Part Two: The Family That Stole Malaysia

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what's colonizing my sop? Help me out here? How
do I introduce the podcast? I'm Robert Evans and this
is Behind the Bastards, podcast about the worst people from
history and today. And my guest is that doesn't sound

(00:21):
like me. No one's gonna buy that. Sophie, we gotta okay, okay?
Can I try? Can I try to get okay? Ready? Hitler?
I'm Robert Evans. See you know, Sophie, you gotta admit
there's there's it's it's there's there's something. You know. There's
a power in just screaming the name Hitler to introduce
the podcast. There's a reason why I've done it so

(00:42):
many times. It gets attention. It gets attention, It gets attention.
People pay attention when you just shout the name Hitler
into their ears as they're driving to work in the morning.
This is of course Behind the Bastards. Bad people talk
about him. Uh. Sometimes we introduced it by shouting Hitler,

(01:02):
but this time we introduced it with a meandering discussion
about how bad I am at introducing the show. My
guest again, it's Dr Kvehda of the House of Pod podcast,
which deals with a whole bunch of cool medical stuff
are our friend of the pod. Garrison Davis was on
it recently to talk about gun violence. Right That's Rights.
Had him on with a gun. We had him on

(01:23):
to ask questions of a gun violence researcher named Dr
Amy barn Horse. That was a really fun episode. Good good, Yeah.
I mean, I'm actually holding a bullet. Speak it's just
one of my desk bullets, the dust bullets. Sophie's holding

(01:46):
up blood orange cake. You know. I just got a
crate of two and fifty tracer rounds of three oh eight,
which is fun because you can light things on fire
with them. So I'm excited to find some things to
light on fire when I when I got shooting next.
Sometimes if you hit a tree stump because of all
the sap and there, it'll light the whole stump on fire.
It's a hoot. Oh, that's a hoot. As long as

(02:07):
it's wet enough outside. You don't want to do it
during the dry summer day. So we're in the last
couple of months where I can light a stump on
fire and not burn down the forest. There's gonna be
like doctors who are gonna you know, who follow our show,
who are going to be listening to this for the
first time and they're just gonna be like, wait, wait,
hold on, what's going on? What's going on? He talked
about Hitler in guns and what what has happened to

(02:29):
Cave And that's okay, I'm okay, it's okay. Speaking of
what's happened to what's about to happen to Cave is
that he's about to hear about what happens next to
James Brooke literally left off had just kind of at
gunpoint made himself into the governor of a sizeable chunk
of Brunei or Malaysia, whatever you want to call it. Borneo.

(02:51):
Um so he has. He has gotten himself declared governor
at gunpoint, which is the way to do it. You know,
I've I've considered that for a while. I would like
to be a governor. I think I'd be a good one,
Gonna open up whatever state I'm in or lock it down,
depending on wherever it is. I'll do the opposite of
whatever they were doing before. It's a safe bet for governors. Change. Change.

(03:14):
That's what people want, is change, whether or not it's
good change or reasonable change or change. People have asked
for just change things. Yes, Sophie, that doesn't sound like
something I do anyway. Uh So, yeah, James had threatened
himself into being a governor. Uh and this this obviously
the actual leaders in in Brunei at the time, like

(03:36):
the different royal people. Uh, most of them were not
super happy with it. So the Sultan of Brunei doesn't
like that he's been forced at gunpoint to make this
guy a governor. Now, there is a chunk of royals,
as there are kind of anywhere there's British imperialism, there's
a chunk of the ruling class that likes what's happening, right,
And in James's case, it's Prince Badrudine, the guy that
he's got the hots for, and Russia hashim Um, and

(03:58):
both of these guys kind of warded him because even
though he was super problematic and kind of disrespectful, he
also had a bunch of modern canons and they were
more worried about their local rivals than they were about
this British guy who they assumed was going to leave eventually.
They were like, we'll put up with this guy. I mean, Badine,
I think really loved him, but Raja Hashim is more like,
we'll put up with this guy and he'll use his

(04:21):
cannons to help us against our rivals, and that'll be
a good deal for us. And for a while this
worked pretty well. Um, But the whole time James was
kind of solidifying his hold on Sarawak. His rivals, who
included Prince Makota and one of the sons of the
Sultan and brune I, were working behind the scenes to
take back their land from this usurper. And obviously it's
worth noting that none of the people fighting over sarah

(04:43):
Wak had a good moral claim to the land right.
The Sultan and Brunei and his kin are all bad people.
They let raiders bribe them to rob and murder their citizens. James, meanwhile,
wanted to rule sarah Walk for the sake of his
ego and to live out his boyhood dreams of Eastern adventure.
Nobody's nobody in charges, As is generally the case in history,
nobody in charges is a good person or particularly righteous.

(05:07):
This is often how colonial dramas would play out. You've
got a shitty local leader, You've got differently shitty foreign
imperialist interlopers, and you've got a bunch of normal people
caught in the middle. That's kind of the story of
imperialism and part of why it. Part of why imperialists
get traction in places is because a decent number of
locals are always willing to sign on with the imperialist
because like, well, but our current leaders sucked too, you know,

(05:29):
like that's the thing that happens a lot, which is great.
Uh So, James had a decent amount of support among
some folks in the area. A lot of Malay and
Dyak people who rebelled against the Sultan liked him because
even if he had won the war against them, he'd
spared their lives and he'd done it against the wishes
of some of the local powers. Meanwhile, a number of
folks in the interior liked him because he'd gotten the

(05:50):
Rash to call off that big Dyak raid. So the
point is he had a bunch of local support. He
was not like, it was not just him imposing his
will on the local people for guns. Because of things
he did. A decent number of people who lived in
sarah Wak and didn't like the leaders in Brunei supported him.
And honestly, if you were living in sarah Walk at
the time. Given the options, especially if you're one of

(06:12):
the people who was about to get rated by these diets,
you might have supported James Brooke too, right, because it's
just like the Sultans ship too, you know. And and
these people aren't dumb. They get a sense of this guy,
and clearly everything he's done up to this point would
lead you to believe that he's probably gonna get tired
at some point and go back to England and leave
them alone. You would think that's what's going to happen.

