White Rajah

by Nigel Barley

  Brooke Brooke showed signs of fighting on from England, even threatening legal action. James pointed out logically and coldly that he could bring no action in Sarawak because, as a traitor, he was denied access to the court. Men were set to watch for him. Should he return, he was to be cut down. All his property was confiscated, his pension was stopped and James refused to take any responsibility for his surviving child, so that the overstretched McDougalls had to pay her passage home. (James spitefully insisted she must travel first-class.) Charles Brooke meanwhile ‘stepped into his shoes, the measure of which he had long before taken’, according to Charley Grant.

  The moves were pushed through the Native Council by James, who boasted of the personal loyalty of all to himself. The locals seem not to have been greatly disturbed either way. After all, mad rajahs, children disinherited, banished and declared traitors – all this was the familiar stuff of a transfer of power and simple proof that the Brookes had turned into a normal Malay royal house. All that was needed was some strategic krissing to complete the scene. Only a couple of Sarawak administrators resigned out of loyalty to Brooke Brooke. Frank and Harriette McDougall found themselves in a very difficult position, having committed their support to him but having to accept the fait accompli in the interests of the infant Church. They were astonished at the intensity of James’s hatred for his opponents. Harriette wrote in awe to his former heir, ‘He speaks calmly of your death.’12

  James left Sarawak for the last time in September 1863, but he had already made so many final appearances that no one could be sure he would not return yet again. Frank’s ingenuity was severely strained when he had to make a farewell speech of gratitude and congratulation to his rajah on behalf of the British residents. James, for his part, seems to have intercepted the bishop’s letters and wrote his own, heavy with menace, speaking of ‘mischief’ and ‘accusations’13 that might arise from unguarded communications.

  The disinheritance of Brooke Brooke struck particularly at the friendship of James and Charley Grant, since Brooke Brooke had married his sister. Charley finally broke off his relations with the Brooke raj, but there remained a residue of sad, chastened affection between the two men. In 1863, having composed a stern and formal rejection of James’s treatment of his erstwhile heir, Charley wrote across it, in an outburst of feeling, ‘Oh, Rajah, I wish you would make a real effort to restore things as they were in the days when we all loved each other and have some of the confidence in your fellow men that you had then …’14 But it was not to be. James Brooke no longer had much faith in anything. He was eloquent that it was all Brooke Brooke’s fault: ‘He has rubbed off the bloom from the tender flower of Trust.’ It was betrayal again.

  On his way home to England in September 1863, James crossed the news that Lord Russell proposed formal recognition of Sarawak as an independent state. It was little enough to show for a quarter of a century of campaigning, but it was something. Perhaps John Grant, Charley’s father, wrote truer than he knew when he described this obsession with the recognition of Sarawak as ‘having this child acknowledged’.15 The leitmotif of orphans, foundlings and abandoned boys continues to run through James’s life, and parallels between his blinkered fixity of purpose in the Reuben George Walker affair and his dogged determination in the matter of diplomatic recognition are clear. Actual British protection would not finally come until 1888 – and be shown to be totally worthless in the Japanese invasion of 1941. A British consul was appointed to Kuching but could not find enough work even for a diplomat. Still, at his first report, James commented, ‘I am purring with contentment,’ thinking perhaps of his favourite cat, reared from a kitten, who survived the Chinese insurrection and was now installed at Skrang, where it ‘enjoys a sleek and quiet old age’. As usual James was not sleek and quiet but worrying about the need for a new steam gunboat.

  The newly minted Charles Brooke was anxious to make his mark. There had long been trouble with the Kayan people of the headwaters of the Rejang River. Protected by a series of rapids which were held to make their country impregnable, they had staged a series of raids on Sarawak Dayaks and – worse – harboured the killers of Fox and Steel, slain in Kanowit. A war spear was sent around the Skrang longhouses. The Rajah was calling out his forces.

