White Rajah Read online

  Nigel Barley is the author of a number of books on topics as diverse as cultural history and African pottery, including The Innocent Anthropologist and Dancing on the Grave. He is a curator in the Ethnography Department of the British Museum.

  Praise for White Rajah

  ‘The author makes an effort to steer away from other stories about his subject that have sought to turn him into a legendary imperial icon. Nigel Barley tries hard to paint a more truthful portrait and to show James Brooke for what he was’ Literary Review

  Praise for Nigel Barley

  ‘Nigel Barley is that rarity, a respected anthropologist with the common touch … Wit and wisdom shine through his pages’ New Statesman and Society

  ‘He does for anthropology what Gerald Durrell did for animal collecting’ Daily Telegraph

  Also by Nigel Barley:

  Dancing on the Grave

  Not a Hazardous Sport

  The Innocent Anthropologist

  A Plague of Caterpillars

  The Duke of Puddle Dock:

  Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978 0 349 13985 2

  Copyright © Nigel Barley, 2002

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Din

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Nigel Barley

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1 Beginnings

  2 The East

  3 The Schooner

  4 First Impressions

  5 Change

  6 The Rule of Law

  7 And So To War

  8 Treachery

  9 Home and Away

  10 The Inquiry

  11 Peace at Last

  12 The Chinese Insurrection

  13 Reuben George Walker

  14 The Malay Plot

  15 The Crusading Bishop

  Epilogue

  Chronology

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface

  In 1949, in a small, bleak Sarawak town called Sibu, a minor British governor was blatantly murdered in a most public fashion. Duncan Stewart had been in the job just eighteen days, the new ruler of a mix of Malays, Dayaks and Chinese in the swampy little state that hugged the north-west coast of the huge island of Borneo. As he walked with gubernatorial aplomb down a line of flag-waving Chinese schoolchildren, a young Malay named Rosly bin Dhobie stepped briskly forward and stabbed him, almost casually.

  The incident figured only briefly in the UK newspapers but in Sarawak, understandably, it was regarded as a great event. A major interest was that Stewart carried on and finished the dutiful inspection of the children before anyone noted what had happened. With blood oozing between the fingers clasped to his side, he walked calmly back to his car, took off the plumed hat that was part of tropical dress uniform and asked quietly to be taken to the hospital. Pictures show the young assassin swaggering eagerly away into martyrdom, his escort hard-pressed to keep up with him. His eyes blaze with youthful moral rectitude. Rosly would be hanged – on a gallows specially imported from Singapore – after a swift trial unhampered by any too-delicate scrupling over his democratic and judicial rights. A picturesque element in the courtroom was the daily attendance of a body of Dayak ‘tribesmen’ in full traditional wargear, who declared themselves there to support the government. Quite who the government was, however, was the whole issue. The British newspapers omitted to even mention which flag the children had been waving – British or Sarawakian.

  In 1945 the Japanese occupation of Sarawak had come to an abrupt end, but servants still had to be reminded to show respect by cupping their hands to their brows or hearts in Malay fashion and not by bowing and hissing as the Japanese did. Nominally in charge was the somewhat vague, effete and well-intentioned Rajah Vyner, third in a dynasty of British rulers, drawn from the Brooke family, that stretched back a hundred years. His position was distinctly odd, as a British subject who was independent ruler of a British-protected territory which paid tribute to the neighbouring state of Brunei, most of whose land it had swallowed anyway. Rajah Vyner Brooke determined that Sarawak’s future lay in a constitutional adjustment with the Colonial Office, as a regularised, sanitised and bureaucratised colony, since the British alone could bring the investment needed to rebuild the shattered economy and ruined infrastructure of the little state. The Brooke philosophy of patch, make do and mend was simply no longer equal to the task. But his people were far from in agreement. Many wanted a rajah of the British Brooke dynasty to remain as their ruler; others wanted independence; very few declared themselves eager to be swallowed and digested in the maw of the British imperial machine despite its shameless use of bribery and intimidation. Rajah Vyner’s heir, Anthony, continued to campaign against the Rajah’s cession of the territory to Britain and was finally banned from Sarawak.

  There was plenty of time for all this to pass through the fevered head of Duncan Stewart as he was transported by flying boat to Singapore and, in the course of five days, his condition passed relentlessly from ‘satisfactory’ to ‘doing well’ to ‘giving cause for concern’ to ‘deceased’. The British authorities put it about that anti-colonial posters had been ripped down throughout the colony and that Malays had fled into the jungle to avoid the righteous wrath of Dayaks. A hundred years after the founding of the state, the myth of Malay duplicity and Dayak loyalty was still doing its job. As he looked up at the changing brown, yellow and white faces that gazed down on him with concern, Duncan Stewart, like all of us, probably asked the question ‘Why me?’ To answer that, he would have to go back to the beginning of the romantic and mysterious status of Sarawak, whose final victim he was, and the start of all the confusion, fighting and wrangling – the curious and disquieting Englishman named James Brooke, who had created the tangled daydream of Sarawak and was the first and greatest of its white rajahs.