(06:32):
I think that would be a reasonable assumption. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's kind of what's happening. They're like, everything
he's done isn't shitty. He's helped us out in a
couple of things we don't like about our leaders. He's
a white dude. He's not going to stay here forever.
He's a rich white boy. He's gonna go home at
some point. Let's use him while he's here, you know.
I think that's the bet a lot of people make now.
At the point in which he became kind of total

(06:53):
ruler of his own little country, James Brooke was thirty
eight years old. He started using the title Raja, which
was not strictly legal because he was not royal in
any way, shape or form. He had been made a
governor um. But he starts calling himself the Rajah. The
locals called him twine Bassar, which means big lord, which
is kind of a rad nickname. Again, and he started

(07:14):
off his reign pretty well by releasing a bunch of
hostages who had been taken during the civil war, so
again kind of ingratiating himself with the local people. Not
a bad move. Um. Now he'd come to power by
defending the cooching Malaise, who were the folks in the
interior that were about to get rated from their rulers
in Brunei. But his territory had an equal population of Dyaks,
and they were not as friendly to him on the

(07:36):
whole because he had stopped some of them from raiding
these cootching Malaise. So James knew that if he was
going to hold on power, he already had the cootching
people like kind of on his back. He needed to
win over these Dyaks to his side, and in order
to do that, he took a leaf out of the
British Empire's playbook. As he later wrote, quote divide and
govern is the motto, I must govern each by the other.

(07:58):
So do you understand what that means? This again what
the British Empire does in in we talked about in
the in the idi Amine episode, and there were certain
tribal groups that they would support an arm to control
other tribal groups. Right, that's the same thing the Belgians do. Yeah,
he's he's learning. That's what he figures out he's going
to do. So his first step was to demolish an
old system set up by both Bruneyan and Malay aristocrats

(08:21):
called the Sarah. This gave those nobles the right to
legally take any diac property they happened to. Like if
they saw a diet boat they fancied, they could cut
a gouge in the top and that was a legally
binding signal that the boat was now their property. Nobles
were also given the right to set prices for produce
that they bought from peasant farmers and gatherers. So like
you gather a bunch of food, or farmer a bunch

(08:43):
of food, and the rich people get to decide what
they pay you for it, which is not a great
deal for the actual people making the food, you know.
Um So, if these little people didn't produce sufficient quantities
of food stuff, their children and spouses could be sold
into slavery. So the Surah is an unpopular their system
among the Dyaks, and James Brooke abolishes it as soon

(09:03):
as he comes to power. Again, not a bad call
so far. He's pretty much to two in my book,
you know. Um So, he also decided early on not
to mess with a local religion. I should clarify. He
decided not to mess with the religious beliefs of the
local Malays who were Muslim. So he sees that like
a lot of the population are Muslim, in kind of

(09:25):
an uncommon move for a British imperial ruler in this period.
He decides, I'm not going to let like missionaries come
in and funk with the Muslims because I think people
have the right to their own religion and that's great. However,
the di Acts were animists, right, so they have kind
of a more not it's they were. They have a religion,
but it's not a Judeo Christian religion, and thus it's

(09:46):
not a religion that James Brooke recognizes as a religion. Um,
and so he is willing to let evangelists go kind
of proselytize to them because he doesn't think they have
a religion, because he doesn't understand exactly he's been to
Islam because all the time the Indian subcontinent, So it's

(10:07):
not foreign to him. This whatever I mean, I don't
know what they were following. Yeah, totally foreign to him. Yeah,
he doesn't know what it is, and so he thinks
they have no religion. His biographer writes that he considered
the Diets to be quote children of nature without true religion,
since their most cherished beliefs were dismissed in the eyes
of civilization as mere childlike superstition. So again, not your

(10:31):
worst case for an imperialist overlord because he respects some
of the local beliefs under gentler imperialist slightly yeah to
some people, I guess now. In all, Brooke championed what
he considered to be a hands off approach to rulership.
He didn't want to engage in the kind of full
scale colonialism that he had seen in India. Instead, he

(10:52):
only wanted to bring in a few Europeans, and he
saw himself as assisting the native leaders, giving them the
benefit of his big European brain, rather than taking over.
He felt that this tactic had quote never been fairly tried,
and it appears to me in some respects more desirable
than the actual possession of a foreign nation. For if successful,
the native prince finds greater advantages, and if a failure,

(11:13):
the European government is not committed. Above all, it ensures
the independence of the native princes and may advance the
inhabitants further in the scale of civilization by means of
the very independence that can be done when a government
is a foreign one and their natural freedom sacrificed. So
that's his attitude here. I'm struck well, he writes, and

(11:33):
this is kind of some like US and Vietnam style thinking,
where it's like, we can't invade this country to declare war,
but we can send in advisors and that way if
we if it goes badly, we're not committed, which didn't
work in Vietnam and spoilers great here. But like that's
the that's the thought process that he has. So critics
will point out that Brooke was regularly heavy handed in

