The Enigmatic Sir James Brooke - Reviews - White Rajah - Book Review

Contemporary Review, July, 2003 by Jonathan W. Doering

White Rajah. Nigel Barley. Little, Brown. [pounds]16.99. 262 pages. ISBN 0-316-85920-6.

This involving book deals with the enigmatic Sir James Brooke, self-styled Rajah of Sarawak, then an unprepossessing region in Borneo. Enigma surrounds even Brooke's place of birth; some sources have him born in 1803, in Bath, others, in Benares, India. (Mr. Barley's thorough research informs us that Brooke was born in Benares.) Like many facts in Brooke's life, origin is not a settled thing: he was a self-mythologizer, a trickster who charmed and fought his way to an Asian throne.

Brooke's father, Thomas, was both a judge and an East India official; a model of conventional behaviour which Brooke spent his life contradicting. At sixteen, he took an East Indian commission. After only two significant engagements (during both he demonstrated intense if casual bravery), Brooke sustained a wound sufficiently severe to see him home to England for convalescence. This injury was later invoked to explain his disinterest in marriage, although the likelihood of Brooke's private homosexual preference constitutes a major aspect of Barley's analysis of what drove Brooke the public man. Brooke then flirted with returning to the East India Service, but failed to present himself by the deadlines set for readmission. Briefly engaged to a parson's daughter, the liaison was broken off at the behest of his fiancee's family, possibly because of an illegitimate son, or perhaps due to a discovery that Brooke's sexual interests lay elsewhere.

Brooke's decision to open up Sarawak was a curious choice. It was mostly jungle, peopled with disparate tribes, many of them pirates, head hunters, and slavers and there were few natural resources. It had been forgotten in the European scramble to snatch as much land as possible, yet Brooke found in it a clean sheet. Should he have the wherewithal to do it, he believed he could cultivate this place as he wished (a view partly disproved later). But this was only part of Brooke's brittle admixture of attitudes and motives: 'It was the love of adventure, the urge for distinction and a vaguer sense of social duty that drove him on'.

Brooke arrived at Sarawak in 1839, on a second-hand Royal Yacht Squadron ship. Entitled to wear naval uniform, he had many local leaders believe that they were dealing with an official British emissary. His dream of establishing a line of succession in Sarawak was so contingent upon his own character, and the loyalty that he inspired in his Malay and Dayak subjects, that his very personal success precluded its remaining a reality for long after his death. Two nephews in turn succeeded as Rajah, but both were pale reflections of their uncle. Finally a governor was appointed by London but he was ignominiously stabbed by a Malay nationalist in 1949.