  Some three hundred boats and twelve thousand men set off over the boiling Pelagus rapids with European guns and support. Even today, after the expenditure of much British dynamite, it is still a formidable barrier. Charles is described as seated on a rock during the boat-hauling, rattling off a rendition of Il Trovatore from the manuscript. He had a passion for opera equalled only by that of the Dayaks for revenge, and they had much to avenge since the Kayan had a taste for taking captives and having them elaborately and slowly tortured by their women before they were mutilated and finally decapitated. In the ensuing warfare with Charles, the Kayan were defeated and fled rather than fight to the end; their long-houses were set ablaze. No longhouse could long withstand a siege once the enemy was close enough. If the fire did not consume it, the attackers scattered large quantities of chilli on the flames and produced a smoke like tear gas. A Kayan captive was given a Sarawak flag and a 12-pounder shot to take to her chief, meaning ‘Is it peace or is it war? Choose.’ The forces returned to Kanowit.

  After a month, the news was brought that a deputation was coming down the river. No one quite knew when it would arrive, since Dayaks told time by the moon and the stars or how long it took to cook rice or for their hair to dry. In the fort, they strained to see the boat as it swept round the distant curve of the coffee-coloured torrent. It was carrying the Sarawak flag. It was peace.

  In two months’ time they again held the great ceremony of ‘drying the eyes and wiping the face’, where a line was drawn under old enmities and ancient feuds were buried in the squealing death of a pig. It was attended by the great Kayan leader Akam Nipa. The main gift brought from the other side of the rapids was the heads of two of the slayers of Fox and Steel. Akam Nipa wore the Sarawak flag over his shoulders like a shawl. Underneath he was decked out in the tattered splendour of James’s old uniform of the Governor of Labuan, cast aside in rage when he saw himself betrayed by the Singapore Commission of Inquiry.

  Charles Brooke nestled in snugly as heir in Kuching, and repelled all attempts to incite him to guilt or loyalty or family feeling concerning his elder brother. He replied to such missives with bland and owlish non-comprehension. Brooke Brooke fell into a slow decline, while Angela’s relations with James were poisoned by signs that he might ultimately agree to a reconciliation with his erstwhile heir. She declared slanderously that Brooke Brooke was a drunk – not falling-about drunk but, she announced authoritatively, it didn’t take much to confuse a weak head such as his. When James suffered another stroke in 1866, Brooke Brooke rushed – sober – to the scene but was denied access through her good offices. He died in 1868, but the claims of his son Hope were felt to be sufficiently strong for them to be bought off with a tax-free pension of £1,000 per annum, charged to the Sarawak exchequer.

  James spent his time visiting friends and engaging in country pursuits, and maintained a stream of letters to Sarawak, favouring Charles with his views on just about everything. Between bouts at Angela’s houses in London and Torquay, he retired largely to his cottage in Burrator, where he retained his interests in animal husbandry and home improvements. He participated in local affairs, was made a churchwarden and, assuming himself as omniscient here as in Kuching, caused the local church to be stripped of its ancient rood screen and clumsily rebodged by a local builder in cheap materials. He got the money from Angela. Locals behaved obligingly, much as the Dayaks had, with suitable awe and reverential hand-touching, and James was universally benign as in Sarawak. Sarawak had always been run like a gentleman’s country estate, and now his estate was run much like Sarawak. He was known for his charity and approachability. James was also busy designing postage stamps and currency, bearing his own head, for the newly independent state of S
arawak. They would be used only after his death but would be avidly collected by generations of schoolboys.

  And James was still acutely interested in boys. In 1866 he read in the newspaper of a thirteen-year-old youth, Samuel Bray, who had saved a friend from drowning in Devonport, and he became unhealthily excited. He traced the lad, sent him a half sovereign and tried to open a correspondence with him.

  In 1866 Charles Brooke published his Ten Years in Sarawak and James was asked to write a preface. It is both his testimonial and his own obituary.

