Flashmans' Lady

APPENDIX B: The White Raja

Nowadays, when it is fashionable to look only on the dark side of imperialism, not much is heard of James Brooke. He was one of those Victorians who gave empire-building a good name, whose worst faults, perhaps, were that he loved adventure for its own sake, had an unshakeable confidence in the civilizing mission of himself and his race, and enjoyed fighting pirates. His philosophy, being typical of his class and time, may not commend itself universally today, but an honest examination of what he actually did will discover more to praise than to blame.

The account of his work which Steward gave to Flash-man is substantially true - Brooke went to Sarawak for adventure, and ended as its ruler and saviour. He abolished the tyranny under which it was held, revived trade, drew up a legal code, and although virtually without resources and with only a handful of adventurers and reformed head-hunters to help him, fought his single-handed war against the pirates of the Islands. It took him six years to win, and considering the savagery and overwhelming numbers of his enemies, the organized and traditional nature of the piracy, the distances and unknown coasts involved, and the small force at his disposal, it was a staggering achievement.

That it was a brutal and bloody struggle we know, and it was perhaps inevitable that at the end of it Brooke should find himself described by one newspaper as "pirate, wholesale murderer, and assassin", and that demands were made in Parliament, by Hume, Cobden, and Gladstone (who admired Brooke, but not his methods) for an inquiry into his conduct. Palmerston, equally inevitably, defended Brooke as a man of "unblemished honour", and Catchick Moses and the Singapore merchants rallied to his support.

In the event, the inquiry cleared Brooke completely, which was probably a fair decision; his distant critics might think that he had pursued head-hunters and sea-robbers with excessive enthusiasm, but the coast villagers who had suffered generations of plundering and slavery took a different view.

So did the great British public. They were not short of heroes to worship in Victoria's reign, but among the Gordons, Livingstones, Stanleys, and the rest, James Brooke deservedly occupied a unique place. He was, after all, the storybook English adventurer of an old tradition - independent, fearless, upright, priggish and cheerfully immodest, and just a little touched with the buccaneer; it was no wonder that a century of boys' novelists should take him as their model. Which was a great compliment, but no greater than that paid to him by the tribesmen of Borneo; to them, one traveller reported, he was simply superhuman. The pirates of the Islands might well have agreed.*

* Suleiman Usman among them. Brooke ran him to earth at Maludu, North Borneo, in August 1845, only a few weeks after the Flashmans were rescued from Madagascar, from which it appears that Usman, having lost Elspeth, returned to his own waters. He was certainly at Maludu when the British force under Admiral Cochrane attacked and destroyed it; one report states that Usman was wounded, believed killed, in the action, and he does not appear to have been heard of again.