by Nigel Barley
At the mission, they made their own villains. It was decided that the worst was Spenser St John, with Angela Burdett-Coutts in the second row, both whispering poison in James’s ear. This would be confirmed by St John’s publication in 1862 of his book Life in the Forests of the Far East. It contained a chapter that was a concentrated vitriolic attack on the mission, its works, and the character of Bishop Frank McDougall. Financial incompetence and neglect of the outlying Dayaks in favour of the slothful ease of Chinese evangelisation in Kuching were but two of the lavishly documented charges – but it is much more likely that it was James who had been poisoning St John’s mind than the other way around. Frank and Harriette were stunned, then outraged. A rebuttal was published by the bishop. A lively controversy developed in the British press that helped neither side. James could not resist such an opportunity to torment Frank and Harriette, and he sank to the occasion. St John followed up his book with a pamphlet, The Bishop of Labuan, a Vindication, but it had secretly been written by James himself, sitting stewing in peaceful bile in Burrator. It is a terrible document, the picture of a formidable but morally diseased intelligence – petty, sneering and crowing by turn, endlessly spiteful and childish, scattered with pedantic footnotes, an intensified, ingrown caricature of the James Brooke that first emerged at the Singapore inquiry. ‘Upon the occasion of the late disturbances in 1859,’ James wrote of the Malay conspiracy, ‘the Government protected every person who remained at his post at Sarawak. The Bishop was not one of these! … The well-wishers of the Mission must have observed with sorrow, mingled with contempt, the timely precautions taken by the Bishop to escape from the sphere of his duties on the approach of danger.’ He quoted in the attached footnote from Frank’s report of that year and remarked, ‘Timidity breathes in every line; the women showed a better and more manly example!!!’1
James stirred up dissident members of their mission against them, accusing them of racism in the treatment of a Singhalese pastor. His pettiness extended to arranging for blacksmiths to be installed right next to the church compound to destroy the peace of their house and foul the schoolboys’ bathwater. Angela wanted to turn the knife still further by installing a rival Anglican mission on her experimental farm.
At the mission, James soon became ‘that crazy old man’ (Harriette) and ‘that hypocritical, lying old Rajah’ (Frank), but, ironically, this rift occurred at the very moment when Frank was articulating his most passionate public defence of James and everything he had done for Sarawak.
In May 1862, Brooke Brooke’s second wife died – like the first in childbirth – leaving him a daughter, Agnes, whom Harriette, as always, took uncomplainingly in charge. The dwarf, Brooke Brooke, had been slapped down by the giant, fate, yet again. Brooke Brooke was persuaded to get away from the scene of his sadness by embarking on the Rainbow for a trip to Bintulu, accompanied by Frank and a few others, including Helms, his rival in bravery during the Chinese insurrection. The Jolly Bachelor followed in tow. What was supposed to be a restful voyage turned into an eventful trip. Brooke Brooke sent an account of it to James,2 and asked Frank to work up a longer public account for The Times, where it was published on 27 May 1862, but both he and Brooke Brooke are more frank in their letters.
