White Rajah Read online

  It was in Canton that James fell ill with a bad attack of influenza and was nursed by John Cruikshank, the Scottish surgeon of the Castle Huntley. They would become affectionate friends for life. The matter has been minutely studied by Dr J. Walker in the Borneo Research Bulletin. Post-modernly attuned to the hidden discourse of sexuality and empire, he has devoted a good deal of effort to spotting, between the lines, James Brooke’s ‘boyfriends’, yet the results are sometimes questionable. Attraction is not seduction, nor is seduction love. To equate them is to reduce the rich, polyphonic music of James’s emotional life to a single note.

  There may well have been sexual attraction on James’s part – later evidence shows he was sensitive to male beauty – but this was no mere passing relationship of the flesh rather a deep and loving friendship. John Cruikshank named one of his sons ‘James Brooke’ and after his father’s death the boy went, at the age of fifteen, to serve in Sarawak where, to avoid confusion, he was known as ‘Fitz’. Another, hopelessly alcoholic, son briefly had a job fixed for him as Government Medical Officer in 1860. There is no suggestion whatever in this long relationship of untoward seaborne yo-heave-hoing or jolly rogering. This was an attachment that hailed from a heady mix of mutual youthful exuberance, sudden freedom and the solidarity of shipmates abroad in the world. It certainly matured into something akin to love, but there is no good reason to assume that this required physical expression.

  Then there was young James Templer, the mate, succeeded by his younger brother John. John’s wife wrote later:

  My husband’s older brother James was mate in the Castle Huntley. Brooke took an enormous fancy to him, and during a period of four or five years spent a great deal of the time he was in England at my father-in-law’s house at Bridport, where a room was always called ‘Brooke’s room.’ Here he made the first acquaintance with my husband, and they soon became great friends, the younger man worshipping in Brooke all the grace, romance, talent and sentiment too, as being so especially attractive at that period of his life … On James [Templer] giving up the East India Company’s service and going to Australia the friendship with John was intensified, and one may almost say transferred, although Brooke always maintained that he had never met so delightful a companion as James.6

  When he came to write his biography of James Brooke, Spenser St John remarked, ‘One judicious friend had advised me to say nothing disagreeable about [John] Templer and the young Rajah: I would carry out that wish as far as possible,’7 since, as he stated some time before, he had no wish to reveal ‘the Rajah’s own private life’. The whole Huntley period is strongly marked by a strange – almost Californian – touchy-feeliness that is indeed suggestive of more than ‘much merriment and vast foolery’. But it was clearly a golden time of liberty and optimism that the band of young shipmates would never forget, an innocent time free of responsibilities when they made their friends for life, a time of endless undergraduate conversations, when they knew exactly how to set the world to rights, the time perhaps that James had in mind when – a broken and bitter old man – he wrote poignantly ‘that the young hope more than they fear, and that the old fear more than they hope …’8

  We are perhaps too used to the sanctimonious tone of the Victorians as the clear sign of high-Gothic hypocrisy, and overeager to translate every high-blown expression of esteem into a mere mask for the furtive snap of elastic. Going to bed together is far from the only ‘disagreeable’ matter that can occur between two men. In later years James and John Templer had a dramatic and certainly disagreeable falling-out over the state of James’s mind that led to a total rupture of relations. And let us not pretend that we can easily read the discourse of Victorian sexuality, which is a language very different from our own. Two basic signposts show us that we are moving in an alien erotic and moral landscape that would fundamentally affect James Brooke’s affections and actions in a way it is hard for us to imagine. The first is that boys at that time were regarded as sexually mature and could legally marry at fourteen (girls at twelve). The second is that sodomy was both an unquestionable sin and a capital offence.9 There were regular moral frenzies against the crime, and something like 80 per cent of those convicted were actually hanged (unlike other capital offences, where the figure was a mere 12 per cent).

