The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (47 page)

He gained a patron in Lord Minto, the admirably liberal governor-general of India, who recognized Raffles' talent and looked for a way to deploy it against the French, who were the recipients, under Napoleon, of the Dutch Southeast Asian empire. Minto made Raffles his special agent in Malacca, charged with gauging whether the Javanese would support a British invasion against their Franco-Dutch rulers. As a Malay noted of Raffles, he was “most courteous in his intercourse with all men. He had a sweet expression on his face, was extremely affable and liberal, and listened with attention when people spoke to him.”
²
In other words, Raffles was a perfect diplomatic agent.

With stout English confidence, Raffles advised Minto that Java could be taken with fewer than 10,000 men (3,000 Europeans, the rest sepoys), though the Franco-Dutch forces numbered a good 14,000. He thought the Javanese nobles would back the British. In 1811, in a swift summer campaign, Java was added to the East India Company's empire, and Raffles was made lieutenant governor of Java.

Raffles ruled the island from September 1811 to March 1816. He put down rebellious sultans, kept the peace, abolished slavery, reformed the
administration of the island, dismantled the Dutch mercantilist system, and established a freer market system that guaranteed property rights (including the rights of small Javanese farmers). The only reform he could not achieve was making Java profitable to the Company—and the Company, while happy to be rid of the French, was not so very happy being saddled with responsibility for the island. With the restoration of Java to the Dutch after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Raffles was out of a job. He returned home a hero, though facing minor, trumped-up charges (insinuated by a disgruntled and dishonest subordinate) of corruption, of which he was later entirely cleared.

He also came home a widower. He remarried in 1817, the same year he published his
History of Java
and was appointed governor-general of Bencoolen. Favored by the prince regent (the future George IV) and his daughter Princess Charlotte, he left for Sumatra as
Sir
Stamford Raffles. Bencoolen, however, was less welcoming. The settlement was a wreck, his official residence badly damaged by an earthquake, the government house abandoned and derelict, the roads choked with vegetation; it was, he wrote, “without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld. I cannot convey to you an adequate idea of the ruin and dilapidation which surrounds me.”
³
While rebuilding he followed his usual path of free market reforms, freeing slaves, and exploring the interior, where he discovered a giant flowering plant now known as the Rafflesia Arnoldi. His wife, meanwhile, the first white woman many of the natives had ever seen, was regarded as something of a goddess (even though, to English eyes, she was nowhere near as good-looking as his first wife; she was, however, six years his junior).

His wife's presumed divinity aside, it was not the backwaters of Bencoolen where Raffles would make his mark—that would be in Singapore,
an island city-state he founded in 1819 in order to give the British a foothold, and a free trade entrepôt, on the Straits of Malacca. Raffles wrote to William Wilberforce that Singapore had given the British “command of the Archipelago as well as in peace as in war: our commerce will extend to every part, and British principles will be known and felt throughout.”
⁴
By British principles he meant free trade, fair play, and honest administration of just laws.

Raffles' usual sunny spirits were clouded by the loss of his eldest three children—victims of the tropics—and his own health began to falter as he was beset by blistering headaches. It became evident that he would have to return to England. Before he left, however, he drew up Singapore's constitution, established a Malay College, and had the pleasure of seeing Singapore develop as a successful, rapidly growing, port city. He also endured the tragedy of his youngest daughter dying (another daughter in England survived) and having the ship carrying all his notes, his animal specimens, his maps—virtually all his belongings—burst into flames and sink to the bottom of the sea. The great entrepreneurial statesman, the great amateur anthropologist, zoologist, and botanist, the great scholar of the Malay people—their history, religion, language, and culture—returned to England empty-handed. There was only this consolation: in 1824, a sweeping Anglo-Dutch treaty accepted Singapore as British (though Bencoolen and the whole of Sumatra went to the Dutch), drawing an equatorial line, giving the British the northern territories of Malaya and the Dutch the southern territories of Indonesia.

In England, still in bad health, Raffles again successfully rebuffed accusations from a disgruntled subordinate, this time over the administration of Singapore. In addition, he was harried by an ungrateful East India Company, which not only denied him a pension but demanded he reimburse the Company for a variety of charges, including those he had incurred to found Singapore. Still, he maintained an active social and intellectual life,
including establishing the London Zoo. He died of a stroke in 1826, one day before his forty-fifth birthday. His parish priest—who had investments in plantations dependent on slave labor—refused to commemorate the anti-slaver Raffles with a memorial in his church; Westminster Abbey made good the difference, erecting a statue in Raffles' honor. Raffles has other memorials, too, most of them in Singapore, ranging from colleges and schools, to a horse racing cup, to the celebrated Raffles Hotel. In the words of one of his biographers, “He taught Malays, Chinese and Javanese to think of the Englishman as just, liberal and sympathetic.”
⁵
Raffles was all that.

When Raffles died, James Brooke was twenty-three, an army officer with the British East India Company. His father had served the Company too, and James had been born in India. He was a child of some privilege, doted on by his parents who didn't ship him home to England to be educated until he was twelve years old; and then it appears he was less interested in hitting the books than hitting the decks and sailing. His formal education didn't last long: by sixteen he was an ensign in John Company's Indian army. He much enjoyed the frat house side of a young officer's life—sports and pranks—but was rather less keen on serious desk duties (which he acquired on rising to sub-assistant commissary general). Far more to his taste was raising a troop of native cavalry scouts to fight for the Company in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26). In that war, Brooke suffered a grievous wound—perhaps, it has been surmised, shot in the genitals; others say the lungs—which put him on the invalid list for five years. To fill the empty hours, he daydreamt about adventure and fantasized that he was meant to do something big, if only circumstances would allow.

