White Rajah Page 14

  I never attended any meeting in connection with the getting-up of the letter. I do not know what person attested the signatures of the letter.

  I do not know whether the allegations contained in the letter to [sic] be true or not true …

  I do not know whether pirate boats are propelled with paddles or not but believe they are …

  It was not from personal motives that I signed the letter but with the public asking [sic] for Enquiry and not making accusations against Sir James Brooke.

  Others, such as George Tod Wright, were no better.

  Q: Your signature appears on the memorial sent to Mr. Hume.

  A: It does.

  Q: Were you aware of the contents of the memorial when you signed it?

  A: No.

  Various groups sought to simplify matters by producing more memorials. The philoprogenitive Chinese, for example, devised a petition showing a more earthy view of British and Sarawak policy than James might have hoped:

  We the undersigned Chinese merchants and Residents of Singapore, knowing the old saying, ‘A well-governed country pleases the heart of the Almighty God – his people flourish under a good and impartial Governor and all men ought to proclaim their confidence in him and rejoice with the clapping of hands.’ As touching Sarawak, Labuan and Borneo, previous to their being reformed, the savage Malay Pirates gathered together both in the jungle, nested in their dens[?] and on the surface of the open Sea, with the Lanoon Pirates flying about every where like Bees. Vessels, both belonging to the country, and also other navigating traders fell a prey to them – often and always ran great danger in those seas. We Chinese trading in these places always ran great danger ourselves and with great difficulty made any profit. But fortunately thro’ the gracious favour of H M the Queen of England, Sir James Brooke was sent as Her Commissioner to have control over these places, viz. Sarawak, Labuan and Borneo – to govern the said places, to open up the country and reform the barbarous Malay into a moral character … We the Chinese Merchants and Residents of Singapore, as mentioned before, urged by a sense of Sir James Brooke’s former and deep-rooted benevolence, have hereby come forward one and all to declare the deserved praise of his skilful capacity and at the same time we pray that his son and grandson may succeed him and that successful prosperity may attend them from generation to generation without ending.

  Then the European residents of Sarawak sent in another petition, expressing their unalloyed adoration of their rajah and his works, clearly got up by Charley Grant. Robert Hentig, former employee of Wise’s trading company and himself a signatory, was questioned about it. It rapidly became clear that he was now a sworn enemy of James, and he joined in the attack via a schoolboy definition of pirates. He knew he was right about it: he had looked it up in Johnson’s dictionary.

  Q: What meaning do you attach to the word pirate yourself?

  A: I have always understood that pirates were those who went out from the Mediterranean and Spanish Main in fine, fast-sailing, well-built, well-armed vessels, not in small boats that paddle along the coast …

  Q: Do you consider these roving expeditions [of the Dayaks] legitimate excursions or what name should you apply to them?

  A: I should call them war expeditions, intertribal war expeditions, principally for the purpose of obtaining heads like the North American Indians who go out in war expeditions for scalps.

  More helpful to James was the dogmatically phlegmatic testimony of C. F. Boudriot, the former Dutch Resident at Pontianak. ‘I am acquainted with the character of the people on the West Coast of Borneo. I know of the tribes Saribus and Skrang Dayak officially. I have always known them as pirates, killing and murdering, burning houses, all along the coast.’10

  St John summed up the whole proceeding with customary acuity:

  What shall I say of the Commission? The two gentlemen sent down to conduct it were very different. Mr Prinsep, the chief, was incapable – the mental malady to which he soon after succumbed showed itself too often and the Hon. Mr. Devereux could alone do anything [sic] and endeavour to control his colleague. He was an able, sarcastic man, well fitted for the work. But the results were most unsatisfactory. The Eastern Archipelago Company had nothing to say to which the Commissioners could listen; Mr. Woods, the editor of the Straits Times, was astonished to find himself called upon to prove the case for the enemies of the Rajah – and as the silly man knew nothing, he could only involve himself in a cloud of absurdities. The Lieutenant-Governor of Labuan tried to bring on his case but that was beyond the scope of the inquiry. The only curious incident which occurred was the stepping forth of a Dutch civil officer, Monsieur Boudriot, … who said that, being on his way home from Java on sick leave, he had accidentally attended the Commission, and he begged to offer himself as a witness. This gentleman’s evidence of itself would carry conviction to impartial minds, for he had held high positions on the coast of Borneo, and knew the Skrang and Saribus Dayaks to be savage, inhuman wretches, and undoubted pirates.