  But, outside the main group of friends, were there other entanglements of other kinds with a more clearly homoerotic backwash? Perhaps, with the benefit of evidence from his later years, there were. For example, in 1831 James wrote to Cruikshank rather ruefully of a younger crew member called Stonhouse:

  I cannot help having some hope that Stonhouse may value my acquaintance a little more than I give him credit for; but the real truth is, I have been too complying with his slightest wish, and have shown him too many weaknesses in my character for him to respect me much. Now, you will say, I write as if I were sore, and it is true; but the same feelings that make me so would also make me very ready to acquit S. of all intention to hurt me, for you know how well I liked the boy. I expect nothing from men, however; but if they will give me their affection or show me kindness I am doubly pleased.10

  James spent several days before his death burning papers, but a problem of quite another order is that his closest circle of friends have clustered round and carefully censored even the remaining material, so that while the truth about his love life clearly lies beyond the evidence as we have it, it is impossible to know with absolute certainty what that truth was. They were evidently sensitive about it. When Spenser St John – after all a lifelong friend – took his final leave, the scene was described as follows. ‘I ran down to Torquay, once more before leaving, and in the beginning of April 1867 I saw him, and as I leant over him I felt it was for the last time. As I neared the door he called me back and I saw the tears falling and then I could see how he also felt that it was one last adieu.’11 But deliberately excised from the published version of this passage as ‘too sensational and Nelsonic’ and ‘contrary to British taste’ are two chaste kisses.

  There are, of course, many kinds of love, sentimental, physical, blatantly sexual, and James Brooke seems to have been an emotional man capable of them all. Yet erotic love seems to have required a seed of compassion around which to crystallise and in which to hide itself. For him, pity does not lead to a purgation of eroticism into pure sentiment – quite the reverse: it stokes the fires of desire into what may be termed ‘compassionate lust’. Sometimes, the balance comes down on one element in the pairing and sometimes the other. While his correspondence with Cruikshank and the Templers does not suggest a physical relationship but something compounded of large amounts of mutual affection and respect that is increasingly rooted in nostalgia for lost youth, indications from his later life, involving not his equals and co-evals but very much younger, poorer, more vulnerable boys, are a different matter. These will be considered in due course but the cumulative evidence is that, where they were concerned, James Brooke was a skilled dissimulator, hiding the sensual in purely avuncular benevolence. St John remarked smoothly, ‘He would often endeavour to defend his system and argue that boys should not be thwarted; and certainly he carried his system into practice with all the lads that came under his control, and certainly also with very markedly bad results.’12 We shall see how badly later. Thus perhaps of significance is another passage in that letter to Cruikshank about the Penang pool. ‘Let me hear from you from the old ship,’ it ends. ‘Present my affectionate remembrance to her. Tell me how she looks and feels and what sort of folk are aboard. I pity you the job of carving in the cuddy and saying pretty things to the ladies. Take care of the “mids” [midshipmen] and be kind to them, as you always were, for you know the “mids” of the Huntley are under my especial care.’13

  Chapter 3

  The Schooner

  I dreamed that honours decked my head,

  I dreamed of conquest hardly won.

  Welcome to me the gory bed

  If bright and brief the course I run.

>   What peril that I would not court,

  What danger that I would not brave,

  A Child of Fortune’s wildest sport

  To grasp at power and find – a grave.

  How, step by step, I could not creep

  While tytled fools, at will, ascend,

  Better to sink in one great leap

  Than struggling live for such an end.

  But vain the wish I might procure

  A place in rank, a star decked breast,

  Obscurity I can endure

  Better than share among the rest.

  In vain my ardent soul aspires,

  In vain my spirit strives to soar,

  Till sickened hope herself expires

  And one by one those dreams are o’er.

