White Rajah Read online

  It was a decidedly pragmatic view of evangelism. James had sworn not to interfere with the Islam of the Malays and would hold to that, but Dayaks, not subscribing to any of the world faiths, were seen as simply ‘without religion’ and so fair game. It was deemed politically a good idea they not become Muslims. Indeed, just as in the days of the Vikings, Christian conversion was counted the only cure for piracy and headhunting. Initially, Frank MacDougall seemed to fit in with these views.

  The missionaries were At Home to the Rajah on Thursdays and were received in the astana every Tuesday and dined there once a month. Harriette adored being the only white lady in Sarawak. But things were far from easy for the new arrivals. Their eldest boy, Charley, had been left in England but Harriette was encumbered with a young baby, Harry, and was pregnant again. Despite Frank’s medical qualifications, she found it impossible to raise children in Sarawak and in the next fifteen months she would lose three. In line with James’s views, Frank opened a dispensary and Harriette a school. The Rajah immediately dumped four bastard children of Europeans on her, but at least paid for their education. The Church was being used to raise a new administrative class. James always judged the mission from the point of view of its utility to the government.

  It was inevitably Frank himself who drew up the plans for the mission building, leaving the minor artistic touches of the doors, railings and arches to Harriette’s more gentle brush. He knew all about building, of course, but would receive unexpected help. They had sailed from England in the perilous Maria Louisa, and wallowed, in God’s hands, through a series of cataclysmic thunderstorms with the cargo of coal and gunpowder sweating and shifting beneath them. The ship was wrecked on the return journey and its German carpenter, Stahl, turned up in search of employment. Frank set him to work on his new building, ‘Noah’s Ark’. They took their biblical building metaphors very seriously and builded high and with solid foundations digged deep, for the couple had learned the lesson of the courthouse, constructed ‘like a big cage’ where, with kettles of boiling water, they waged constant war on ants, to whom English oak ‘seemed like a slice of cake’. The solution was the ironwood that the Dayaks used for their longhouses, so hard that it blunted the tools and reduced the insects to despair. Soon the building began to take shape – offices, dormitories and classrooms below, dining room, library, place of worship and bedroom on the first floor and three more sweltering bedrooms tucked under the ironwood roof. It is still there in Kuching, looking for all the world like a mock-Elizabethan Home Counties golf clubhouse, as a solid testament to their determination and faith.

  The hill was already occupied by the Adam and Eve of cobras, convenient symbols of evil and the wilderness. Adam was dispatched by Frank with a stout stick just before it could kill the carpenter. Eve was encountered late at night as Frank wandered into his dressing room with a candle and book. Having no stick to hand, he smote it this time with the book, a heavyweight copy of Robinson’s sermons discussing St Paul and the viper. The coincidence accorded nicely with the McDougalls’ ideas of the essential practicality of Christianity.

  Harriette walked up every day to see the progress on the building, taught the children their letters in the white sand of the site and chatted cheerfully in Malay with the Chinese workers. Frank, of course, had to interfere, importing more efficient wheelbarrows to replace the hoes and baskets they customarily used to shift earth, but the workers found the wheelbarrows simply too heavy to carry. They shared their tea with Harriette and she was quite unflummoxed to find that their ‘tea’ was hot rice spirit.

  The pirates were stepping up their raids again. Makota was in the ascendant in Brunei. The troublesome Muslim divine, Sherip Mullar, had returned to his haunts among the Saribus Dayaks. Both were plotting and there had been killings all around Sarawak. The Melanau people up the coast were suffering; they were just outside James’s jurisdiction, but he would soon shift the border.

  First he had to start the British settlement at Labuan, and that tied him down for a good two months. On the island, everyone was racked with fever; many were at the point of death – Indian troops and Europeans alike; some died; there were no resources; the naval protection was withdrawn. James raged but was too ill himself to do much more than a little gentle inter-island diplomacy.

  By the time he returned to Kuching, a hundred Malays had been slaughtered in Sadong and the town was awash with Melanau refugees. Something had to be done. James struggled to mount a campaign on his own – the Malay leaders had the right to summon their followers for war service while the Rajah provided the rice – but it came to nothing. Then the Company steamer Nemesis arrived. In March 1849 a pointless expedition sailed into the Saribus country and burned a few longhouses in a token manner, but the pirates were making hay elsewhere. The Navy retired and promised help for July. Rather against the odds, they kept their promise, and the second expedition was a resounding military success. The Albatross, Royalist and Nemesis joined a fleet of eighteen Sarawak war canoes led by James in the Rajah Singh. Fifty more Iban boats from the Lundu and Balau area as well as Malays from the Sadong and Samarahan Rivers met them. William Brereton, former ‘mid’ friend of James, was put in command of the Tiger, and since he was a great favourite with Harriette, she did her bit for the war effort by embroidering his standard, putting in the eyes and teeth of its tiger’s head during a moonlight boat ride with Frank.

