bitterly over the tail they had cut off his Brahma bull so that he now had to spend hours whisking the flies away himself. This lump of silver seems to have been the source of the Brooke Heirloom Cup, donated much later to Magdalen College, Oxford.

  With admirable consistency, the British worked hard to see the whole event as the machinations of their sworn enemy, Makota. But they had real enemies enough. Profiting from their distraction, Rent
ap descended from his mountain fastness in Sadok and harried local supporters of the Sarawak government with acts that may or may not have been piratical. Charles Johnson was dispatched with a Dayak force to capture him, but nothing came of it.

  ‘It was the madness,’ wrote James Brooke, ‘the stark, staring folly of the attempt which caused it to succeed. With mankind in general we may trust to their not doing anything entirely opposed to reason; but this rule does not hold good with the Chinese.’11 No one raised their voice to say that the Chinese resentment at being by far the most highly – and arbitrarily – taxed part of the Sarawak population was only reasonable. Nobody asked – as they had about the Dayaks – whether the high mortality of the retreating Chinese was justified. The Dayaks, perhaps, were small in number and romantic so that sympathy for them was permissible. The Chinese were commercial rivals and potential enemies on a worldwide scale.

  The devastation of Kuching seemed to some to have revived James. Charles Grant returned from England to see him ‘talking, laughing, singing, in fact as charming as ever’. Helms noted that he quickly ‘recovered tone and was able to receive the Dutch with a show of becoming confidence in his own resources’. James himself swept aside the disaster and his own behaviour with the usual soldierly jocularity and squirish assertions of high principle:

  A dead Chinaman is no more to be apprehended than a dead dog, and we have taught the living miscreants such a lesson that they will not play their tricks upon us for many a long year. For the future we will take such precautions in ruling them as to deprive them of the means of doing mischief. Worldly goods, you know, I care not for. I have suffered so much before, that this misfortune appears light; and, so that the few that I love are spared to me, I care not. Through my affections, I could be deeply wounded; but the possession of money, pictures, books, etc., is but of small account. Had I valued these things, had I desired ease, sought fame as a primary object, or lived for society, I should not have exiled myself to this country. I have a duty to perform from which I may not shrink; and I have long known, with an aching and a steadfast heart, that this duty entails trials and struggles even to the end. What, then, is the yelling of a few score of Chinese for my life? I told Penty that our death was at hand. I was wound up to the resolve that knows no shrinking, and had we been surrounded I would have given them cold steel and hot shot whilst life lasted, and so have been killed with courage tingling to my fingers’ ends, and despair lending me strength; but it was not so to be, and I had quite enough of common sense and lack of heroism to make my escape when opportunity offered.12

  In the English press, despite the huge bloodshed and the embarrassingly public revival of headhunting, James bafflingly became an icon of empire again. The Times was typically arch:

  The conspirators did not know all. Had they had the opportunity of reading recent debates in the British Parliament, then more subtle spirits might have received further encouragement from the belief that we are not only an ultra-peaceful, but an ultra-punctilious people, and that the cutting of Rajah Brooke’s throat and the burning of the town, might be considered matters beyond our cognizance until the precise colonial status of Sarawak was determined, and whether a Kunsi Chinese was under the jurisdiction of any British court.13

  Yet there were bitter fruits of the insurrection.

  That the Rajah’s behaviour on this occasion seemed at variance with his previous brave and chivalrous conduct, was doubtless the case; but if we consider that he was scarcely convalescent after an exhausting illness – that by a sudden blow, he, in one night, saw the fruit of years of toil destroyed, his property given to the flames, and himself a hunted fugitive in the woods, disappointed in the support he sought amongst the natives – his failure, if such it was, to meet the occasion as it required, may well be overlooked. Still, those who were with the Rajah then and afterwards could not but think that a change had come over him, which seemed to show itself in his subsequent conduct.14

  This was Helms’s view. St John, when he came down from Brunei in July, observed James with his accustomed unclouded clarity: ‘I particularly noticed one thing in the Rajah, that though when in society full of mental vigour, yet when alone he showed a loss of buoyancy, a tone of melancholy in public matters, as if all ambition was dead within him. “I weary of business,” he said to me.’15

