he never took his eyes from the course. He was secure on his throne now, but I
could not but wonder if that yell, which sent a strange thrill through me, did not
bring up recollections of one of the hundred sanguinary scenes through which he
and his great uncle, the elder Rajah Brooke, had gone when fighting for their
lives and kingdom.
The Sultan of Johore’s griffin won, and the Rajah stepped back to congratulate
him. I, too, passed over to where he stood, and the kindly old Sultan took me by
the hand.
“I have a very tender spot in my heart for all Americans,” the Rajah replied to
his Highness’s introduction. “It was your great republic that first recognized the
independence of Sarawak.”
As we chatted over the triumph of Gladstone, the silver bill, the tariff, and a
dozen topics of the day, I was thinking of the head-hunters of whom I had read
in the morning paper. I was thinking, too, of how this man’s uncle had, years
before, with a boat’s crew of English boys, carved out of an unknown island a
principality larger than the state of New York, reduced its savage population to
orderly tax-paying citizens, cleared the Borneo and Java seas of their thousands
of pirate praus, and in their place built up a merchant fleet and a commerce of
nearly five millions of dollars a year. The younger Rajah, too, had done his share
in the making of the state. In his light tweed suit and black English derby, he did
not look the strange, impossible hero of romance I had painted him; but there
was something in his quiet, clear, well-bred English accent, and the strong, deep
lines about his eyes and mouth, that impressed one with a consciousness of
tremendous reserve force. He spoke always slowly, as though wearied by early
years of fighting and exposure in the searching heat of the Bornean sun.
We became better acquainted later at balls and dinners, and he was never tired of
thanking me for my country’s kindness.
In 1819, when the English took Malacca and the Malay peninsula from the
Dutch, they agreed to surrender all claims to the islands south of the pirate-
infested Straits of Malacca.