(11:54):
his leadership, although he wouldn't admit to this personally. His
years in power included numerous rebellions and brutal crackdowns on
insurgent campaigns. They will also note that his enlightened colonialism
may have been preferable to him because it was cheaper.
James Brooke definitely had dreams of exploiting the mineral wealth
of sarah Walk, but he never ever gained any kind
of competence at trade or business. The land he conquered

(12:15):
was also not rich in the kind of gyms and
precious metals he wanted. He just did send back one
stone that his laborers found, which he called the Brook Diamond.
He sent this to like England to try to drum
up like enthusiasm for his reign, but when it was
appraised in London, it was found to be a worthless opal. Now, yeah,
the Brook Diamond. I wonder what if that's why I
thought the name Brooke was related to diamonds. I wonder

(12:36):
if I'd ever heard that before. I don't know. I
don't know. They may have a cookie company, yes, but
not so much of the diamonds. Not so much of
the diamonds. So the irony is that the land he'd
stumbled into controlling held a tremendous amount of crude oil.
That's why the Sultan of Brunei today as a billionaire. Right, Like,
there's actually it's very very valuable land to control, but
at the time crude oil was kind of useless. There

(12:58):
were plenty of valuable commodities though with in sarah Wak,
but through financial incompetence, James Brooke repeatedly failed to capitalize
on them. When he took power in like he kind
of estimated the revenue of his country at about five
thousand pounds per year um and although even this sum
was inflated, but as time went on, Like he would
never make a profit out of this. He would eventually

(13:18):
go broke running sarah Wak um because he just like
had no head for actual business. It would not be
fair to say that his motive in sarah Wak was pure,
pure venal profit seeking, but neither was he particularly pure hearted.
For James, ruling was about stature. He didn't want to
get rich off of the wealth of sarah Wak. He
wanted to be a big man who had to be

(13:40):
respected because he was the governor of like he was
the king basically of an entire country. Right to that end,
he started sending home excerpts from his diary and inflated
stories about the rebellion and his campaign's fighting pirates in
the area. These started to pick up a leadership, in
part because he had an agent back and like he
has like a like a press agent who he sends
back his diaries to and who pumped him up in

(14:00):
the imagination of the local people in England. We'll just
not done. He started to pick up a readership. But
James was incensed because, like, while his stories were popular,
the Queen didn't automatically knight him, and he wrote back
to the British government, who still had not acknowledged his reign,
asking for an eight barrel. So he gets frustrated, like
he does all the time, this like work to puff

(14:21):
himself up, and the British Government's like, I don't think
we should recognize this guy. This seems like this might
go bad, Like let's let's just let's just kind of
keep quiet for now. Um. This makes him angry and
he writes back to Britain being like, you guys have
to support me. I'm doing the right thing in this country.
I'm trying to civilize them. And by the way, would
you send me an eight barreled cannon, because I I
think I'm gonna have to kill more of these people

(14:42):
to civilize them properly, so I need a beggar gun.
He's sad he's not immediately knighted, so he's like, can't
have a cannon? And I have a cannon. Yeah, an
eight barreled cannon. I mean that makes sense. One barrel
is not enough to clip Clinton mother. So James's letters

(15:03):
home this period evince a distinct sense of insecurity. After
taking power, he took actions against pirates, often with the
late aid of a local British naval captain and his ship,
but the lack of formal recognition of his own government
rankled alongside the fact that his status as governor had
only been confirmed by the words of the Rajah. There
was nothing written by the Sultan of Brunei that made
his position clear. As the new, unchecked ruler of sarah Wak,

(15:26):
James inherited a number of things, most notably a five
year old Diak boy named Stu. This kid was a
prisoner of the war that he had just fought, and
in his writings, James's care for Settu comes across as
genuine and frankly somewhat heroic. He wrote, quote, the gift
causes me vexation because I know not what to do
with the poor innocent, and yet I shrink from the
responsibility of adopting him. My first wish is to return

(15:49):
him to his parents and his tribe, and I find
I cannot do that, and if I fight, I cannot
do this. I believe it will be better to carry
him with me than leave him to become a slave
of a slave, for should I send him back, such
will probably be his fate. So for a time he
keeps this five year old boy. Uh. And James later
wrote that he was able to make Situ content and
happy um by giving him a bunch of tobacco. So

(16:10):
that's like his to give him cigarettes. Kids love cigarettes.
This will make him happy. Um. Now, Brooke did write
regularly about wanting to find and return this boy to
his parents, but as Nigel Barley writes, it's not easy
to tell how honest he was about wanting this quote.