  The fleet learned that a Saribus flotilla had recently set sail for the north, and rather than pursue them they decided to barricade the mouths of the rivers and quietly lie in wait for their return. A week later they did return, at dusk, and a pitched sea battle ensued in the bright moonlight and the eerie light of blue flares. In England the Battle of Batang Marau would become infamous as ‘the Albatross affair’. Brute courage served ill against the concentrated fire and thrashing paddle wheels of the well-named Nemesis. ‘The action was a night action; the pirates were entirely surrounded, and, after their first panic dashed at Point Marau and engaged our native force guarding it; but, failing to force a passage at once, they ran their perahus [canoes] ashore to the number of ninety, and fled into the jungle. In this encounter several of our people were wounded, and one or two killed. The remains of this large fleet, trying to escape by sea, were cut up by the steamer Nemesis.’15

  In the course of five hours that night, the pirates lost a hundred boats and five hundred men against fourteen locals on the Sarawak side, but some two thousand managed to land and escape home. James could have cut them off and slaughtered them or starved them out, but instead let them go. They were badly bloodied, and – after all – he wanted them to spread the word of what had happened, so he contented himself with once more burning their stronghold at Paku. He could not guess how, later, this act of calculated mercy would be turned against him by those who would argue that these must have been harmless sailors, otherwise – had they really been pirates – they would surely have been hanged. ‘I know very well that these people are to be reclaimed by punishment and by kindness, and there is no chance of their being “exterminated,” though there is a certainty of all the poorer and peaceful Dayak tribes being exterminated if the Saribus and Skrang are countenanced by the English philanthropists, and encouraged to slaughter their neighbours,’16 wrote James.

  Then James turned his attention to the restive Skrang Dayaks, and burned some of their fortifications around Kanowit. The Saribus Dayaks immediately sent their submission and later so did those of the Skrang. Henceforth – except for the supporters of the recalcitrant Rentap – they would fight on the Rajah’s side. James suggested strongly to Sultan Omar Ali that Sarawak should take over the administration of these rivers and divide the revenue with him. The Sultan’s dominion was numinous, the revenues non-existent, and James had just eloquently demonstrated his ability to do anything he liked with the area. Omar Ali hastily accepted the offer. A fort was built and young, ‘delicate’ Brereton was sent to live there in terrible isolation. ‘I choose Brereton t
o rule over these people, and I trust to God he will do it well; though young, I have confidence in him, and know that he has many qualities suited to the task.’17 It was perhaps just as well that the basis of James’s recruitments to the Sarawak service was not more widely known. But Brereton did do well, so well that he was able to organise a formal peace ceremony of ‘drying the eyes and wiping the face’ amongst the various peoples of the river, to finally extinguish traditional enmities.

  James naïvely expected his recent naval victory to be lauded as a gallant triumph of British arms, of civilisation over savagery. New extracts from his journal had just been published in England and there seemed no reason to suppose they would not go down as well as the first. But they were less discreetly edited, and Wise had taken copies of the more bellicose sections that had been previously excised and eagerly laid them, torn out of context, before the public. James was unfairly portrayed as a mad, sanguinary despot who used the navy to slaughter harmless natives so that he could seize their land.

  The liberal conscience, once roused, was not easily laid to rest. Hume and Cobden spoke publicly and in the House of a massacre of innocents. Mr Woods, editor of the Singapore Straits Times, delivered delicately filleted accounts of the action mixed with damning editorials. His implacable enmity was said to go back to the slight of being omitted from the invitation list to the investiture of James Brooke as a Knight Commander of the Bath. Wise, who had wanted to asset-strip Sarawak, piously founded the Aborigines Protection Society and used it as a stick with which to beat James Brooke. Deputations assailed the Prime Minister, and the fires were stoked the next year by the claim for over £20,000 compensation for the naval personnel who had participated in the Battle of Batang Marau. There were public meetings, petitions, calls for an inquiry, even for a trial. Hume, it seems, was just a high-principled, windy bore, his allies such as Cobden rather sharp politicians who knew a good bandwagon when they saw one. The government carried the day, but it was severely rattled. Borneo was a long way away. Who could really tell exactly what was going on? There was just sufficient truth mixed in with the falsehood to unnerve Russell. After all, James had killed lots of natives, had taken over their territory, and had used the British Navy to do it. The name of Brooke was taking on a bad smell and the whole business of Borneo was becoming a great deal more trouble than it could possibly be worth.

  Labuan was proving an unmitigated disaster. Governor Napier fought with everyone, including James. The confused nature of the coal lease, the ill-defined rights of Wise’s company and the unclear distribution of responsibilities tied everyone in a knot of mutual distrust and animosity further inflamed by chronic malaria. When Keppel had turned up in 1849 hoping for coal, there was precious little of it and he had to load it himself, the most unpopular job in the Navy. There was devious dealing in the control of the island’s drink-trade. It all looked very much like local-government hands dipping into the till. Worst of all to James, it seemed that Napier had become ultimately compromised by borrowing money off Wise and he finally dismissed the Lieutenant Governor. It was scarcely legal.