  Sir James had retired from the Commission, as Mr. Prinsep had permitted Mr. Woods to take almost an official position during the enquiry.

  The result was what might have been expected. As no specific accusations were brought against the Rajah, no specific answers to them could be prepared … Sir James Brooke himself did not manage his part well. He was anxious to prove the complicity of the Eastern Archipelago Company in all the intrigues which had brought about the Commission, and he wearied the Commissioners with a useless and tiresome examination of Mr. Motley, the agent of the Eastern Archipelago Company in Labuan. Nothing could be got out of the man, as he knew little, and had only been playing the part of the frog in the fable. We tried ourselves to induce the Rajah to confine himself to two issues, which were really important: first whether the Saribus and Skrang were really pirates; and if they were, had undue severity been exercised in suppressing them …

  No man perhaps felt the absurdity of the whole inquiry more than Mr. Devereux. He vainly enquired, What are the charges, who are the accusers? and probably had he not been hampered with an impossible colleague, he would have closed the Commission at once …

  In speaking of Sir James Brooke, I wish to present him exactly as he appeared to myself, and neither to conceal nor palliate his errors and faults. I watched him closely during the course of this Commission, and I thought that I detected in him the same impatience of opposition which I have often observed in those who have lived much alone, or in the society of inferiors, whether of rank or intellect. Sir James had lived much alone, or with those to whom his word was law, so that he had had rarely the advantage of rubbing his ideas against those of his equals, and therefore treated as important subjects matters which, to others less interested, were but trivial … Sir James Brooke did not direct the inquiry to the real issues, therefore it failed.11

  It failed to such a degree that the two judges were incapable of agreeing on their report, so each sent in a separate document. James’s many different offices and allegations concerning his role in trade, they dismissed as unworthy of investigation. Both accepted that the Skrang and Saribus Dayaks were pirates – regardless of their use of paddles, not sails – whose custom and delight was headhunting. But on the measures taken by the Navy against Skrang and Saribus Dayaks they were at loggerheads. Devereux observed tartly, ‘There does not appear any reasonable ground for sympathy with a race of indiscriminate murderers.’ Prinsep, however, was damning about the mortality involved: ‘I cannot but consider this unfortunate consequence of acting in concert with savage allies, to be a strong ground against the investing of an individual, holding authority under a half-savage chieftain, as hereafter mentioned, with any such official character under the Crown of Great Britain as that held by Sir James Brooke.’ While James seemed to have genuinely attempted to prevent ‘atrocities revolting to European feeling’, he had been unequal to the task.

  Both commissioners wrestled with the knotty matter of Sarawak’s sovereignty. Devereux was
so perplexed by the de factos and de jures that James had thrown at him that he was quite unable to come to any useful conclusion and produced a long appendix to prove it. Prinsep, however, was not a man to be fooled by mere facts and declared James roundly to be simply a vassal of the Sultan of Brunei. But both commissioners agreed that the Navy should no longer be involved in the defence of Sarawak and that James should have no role in the decision of who was a pirate to be suppressed and who not. At the end of the inquiry, the shimmering web of ambiguities that James had so carefully spun about himself over the years was torn rudely away, leaving him naked and exposed as a mere private citizen and a foreign lackey stripped of all rights of protection. But he would not actually learn that for another year.