  Then thus the sparkling bowl I drain,

  Thus, thus defy the will of Fate,

  Tho’ all my fondest hopes are vain

  I’ll dream at least I shall be great.1

  Thus James Brooke, poet, in the early 1830s, back from near death, back from the east and trapped in ‘the whirl of renewed affections’ in Bath, but dreaming romantically of greatness elsewhere. ‘I have dined out two or three times, but I feel the irksomeness of civilized society greater than ever, and its bonds shall not hold me long. My own family speak to me of the years we are to pass together, and that it always makes me sad to think that in my inmost heart I have determined to plunge into some adventure that will bestow activity and employment. I have thought much of “the schooner.”’2

  ‘The schooner’ is the shorthand name for a vivid daydream he has hatched with his old friends of the Castle Huntley. He will learn navigation. They will sail away together under his leadership to adventure, battle, wealth, distinction, an all-boys’ adventure writ large upon the real world. Meanwhile he moped at home, raging at ‘The growing, desperate, damned restraint – the consciousness of possessing energies and character, and the hopelessness of having “a fair field and no favour” to employ them on … If I say that I fret or fume, the fools turn on me and say, “You have fine clothes and fine linen, and a soft bed and a good dinner;” as if life consisted in dangling at a woman’s petticoat and fiddling and dancing.’3

  He shows all the signs of frustration: drinking too much, smoking too much. Despite his pampered condition, he feels himself one of the oppressed of this earth, with a horrible sense of time drifting away, and sees, staring him full in the face, ‘a youth of folly and an age of cards’. He is afflicted by a sense of his own unappreciated greatness and, like many who puzzle that their abilities are so strangely unrecognised, turns to politics, writing a pamphlet in support of Reform. Then another pamphlet, ‘A Justification of the Foreign Policy of Great Britain Towards Holland’. He will stand for Parliament – but he lacks the money. He and Cruikshank will go whaling in Greenland. Wait, no. He will run off to Australia with Kennedy of the Castle Huntley and become a farmer. After all, he has read some botany books. ‘My schemes may be wildish, but not quite visionary.’

  The old crew visited each other, caroused and reminisced – Cruikshank, Kennedy, sulky Stonhouse, Wright – in Scotland, Bath, Ireland. He will go to the Azores. No, better – up the Amazon. He will go to war against Holland. If only he had a ship.

  His father was increasingly unwell and James became relentless in his wearisome nagging for a vessel. Finally Mrs Brooke threw herself into the family disagreement, taking the part of her son. Thomas, who had already had to buy one son an elephant, caved in at once and bought James a ship and merchandise. So in early 1834 James proudly wrote to Cruikshank, ‘I have a vessel afloat, and nearly ready for sea – a rakish slaver brig, 290 tons burden – one that would fight or fly as occasion required, and made to pay her expenses. The Indian Archipelago, the north-east coast of China, Japan, New Guinea and the Pacific is the unlimited sphere of our adventure.’4 Long-suffering Thomas had not given way without some barbed and sniffy remarks:

  Supposing gain by traffic to be one of your objects, I conclude you will agree with me, that about trade you are quite ignorant, and that there is no pursuit for which you are less suited. Is it the intention to plunge into the China mania? This is not trade; it is mere speculation; and, after all, are not traders for the greater part a tribe of smugglers? The speculation has so little of the mercantile character, and is so much like a gambling concern, that I know not whether a preference is not to be given to a gaming-table.5

  But there were other reasons to concede the ship. Love had intervened again in the life of James Brooke, and it was love that moved the family to action.

  About this time, he passed through that ordeal which punishes most men – he fell in love and became engaged. What were the causes which induced the lady or her family to break off the engagement I do not know, but it was broken off, and Mr. Brooke appeared to look on it as final; and from that time he seems to have withdrawn from all female blandishments. He never spoke of it to us, though an occasional allusion made us think that his thoughts often reverted to this episode in his history. I notice in one letter it is stated that this lady, whose name is given, died shortly afterwards.6

  That letter does not survive. Jacob gives a more Mills & Boonish version:

  In or about this year, 1833, it seemed as if Brooke’s whole nature might be charmed into the willing loss of an adventurous future, for he became warmly attached to a lady, the daughter of a Bath clergyman. She had been at school with his sister Margaret, and these two, as girls, had felt drawn to each other. It would seem that she returned Brooke’s affection, and that an engagement followed, but that, in consequence of the families on both sides seeing grounds for objection, she felt it right to break it off, and Brooke appears from this time to have taken ambition as his only bride.7

