White Rajah Read online

  I had been reading in some medical publications that it was now the custom to treat fevers with wine and brandy, and I explained to Captain Brooke what I thought, and showed him the authorities on which I formed my opinion, for Mr. McDougall, who was then in England, had a medical library which we missionaries all studied. I accordingly proposed that he should have some brandy, and, Captain Brooke assenting, I mixed some with water and put in some things to make it taste like medicine, and brought it to him. He resolutely refused to take or even look at it. Captain Brooke, Mr. Crookshank, and I think, the present Rajah [James’s nephew Charles], were in the room. ‘For God’s sake, Rajah,’ said Captain Brooke, ‘do take it,’ and he pleaded earnestly that he should. He at last was so far moved as to ask what it was, so I told him there was quinine in it. ‘Anything else?’ ‘Tinc. Cardammons.’ ‘Anything else?’ I fenced with the brandy as long as possible, but before his eager and half-angry questioning I was obliged at last to confess it. This was enough, he turned his face to the ceiling, held up his hands, and exclaimed, ‘Who ever heard of brandy in smallpox!’ Abashed and disappointed as I was, and deeply anxious both at my own responsibility and at his evident danger, I could not help feel the thoroughly ludicrous nature of the scene, and had to turn my back to conceal a silent laugh; but I saw plainly that there was nothing more to be done, at least, at present, on this side of the question. The gentlemen then left the room and I remained alone with the servants, but as I saw he did not take kindly to me, I kept pretty much out of sight, merely coming forward and showing myself when he wanted anything. In the afternoon he seemed to be getting weaker, and I made up a stimulating prescription, which was given in one of the medical books, told Captain Brooke of it, and begged him to use his influence to get the Rajah to take it. At Captain Brooke’s entreaty, he took it, and it soothed him and gave him a little rest. At midnight Sherip Moksain thought him dying, and urged me to tell Captain Brooke so; it seemed to me that he was going on well, but I went with Sherip Moksain to the Captain’s room. He told me afterwards, that when he heard our knock he thought it was all over. I told him that I myself thought he would live through the night, and that there was still a hope of recovery. This seemed to give Captain Brooke some comfort, and my prognostication was right. I continued to give the Rajah food and stimulants, but he did not like my pressing the medicine on him, and from the hands of Mr. Crookshank especially he would take what he would not from me.4

  Medicine in Sarawak would continue to be a rather hit-and-miss affair for some time. Even just before the Second World War, a District Officer in a remote station noted,

  One of my daily tasks was dispensing medicine. In a case alongside my desk were sundry bottles known as Winchesters labelled ‘Stomach Mixture,’ ‘Cough Mixture,’ ‘Liniment for Sprains’ and so on; pots of Boracic Ointment, pots of Goiter Ointment of a beautiful pink hue, and of course quantities of castor oil. Dayaks crowded round, plonked down two cents, and when their ailments accorded with the labels on the bottles it was plain sailing. If there was any difficulty in diagnosing a case, I was instructed to prescribe castor oil; as far as I know it generally did the trick … One varlet mixed them all together. Cough Mixture was so popular that the Medical Department limited our supplies; Dayaks used to roll up for a morning’s dose, just as we might call in at a Bar for a morning glass of beer.5

  Despite the medical care, James Brooke, like the Dayaks, survived. The Malays had prayed in their mosques and made surreptitious offerings at more trusted but less official shrines; the Chinese, the Hindus, the Dayaks and the Christians had each invoked their own spiritual powers. The astana was heaped with jars of aromatic water to scent his bath, cool plantain leaves to soothe his bed in the sweltering heat and tempting dishes to rally his fading strength, but James slept an opium sleep. When he finally rose there had been a striking transformation. His appearance now mocked that of the Grant portrait, a sort of reversal of the picture of Dorian Gray. In his fevered state he had believed himself to be Simon de Montfort at the battle of Evesham and torn at his own cheeks in a ghostly combat for English democracy. He was scarred, pocked and lined, terribly aged and shorn of much of his hair (and what remained had turned white). James had become a shrunken old man but his blue eyes were ‘as fierce as a crocodile’. (Eyes were important in Sarawak. The next rajah, Charles, lost an eye hunting and replaced it with a glass tiger’s eye bought from a London taxidermist. It, too, terrified people.) With time, some of the welts healed and part of the hair grew back. James wrote cheerfully, ‘I shall be a good deal disfigured; but my friends will not esteem me the less for being a little uglier late in life.’6