  When James rebuilt his house, he called it The Refuge. Whereas his letters were once full of a sense that life is an accretion of rich experience, they now read as if he felt it consisted of leaving parts of himself scattered about in loss and dissolution. ‘He only occasionally felt able to throw off a burden of anxiety. He writes of being “weary of the world, weary of evil, weary of weakness.” A cry for rest was first wrung out of him during the Inquiry at Singapore, and after that it is never long absent from his letters.’16

  Scarce had the smoke begun to clear than new faces appeared in Kuching. Brooke Brooke had been absent in England, looking for a suitable wife. He had found one, economically and conveniently to hand, in Charley Grant’s sister, Annie. More troubling to James was his beloved Charley’s marriage to Matilda Hay. Yet despite the feelings of jealousy and betrayal, James did the decent thing. He had bought new furniture for them, alas now burned, but he moved Brooke Brooke and Annie into his own rebuilt house, Charley Grant and wife into the courthouse, and decamped himself into humble quarters. ‘Charley has returned to his government. I lean upon him and love him.’

  In the midst of his own despair, news of the Indian Mutiny reached Sarawak and moved him deeply. Indians, it seemed, were a very different breed from Chinese, possessed of honour and affections – indeed, almost Sarawakians. ‘What fine and faithful fellows they were in days gone by! And what grievous errors and offences on our part must have gradually undermined their adherence! Oh wretched, wretched system – that has converted a native soldiery into a European army; which by generalization has destroyed the interest of the officers in their men, and alienated the men between them, and predominantly brought to light that they were of different races, colours and feelings!’17 He speaks implicitly of the contract between Sarawak and himself when he writes of local Indian troops as ‘faithful, with a child-like dependence on the one side, and sympathy and the means to assist on the other’. It was a sense of mission founded on his own sense of inherent superiority, but a sense of mission none the less. Indian mutineers would be accepted for military service in Sarawak. Unlike James’s young men, they were found to be excellent material.

  A new domesticity was also creeping over Kuching, what crusty bachelors would denounce as the clammy, jealous hand of the memsahib. James took a sad pleasure in watching it from without, knowing it was not for him. ‘The piano sounds, the voices mingle in some pleasant song, the violin accompaniment reaches my ear from time to time, and there is merry laughter and sweet chatter in the pauses of the music.’18 Brooke Brooke, James’s acknowledged heir, soon fathered a son, whose first act was to kick the bishop in the face, thus neatly establishing the continuity of the line and the official separation of Church and State. He was named Basil, an unlikely appellation for a rajah. The local chiefs, who had been accustomed to drop in of an evening and talk freely and companionably with the British till all hours, noticed the change towards a more private life and gradually ceased to come. The door that had stood always open to locals was now closed, just as it had been in India.

  Chapter 13

  Reuben George Walker

  ‘What an important year 1858 might have been for Sarawak had the Rajah known how to secure his advance step by step! But he wanted to clear all obstacles at a bound and failed.’1 James Brooke returned to England at the end of 1857, deliberately leaving Brooke Brooke to rule in his stead and to set his personal stamp upon the administration. He was fifty-four years old, but time had not been kind to him. He was ravaged by smallpox and constant attacks of malaria. He was disillusioned, dispirited and lonely. ‘The devil has laid his claw upon my visage, and some injustice has eaten
at my heart.’2 He spoke as though he was effectively retiring from Sarawak affairs.

  Yet he plucked up his courage and immediately entered another exhausting round of negotiations with the British government; it seemed that there had finally been a change of heart at the highest levels. St John had been lobbying with quiet effectiveness. Hume was dead and had taken his allegations with him. After the insurrection, public opinion was back on James’s side as a gung-ho, all-British national hero. Queen Victoria received him as a sign of renewed royal favour. The government at last offered the protectorate that he had so long sought – they would even set up a naval base – but instead of gratefully accepting it James now began to haggle about the money he had invested in Sarawak – he wanted a large sum refunded. Nothing is so uncongenial to governments as to find large amounts of money unexpectedly with swiftness and resolve for the benefit of other people. To the total exasperation of his friends, James prolonged the haggling until February, when Palmerston’s government fell. In the mid-nineteenth century British governments swiftly wobbled and collapsed with banana-republic unpredictability. The new prime minister, Lord Derby, had a marked dislike of foreign commitments and the Sarawak protectorate was suddenly out of the question. Public meetings, petitions and the pulling of strings all did no good. Sarawak was exactly the sort of private project, dragging government involvement after it, that he did not wish to encourage. James had simply missed the boat. He began to think about asking the government, instead, for a loan.