XA. D. 1841RAJAH BROOKE
Borneois a hot forest about five hundred miles long, and as wide, inhabited by connoisseurs called Dyaks, keen collectors. They collect human heads and some of their pieces are said to be very valuable. They are a happy little folk with most amusing manners and customs. Here is their ritual for burial of the dead:
“When a man dies his friends and relations meet in the house and take their usual seats around the room. The deceased is then brought in attired in his best clothes, with a cigar fixed in his mouth; and, being placed on the mat in the same manner as when alive, his betel box is set by his side. The friends go through the form of conversing with him, and offer him the best advice concerning his future proceedings, and then, having feasted, the body is deposited in a large coffin and kept in the house for several months.”
The habits of the natives have been interfered with by the Malays, who conquered most of them and carved their island up into kingdoms more or less civilized, but not managed at all in the interests of the Dyaks. These kingdoms were decayed and tumbling to pieces when the Dutch came in to help,and helped themselves to the whole of Borneo except the northwestern part. They pressingly invited themselves there also, but the Malay rajah kept putting them off with all sorts of polite excuses.
While the rajah’s minister was running short of excuses to delay the Dutch an English yacht arrived in Sarawak. The owner was Mr. James Brooke, who had been an officer in the East India Company, but being hit with a slug in the lungs during the first Burma war, was retired with a pension of seventy pounds for wounds. Afterward he came into a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, took to yachting, traveled a great deal in search of adventure, and so in 1839 arrived in Sarawak on the lookout for trouble.
An Englishman of gentle birth is naturally expected to tell the truth, to be clean in all his dealings, to keep his temper, and not to show his fears. Not being a beastly cad, Brooke as a matter of course conformed to the ordinary standards and, having no worries, was able to do so cheerfully. One may meet men of this stock, size and pattern by thousands the world over, but in a decayed Malay state, at war with the Dyaks ashore and the pirates afloat, Brooke was a phenomenon just as astonishing as a first-class comet, an earthquake eruption, or a cyclone. His arrival was the only important event in the whole history of North Borneo. The rajah sought his advice in dealing with the Dutch, the Dyaks and the pirates. The Malays, Dyaks, pirates and everybody else consulted him as to their dealings with the rajah. On his second visit he took a boat’s crew from his yacht and went to the seat of war. There he tried to the verge of tears to persuade the hostile forces either to fight or make friends,and when nobody could be induced to do anything at all, he, with his boat’s crew and one native warrior, stormed the Dyak position, putting the enemy to total rout and flight. Luckily, nobody was hurt, for even a cut finger would have spoiled the perfect bloodlessness of Brooke’s victory. Then the Dyaks surrendered to Brooke. Afterward the pirate fleet appeared at the capital, not to attack the rajah, but to be inspected by Brooke, and when he had patted the pirates they went away to purr. Moreover the rajah offered to hand over his kingdom to Brooke as manager, and the Englishman expected him to keep his word. Brooke brought a shipload of stores in payment for a cargo of manganese, but the rajah was so contented with that windfall that he forgot to send to his mines for the ore.
Further up the coast a British ship was destroyed by lightning, and her crew got ashore where they were held as captives pending a large ransom. Even when the captain’s wife had a baby the local bigwig thereabouts saw a new chance of plunder, and stole the baby-clothes. Then the shipwrecked mariners sent a letter to Brooke appealing for his help; but nothing on earth could induce the spineless boneless rajah to send the relief he had promised. Then Brooke wrote to Singapore whence the East India Company despatched a war-ship which rescued the forty castaways.
The rajah’s next performance was to arrange for a percentage with two thousand, five hundred robbers who proposed to plunder and massacre his own subjects. Brooke from his yacht stampeded the raiders with a few rounds from the big guns—blank ofcourse. Brooke was getting rather hard up, and could not spare ball ammunition on weekdays.
So King Muda Hassim lied, cheated, stole, betrayed, and occasionally murdered—a mean rogue, abject, cringing to Brooke, weeping at the Englishman’s threats to depart, holding his throne so long as the white yacht gave him prestige; but all this with pomp and circumstance, display of gems and gold, a gorgeous retinue, plenty of music, and royal salutes on the very slightest pretext. But all the population was given over to rapine and slaughter, and the forest was closing in on ruined farms. The last and only hope of the nation was in Brooke.
