11 minute read
JAMES BROOKE
from The Chap Issue 112
by thechap
Biography
The White Rajah of Sarawak
Chris Sullivan recounts the swashbuckling tale of James Brooke, who ruled Borneo in the 1840s with a limp hand and left a legacy of tittle-tattle in his imperious wake
ILLUSTRATION BY MARK ELLENDER
ir James Brooke might easily have popped
Sup in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books and was indeed the inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Brooke bought a ship with his inheritance, fitted it with a plethora of guns and sailed off to Borneo where, in defence of the Sultan Of Brunei, defeated a mob of headhunting natives who, armed with only blow pipes and bows and arrows, were easily routed. Bucking the trend for swashbucklers, Brooke exhibited a total lack of interest in the fair sex and seems never to have tupped a single damsel. As his family friend Kegan Paul commented, ‘He was able to be close to women and intimate friends but without a tinge of love making.’ Brooke was best of friends with a brace of rich older spinsters but remained entirely preoccupied with adolescent boys, his more notable relationship being with Badrudeen, a Sarawak prince, of whom he wrote, ‘My love for him was deeper than anyone I knew.’
James Brooke was born on 29th April 1803 in Secrore, India to mother Anne Marie Stewart and father Thomas Brooke, who had been an officer in the East India Company before becoming a High Court Judge. The rather spoilt little James was sent back to England to Norwich Grammar School in 1815 but, as he missed his mum, was often absent and ended up being tutored at his parents’ house near Bath.
He completed a rudimentary education and in 1819, aged 16, he entered the service of the East
Kuching, Sarawak in James Brooke’s day
India Company as an ensign to the Bengal native infantry, then transferred to the 18th native infantry, moving up to sub-assistant commissary-general in May 1822. Just 19 years old when war was declared between Burma and Britain on 5th March 1824, Brooke was given the command of a company of unbalanced irregular cavalry and shipped off to fight the hostiles in the jungle. He was seriously wounded in one lung during his first skirmish at Rangpur, Assam in January 1825.
“His active army career lasted two days and his convalescence would last five years,” wrote his biographer Nigel Barley. “He was awarded a wound pension of £70 per annum and written off as an invalid aged 22.” Brooke recuperated in Bath and was briefly engaged to the daughter of a clergyman, though soon saw the error of his ways. While recovering, he read Stamford Raffles’ The History of Java and, once back on his feet, resigned his commission in 1830 and travelled to China, Penang, Malacca, and Singapore as an independent trader. “They [the Singaporeans] are the first race of people I have ever met whose appearance positively displeased,” wrote Brooke in his extensive journals. “Their habits are the most filthy, their faces most ugly and their figures most ungraceful of any people under the sun.”
In 1835 Brooke inherited the hefty sum of £30,000 (£4m today) when his father died, so he bought a 142-ton schooner, named it The Royalist, bedecked it with six 6-pounders of cannon and, after a little practice with his crew in the Mediterranean, aimed East in late 1836. It was then that he heard of a rebellion against the Sultan of Brunei, so he pulled up anchor and set sail for Borneo in 1838, hoping to ‘earn something’ for his endeavours. He arrived in Kuching in August 1838. At that time, Borneo was not on the British radar; even though it is the world’s third largest island, it was primarily known as a hotbed of piracy and headhunters.
“In the devastated feudal economy, the best business [in Borneo] to be in was simply to take money off others by violence,” writes Barley. “The Royal House of Brunei divided its time equally between the traditional demands of fornication, murdering its relatives, and Islamic piety.” The Sultan was Omar Ali Saifuddin II, whose uncle, the heir-apparent Raja Muda Hashim, had resigned and taken the office of prime minister in favour of his nephew becoming Sultan.
And so in came Brooke with his cannon-toting craft and the obligatory gun salutes, flying the white ensign and wearing his semi-naval uniform. The ill-informed Sultan thought he was entering into an agreement with the British navy, and “not some spoilt young man from Bath squandering his inheritance.” So excited was Brooke to be the first white man to walk on this undiscovered land that he went barefoot and got a serious infection, limping along like Long John Silver for months.
Brooke’s next stop was to meet the famed headhunting piratical Dayaks, where he was introduced to his first smoked severed human head. He thought it rather charming. Brooke then left for Singapore, where he was met with adulation. “Newspapers call me patriotic and adventurous,” he wrote to his mother, “The Geographical Society pays me compliments. Am I not a Great Man!”
Brooke returned to Kuching on 29th August 1840 and immediately became enmeshed in subduing the uprising alongside Hashim. In two months of fighting he lost no men, while the enemy had lost five. Meanwhile, Brooke fell for Hashim’s younger brother Barudreen and they became inseparable. It is thought that Brooke’s decision to help in the war was simply because it kept him close to his new squeeze. Hashim, still believing Brooke to be a representative of the British Navy, offered him the state of Sarawak, which he readily accepted.
After a minor victory against the rebels, the dissenting indigenes offered surrender if their lives were spared. Brooke had his men fire a volley over their heads, persuaded Hashim to let them live, and so the four years of conflict were concluded. Brooke was now 38 and had illegally assumed the title of Rajah. In July 1842 he obtained personal confirmation of his appointment from Sultan Omar Ali, and on 18th August was installed as Rajah at Kuching. Brooke had bagged himself a formidable chunk of real estate, but with few assets and no mineral deposits it meant little. He remained more or less skint for the rest of his life.