  We cannot but speculate on what these ‘grounds’ might be and how they tie up with Marryat’s ‘private history’ (see p. 18 above). Jacob suggests they may involve Brooke’s growing unitarianist doubts on the dogma of the Trinity. A modern mind would – more crudely but not necessarily more accurately – suspect them to lie in his enthusiasm for midshipmen. Strangely, there is another explanation. In 1858, James Brooke publicly acknowledged an illegitimate son. Recent revisionist students have supposed the mother to be a housemaid, adding class exploitation to colonial outrage in the catalogue of Brooke crimes, though there seems to be no clear reason to think she was not the clergyman’s daughter of this early romance. From the age and date of death of this young man, as recorded on his gravestone in Plumtree graveyard, Nottingham, he must have been born in 1834, possibly conceived in 1833, the year of the breaking-off of the engagement. So perhaps we do not have to look too far for the cause of Thomas Brooke’s sudden change of heart on the question of the schooner plan. After all, he had the oldest reason in the world to get the boy out of town fast.

  Thomas was right about his son’s nautical and mercantile skills: the trip was a disaster. In James’s life, ‘trade’ was always just the excuse for indulging his thirst for adventure. Kennedy and Wright from the Castle Huntley fought endlessly on the way out. James, it seemed, interfered constantly in matters of discipline. Finally, the ship and cargo, become wearisome, were sold at a heavy loss in Macao and James returned to England. But again, if there was family recrimination it went unrecorded. At the end of 1835, Thomas Brooke died and left the children £30,000 apiece, despite the understanding that James’s schooner was a deductible anticipation of his inheritance. With his pension and other assets James was now in a position to live in gentlemanly ease for the rest of his life.

  But the money was burning a hole in his pocket. Within three months he had bought a real schooner, the 142-ton Royalist. The previous fiasco was now reckoned useful training, and this time his preparations were more considered. Over the next two years he studied charts and read books, notably Raffles on the Malay archipelago and George Windsor Earle on Borneo. He undertook shorter cruises, to break in the crew and the vessel. The problem with the previous voyage, he
now saw, had been not his own interference but the opposition to it from others. Henceforth he would always demand to be master of his own vessel and any questioning of his authority would be counted disloyalty. Before he sailed again to the east he wrote his letter of farewell to Cruikshank:

  For my temperament and mode of thinking, there is nothing which makes prolonged life desirable, and, I would fain be doing something to add to the amount of happiness, especially in the way of life suited to my wild habits, wild education and ardent love for an undue degree of personal freedom … Could I carry my vessel to places where the keel of European ship never before ploughed the waters – could I plant my foot where white man’s foot never before had been – could I gaze upon scenes which educated eyes never have looked on – see man in the rudest state of nature – I should be content without looking for further reward. I can, indeed, say truly that I have no object of personal ambition, no craving for personal reward: these things sometimes flow attendant on worthy deeds or bold enterprises, but they are at best but consequences, not principal objects.8

  So it was the love of adventure, the urge for distinction and a vague sense of social duty that drove him on. But duty is in the eye of the beholder. Towards the end of his life, he described it more dramatically: ‘I was twenty years younger, and forty years lighter of heart when I left England for the shores of Borneo. I had some fortune, more ambition and no outlet for it. There are thousands and thousands of our countrymen whose hearts like mine are higher than their positions.’9

  Enormous self-confidence was an essential part of his mission, for James Brooke took himself seriously. He published a prospectus to his trip in the Athenaeum, speaking of resisting Dutch influence in Borneo, reasserting British claims to Marudu in the north, and the founding of colonies, as though this young tourist were creating, in fevered imagination, a whole new British imperial policy in the east. Trade was fine, he concluded, but it was better for trade to follow unforced from colonial possession than the other way round. Looking for a justification for British interference in terms of ‘tender philanthropy’, he homed in on the existence of slavery and paganism in the east. ‘Not a single voice is upraised to relieve the darkness of Paganism, and the horrors of the eastern slave-trade.’ He did not yet know about headhunting, whose eradication would later replace slavery as chief argument for the civilising nature of his mission. Once he was actually established in the east, the abolition of domestic slavery would be politically too hot to handle and he would leave it severely alone.