(16:30):
His relations with Stu are cast in exactly the same
terms of chest beating morality as his relations with the
whole of poor suffering sarah Wak. He will take in
the devastated orphan province, protect it, train it up, give
it the means to earn a living, if only as
a servant, and give it back at self respect, regardless
of the cost to himself. Above all, he will give
it love, And the greatest of these is love. No

(16:51):
wonder then that it becomes a matter of deep concern
whether Settu and other boys were, as claimed objects of
selfless love or active lust. To James Brooke, to debauch
Situ would be to metaphorically debauch innocent sarah Wak. In general,
he would no longer be the founder and protector of
a model state, but the abuser of innocent trust Sarawak. Indeed,
is like a foundling at which you first protect with

(17:12):
hesitation and doubt, but which foundling afterwards repays you your
cost and your trouble. We will never know whether, as Rasha,
James boyled daily and the clammy sheets of unrequited lust,
engaged in a little vague scout masterly fumbling, sublimate a
desire under a stiff rictus of a buncular benevolence, or
reached a sensible standing arrangement with wondering more of his
young men. So again, we don't know if he was

(17:35):
sexually abusing this young child or if he was just
like because of kind of the way things are written,
it's possible that he was. He was possible that he
was like engaged in perfectly consensual sexual relationships with other
adult men and men that were considered adult at the time.
It's also possible he's abusing this kid. And we don't
really know which is going on, but Nigel Barley considers

(17:58):
the idea that he may have been male sting this child.
It's kind of symbolic of his relationship with Sarah Wak
in general. So he's both portraying himself as honestly and
kind of heroically taking this this boy and this province
under his wing, trying to help it, trying to raise
it up, and the possible reality lurking under the surfaces
that he's abusing both of them like that that might

(18:19):
be what's happening. It's definitely what's happening with Sarah walk
We don't know if it's what's happening with the boy
or not, but it's kind of hard I get why
Barley kind of draws a comparison between the two. Yeah,
that's tough. I mean, actually, this guy in general is
not the most bastardly bastard you've covered. It's not so
I kind of want to give him the benefit of
the doubt. But I don't feel like that's the smart

(18:40):
play I feel. I don't think it is something very bad,
and it may not have been with Situ. It may
have been that his sexual relationships were all with people.
We would call it pedophilia still, but fifteen year olds
are kind of legally adults at this point, right, which
I'm not saying makes it right, But if they like
it's they're like lieutenants the military and stuff. That might

(19:01):
be what he can find. We don't really know. Or
he may have been molesting this five year old boy.
We don't know. I do like the phrase vague scout,
masterly fumboy. Yeah. So, as ruler, James took responsibility for
enforcing the law on himself. He had a house constructed
to his own specifications, and he used it as both

(19:24):
his home and the only law court in sarah Wak.
His subjects would attend mainly to gamble on the results
of the proceedings. A fact James seemed largely unaware of.
So like he starts he becomes like I am the law,
I'll rule on all cases, and like an industry, starts
up gambling on how he's going to decide. Is it
because he's just so haphazard that like, yeah, because I

(19:44):
imagine if he really was a good ruler, there wouldn't
be much, you know, much don't much gambling in there.
If if he was a good ruler, there might be
actual professional judges. James also attempted to broke your peace
with the local pirates. To this end, he held us
summit with several of their leaders. He seems to have
fallen in love with them, describing one pirate chief as

(20:05):
as fine a young man as the eye would really
wish to rest upon, straight elegantly, let's yet strongly made,
with a chest in a neck and a head and
set upon them which might serve Apollo legs far better
than that of his belvidere, and a countenance mild and intelligence.
He meets with these pirates because there's a pirate problem
in his domain, and he's just like his thirsty as

(20:26):
buck over these young great I don't know everyone's complaining
about these guys are snacks, what's going on there? He
writes repeatedly about the fact that these young pirate kings
didn't cover their thighs or their torsos, which again profoundly thirsty.

(20:47):
The pirates realized that the white Rajah was kind of
hot for them, and they tried to use his attraction
to them to push him to allow them to go
head hunting in his domain. Brooks own writings relate to
how one of these conversations went between him and a
sexy young pirate named Matari. Quote, and this is Matari speaking,
You will give me, your friend leave to steal a

(21:07):
few heads occasionally, No, I replied, you cannot take a
single head, you cannot enter the country. And if you
were your countrymen, do I have a hundred scrying, I
will have a hundred scring that's the name of these
pirate people heads for everyone you take here. He recurred
to this request several times, just to steal one or
two as a schoolboy asks for apples. That's how James

(21:28):
describes as pirate asking to the head people. At what
point do you think like his mother was reading these
letters and was like, he's really focusing on the thighs
of pirates. I mean, I'm not gonna get grandkids, Yeah,
I don't. I don't think I'm gonna have grandkids out
of this one. Talking a lot about the thighs of

(21:50):
these sexy pirate boys. Paragraphs on his quads. Something's really
a quad man definitely a quad man. Um. And this
is part of why I think it might be less
likely that he was molesting that little kid, because most
of his obsession is with like his he. I mean,
there's a lot of them are teenagers, but older teenagers.

(22:12):
I don't know, you can decide how you what, like
what you think about James Brooke. Clearly something sketchy is
going on. Um, just because a lot of these relationships
are there's a huge power in balance. Like outside of
the fact that some of these people are teenagers, he's
also like now the governor king of the province and
not just a bunch of these young local teenagers. But

(22:34):
later on he starts bringing in young young British boys
who are legally again legally adults, but are also he's
taking like these fifteen and sixteen year olds into the
country and like giving them positions and highly problematic problematic,
you would say, yeah, but you know who won't try
to molest young pirate chieftains. I really don't like where

(22:57):
you're going here, but continue the products and services that
support this podcast. I did not like that one. Well
they won't, Sophie. Yeah, I think we can safely say
that Audible has never thirsted angrily over a pirate attempting
to take heads in their domain. Never doubt Bezos, man,

(23:18):
I you are right, No, I don't know. We know
what Jeff. We've seen Jeff Bezos's sects. We know what
he's into, and it's weirder than liking a pirate kings squads. Yeah,
have you not run into this? Oh my god, Google
Jeff and all you at home who don't know what
I'm talking about. Google Jeff Bezos alive girl? Oh boy, yeah,

(23:43):
go go check into that. Will you listen to these ads?
We're back talking about talking about James brook By eighty three,
it had become clear that negotiation was not going to
bring a conclusion to Sarah Wak's piracy pro them. James
Brooke decided he had no choice but to go to war.