Scarcely had Helms been dropped at Mukah for a little sago business than he heard that a fleet of Illanun pirates was blockading the mouth of the river. He sent a swift boat after the Rainbow with the intelligence, and the little vessel bravely put out to intercept them. Brooke Brooke takes up the story:
Just at daybreak on 23rd [May 1862] to our great joy, the man at the mast reported three large boats and sampans to seaward of us. Steam was immediately got up, the Jolly taken in tow and off we went after them. As the light increased and the distance lessened we could distinctly see that they were crowded with men and pulling with all their might for Kadumong. The first boat, a very large and fast one, took the lead and it soon became evident that she would cross our course and get ashore before we could be up to her. This she effected and grounded just as we got abreast of her at about 250 yards distance. I stopped the steamer, and as there was not a shadow of doubt of her character, opened on her with grape and musketry which she returned feebly. We kept her under a hail of shot for about 10 minutes when the crew ran into the jungle. Leaving the Jolly to look after the deserted boat we pressed on, turned and went at them stern on. The Lanuns jumped overboard as we approached and swam for the shore. The captives only remained. Luckily the steamer struck the boat so that she canted alongside and we took the unfortunates aboard. Nothing could have been more touching than to see the poor emaciated wretches holding up the ropes with which they had been lashed, and entreating our compassion. In this last we found no less than five Dutch ensigns, some evidently belonging to large vessels, and one Spanish flag. Our boats were lowered and but few of the pirates escaped to the shore, but a crisp fire of grape from the Jolly and steamer told frightfully, and when within a few hundred yards way was got on the steamer and she went clean over her. In a moment, the steamer was surrounded by the unhappy captives floating on pillows built of planks and every thing that came to hand. Those that were Chinese holding up their tails to show their nationality, women with children clinging to them. It was not difficult to distinguish the captives for each had round his neck a rope with which they had been lashed and entreating our compassion [sic]. Our ladder was lowered, and beginning with the women and children all were got aboard. Our decks were now pretty well crowded, and the Bishop (who by the way had been most industrious with his new Terry rifle) took the wounded in hand – and ghastly wounds many of them were. The swimming Lanuns were intercepted by the boats and few got to shore. The Destruction of the first division of the Lanuns being as complete as possible the question was what had become of the rest. We had destroyed three, Haji Matima had reported six. The captives were consulted and reported that they had pulled straight out to sea on the previous evening as they heard of the steamer being at Bintulu … Rainbow steamed to eastward in search of the missing three. By the most wonderful luck after running 20 miles we came straight upon them – three large boats full of men, with sampans towing astern. No one had any doubt what they were. The sea was smooth, the wind had died away, and as we approached the enemy closed on each other and evidently had a conference. They formed only so that their guns might all bear, and awaited us. We knew that this betokened a determined resistance. I ordered Hewat to put the steamer abreast of them at about 200 yards distance and stop her. They opened the battle by a general discharge of lelahs [swivel guns] and musketry. The balls flew by us – then came our turn. The Mate commanded the forecastle gun and I turned the 12-pounder midship and I took the poop gun myself. Scarce a shot misfired. As each gun was fired you heard the grape crash into them tearing everything to pieces. Still the rascals fired away and some of us on the poop would have fared hardly, but I had luckily made a breastwork of planks and mattresses.3
Frank’s version stressed the centrality of his own role: ‘My dress attracted the particular attention of the enemy and the balls fell smartly about my station on the poop. Once I was returning to my post after helping a wounded man on the quarter-deck, and as I was near the top of the ladder, I saw a fellow in the prahu nearest to us take a deliberate aim at me with his rifle; the ball whizzed by my ear and went into poor Hassein’s heart, who was standing behind and above me.’4 Frank fought on, half medic, half warrior and – it seemed – only a little bit missionary. Brooke Brooke continues:
As the Rainbow got away, the rascals thinking we were going to bolt, reloaded and opened upon us again. Terrible must have been their feelings when they saw her come leisurely around, single out the first and largest boat and charged clean at her, back out of the wreck, charged the second and cut her in two, then at the third. The third boat disappeared under the steamer. Then we set to work to pick up the captives, some of them frightfully wounded. Besides the captives, we picked up about thirty Lanuns who were carefully pinioned an