  They built him a hilltop retreat near his cottage at Peninjau, ‘See-afar Cottage’, where he sat peacefully and stared at distant, healing nature. The fever seemed to have seared the passion out of him, so that he could now speak of the British inquiry almost with detachment. But that would not last. He went on a tour of desolate Labuan and Brunei where a new sultan, Mumein, of whom he approved, had inherited the throne. But Makota, his old enemy, had returned to prominence there.

  At court, James expressed himself with great bitterness on the perfidy of the British. ‘He committed … the natural error of confounding his feelings with the facts, and describing the conduct of the English government as more hostile than it really was. It was in vain for me to point out to the Rajah the impolicy of this,’7 wrote St John. The Bruneians were all ears, but neither the Sultan nor Makota wanted anything to do with the inquiry. For the upcoming commission, James sought the letters his enemies had written urging the Sultan to submit charges against him to the British Queen. Alas, they had been lost. That was unfortunate, since money could perhaps be found to pay for them. Miraculously, they were found by Makota and dollars to pay for them were passed back through the bathroom window of James’s quarters under cover of darkness.

  More than a year would pass before the inquiry sat, and letters crisscrossed between Sarawak and London at a leisured pace which denied the acrimony of their contents. The British government was ducking and diving as James chipped away relentlessly at the whole foundation of the commission. He questioned the instructions of the commissioners, the terms in which Sarawak was described, the availability of previous ministers as witnesses. Like his adversary, Hume, he had the tenacity of a terrier with a rat.

  In the meantime Sarawak affairs continued to boil. A plot was detected between the high Malay official, Datuk Patinggi Abdul Gaffur, and Sherip Masahor, another of those troublesome descendants of the prophet who ruled over the lower Rejang River. Invoking the same procedure he had applied against Makota and would use again against other ‘traitors’, James ensnared Abdul Gaffur and a public denunciation was bulldozed through a meeting of the Kuching Malays, making James’s personal view an expression of popular will. Since there was no evidence of treason that could stand up in James’s own court, Abdul Gaffur was sent on a face-saving pilgrimage to Mecca to allow matters to cool down, and Masahor was allowed to return home to Serikei.

  Abdul Gaffur had been apparently emboldened by the withdrawal of the British military presence in the wake of the outcry raised by Hume. James saw the whole affair as an act of disloyalty encouraged by the continuation of the policy of cowardly British indecision that had killed Hassim and his beloved Badrudeen. He brooded on it.

  There had already been one expedition against the ‘pirate’ Rentap. Now, following the latest shifting of the frontier, he was a ‘rebel’ as well. James and his nephews mounted another raid on him, though its wisdom might have been questioned in the light of the imminent inquiry. Since James was no longer up to doing any of the charging, he stayed behind to look after the boats while the active campaigning was left to the next generation, who made a mess of it. But the wounded were brought to him that he might heal them by spitting on them. Politics in Sarawak always had a spiritual dimension. As a mighty lord, James was held to be full of semangat, spiritual potency, which could cure sickness, make th
e crops grow and even call the dead back to life. The Hill Dayaks were forever bringing him seed to bless or rubbing themselves against him or begging for small personal gifts of cloth or china that would transfer a little of it from him to them. No wonder James saw them as touchingly ‘faithful’ to him.

  There was a nasty, sharp little battle, nearly lost, but finally the fortified longhouse that was Rentap’s headquarters was taken and burned – Panglima Usman quietly shinned up the wall and unlocked the door when no one was looking. Rentap himself was wounded and carried away to his hilltop fortress by his men. It would take another eight years of blood, worry and expense to finally defeat him. James’s old acquaintance, the chieftain Bulan, came and watched with interest, accompanied by a huge body of armed warriors, clothed in blood red, who settled down to chew betel nut and spectate peacefully while remaining strictly neutral.