  Chapter 1

  Beginnings

  A childhood portrait shows a rather knowing James Brooke pouting cherubically in lace and napped velvet. From the first he was unutterably spoiled. His early years were blessed with an ample private income and hushed legal respectability, and his youth conditioned by the measured flow of imperial tribute into family coffers, for the family was ‘above pecuniary excitement’. James Brooke was born on 29 April 1803 and raised in Benares, India, as the fifth child of Thomas Brooke, an official of the Honourable East India Company and a wealthy High Court judge. Thomas is described in terms such as ‘not really clever’, ‘precise’, ‘old-fashioned’ – probably euphemisms for withering dullness and lack of imagination – but as ‘a good talker’, meaning that he had been well finished. These qualities may have made him an ideal servant of the law but they contrast rudely with those applied to his swashbuckling son.

  Curiously, the two always seem to have got along very well. Thomas Brooke was an affectionate and kindly parent, like the long-suffering father in a Jane Austen novel. If he had a fault it seems to have been that he was simply too indulgent and forbearing. It was a fault that, for most of his life, James would show too. Only at the end would he learn how to be cruel.

  Understanding India is important for understanding the Brookes. It was the forge in which they hammered out their ideas of ruler and ruled. India became, to the whole Brooke dynasty, an enduring and terrible example of how
not to run a country. It was too large, too professional, not based on a loyalty that was purely personal – indeed, they believed that loyalty should be almost familial, and retain the rough-edged feel of the home-made. When it later came to appointing officials in his own private kingdom of Sarawak, James would always show a suspicion of both academic brilliance and bureaucratic regulation. For him a committee was a thing that kept minutes and wasted hours.

  A brother, Henry, died young in the army, leaving James sole beneficiary of four sisters. Two of these would also perish early, not in India but in the dangerously pestilential environment that was nineteenth-century England. Both of his surviving sisters would marry into the Church, Emma to the Reverend Charles Johnson, to provide the stuff of future rajahs, while Margaret wed the Reverend Anthony Savage and remained childless.)

  Benares must have been an odd place to grow up in. Its principal business has long been death and the large-scale disposal of the bodily remains of the Hindu pious, burned to the purity of ashes and scattered to cosmic dissolution in the murky but holy water of the Ganges. Secrore, the European quarter, was carefully sited upwind of the fat pall of smoke and a brisk carriage ride away from the sites of incineration, but domestic arrangements behind the classical Georgian façades and velvet curtains were necessarily more flexible than those of bourgeois England. India leaked in through a hundred cracks. Thomas Brooke had been married before and, though described officially as a childless widower, he had an illegitimate son, born in 1784, whom he publicly acknowledged. Charles William Brooke was openly raised in the same household as his half-brother, ‘little James’, ‘the sweet baby’, and became a lieutenant in the 17th Native Infantry, rising to the final rank of brigadier-general. He would be that rare thing, a brigadier-general killed in action.

  As a young man he writes constantly to his father, a typical young man’s letters full of the gossip of wars, promotions and his urgent need for parental money. He even extravagantly requests his own elephant – he simply cannot manage without one, he declares – and is sent it promptly, a sure sign of just how doting a father Thomas Brooke could be. Charles William married Charlotte Marshall, and it is fortunate that he found children ‘sweet’, for he produced ten of them himself and remained on the very best of terms with his young half-siblings. The relations between his own mother and his stepmother are open to question, but he writes guilelessly to the former of ‘dear Mrs. Brooke’ as he wallows in the typical dreams of home of the exiled Anglo-Indian. ‘My prospects are now so good that a few years hence I hope to return to England with a fortune which will render unnecessary my revisiting this country – with what joy shall I give up what are termed “the luxuries of India” for a cottage and a snug fireside. This I am determined to do.’1 He goes on to fantasise, in the beating Indian heat, of being buried up to his chin in snow. Very English. Very much the sort of thing James would later write from Sarawak. Yet the ethnicity of Charles William is unclear. A codicil of 1835 to Thomas’s will left Charles William the sum of £1,000 to provide a pension for a lady called Moher Bibee of Arrah in Bihar; ‘Bibby’ was a term often used for a local mistress. In the East India Company, Eurasian faces often lurked behind impeccably British names. And despite all the talk of her brother as being a member of the Bengal Council and his complexion as ‘like the inside of a bivalve shell’, James’s own mother, Anna Maria Stuart, was herself almost certainly illegitimate. Shame at that time lay not in having illegitimate children – such things were passed over lightly – but rather in not doing right by them. Company India was above all an opportunity for origins to be rewritten, a place for the enrichment of younger sons and the rehabilitation of the ambitious who were of doubtful, or – just as bad – regional, origins.

  A contemporary description of Anna Maria casts her as

  A very shy and retiring woman, not handsome or even pretty … for her mouth was rather screwed-up and a little underhung, but her complexion was perfectly lovely, and she had soft blue eyes and delicate features … Mrs. Brooke was a woman who, as the fashion was in those days, dressed much older for her age than people do now, but she always seemed to have on the best and the most proper thing … I never saw her in anything gay or startling. She was like her style of dress, and a very sweet lovable person: one who never raised her voice, nor should I think she had ever uttered an angry word in her life.2

  James clearly adored her.