d put down in the hold. We then went after the flying sampan and in a trice she was bottom uppermost. The Lanuns in her we left to their death, I did not dare take more on board for we had already thirty desperadoes and about 40 captives besides between 20 or 30 wounded in the Rainbow. Then we steamed back to Kadumong, picked up the Jolly Bachelor and towed her to Bintulu. Then on to Mukah, which we reached at daylight, and landed the Mukah captives to the number of 15 out of upwards of thirty carried off a few days before. This has been the severest defeat these devils have received for many a day. According to the account of the captives each boat had from 30 to 40 Lanuns and from 60 to 70 captives on board. – in all say 200 Lanuns and 360 captives. Of this number we have thirty Lanuns in irons and probably 30 or 40 made their escape to Kadumong where the Bintulu people will hunt them up; the rest are drowned or shot.5
Most of the Illanuns were later executed. In his Times article, Frank was careful to tone down the massacre and note that the captives told terrible tales of suffering, rape and torture and that many of their injuries were from the pirates. He then commented:
Not a man flinched from his work, and, although never in action before, they showed the coolness and steadiness of veterans. We could not have had more than thirty-five rifles and muskets and smooth-bore guns between us – less, perhaps than each of the pirate boats carried; notwithstanding which, our fire was so steady and galling that we very much kept down the fire of their lelahs, and so thinned their men as to put the idea of boarding us out of their heads. In short, our weapons, though few, were good and well-served, and, in justice I must mention that my double-barrelled breech-loader, made by Terry, proved itself a most deadly weapon from its true shooting and certainty and rapidity of fire. It never missed fire once in eighty rounds, and was then so little fouled that I believe it would have fired eighty more rounds with like effect without wanting to be cleaned. When we ran down the last pirate all our ammunition for the 9-pounders was expended, and our own caps and cartridges for the small arms had nearly come to an end, so that if we had had more prahus to deal with we should have been in a sorry plight, and had to trust to our steam and hot-water hose to do the work. But the whole affair was most providentially ordered in our not meeting the six boats together, when their fire might have been too much for us; and then in their departing from their usual plan of rushing us en masse to board, and by their separating and giving us the opportunity of running them down one after the other. We are, indeed, all most thankful to our Heavenly Father who thus ordered things for us, and made us His instruments to punish these bloodthirsty foes of the human race.6
He followed it up with some standard Brooke material – about the neglect by public opinion of slavery in Asia as opposed to Africa, and the immoral and un-Christian pusillanimity of the British government in their refusal to aid the anti-piracy policy of gallant little Sarawak. Much of this had been borrowed directly from James. He even finished with a hearty endorsement of the Rajah, but was careful to leaven it with praise for Brooke Brooke.
But it seemed that Brooke Brooke had learned nothing from the storm caused by James’s accounts of pirate-killing. All the passages of mitigation were ignored in the furore raised by the idea of a Christian bishop slapping his gun and praising it as the instrument of God. Frank’s principal enemy in this was the Bishop of Durham, though Angela is supposed to have meddled too. Finally the Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to intervene in the debate and pronounced Frank guiltless, but ‘At the same time, I regret that the Bishop should have felt himself called upon to become the historian of a conflict in which he feels grieved to have been compelled to engage, and still more that the tenor and tone of his narrative should have been such as to give just offence to Christian minds.’7 His readiness with a rifle remained ‘unepiscopal’ and it was suggested that Harriette’s gentler pen should write any further accounts. Spenser St John termed Frank’s letter ‘silly, prosey, bragging, in bad taste, exaggerated and distorted’, whilst James had been toying with the idea of prosecuting the bishop for treason for alleged remarks made about the Brookes’ wars encouraging Dayak headtaking.
Frank himself sighed, ‘I hope that I shall never have so unpleasant a duty again, for it is a strangely distracting thing to be fighting pirates one week, and confirming and ordaining the next.’ Yet it had brought the faiths closer together:
When the affair was over and I was dressing the wounded, a Malay friend of mine, Haji Mataim, came to me and said: ‘Tuan, this is terrible work for you and me, men of prayer; you are all over blood,’ and so I was; the decks were slippery with it, so many bleeding men were lying about on all sides. ‘You can’t say your prayers, there is not a pure place in the ship where one can stand or kneel; do give me a pair of your shoes, and then I can say my prayers and thank God for this great victory.’ I told him that I had none to give, mine were all bloody, but that he had better say his prayers and thank God at once, as I was doing, in spite of the blood; as God looked at our hearts and not at our feet.8
The McDougalls were firm allies of Brooke Brooke in his war of succession but he, fearing to further inflame James’s waxing paranoia, dared be only the most lukewarm supporter of theirs. He hoped to simply keep his head down and wait for time and James’s ill-health to take their course and deliver his inheritance intact. As usual it was Spenser St John who put the cat among the pigeons – though this time unwittingly.