(24:03):
Lucky for him, an East India Company warship that Diana
had just sailed into the area at the time. Again,
this is like the second one of these coincidences that happens.
James had attempted to enlist the company's warships in his
military campaigns before, with mixed success. But the captain this
time was a fellow named Henry Keppel, who was a
very similar sort of person like James, he had been

(24:23):
raised on a steady diet of imperialist popular fiction, and
he too dreamed of fighting pirates in the Far East. Now,
Keppel's actual job in the area was to fight against
a group of raiders who are harassing company shipping nearby.
He was not there to travel around the waters in
Sarawak and fight pirates. But James made a series of
very effective arguments. First, he pointed out that since water

(24:44):
was the primary means of transport around uh Borneo, any
criminals who were sailing on the water were by definition pirates.
So if the company had been sent here to fight
raiders who were using waters nearby, pirates are the same
thing as raiders. That means that your job is also
to fight the pirates and sarah Wak you could justify
it this way. Now, he also pointed out that it

(25:07):
would be profitable for the company because at the time
the British Parliament offered generous bounties to officers and men
who killed or captured pirates. This law was a holdover
from the eighteen twenties, when the British government had declared
a crusade against slavery and human trafficking. Pirates were a
big part of the slave trade, and by monetizing the
murder of pirates, Parliament created an underground economy based around

(25:28):
liberating slaves. Now, of course, those freed slaves were left
destitute without any kind of restitation, restitution or compensation UM
and the people who killed the pirates got rich. So
it was again kind of a fucked up situation, but hey,
what are you gonna do? So James Brooke basically argued
that the the raiders Kepple had been tasked to fight
by the company UM and the rebels and pirates threatening

(25:50):
James's rule in sarah Wak were one and the same.
And again James frames, all of this is fighting pirates.
Some of them are actual pirates, some of them are
rebels who were fighting for other Brunei and princes in
the area, Like He just kind of lumps them all
because they're all on boats. They're all pirates to him,
even though some of them are political dissidents who were
fighting against his regime. For you could argue justified reasons. Um.

(26:12):
He also points out to Keppel that if the company
lets these pirate havens and sarah Wak exist, the rating
of company ships will continue. Eventually, he had made like
a good enough argument that this guy Keppel was like, yeah, okay,
I'll come fight pirates with you. And this gives James
Brook access to an army of Company soldiers, one he
would repeatedly used to butcher pirates and rebels. Now, best

(26:34):
of all, the company helped him avoid maintaining a standing
army or navy. This was very fortunate too, because it
let him save money. Sarah Wak didn't have a formal
military force. He would occasionally like raise up militaries. But
that ship's expensive. If the company's coming in and fighting
pirates on his behalf, and they're being paid by the
British government, and he's maybe being able to argue these

(26:54):
political dissidents are pirates, that means the British government is
paying for the army. That's helping him cement his rule. Right,
that kind of makes sense what he's doing here. So
after working out this arrangement, James Brooke had the Company
land men at his capital, where he was able to
show them off to his people as a sort of
veiled threat. Now in actuality, the Company soldiers spent more
time traveling around Brooks new domain and showing off their

(27:17):
guns than they did actually fighting. There were several encounters
with pirates, but since any locals and boats who had
weapons were to find as pirates, we don't know if most,
or even any of the people killed by Company soldiers
in this period were pirates. The violence quickly escalated, though
largely because Brooke wanted it to escalate. Though their initial
raids had led to a marked drop in pirate activity,

(27:38):
Brooke had Pence, Prince Bodredine, and other local leaders sent
him letters begging for British help with the pirate menace.
This paper trail helped brook And and Kepple justify their
escalating use of force. Soon he had gathered a force
of more than a thousand local troops and Company soldiers.
He marched them deep into the jungle, burning villages as
they went. What had started as an anti pirate campaign

(27:59):
quickly became something akin to a light ethnic cleansing. James
promised his local Malay fighters the right to loot the
villages of their enemies. He promised his diet soldiers the
right right the right to take heads, which they stole
both from corpses of the slain and from ransacked graves.
We'll never know how many people were killed in this
anti pirate crusade, or how many of them were actually pirates,

(28:19):
but it did serve to kind of wipe out any
resistance to him, because, among other things, first he's killing
a bunch of the people who don't want him to
be Raja. And second, everyone who might resist him sees, oh,
this guy can command a company military anytime he wants.
I don't want to fight funk with that. I guess
I'm a little surprised that he even needed a paper trail.
I feel like no one would care if he did

(28:40):
it from the you know, the English side. That's actually
not true, And this is one of the things that
I think when we talk about anti imperialism is not
mentioned enough. It's often kind of I think people tend
to think like everyone in England was okay with this
sort of stuff. They were not a lot of people
recognized at the time how immoral this was, um, how
fucked up all of it was. And there was there

(29:02):
were even within Parliament there was a significant anti imperial
parliamentary faction and we'll talk about that later. Here he
goes on trial for some of this stuff. So there
was actually a reason for him to make a paper trail,
and it's because he knows there are people back whom
we don't support of the imperialism happening. Yeah, this is
it's a little reassuring. Actually, that makes me feel a
little bit better. It's this and they're never successful. Really.