Brooke then decided to reform the dishonest and declining Malay kingdom of Brunei, based on the British code of fair play. He was determined to abolish local practices such as slavery, amputation and headhunting, while asserting that Islam was to be respected. He forever stressed that native interests were his focus and, in truth, it was the enlightening dogma of Brooke’s rule.
He quelled the Dayak raiding the coast in June 1843 with the help of the Royal Navy, under the command of his old friend Captain Henry Keppel, and in August 1844 Brooke joined forces with them to destroy the principal Dayak longhouses. Disaster struck in 1846, when the Sultan decided he needed to get rid of Brooke’s Sarawak allies. A group of the Sultan’s armed bodyguards attacked Badrudeen, shot him six times and killed him. Hashim escaped but, knowing he was done for, blew his brains out. Emotionally in pieces, Brooke returned to England in 1847 and quickly became one of the icons of early Victorian imperialism. He was made an Oxford DCL, met Queen Victoria and had his portrait (left) painted by Sir Francis Grant, RA.
Brooke was appointed governor of the new colony of Labuan and consul-general for Borneo, but still found it difficult to obtain recognition from the British government of his sovereign status in Sarawak. He tried to raise funds by selling off the rights to the island’s coal and employed as his agent Henry Wise, as conniving and slippery a character as one might find, who then tried to set up a company to buy out Brooke behind his back. He fired Wise, who then began plotting Brooke’s downfall.
Brooke sailed back to Borneo, creating something of a scandal by frolicking with youthful midshipmen in his boudoir, dancing the polka with his new catch, 15-year-old Charles Grant, whom he called ‘Hoddy Doddy’, grandson of the Earl of Elgin and some 29 years Brooke’s junior. Even though this was not particularly unusual in the Navy, fellow officers were not amused.
In 1848 Captain John Brooke Johnson, the Rajah’s nephew, arrived in Borneo, immediately taking the surname Brooke. The newly named Brooke Brooke, tipped to succeed his uncle, was then dragged into suppressing the volatile Dayak Pirates. James Brooke arranged for Royal Navy Captain Arthur Farquhar’s ships to attack the Dayaks once again, resulting in the battle of Beting Marau at the mouth of the Saribas on 31 July 1849, when more than 1000 Dayaks were killed.
Back in Blighty, Brookes published another of his journals. Henry Wise edited out the more bellicose sections and delivered a document that portrayed Brooke as a “mad, sanguinary despot who used the navy to slaughter thousands of natives and steal their land.” The slighted Wise then founded the Aborigines Protection Society, purely as a means to bring down his nemesis Brooke. “I have been held up as prodigy of perfection and I have been cast down as a monster of iniquity,” wrote Brooke, while having contracted smallpox on top of his recurrent malaria. A year later, in 1854, an inquiry sat in Singapore to determine the truth. Wise was instrumental in providing much of the damaging evidence, but Brooke defended himself admirably. He was exonerated of charges of inhumanity and illegality, but the experience was demeaning and disillusioning. He emerged with his reputation bruised, “A foreign lackey stripped of all means of protection.”
Three years later the Chinese, seeing Brooke weakened, went on the rampage. Infants to
Dayak warriors in war dress
elderly were beheaded and mutilated. Using the lure of human heads (a future husband would be laughed out of a Dayak House if he failed to turn up without a severed cranium), Charles Brooke (James’s nephew) brought in the Skrang Dayaks and led an attack, killing 1,500 Chinese, most of whose heads ended up on display in a Kayak crib. “I was sitting in the boat and I could notice this awful smell,” wrote missionary Harriette McDougal. “I looked and saw a Chinaman’s head in a basket. It entirely spoiled my handbag which lay near it. I had to throw my bag away.”
Brooke was now 54. It was 1858 and he set sail for England and haggled for payment for the costs he’d incurred in Sarawak, but came away empty-handed. He was now more or less destitute. To make matters worse, another secret was about to appear in public. His name was Reuben George Walker, who had gone missing in 1857. In a letter to Brooke Brooke, James wrote, “Now for Reuben, I told you he might be my son. I may tell you now that it is as certain as a fact can be.” Given James’s sexual proclivities, it was assumed that Reuben had been one of his paramours, though as one wag commented, “At 21, Reuben was far too old for James.”
Having weighed up the evidence, biographer Nigel Barley concludes that, “All in all, it seems likely he was Reuben’s repentant and slightly disappointed father. Whether Reuben was his son, or recognition was to conceal a homosexual relationship, must remain a matter for speculation.”
In 1857 he met confirmed spinster Angela Burnett Coutts, heir to Coutt’s Bank and one of the wealthiest women in England. She saw James as a hero, bankrolled his endeavours and bought him the vessel of his dreams, the Rainbow. Meanwhile, the most serious consequence of the Reuben affair was the alienation of his elder nephew, Brooke Brooke, who governed during the Rajah’s increasingly protracted absences. For him Reuben was a severe challenge to his legacy. In January 1863 the Rajah both disinherited and banished Brooke Brooke for challenging his authority. After establishing Charles Brooke in his place, the Rajah left Sarawak on 25th September for the last time and returned to England. By this time, the British government had finally recognized Sarawak as an independent state, but its finances were still underwritten by Baroness Burdett-Coutts.
On his retirement James moved to his house on the edge of Dartmoor. Baroness Burdett-Coutts gave up her rights in 1865, enabling James to declare Charles his heir. In 1866 Brooke suffered his second stroke, and on 11th June 1868, he died at home after suffering a third stroke. He was succeeded as Rajah of Sarawak by his nephew Sir Charles Anthony Johnson Brooke (1829-1917). n
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