  Chapter 11

  Peace at Last

  James returned to Sarawak in HMS Rapid just before Christmas and found it at peace. ‘Now commenced a really quiet life,’ notes St John. James was more ironically content. ‘We are quite prosperous, and quiet, dull as ditch water.’

  The commission had set him in a legalistic frame of mind.

  Since the departure of the Datuk Patinggi (Gaffur), we have been very successful in establishing our inferior court, in which the Datuk Bandar presides, assisted by three or four hadjis of character. The old Temonggong is likewise a judge in Israel, and sometimes he breaks into the court, upsets the gravity of all present by laying down his law for a quarter of an hour – krissing and hanging, flogging and flaying all offenders, past, present, or future, and after creating a strong impression, vanishes for a month or two.1

  There was a need for more European officers, but everything went into slow limbo while awaiting the result of the commission. Many relieved their boredom with local mistresses, ‘keeps’, giving themselves an appetite for the communal all-male mess dinners with a swift pre-prandial gin and autochthonic. James, of course, did not, though his successor, Rajah Charles, was partial to local ladies and embarrassingly fertile. He would publicly sing the praises of miscegenation, and scandalously urge English women to accept the embraces of virile Asian husbands. Dayaks were notoriously unflustered by such passing relationships, seeing them perhaps as an even better source of discharged semangat than gifts of crockery. Malays preferred more fixed arrangements, being expert at the transformation of the silken bonds of affection into the steel fetters of political alliance. Moreover, they were always keen to tie up those nasty male loose ends that might suddenly lash out at their virgin daughters or chaste wives.

  James cultivated the skills of a country squire and also became a passionate chess player, delighting in thrashing younger officers at the game and working out chess problems in painstaking detail. Weekends might be spent in one of his country retreats arguing clubbily over religion, science or politics. It was a sign of how much Sarawak had changed that they were occasionally stirred to controversy by visitors. Spenser St John wrote:

  We had at this time in Sarawak the famous naturalist, traveller and philosopher, Mr. Alfred Wallace, who was then elaborating in his mind the theory which was simultaneously worked out by Darwin – the theory of the origin of species; and if he could not convince us that our ugly neighbours, the orang-utans, were our ancestors, he pleased, delighted and instructed us by his clever and inexhaustible flow of talk – really good talk. The Rajah was pleased to have so clever a man with him, as it excited his mind, and brought out his brilliant ideas. No man could judge the Rajah by seeing him in society. It was necessary to get him at his cottage at Peninjau, with his clever visitor Wallace, or with his nephew Charles … who was full of the crudest notions, the result of much undigested reading, but who could defend his thoughts cleverly, pleasantly and gaily … In the morning we would catch each other looking in the library for our authorities, and perhaps the arguments, with which to support another discussion in the evening.2

  James loved the idea that it was not just ‘natives’ who were civilised by contact with him, but also his young men who attended the discussions.

  Wallace departed with the opinion that James Brooke was the finest gentleman in the east, but Frank McDougall was offended by some of the opinions expressed at these bibulous, undergraduate sessions, so he was normally replaced by the stolidly orthodox Mr Chambers. He and James sat in the jungle and wrote earnest and obsessive notes to each other about such subjects as the relationship between passion and reason. James, interestingly, argued against the need for divine revelation and took the view that

  The passions which we share in common with animals by their inordinate strength disturb reason and destroy morals, and the struggle is common to heathens and Christians alike, and the victory must (independently of supernatural aid) depend on the proportion which reason may bear relative to passion. The perfection of reason must be the perfection of morals – the improvement of reason, the improvement of morals in this world; for we then know more distinctly the duties we have to perform, and acquire power to perform them as knowing that they tend to happiness.3

  This is a remarkably eighteenth-century view of things, and one wonders how far it worked to control James’s own dark passions.