(29:25):
It's the same thing with like when we talked about
King Leopold in Belgium, right, there was an anti imperial
movement that four years was fighting against what he was doing.
They didn't succeed in stopping the genocide until it had
killed thirteen million people. But I think it is important
to note that they exist in part because it means
this is not a everyone at the time thought it
was fine. No, a lot of a lot of elected

(29:46):
leaders in England at the time, we're like, it's bad
what we're doing, right, we're committing crimes against humanity. We
ought to stop um and that's important. It's the same
thing as like there were Founding fathers who were abolitionists
and record nice that slavery was a tremendous evil, and
unlike Thomas Jefferson didn't own slaves while talking about slavery,
as guys like Thomas Paine, and I think you you

(30:08):
need to highlight those folks because it makes it clear
how immoral everyone else was. Yeah, good to know, good
to know. So after this quick brutal little war, Kepple
sailed on Um and another company vessel entered into the
area soon after his departure, and in a very another
wildly lucky like strike for Um, uh for James Brooke,

(30:30):
this next company ship that sails into Sarah Wax strikes
a rock and capsizes. Now the crew and captain are
rescued and James gets to take them into his care
in his capital while he waits for company reinforcements. And
the company sends an entire fleet of ships to pick
up these guys. And this is really lucky for James
because for all of the locals know for massive warships

(30:50):
sail into Borneo and as far as they know he
has some power over these ships. They're not like he
doesn't make it clear to his the locals, like they're
just here to pick up a crew of a boat.
That's something like. It looks like, oh look, now there's
a whole fleet of military ships at his beck and call.
So James takes advantage of the opportunity and he convinces
all of these company warships to sail with him to Brunei,

(31:12):
which is the capital of the region where the Sultan lives.
And he goes ashore to meet again with the Sultan
and asked him for an official declaration confirming his appointment
as governor of sarah Wak and now granting him the
powers of governor. Uh, not just to him, but to
his peirs, his heirs on into perpetuity. Right. So this
declaration also guaranteed in writing that the Sultan could not

(31:35):
dismiss him from his throne for any reason. This is
a bad deal for the Sultan, But the Sultan signs.
When I guess why he signs because there's massive warships
pointing in the capital. Yeah, and he literally James has
these four warships trained dozens of cannons on the Sultan's home.
It is not settled. This guy like, well, he's presented

(31:56):
with this offer and he looks out of his window
and there are dozens of massive artillery guns pointed at
his house. Yeah, sultan had Nope, there you go again,
blitzing and every play this is this is by this
time it's working. Yeah, I am not again. The Sultan
is a bad person too, as pretty much all sultans
in history have been. But you can't consent when someone's

(32:17):
pointing dozens of cannons at your home. I think it's
fair to say that is not like free consent, you know. Um,
this is basically armed robbery. That's how he gets Sarah walks.
This is a mugging, you know. Yeah, yeah, very fortunate.
Um yeah, so uh the Sultan signs this declaration, um

(32:39):
and yeah. One historian Stephen Luscomb states that Brooke quote
gave the distinct impression that he could seize the entire
kingdom for himself if he was so disposed to do so,
and that's why the Sultan like gives him Sarah wak
basically so most people. Again, we had talked about there's
resistance to this, there's people who who see what James
is doing is immoral. It is also important to note

(33:01):
most people back in England see him as a hero
for this right he like. He's continuing to send his
diaries and dispatches back, his agent is putting them into
the popular press, and he becomes wildly popular for what
he's done, and most people credulously accept his version of
events that the people of sarah Wak had basically demanded
he take rules and uses enlightened white wisdom to fix

(33:21):
their country. And for the next several years, Brooks settled
into a pattern engaging in intermittent battle with local princes.
He always described them as pirates, but their local leaders
who don't like his him being in charge. Right again,
these antipo He does also fight pirates, but a lot
of the people he calls pirates are just local leaders
that don't want him to be in charge. Yeah, um yeah.

(33:44):
The East India Company took his words at face value.
Whenever he said someone was a pirate, they assumed he
was telling the truth. Uh. In eighteen forty four, they
helped him depose a local Bruneian prince and annexed that
prince's former territory so the the agreement he'd signed with
the Sultan had included a promise that he would not
act outside the borders of sarah Wak. And like a
year later he conquers a bunch of land outside of

(34:05):
Sarah Walk and annexes him. Because he doesn't like he
doesn't feel like he has to actually abide by this.
He sees this this agreement as like limiting the Sultan's power,
but he doesn't see any of the limitations he agreed
to his binding in any way. Um Now, whenever he
would conquer that he does it a few times where
he'll fight a war against some local leader, calling them
a pirate. He'll conquer their land, and in order to

(34:27):
make it seem legitimate, he'll arrange what he calls a
conference where local leaders will come out in view of
company representatives. So he has witnesses who are white and
ask him to take control of the territory. His friend,
it's a whole show, it's a whole thing. Yeah, he
knows what he's doing, and his friend, Captain Keppel, wrote
about one such encounter. On this occasion, I had the

(34:47):
satisfaction of witnessing what must have been from the effect
I observed it to have produced on the hearers a
splendid piece of oratory delivered by Mr Brooke in the
native tongue with a degree of fluency I had never
witnessed before, even in a Malay. Again, he's saying, oh,
he speaks better than the natives. That's what this guy,
who doesn't speak the local language thinks. He hears this