  I once had a day-dream of advancing the Malayan race by enforcing order and establishing self-government among them; and I dreamed, too, that my native country would derive benefit of position, influence, and commerce without the responsibilities from which she shrinks. But the dream ended with the first waking reality, and I found how true it is that nations are like men; that the young hope more than they fear, and that the old fear more than they hope – that England had ceased to be enterprising, and could not look forward to obtaining great ends by small means, perseveringly applied, and that the dependencies are not now regarded as a field of outlay, to yield abundant national returns, but as a source of wasteful expenditure, to be wholly cut off. The cost ultimately ‘may verify the adage, and some day England may wake from her dream of disastrous economy,’ as I have wakened from my dream of extended usefulness. I trust the consequences may not be more hurtful to her than they have been to me.

  Since this I have found happiness in advancing the happiness of my people, who, whatever may be their faults, have been true to me and mine through good report and evil report, through prosperity and through misfortune.16

  At the end of 1867 came a great, but inevitable, falling-out with Angela. Although staying at her house in Torquay, James stormed off and moved into a hotel. Angela was perplexed but unforgiving. ‘Nothing could have exceeded the hardness and cruelty of their conduct to him during the last six months of his life.’17 The trigger seems to have lain in Mrs Brown’s jealousy of his influence with Angela, but two such egos could never easily rub shoulders together.

  On Christmas Eve of that year, James suffered another stroke, and in June 1868 a final one, dying on 11 June. It was described much as it would have been in Kuching: ‘When a little while later, the poor people stole in sorrowfully and reverently to take their last look, they found that the weary anxious expression which had touched their hearts the more because of the smile ever ready to light up the face, had entirely passed away, and the Rajah lay in death as Sarawak had known him in the full vigour of his manhood.’18

  The obituaries came thick and fast. Readers of The Times were treated to an extraordinary mishmash of muddled ideas. The writer was unsure whether James had been born in India or Bath, but confirmed him to be ‘from a good old Somersetshire family and the son of a plain retired official’. He came to power in Sarawak when ‘Muda’ was appointed Prime Minister and recommended James as his successor, at which point ‘the honour and dignity of Rajah was laid at the feet of the Englishman’. There had been calamities, notably when ‘his books and private papers had been destroyed in an insurrection in Borneo, which he was not on the spot to quell’. At least, the writer soothed his readers, British rule had now been assured.

  Perhaps the most discerning was that in the Monthly Packet. Significantly, it was by Tidman, who had worked for the Borneo Company and seen James at his lowest ebb during the Chinese insurrection.

  The Rajah Sir James Brooke was no demigod, triumphing unaided and alone over the so-called injustice of his country. He was one of the really great men of his time. – with high noble aims – courageous, ambitious, and at times unscrupulous. Capable of the greatest things, he could yet under the influence of prejudice and an over-weening trust in himself, commit gross injustice and become the sport of contemptible imposture. But his work that will live when his faults are forgotten, is perhaps without a rival. He came to a disorganised crowd of savages, and left them a compact nation. He gave peace in their borders and taught them for the first time the meaning of Justice, Mercy and Truth. When his Biography comes to be written, there must be in it, dark chapters as well as bright ones, but while those who loved him the best, could fondly and sadly wish it had been otherwise, they will ever be able to think of their leader, as the Father and Founder of a nation and as one of England’s greatest sons.19

  James Brooke was laid to rest in Sheepstor Church, near his beloved cottage, in a spot he delighted to point out to visitors as his future tomb. The gravestone read:

  SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

  SIR JAMES BROOKE KCB, DCL

  RAJAH AND FOUNDER OF

  THE SETTLEMENT OF SARAWAK

  WHO DEPARTED HIS LIFE AT HIS RESIDENCE

  BURRATOR IN THIS PARISH THE 11TH DAY OF JUNE 1868

  AGED 65 YEARS

  Angela, litigious to the end, disliked the word ‘settlement’ and vainly tried to have it rechiselled to read ‘state’, which she found more to her taste. Frank and Harriette McDougall, though in England, were not invited to the funeral. Charley Grant came, though: for him, as for James, loyalty was all. In Sarawak, Charles Brooke was declared Rajah and the waiting guns finally fired off the royal salute. Having eventually attained royal dignity, Charles would remain Rajah for another fifty years.