  An outbreak of dysentery now ravaged the Sarawak forces. Many died in pain and squalor, young Brereton among them. He had sired a child by a local woman but Rentap sneered at him, calling him a man who wore women’s clothes. The Dayaks were astonished but touched that this unpaid official working for love and sheer belief in both James and Sarawak had left his few pathetic possessions to them. James wrote, ‘He was an affectionate and particularly lovable person, able, clever, enthusiastic, and with particular tact in handling the natives. Poor dear fellow, he loved me very sincerely, and I was attached to him from his youth upwards.’8

  When the expedition got back to Kuching, James’s presence was required immediately in Singapore. The Commission of Inquiry was in session. The coming of the Lily to fetch him must have seemed oddly ambiguous – half obsequious flunkey, half distraining bailiff. No other steamer had been seen in the river since 1849. A more eloquent expression of British withdrawal could not be imagined. It was clear that James Brooke had been socially ‘dropped’.

  The Governor General of India really did not want to be bothered, but according to Company rules Singapore was still part of his patch and there was nothing to be done about it. Extremely grudgingly, two officials were shipped over to head the commission: the Advocate General of India, Charles Henry Prinsep, and a government agent, Humphrey Bohun Devereux. For some time they sat about and sulked that their papers had not come and that nobody attended the inquiry they had opened.

  It rapidly became obvious that Prinsep was not quite right in the head. James called him ‘A gobbling old donkey without judgement and without dignity.’9 A member of the House had remarked that it was highly unusual to combine an enquiry into policy with an accusation of murder but this did not deter Lord Clarendon in the instructions he had sent out. The commissioners were to decide on the compatibility of all the offices James held – which was far from urgent since they had been resigned. They were to determine whether or not he had deliberately impeded British traders – the implication being that he had done so for his own financial benefit. The allegations of genocide were hidden under the heading of ‘Whether the conduct pursued by Sir James Brooke … and the relations which he holds with the native chiefs, have been such as are becoming a servant of the British Crown’. Anyway, in the heat and endless delay of Singapore, the issues rapidly became as blurred as the ink of the original records.

  Charley Grant was sent in to cavil and quibble and bombard the commissioners with letters, eliciting bland secretarial replies. In the evenings he went round the boats in the harbour, drumming up local sailors who would declare Dayaks to be pirates in a half-dozen different tongues. The undertaking’s total lack of structure was resolved in a rather strange way. Since a number of Singapore merchants had signed a memorial, an open letter, written by Woods to Hume demanding a public inquiry, Woods found himself abruptly elevated to the role of unofficial counsel for the prosecution on behalf of ‘the memorialists’.

  Another group of merchants had signed a contrary letter, in support of James’s measures to suppress piracy, and equally suddenly found themselves counsel for the defence and collectively represented by a law agent, Aitken. The case had been turned into a football match of two teams, Woods versus Aitken, with the commissioners snugly established as referees. They could now send out some subpoenas to the signatories and settle down to watch the goal scoring.

  The major question lay in the identity of pirates. Were the Dayaks pirates or not? The problem was that no one knew quite what the determining features of a pirate were. The commissioners invented their own definition but left it unarticulated, which explains the extreme oddness of the cross-examinations. They homed in on sea-going ships with sails not paddles, inveterate and general animosity rather than focused war, long-distance rather than local activity, attacks on European not native vessels, the disruption of foreign rather than regional trade, the possession of cannon not spears, and the distinction between Dayaks and Malays. In a neat pincer movement, James’s side would make much of the taking of Chinese heads by Dayaks, since many Chinese turned out conveniently to be British subjects, but also invoked the Brunei treaty of 1847 which committed the Navy to suppress piracy in the dominions of the Sultan of Brunei. That this had been negotiated by James himself was neither here nor there.