Behind every evil in the state was Makota, the prime minister, a polite and gentlemanly rascal, and at the end of two years he annoyed Brooke quite seriously by putting arsenic in the interpreter’s rice. Brooke cleared his ship for action, and with a landing party under arms marched to the palace gates. In a few well-chosen words he explained Makota’s villainy, showed that neither the rajah’s life nor his own was safe, and that the only course was to proclaim Brooke as governor.
No shot was fired, no blow was struck, but Makota’s party vanished, the villain fled, the rajah began to behave, the government of the country was handed over to the Englishman amid great popular rejoicings. “My darling mother,” he wrote, “I am very poor, but I want some things from home very much; so I must trust to your being rich enough to afford them to me. Imprimis, a circle for taking the latitude; secondly, an electrifying machine of good power; thirdly, a large magic lantern; fourthly, a rifle which carries fiftyballs; and last, a peep-show. The circle and rifle I want very much; and the others are all for political purposes.” Did ever king begin his reign with such an act as that letter?
But then, look at the government he replaced: “The sultan and his chiefs rob all classes of Malays to the utmost of their power; the Malays rob the Dyaks, and the Dyaks hide their goods as much as they dare, consistent with the safety of their wives and children.” Brooke found his private income a very slender fund when he had to pay the whole expense of governing a kingdom until the people recovered from their ruin.
February the first, 1842, a pirate chief called to make treaty with the new king. “He inquired, if a tribe pirated on my territory what I intended to do. My answer was ‘to enter their country and lay it waste.’ ‘But,’ he asked me again, ‘you will give me—your friend—leave to steal a few heads occasionally?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I shall have a hundred Sakarran heads for every one you take here!’ He recurred to this request several times—‘just to steal one or two’-as a schoolboy asks for apples.”
Brooke used to give the pirates his laughing permission to go to Singapore and attack the English.
Sir James Brooke
Sir James Brooke
“The Santah River,” he wrote, “is famous for its diamonds. The workers seem jealous and superstitious, disliking noise, particularly laughter, as it is highly offensive to the spirit who presides over the diamonds.... A Chinese Mohammedan with the most solemn face requested me to give him an old letter; and he engraved some Chinese characters, which, being translated signify ‘Rajah Muda Hassim,James Brooke, and Hadju Ibrahim present their compliments to the spirit and request his permission to work at the mine.’”
There were great doings when the sultan of Borneo had Mr. Brooke proclaimed king in Sarawak. Then he went off to the Straits Settlements, where he made friends with Henry Keppel, captain of H. M. S.Dido, a sportsman who delighted in hunting pirates, and accepted Brooke’s invitation to a few days’ shooting. Keppel describes the scene of Brooke’s return to his kingdom, received by all the chiefs with undisguised delight, mingled with gratitude and respect for their newly-elected ruler. “The scene was both novel and exciting, presenting to us—just anchored in a large fresh water river, and surrounded by a densely wooded jungle—the whole surface of the water covered with canoes and boats dressed with colored silken flags, filled with natives beating their tom-toms, and playing on wind instruments, with the occasional discharge of firearms. To them it must have been equally striking to witness theDidoanchored almost in the center of their town, her mastheads towering above the highest trees of that jungle, the loud report of her heavy thirty-two-pounder guns, the manning aloft to furl sails of one hundred fifty seamen in their clean white dresses, and with the band playing. I was anxious that Mr. Brooke should land with all the honors due to so important a personage, which he accordingly did, under a salute.”
It was a little awkward that theDidostruck a rock and sank, but she chose a convenient spot just opposite Mr. Brooke’s house, so that Brooke’s officersand those of the ship formed one mess there, a band of brothers, while the damage was being repaired. Then came the promised sport, a joint boat expedition up all sorts of queer back channels and rivers fouled by the pirates with stakes and booms under fire of the artillery in their hill fortresses. The sportsmen burst the booms, charged the hills, stormed the forts, burned out the pirates and obtained their complete submission. Brooke invited them all to a pirate conference at his house and, just as with the land rogues, charmed them out of their skins. He fought like a man, but his greatest victories were scored by perfect manners.
The next adventure was a visit from the Arctic explorer, Sir Edward Belcher, sent by the British government to inspect Brooke’s kingdom, now a peaceful and happy country.
Later came Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane with a squadron to smash up a few more pirates, and the smashing of pirates continued for many years a popular sport for the navy. The pirate states to the northward became in time the British colonies of Labuan, and North Borneo, but Sarawak is still a protected Malay state, the hereditary kingdom of Sir James Brooke and his descendants. May that dynasty reign so long as the sun shines.