  The ‘mean calumnies’ at home came as a great shock to James. After all, he had been thinking, the worst was now over. Sarawak was established and at peace. The Dayaks had learned the error of their ways and become his friends. He could look forward to an era of steady development – ‘steady’ was one of his favourite words of approbation. Trade would flourish. The money would come rolling in. He himself declared:

  You must not think … that I now take these things much to heart. At first they told upon me; they appeared so infamous, so mean, so base, that they excited the scorn and indignation which every generous mind must feel; but this has passed, and I look forward with calmness to anything which may occur, and I have that firm self-reliance which can only be derived from pure motives and upright actions. At the same time, I am not the least inclined to become a martyr, and I always mean to speak out and hit hard.18

  So he may have claimed, but it was far from true. St John noted, ‘The savage attacks to which he was subjected roused his anger, and did him permanent injury. He never was again that even-tempered gay companion of former days. He thought too much of these attacks and longed to answer every petty insult and calumnious insinuation.’19 Sometimes there were flashes of the old self-mockery so that he could make a joke of the whole thing. ‘I shall take to wearing moustaches and carry a pocket-pistol concealed in my vest, which shall peep forth whenever I meet nursery-maids, or other nervous persons, and I shall affect a lowering brow and eye unquiet – that sort of satanic Lord Byron hero sort of look, dear to youth of both sexes, and if Cobden disappears in some unaccountable manner, I shall at once gain the credit of having smothered the jewel of freedom between two blankets, and buried his remains in some unholy place.’20 But on another occasion, when he received a particularly sharp savaging from Cobden and Hume, he cried out in agony and unconscious anticipation of Errol Flynn: ‘I wish I had the two before me, sword in hand, on the sands of Santubong.’21

  In the long, dark, tropical nights, a swelling strain of paranoia took root in his mind, and wit gave way to anger. It was not yet noticeable to any but sharp-eyed St John and it would grow only very slowly, feeding on a sense of outrage and grievous wrong – generously nourished over the years by the British government – until it poisoned James’s every generous impulse with its bitterness. James Brooke had already become one of those people who write twelve sides of closely reasoned personal resentment to newspaper editors in a spidery and obsessive hand. ‘I am a man of one idea – Borneo; everything else in my life is a little snuff which tickles my nostrils.’ He began to feel that history itself was conspiring against him. ‘I will not have a repetition of Sir Stamford Raffles’ fruitless labours revived in my person.’22

  One possible consolation was the arrival of the Rajah’s heir. James was no longer a solitary ruler but the start of a dynasty, for he did not seek just to succeed but to be succeeded. Born in 1823, John Brooke Johnson, James’s elder nephew, son of his sister Emma Johnson, was known as ‘Brooke’. When enticed into the Sarawak service and adopted as heir, he changed his surname to Brooke too, to mark the new formal relationship that conferred continuity on the little state. He thus awkwardly became Brooke Brooke, but was sometimes also known as ‘Captain Brooke’ to avoid a little of the confusion this caused. (His younger brother, also to join the Sarawak administration, remained, for the time being, Charles Johnson.) In view of later disputes, it is important to note that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about this arrangement concerning his ultimate inheritance of Sarawak. Brooke Brooke soon became another favourite of Harriette, despite his shy diffidence and – it must be said – deep mediocrity.

  Poor Harriette. While she was convalescing from the loss of one of her babies, her young Harry caught diphtheria in Singapore and also perished. ‘The flowers all died along my way,’ she sighed. But so did sturdy shrubs. Some years later, even Charley, her eldest, apparently safely tucked away in England, would find sudden death in Ipswich after being smacked on the head by a cricket ball. Some time after the death of the baby a box of presents for the infant arrived from England. She quietly unpacked it and hid it all away without mentioning it to Frank – to spare him the terrible pain she herself felt. In tribulation, her great comfort was the mountain of Matang, visible from the mission house. ‘How dear a mountain becomes to you is only known to those who live in hilly countries. One gets to think of it as a friend. It seems to carry a protest against the little frets of life, and by its strength and invariableness to be a visible image of Him who is “the same yesterday, to-day and forever.”’23

  (The Malays had a different view of things. In the silhouette of the mountains they saw the profile of the Rajah, and so read into the land a sure sign of his right to rule; and as for ‘invariableness’, everyone knew there was a rock just down the new road they were building that was alive and grew day by day. In later times, the Malays even got
up a petition to protect it.)

  The new ironwood church was steadily rising a few hundred yards from the Ark. Furniture was brought from Singapore, stained glass with the new Sarawak flag. Babies were baptised in a huge pink clam shell on an ebony pillar, and this became standard practice in all the Dayak churches. The pillar was intended to simulate coral, but the skill of the carver was not equal to the task so it became simply fluted. Dayak initiands entered Christianity poetically, like Botticelli cherubs emerging from the waves.