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 of course. 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 fifty balls; 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.