  When the printed findings of the commission finally arrived in Sarawak, James forgot reason and raged and roared. ‘Never was there such a farce of an enquiry. Humiliation to me, disgrace to the government, injury to the natives, ruin to our policy, from a Commission conducted without dignity or propriety, and all about nothing!’4 Immediately, he got into a dispute about the competence of his courts to judge British subjects. He was stunned that his resignation of Crown offices was simply accepted and that he was not begged to resume them. Worse, Spenser St John was appointed to be Her Majesty’s new Consul-General for Borneo and found it impossible to convince James that this was intended as a friendly gesture. James huffily noted, ‘He abandons a life devoted to a great cause … for an official mediocrity.’5 No British consul was to be allowed in independent but unrecognised Sarawak, so St John would be obliged to move – regretfully – to Brunei, where James, according to London a private citizen and vassal, was now flatteringly called upon to settle a dynastic dispute.

  At the mission, too, things were in flux. The McDougalls had just returned from leave in England, and Frank was to become Bishop of Labuan. James immediately started bickering about the need for him to become Bishop of Sarawak as well. The finer points of ecclesiastical legislation fascinated him. Harriette was more preoccupied with her new baby, with Charley Grant’s young brother, Alan – entrusted to them in Sarawak for his health – and with her alcoholic Muslim ayah, whose charitable spirit had driven her to give Harriette’s possessions away and whose greatest feat was to pass out from drink before the Bishop of Calcutta. The very day after their return, to top it all, Mr Chambers arrived from Banting with seven new Dayak converts, and then Mr Gomez turned up from Lundu with a whole clutch of new souls to pillage her stores and try her patience.

  Yet occasionally the Sarawak sense of torpor would insinuate itself even into Harriette’s busy helpers. One attempted suicide with slashed wrists and laudanum, apparently as much from boredom as anything. Frank was away so Harriette, of course, coped with it all.

  It is … a common mistake to imagine that the life of a missionary is an exciting one. On the contrary, its trial lies in its monotony. The uneventful day, mapped out into hours of teaching and study, sleep, exercise and religious duties; the constant society of natives whose minds are like those of children, and who do not sympathize with your English ideas; the sameness of the climate, which even precludes discourse about the weather, – all this added to the distance from relatives and friends at home, combined with the enervating effects of a hot climate, causes heaviness of spirits and despondency in single men and women. Married people have not the same excuse.6

  Until the results of the commission were announced, relations between mission and Rajah were close, even intimate. Harriette wrote:

  It is an established rule now that we go to the Rajah’s on Tuesday evening, a
nd he comes to us on Thursday, and we are to dine together once a month … You have no idea how merry we are, but there is no resisting the fun of this patchwork society. Last Tuesday, Mr. H—, a tall and immensely stout man, would persist in dancing a Minuet de la Cour with a little midshipman. He mounted a Dayak cap and feathers and made us laugh till we cried … I danced a quadrille with the Rajah, who dances beautifully and is as merry as a child. A charade was acted, which, with the dancing, infinitely amused the natives, of whom I should think 150 were present: and the evening closed with singing ‘Rix Rax’, the national anthem of Sarawak, the Europeans clapping their hands and the natives yelling a war yell for the chorus.7

  Harriette and Brooke Brooke had written ‘Rix Rax’, basing it on an old German nonsense ‘catch’, and it was the inevitable end to a festive soiree. It ran:

  Rix Rax, filly bow bow bow bow, filly bow bow bow, Rix Rax

  Sarawak, Sarawak, Sarawak shall win,

  I see from far the Dayak fleet of war. How fast!

  And meet Saribus’ pirate fleet! And Sarawak and Sarawak and Sarawak shall win.

  Charles Bunyon presents another account of the jolly social life of the little settlement, which gives a hint of the relations between rajah and bishop that were later to become so soured. The joke centres on durian fruit. After describing tiffin and the fruits which formed part of it, concoctions of sun-made creams and ‘limonade divine’ contained in red prickly caskets lined with white satin [durian], Bunyon adds that the announcement was made that the first durians of the season had come in.