  It was the sort of situation, rich in pettifogging terminological dispute, that appealed to the strain of pedantry in James Brooke. He had not honed his nit-picking, legalistic skills on the bench in Kuching all those years for nothing, and he could have made a very sharp lawyer. He opened the fight with the symbolism of space and furniture, an idiom he had mastered in the east. He did not like the venue in the courthouse, since it suggested a trial. Although he cross-examined witnesses himself, he violently objected to Woods doing it. Even more, he refused to accept Woods’s sitting in a space separate from the spectators with a toehold on the very platform on which the commissioners themselves sat. After arguing back and forth, in a desperate effort to placate him the venue was moved to a room without a platform. He was not placated. It was all ‘bosh’. If only he had a steamer. He ordered his officials to charge the government for every farthing of postage and stationery.

  Thanks to Charley Grant, the range of witnesses was large and exotic: traders of every kind, Sarawak and Dutch officials, Malay, Buginese and European sailors, British, Chinese, Jewish and Eurasian merchants. They all swore their oaths and had their say through interpreters. The documents are an extraordinary evocation of the rich ethnic and cultural mix that was British Asia in the nineteenth century, all ranged beneath the panoply of Mother India and the religion that was commerce and expressing the almost desperate belief that, underneath all this cultural variation, reason could remain inviolate.

  The exiled Datuk Patinggi of Sarawak, Abdul Gaffur, was called and – unlike the Europeans – disappointed by simply telling the strict truth, quite uncoloured by his recent conflict with James. A remarkably equable man, he never felt he had done anything wrong in the first place, even though James always insisted on seeing his opponents as foolish, or self-seeking, or downright evil. But then, moral relativism and a sensitivity to an enemy’s view have never built empires. First, they tried to ensnare the Datuk Patinggi with vocabulary. Were Skrang Dayaks perompak-perompak – pirates – or merely musuh – enemies? He shrugged away the difference. They were the same. Transcripts held at the Public Record Office record:

  Q: When not at war with the people of Sarawak, do the Saribus and Skrang people trade with Sarawak?

  A: Not before. Now they are at peace and do trade with Sarawak.

  Q: When did that trade begin?

  A: Six or seven years ago in Sir James Brooke’s time – not in the beginning of his rule – it was after the attack of 1849.

  They tried to show that the conflict with the Dayaks was balanced warfare, not predation.

  Q: Do the Dayaks keep and adjust a sort of account of the number of heads taken from each other and take occasion to effect a balance?

  A: I do not know that they keep such an account. The Dayaks are very bad accountants.

  T
hey tried to cast James in the role of war-criminal.

  Q: Have the Dayaks any means of intimating or signalizing their intentions of peace or war?

  A: When they meet an enemy, they attack him at once. They make no sign. If they did the enemy would run away.

  Like many terribly serious British trials, the whole proceedings constantly threatened to turn into farce.

  Napier, choleric and disaffected Lieutenant Governor of Labuan, was called and tried to mask, with a front of judicious objectivity, a determined attempt to drop James in the soup. His testimony was carefully calculated to make the commissioners infer that Dayaks might be headhunters or worse but were certainly not pirates – but even he fell prey to the absurd.

  Q: Has the fact of piracy in these seas been long a matter of notoriety?

  A: Yes ever since I came to this place.

  …

  Q: Is piracy a peculiarity of the Dayaks?

  A: I know that of late years piracy has been attributed to some of them and that they have been attacked as pirates. I should say the predatory Dayaks of the West Coast of Borneo are a race of man-slayers and slave-hunters and that they range the coast in the vicinity for the purpose of procuring heads and slaves.

  Now, about his dismissal by James … The court refused to hear about it and sent him away.

  The ‘memorialists’ on the whole were equally unimpressive. Henry Allen MD declared anxiously,

  My name was attached to an address to Mr. Hume, the Member of Parliament. It merely referred to me as one of the public of Singapore and merely with the desire for a public enquiry. I was never in Borneo and can know nothing personally of the different tribes or their customs and occupations.