  James Brooke led an extraordinary life but in the past he has been so enwrapped by the unavoidable myths of empire, positive and negative, that the man himself has been hard to see. For as our views of the imperial programme have changed, so necessarily have our ideas of its great icons, and it is only with the final banishing of that romantic vision and its aftermath that he can emerge again as an individual. James Brooke dedicated himself to a cause that he genuinely believed to be greater and more important than his own life or happiness, and it is not surprising therefore that it brought him both his greatest satisfactions and that caustic bitterness and sense of failure that poisoned his later life. His critics have debated whether he was benevolent or arrogant. He was both. He was a giver and a taker. For him, Sarawak and himself were each absorbed in the other. Without Sarawak, he would have had nothing to live for and, without him, Sarawak would either have become a neglected Dutch possession or remained a despised backwater of Brunei. He offered it identity, self-respect and a firm independence. So he kept his sacred promise, made many years before, to Sarawak as incarnated in the orphan Situ. Perhaps it does not matter, then, that the noble urge to nurture, protect and cherish that he frankly expressed seems now unbearably patronising, that it drew its strength from vanity and hypocrisy and was ultimately rooted in expiation and displacement of a desire that is – if anything – even less acceptable now than it was then.

  To say such things is not to belittle his achievements and reduce them to a mere mask of magnanimity. James Brooke is a prime example of the ways in which darker instincts may be employed to drive high motives, converting the compassionate lust of his private life into the ‘tender philanthropy’ of his Athenaeum address and the therapeutic usefulness of imperialism to the rulers, if not the ruled. In its wake followed a sense of paranoia, betrayal and obsession that left its mark on those who believed in him but also a genuine sense of selflessness that he inspired in others, both European and local. To call him a racist is irrelevant – he lived in a racist age. More importantly, he knew himself to be a member of the ruling class and it is not clear that he treated his Devonshire neighbours and tenants as well as he did his beloved Dayaks, or held himself to be closer to them. The blood he spilled was spilled in the name of peace, while his compulsive imposition of his own views went hand in hand with a manifest and modest respect for local ways of life. Such contradictions confound the simplicities of good and bad, for they are the contradictions of love in its many forms. For he did love Sarawak and its inhabitants, just as he loved Charley Grant and Badrudeen, and each form of love informed and justified the others. His model of Sarawak was one blatantly transplanted from the English shires – small i
s good, the valorisation of face-to-face relationships, the local over the metropolitan, tradition and emotion over rationality – but perhaps these are the values of all small communities everywhere, which is why Sarawak never became entirely absurd and evoked a sort of piquant antiquarian nostalgia from the very start. And the first and last of virtues was that of loyalty.

  Yet behind the agreeable Toytown façade there always lurked the harsh economic and military reality of the wider British Empire on which he covertly relied at the same time as he publicly rejected it. It seems ironic and inevitable that after all the tumult and the fury of the Second World War, the empire finally took over the Brooke dynasty as the acceptable and caring face of itself, and exiled the last of his royal line.

  The stabbing in 1949 of Duncan Stewart, the despised British Governor, was perhaps the final desperate attempt to prevent that act of mythic appropriation. As the conspirators spent their final days in the condemned cell, listening to the workmen hammering together the expensive new scaffold on which they would hang, rumours swept again through the little town of Kuching. It was confidently expected, even by some of the prisoners themselves – patriotic fighters for their independence – that they would never pay the price for their crime. Surely the Rajah, or the Tuan Muda – anyway one of the Brookes – would miraculously intervene and save them, just as they always had? But the Brookes had gone.

  Epilogue

  There was a serial killer loose in Kuching. The third headless body had just been found under the suspension bridge. The police deduced from the absence of a smallpox inoculation scar that the victim was an Indonesian illegal immigrant. I found that interesting.