The British government had continued to blow hot and cold on the Sarawak issue but was itself by now thoroughly confused about what it was that James actually wanted. The flirtation with foreign powers had borne no fruit. The Colonial Office remarked, ‘It is just the old story. We are called upon to do an inconvenient and probably expensive thing, because if we do not, the French will.’9 If the declaration of an official protectorate was on the back burner, this was perhaps – it was hinted – not an impediment to proclaiming some form of protection for British residents, along with recognition of the independence of the little state. Via an infinity of memos and slow submissions, the Foreign Office painfully worked its way round to suggesting the feasibility of a new commission being sent from India to enquire into the theoretical possibility of perhaps recognising Sarawak. After due process this materialised in the person of Colonel Cavenagh, Governor of the Straits Settlements.
The only initial concern for Brooke Brooke was that he might fall so hopelessly in love with Sarawak as to want it entirely for himself, but his visit, in late 1862, did not come at the best of times. The recent loss of Brooke Brooke’s wife had been followed by that of his eldest son and he was in a thoroughly distraught condition. Cavenagh foolishly showed him a secret report from St John, discussing James’s attempts to interest foreign countries in assuming responsibility for Sarawak. It was mentioned here that, should this happen, Brooke Brooke would need to be compensated for his loss of rights and expectations. Smelling a plot between St John, James and the British government to sell Sarawak from under him and betray the natives who had placed their trust in him, he exploded in outrage. In the white heat of indignation he wrote to James:
When St John’s secret memo was shown to me in which my rights were utterly suppressed, I hesitated not one moment but resolved to take my own course, and assert my rights and those of the people of Sarawak … Rajah, you must blame yourself. You have overstrained the bow of my patience, and it has broken at last; we must try our relative strength, and all I can say is, that if I prove the stronger I shall always bear in mind that you were the founder of Sarawak, that you are my relative, and that you were my Friend.10
He also wrote to the British government, declaring the illegality of any constitutional change. In his view James had already abdicated when he was installed as Rajah Muda.
James, too, hesitated not one moment. He was always obsessive on the matter of loyalty. Raising another loan from Angela, he stormed off to Singapore, accompanied by Charles Johnson and a mysterious Mr La Touche, an envoy of Miss Burdett-Coutts. Before he left, he b
riefly named Angela to inherit Sarawak in the event of his death, a move which would surely have tied up constitutional lawyers for another twenty years had it come to pass. But other writing was already on the wall. Before they sailed, Charles changed his family name from Johnson to Brooke.
James was full of self-righteous bitterness, insisting on misinterpreting Brooke Brooke’s words as a direct threat against his own life. ‘That you would shed your own uncle’s blood, and excuse civil war upon a question of your pecuniary rights, is so horrible that I dismiss it at once from my mind …’11
In February 1863 Brooke Brooke crossed to Singapore in the Rainbow, to avoid a confrontation with James in Kuching. James transferred all the cash in the bank to his own account and took the precaution of boarding the vessel in Brooke Brooke’s absence and making the crew swear loyalty to him alone. Mr La Touche was probably there to arrange the seizure of the vessel on behalf of Angela, the legal owner, should this fail. James then issued an ultimatum. If Brooke Brooke would submit to him, they would meet at twelve o’clock. If not, they would never speak again on earth. A melodramatic sealed letter was prepared in advance, announcing his banishment. They met in what seems to have been a stormy encounter in the presence of Mr La Touche. It ended in Brooke Brooke’s total defeat. He was relieved of all authority and ordered to return to England immediately. He would receive £500 a year on condition of good behaviour. James, triumphant, returned to Kuching with seven British vessels, allegedly there to chase pirates. But again, to knowing Sarawak citizens, they must have carried a very different message, one of British support.