(35:09):
guy saying words he doesn't understand. Was like, this guy
is better at speaking their language than they are. Of
course I don't speak their language. But was he actually
was there any evidence that he actually spoke the language
or was this just like I think he did. I mean,
he ruled the country, who lived there for most he should.
I believe he didn't gain a fluency, but I don't
know if it's more fluent like neither and neither does

(35:29):
this guy right, because he doesn't know that it's a
splendid piece of oratory. He says that he thinks it
is because of the effect it has on the people hearing,
but he doesn't know what they're saying. It's just this
is like this this guy is Captain Keppel's speech here
is like unbel like the peakest white man ever of like, well,
he I can tell by the way they're reacting that

(35:49):
he must be better at speaking their language than they are.
It's amazing um from these people. Many assurances were received
of their anxiety and willingness to cooperate with us and
our laudable undertaking, and one and all where like urgent
that the government of their river should be transferred to
the English. So again he doesn't speak the language, but

(36:11):
he assumes like, oh, they all really are, they are
all on lockstep that we should take over this area.
How can we not They all clearly assume I'm being
told by other white men that this is what they're
saying to speak a little bit of another a little bit.
This is all you need is a little bit, a
little bit. Yeah. Now. In this manner, James Brooke was

(36:34):
able to portray his gradual conquest of more and more
Bruneian territory is entirely legal, and not just legal, but
driven by the demand of the locals. In eighteen forty five,
James executed a plan that, if successful, would have given
him command of the Sultan of Brunei himself. He started
by sending Prince Hashim away from sarah Wak and back
to the capital along with his beloved Prince Badrudine. The

(36:56):
idea was that Badrudine would keep an eye on Hashim
and that they would back each other her up because
Hashim was now second in lyne to the throne of
Brunei and the Sultan was an old man, so basically
he was his men in the capital. So that when
the Sultan diet, Hashim can take power and James can
kind of carry out a soft coup because he sees
Hashim and bad Rudin is basically they'll do anything I say.

(37:17):
So if I can put this guy on the throne
and this guy next to him, all be in control
of all of Malaysia basically, like that's it or all
of at this point it's brune I. But that's his
plan here, and this also would have been legal, right
because Hashim is the legal heir. So if I can
get this guy on the throne who will do everything
I say, I'll be I'll be writing pretty you know.
That's his that's his idea. I should note here that

(37:39):
James sending bad Rudine away was practical because he trusted
the prince and he wanted him to help him, like
take over this country. But it also fit part of
a pattern that Brooke had with the young men he
fell in love with. The Brook The book White Braja
describes this pattern quote the flattering attention, the seeking out
of the company of the new young find, the selfless,
selfless bestowal of patronage, a concern with his education and development,

(38:02):
the breathy descriptions of his qualities and letters to others,
and usually finally, the emotional retirement of the loved one
to become a sarah Wak official. So this is kind
of his pattern that when he gets over a crush,
he sends them off to like control, some to take
up a little would with them, and then he sends
them off. Yeah, and several of these guys die doing

(38:23):
the jobs he gives them after he sends them off. Spoilers.
But before we get into that, you know who never
sends off their former lovers to die in Malaysia the
products or services that support this podcast. All right, we
are we are in fact back. So unfortunately for Prince

(38:45):
Badru Deine, playing a part in the scheme of James
Brooke to take power would cost him his life. The
Sultan of Brunei was not a dumb man, and he
was fully sick of English adventurers taking over larger and
larger portions of his territory. He was also quite understand
Annibalie still erked about the time Brooke aimed dozens of
cannons at his house, so he started to plot alongside

(39:06):
one of his younger sons about how to rid themselves
of the Brook supporters in their own court, Princess Hashim
and Bodredine. Now they did this in the bloodiest way possible.
One night, when Boderdine and Hashim were apart from each
other in their own separate apartments, the sultan dispatched several
bands of armed men who attacked both brothers simultaneously. Now,
Buderdine was a fucking badass. And this guy like he's

(39:28):
got like four different retainers slash bodyguards with him, and
they get attacked by like fifty men and all of
his friends get killed, and bad Renine is like fighting
standing in his doorway with a dagger alone, stabs a
bunch of people, fights them off for quite a while
until one of them shoots him in the hand and
he has to flee and retreat um and he like
runs back into his inner apartments and locks himself in

(39:49):
with his um, his sister, and his favorite concubine UM
and a favorite slave boy UM and they're all kind
of sheltering together from this attack, and bodreu Deine tells
the slave boy to go run down and grab a
barrel of gunpowder, and he then tells the boy to
like like save yourself basically, and he gathers his Bodrian
gathers his sister and his concubine to him. He spreads

(40:11):
gunpowder around them, and then he blows them all up.
As these guys are like banging down, he's like suicide
bombs his house basically. And that's yeah, I mean it's
a it's a it's a flex like he's a he
very much goes down as kind of the like and
I guess, you know, have questionably moral to take your
your girlfriend and wife or your sister with you whatever,

(40:31):
but like, right, I don't know if they were so
into that plan, but it's a storybook death though, right,
it's like one of those like like he he goes
out kind of like the way you're supposed to go
in the legends or whatever, you know, fighting until you're
two wounded too, and then blowing yourself up with gunpowder. Um.
Prince Hashim tries to do the same thing, but fox
up and kills everyone in the room but himself, so

(40:52):
he has to shoot himself in the head um in
order to once it becomes clear that he's going to
be captured. So these guys get killed a lot with
a couple of other Brook supporters in the capital um,
and the news eventually reaches Sarah Wak and James Brooke
is said to have gone nearly insane with grief when
he realizes what's happened. He writes at the time quote,
violent passions and sleepless nights are hard to bear. I

(41:14):
lay no blame on anyone. I look forward as much
as I can, and backward as little. But I ought
not and cannot forget my poor friends who lie in
their bloody graves. Oh how great is my grief and rage.
But the British government will surely act, And if not,
then let me remember I am still at war with
this traitor and murderer. One more determined struggle, one last
conclusive effort, and if it fail, borneo and all for
which I have so long earnestly labored must be abandoned.