The first thing circumstances did was prevent his return to duty within the designated five-year limit.
⁶
So Brooke resigned his commission, decided
that his life's work was to plough the sea and set foot on a far eastern island where no white man had trodden before, and to that end badgered his reluctant father into buying him “a rakish slaver-brig.”
⁷
Better that, his father thought, than having young James moping about like an adolescent—though his schemes sounded impractical to the old man.

His father was right. James's schemes were impractical, and commercial failures—but profit-making was never really Brooke's goal. Brooke's real interest was in unexplored territory. When his father died, he used his inheritance to acquire a bigger boat, a schooner, and set himself to studying nautical books and the works of Sir Stamford Raffles, after whose adventures he hoped to model his own. He decided, as a young Englishman might in the nineteenth century, to annex a goodly portion of Borneo for the British Empire and in the process “relieve the darkness of Paganism, and the horrors of the eastern slave-trade.”
⁸

Brooke's schooner,
The Royalist
, was fitted out with guns, gave its master a reason to wear a dashing uniform, and, as a listed vessel with the Royal Yacht Squadron, could fly the white ensign of the Royal Navy. It had in short everything required to impress the natives of Sarawak, northern Borneo, where Brooke landed in 1839. He helped the Sultan of Brunei put down a rebellion in the province; and in consequence of that—as well as a martial show of force by Brooke, who was rather better at the art of war (and diplomacy) than the locals—the Sultan thought it wise to make the enterprising Englishman his governor. In 1841, Brooke assumed the title—to be affirmed later—of Rajah of Sarawak.

Like Raffles, he set about an administration of reform—in particular, trying to protect the Hill Dayaks (“one of the most interesting and easily to be improved races in the world”
⁹
) from the piratical, headhunting Sea Dayaks and imperious Malays. As the Lycurgus of Sarawak, he gave the province a legal code. Typically, while he boasted of Sarawak's natural resources, it actually had little to offer, and Brooke kept his government
afloat by writing checks on his own account or by offering protection to business-savvy Chinese who were harassed by the Malays.

He also began building a navy. Granted, it was mostly made up of large canoes with small mounted guns, but in his Dudley Do-Right way he was determined to sink Sarawak's pirates; though in typical British imperial fashion he rather liked the ruffians, just as he found headhunters had their good points too. But most of all, he relished the role of liberating peaceful Sarawakians from fear and injustice. In that cause he enlisted a Royal Navy captain, charged with protecting British shipping, to expand his portfolio and lend him a hand. Brooke became quite the swashbuckling nemesis of the pirates of Sarawak.

As he extended his authority, so too did he expand British interest and influence. In 1845, he was given the title of Her Majesty's Confidential Agent to the government in Borneo. With that title, he and the Royal Navy became the kingmakers of Brunei and took ownership of the island of Labuan.
¹⁰
In 1847, Brooke, the conquering hero, paid a trip back home to England and was lionized—not to mention knighted as Sir James.

When he returned to Sarawak, he buckled down to further wars against pirates. While he focused on the sword and the cannon, he welcomed Christian missionaries to win converts to peace through good works and schools (the Americans, he thought were better at this approach). Proselytizing Muslims was discouraged, but the Dayaks were fair game. What stunned Brooke was that his recent fights, reported in the British press, brought him not more of the fame he desired but attacks from liberals (ironically, he was himself a Liberal) who questioned why Britain was cooperating with a man who left a trail of dead Sarawakians behind him (even if they were pirates and headhunters). He was rather more popular with the Dayaks and the Malays and Chinese, who prayed for his recovery when he was laid low by smallpox. He survived—both the smallpox and a British inquiry into his affairs, which exonerated him from the highly
colored charges thrown against him, though the British government distanced itself from Brooke. To his dismay, he was no longer an official British imperial agent; he was a mere rajah subordinate to the sultan of Brunei.

The smallpox aged him—perhaps Britain's ingratitude did as well—and the pirate-hunter turned again to the example of Raffles and became a man of study. Not much interested in female companionship—he always preferred the company of young men, though he was once engaged and had fathered an illegitimate son—he became an avid chess player and liked nothing better than sitting up nights convivially talking about religion, politics, and philosophy. Nevertheless, in 1857 Brooke again buckled on pistol and sabre to put down an insurrection by rebellious Chinese angry over high taxes on their opium and ambitious to seize control of Sarawak now that Brooke was stripped of British support. The Chinese, allegedly more civilized than the Dayaks, proved as barbarous as any—even beheading children or tossing them alive into flames. But as they slaughtered Christians, looted and torched European homes, and burned Malay villages, they were surprised to find an avenging army coming behind them. Brooke was joined by his nephew and eventual successor Charles Johnson (who later took the last name Brooke), already an experienced naval officer. With them were Dayak and Malay warriors who chased the Chinese rebels over the border of Dutch Borneo. There the Chinese fought bloodily amongst themselves; the Dutch finally disarmed them; and the rebels' booty was returned to Sarawak.