The Founding of Sarawak
In the East Indian seas, by Europeans and natives alike, two names are revered
with a singleness and devotion that place them side by side with the national
heroes of all countries.
The men that bear the names are Englishmen, yet the countless islands of the
vast Malayan archipelago are populated by a hundred European, African, and
Asiatic races.
Sir Stamford Raffles founded the great city of Singapore, and Sir James Brooke,
the “White Rajah,” carved out of a tropical wilderness just across the equator, in
Borneo, the kingdom of Sarawak.
There is no one man in all history with whom you may compare Rajah Brooke.
His career was the score of a hero of the footlights or of the dime novel rather
than the life of an actual history-maker in this prosaic nineteenth century. What
is true of him is also true in a less degree of his famous nephew and successor,
Sir Charles Brooke, G. C. M. C., the present Rajah.
One morning in Singapore, as I sipped my tea and broke open one cool,
delicious mangosteen after another, I was reading in the daily Straits Times an
account of the descent of a band of head-hunting Dyaks from the jungles of the
Rejang River in Borneo on an isolated fishing kampong, or village,—of how
they killed men, women, and children, and carried their heads back to their
strongholds in triumph, and of how, in the midst of their feasting and
ceremonies, Rajah Brooke, with a little company of fierce native soldiery, had
surprised and exterminated them to the last man; and just then the sound of
heavy cannonading in the harbor below caused me to drop my paper.
In a moment the great guns from Fort Canning answered. I counted—seventeen