who were demanding ransom: “A captive damsel! Does it not conjure up images of blue eyes and auburn hair of hyacinthine flow! And after all, a fat old Dutch frau may be the reality! Poor creature, even though she be old, and fat, and unamiable, and ugly, it is shocking to think of such a fate as a life passed among savages!” Obviously, he cannot have had Mrs Flashman in mind.
Henry Keppel (1809–1904) was one of the foremost fighting seamen of the Victorian period. An expert in the specialized craft of river warfare, he was known to the Dyaks as “the red-haired devil”, and served with Brooke in numerous raids against the pirates of the South China Sea. (See his books, Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido, 1846, and A Visit to the Indian Archipelago in HMS Maeander, 1853.) He later became Admiral of the Fleet.
Stuart’s enthusiastic description of Brooke and his adventures is perfectly accurate, so far as it goes (see The Raja of Sarawak by Gertrude L. Jacob, 1876, The Life of Sir James Brooke, by Spenser St John, 1879, Brooke’s own letters and journal, and other Borneo sources quoted elsewhere in these footnotes. Also Appendix B). The only error at this point is a minor one of Flashman’s, for “Stuart’s” name was in fact George Steward; obviously Flashman has again made a mistake of which he is occasionally guilty in his memoirs, of trusting his ears and not troubling to check the spelling of proper names.
Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), “the richest heiress in all England, enjoyed a fame … second only to Queen Victoria.” She spent her life and the vast fortune inherited from her grandfather, Thomas Coutts the banker, on countless charities and good causes, endowing schools, housing schemes, and hospitals, and providing funds for such diverse projects as Irish famine relief, university scholarships, drinking troughs, and colonial exploration; Livingstone, Stanley, and Brooke were among the pioneers she assisted. She was the first woman to be raised to the peerage for public service, and numbered among her friends Wellington, Faraday, Disraeli, Gladstone, Daniel Webster, and Dickens, who dedicated “Martin Chuzzlewit” to her.
The combination of her good looks, charm, and immense wealth attracted innumerable suitors, but she seems to have felt no inclination to matrimony until she met Brooke and “fell madly in love with him”. There is a tradition that she proposed to him and was politely rejected (see following note), but they remained close friends, and she is said to have been instrumental in obtaining official recognition for Sarawak. She eventually married, in her sixties, the American-born William Ashmead-Bartlett. She is buried in Westminster Abbey. (See Raja Brooke and Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Letters, edited by Owen Rutter, and the Dictionary of National Biography.) Flashman’s memory has again betrayed him on one small point; he may have known Miss Coutts, but not “at Stratton Street”; she did not take up residence there until the late 1840s.
The truth about Brooke’s Burmese wound is far from clear; all that can be said with certainty is that he received it during his service in the Bengal Army in the Assam campaign (1823–5) when he commanded a native cavalry unit and was shot while charging a stockade. Both his principal biographers, Gertrude Jacob and Spenser St John, say that he was hit in the lung; according to Miss Jacob the bullet was not extracted until more than a year later, when it was kept in a glass case by Brooke’s mother. On the other hand, Owen Rutter cites John Dill Ross, whose father knew Brooke well, as the authority for the story that the wound was in the genitals. If this is true it is certainly consistent with Brooke’s reputed refusal of Miss Burdett-Coutts, and with the fact that he never married.
It is possible, of course, that Jacob and St John were unaware of the true nature of Brooke’s injury (although this seems unlikely in the case of St John, who was Brooke’s close friend and secretary at Sarawak), or that they were simply being tactful. Remarks occur in their biographies which are capable of varying interpretations: St John, for example, says that in convalescing from the wound Brooke was “absorbed in melancholy thoughts, and often longed to be at rest”, but that is not necessarily significant – any young man with a wound that had put paid to his military career might well be gloomy. Again, both Jacob and St John refer to Brooke being in love, and briefly engaged (to the daughter of a Bath clergyman) after he had been wounded, and St John adds that “he from that time seems to have withdrawn from female blandishments”. It would be dangerous to draw conclusions from such conflicting evidence, or from what is known of Brooke’s character and behaviour; Flashman, naturally, would be ready to believe the worst.
Whatever Flashman’s opinion of Brooke, he has been an honest reporter of the White Raja’s background and conversation. The picture of The Grove – the furnishings and routine, the formal dinners, the reception of petitioners, even his interest in gardening, his pleasure in comfortable armchairs and home newspapers, and his eccentric habit of playing leap-frog – is confirmed by other sources. Much more important, virtually all the opinions which he expressed in Flashman’s presence, throughout this narrative, are to be found elsewhere in Brooke’s own writings. His views on native peoples, piracy, Borneo’s future, missionaries, colonial development, religion and ethics, honours and decorations, personal ambitions and private tastes – all the philosophy of this remarkable man, in fact, is contained at length in his journals and letters, and his conversation as reported by Flashman reflects it accurately, often in identical words. Even the style of his talk seems to have been like his writing, brisk, assertive, eager, and highly opinionated. (See Brooke’s papers, as quoted in St John, Jacob, et al.)
Charles Johnson (1829–1917) was Brooke’s nephew, and became the second White Raja on his uncle’s death in 1868. He took the name Brooke as his surname, reigned for almost 50 years, extended Sarawak’s boundaries, and earned a high reputation as a fighting man and just ruler. Despite his background, he was an unusually clear-sighted colonialist who predicted at the beginning of this century the end of empire and the ascendancy of new Eastern Powers in the shape of China and Russia.
W. E. Gladstone was one of several liberal politicians who pressed for charges to be brought against Brooke on the ground that his actions against the Borneo pirates were cruel, illegal, and excessive. St John comments bluntly: “James Brooke’s sympathies were with the victims, Gladstone’s with the pirates.” (See Gladstone’s article on “Piracy in Borneo, and the Operations of 1849”.)
An excellent description of a sea-going pirate prau. These vessels, up to 70 feet long, heavily armed with cannon and carrying hundreds of fighting men, were the scourge of the East Indies until well into the nineteenth century. Cruising sometimes in fleets of hundreds from the great pirate nests of the Philippines and North Borneo, they preyed on shipping and coast towns alike in search of slaves and plunder, and set the small naval forces of Britain and Holland at defiance.
While piracy was universal in the Islands, the principal fraternities were the Balagnini, subsidized by the Borneo princes in return for
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