  It is probably a sign of how deep was James’s relationship with his mother that he stayed in India until the relatively late age of twelve before being shipped ‘home’ to be educated. Normal practice would have been to send him away at half that age. It was decreed that he should divide his time between Reigate, with his grandmother, and Bath, in the boisterous household of his guardian, Charles Kegan, friend of his father. Here he found himself again congenially surrounded by adoring female company, petted and made much of just as at home. But for the rest of the time he had to suffer long bouts of unaccustomed indignity and austerity as a Norwich schoolboy.

  For knowledge of this period of James’s life we are dependent on Spenser St John, a professional diplomat who was both James’s secretary and friend. Often known as ‘the Saint’, he was a devilish sprite; one of James Brooke’s chief claims to be an unusual human being must be that he managed to inspire unquestioning trust in himself and his vision in such a determinedly sceptical and deflating spirit as Spenser St John. St John summed up James’s childhood tartly: ‘The want of regular training was of infinite disadvantage to young Brooke, who thus started life with little knowledge, and with no idea of self-control’.3

  Things did not go well at school. James was a boarder at King Edward VI Grammar in Norwich and, while he liked drawing, he was notoriously unattracted by ‘gerund-grinding’. Biographers abhor a vacuum and so created unreliable legends of him as unable to tell a lie and recognised as the natural leader of his peers. Like much else in his life story, such tales have a decidedly derivative and second-hand look about them. The truth about James is that his later greatness was not prefigured in any prodigies of childhood and it astonished those who had known him earlier.

  It was probably at Norwich that he learned to sail, an accomplishment that would set the course of his later experiences and henceforth come to symbolise for him escape, adventure and freedom. All his life, James would believe that everything would be all right if only he could lay his hands on the right kind of boat. It was during his two years here too that he formed the first of the passionate friendships that would swirl in such deep and powerful currents beneath the official surface of his existence. His friend was a boy named George Western and when, after one holiday, he returned to find that Western had gone to sea, he was devastated and resolved to leave himself. Borrowing money for the stage-coach, James decamped, not as it turned out to ‘sea’ but to cosy Reigate and his grandmother, where he lurked in the garden until spotted by servants and brought into the house. Thence he was referred back to stern Mr Kegan, and was only saved the burden of much further education by the return of his indulgent parents from India shortly afterwards to take up genteel retirement in Bath. A private tutor was engaged for James, a ‘wayward pupil’, to torment and terrify.

  Brother Henry had served in the Bengal Army, as did Charles William, so it was almost with a sense of the inevitable that in 1819 James Brooke became an ensign in the 6th Native Infantry. He was sixteen years old. By 1821 he had become a lieutenant and then, doubtless through family influence, Sub-Assistant Commissary General, ‘a post for which he was totally unfitted’. But there was plenty of time for pig-sticking, shooting, jokes and japes, for which he was most fitted. It was the sort of exuberant, clubby male atmosphere where James always felt most at home and excelled. His superiors noted piously that ‘Lieutenants Brooke and Fendall during their attendance at Cawnpore were attentive, and willing. They possess excellent abilities, and will, we hope receive an early impression of the necessity for steadiness and decision.’4 That hope was not t
o be fulfilled.

  The Honourable East India Company of the time was in full expansion. It was in theory a joint stock company, instituted solely for the pursuance of trade. But trade had led to the need for overseas forts and storehouses, dockyards, towns of native workers and distribution networks. These had to be protected, militarily and legally, and all this had to be paid for by taxation and duty. Little by little, it was dragged unwillingly into the business of colonial administration, and an early version of domino theory assured that possessions were constantly added to protect those already under its sway. Moreover the British government exerted influence through a Board of Control and a well-named Secret Committee, so that the Company’s aims could no longer be distinguished from those of Whitehall. In the year of James’s birth, almost the whole of India had been successfully brought under its rule with the crushing of the Mahrattas. Company forces had contributed to the routing of Napoleon through campaigns in Mauritius, Réunion and Java, where James’s future hero, Stamford Raffles, held the island in its name for five years. And now it was time for a war with Burma, the next obstacle to growth.

  James was permitted to duck out of normal duties to raise and organise a body of irregular volunteer cavalry to serve as scouts in the campaign. He had found his niche – a big fish in a small pond, operating on the margins of established order – and this was the kind of position to which he would gravitate all his life. Much later he would relate with relish a story that, at a demonstration of their abilities to his superiors, he ordered the new forces to charge, which they did, but they forgot to come back and were never seen again. He liked to order them to charge a lot; indeed one wonders if they ever practised anything else but charging.

  James Brooke first saw action against the Burmese in January 1825 in Rungpore, Assam. After ‘a few inspiriting words’, he charged. Even his greatest detractors have never been able to question his physical courage at this point in his life. The Burmese, in their well-defended and superior position, were astonished. They fled, and James was mentioned for conspicuous gallantry in dispatches. Soon after, he met the Burmese Army again.