(41:37):
It's very dramatic about this um, and he desperately wants
the British government to intervene and punish the Sultan. But
the British government this is for them a step too far,
because again there is a veneer of legality to this.
And as long as it's like, I want you to
fight pirates, this guy wants us to fight pirates. He's
got letters from the local leaders asking us to help
fight pirates. We have this whole crusade against slaving pirates.

(42:00):
We can justify that. But when he's like, the Sultan
has under his legal powers executed two men, I want
you to murder him, the British government is like, that's
that's a little bit much for us, right, like where
you might draw us into a war in Brunei and
we really don't necessarily want to do that. So it
takes him about six months of pleading to get the

(42:21):
British to send a fleet, and they do send a
fleet eventually, which sails up to the capital and demands
entrant entrance to talk about what had happened, and in
a very and another stroke of luck for Brooke, the
Sultan's men get kind of trigger happy and fire on
the British fleet, which gives them the legal justification to
burn down all of the defenses and sail into Brunei.
So the Sultan flees during the fighting, and the British

(42:44):
are able to put a puppet, Hashim's brother Mohammed, on
the throne, and this is the start of the of
Brunei becoming a protectorate of the British Empire. Right. That's
how this happens is because there's this failed coup that
the Sultan cracks down, the British senden ships to talk
about the fact that he's murdered, James books his friends,
and then the Sultan's men fire on the British and
that lets them depose the Sultan. They had considered just

(43:07):
making James Brooke the Sultan of Brunei, but they decided
that would be a step too far even for the
British Empire, and the fact that they've got a puppet
sultan on the throne works out better for them because
it seems more legitimate. But they're able to convince this
guy to give the British Empire an island full of
coal nearby that they can use as a refueling station,
and the whole situation makes James Brooke and national hero again.

(43:27):
His rule over sarah Wak was now absolutely written in stone,
and all local resistance had been broken. There's no more
authorities in the area who have any sort of resistance
to him being in power. And so now that he's
got his kind of rule settled for the first time
in eighteen forty seven, he decides to travel back home
to the land of his birth to bask in the
glory of his fame. The Times of London, working with

(43:50):
his agent, published a fawning piece on him just as
he arrived in town. Quote much as we go, oh
to guns and grape shot, we are indebted still more
to the peaceful and meritorious exertions of one man for
the advances which have happily been made towards civilization in
peace amongst the Malay people of whom we speak. England
owes a debt of obligation to Mr Brooke, Rajah of
sarah Wak, which she will not easily repay. Wow. Journalism

(44:13):
was not not fantastic at the time. They were really
impressed with how peacefully he had burned down all of
those diligious in the interior. What a peaceful series of wars.
He's delightful. Look at him. This guy is hailed as
a hero. When he arrives back home, Oxford gives him
an honorary doctorate. The school he'd run away from as

(44:35):
a boy, which had refused to take him back, announced
as a dinner in his honor. He was even given
a personal meeting with the Queen herself. After six months
or so, though, he'd had phil his fill of the
home country, and he booked passage home on a ship
commanded by his friend Kepple and stalked with a significant
number of teenage boys new officers. I have one request, couple,

(44:56):
let me look at one request. How many boys will
there be? Uh? And again? These these boys are all
simultaneously old enough to command troops in battle and young
enough that I think we should continue to call them boys. Right.
These are children that said their children who are given
command of army. Sometimes it's a weird time. So James

(45:20):
is got to s this. This, this voyage back to
the East, is a blissful period of his life. He
gets to spend months locked on a boat with a
bunch of young boys. One of his friends, who was
present on the voyage, later wrote he had a nephew
on board, Charles Johnson, a staid sub lieutenant who endeavored
to preserve order, but it was of little avail. The
noisy ones were in the ascendant, led by a laughing,

(45:41):
bright faced lad who, when he was a midshipman on
the Agincourt in eighty seven, had become acquainted with Mr Brooke,
and whose fondness for cherry brandy was only equalled by
his love of fun. No place in the cabin was respected.
Six or seven would throw themselves on the bed, careless
of whether Mr Brooke was there or not, and skylock
over his body as if he were one of themselves.
In fact, he was as full of play as any

(46:03):
of them. This is, of course, in reality, what's happening
is there's probably a bunch of these guys there that
just have no choice, but the fond over him because
he has so much power over them. And this guy
is this quote this he's quomoing it at this point,
you know, yeah, it is. Also there are references made

(46:24):
in his biography and other books at the time of
like if you were a young British boy on a boat,
like a naval aid or one of these things. You
got molested, that was and in some cases it would
be like because obviously some portion of these these folks
like that that they wind up being into it, which
doesn't mean it's not abusive, it's complicated. The navy is
kind of one of those few places where people who

(46:46):
are homosexual, like you can have gay relationships in the
navy and they're kind of there. No one considers it
gay because you're on a boat, you know, Like that
is that is a factor in all this. That said,
James is also clearly he is the powerful young he
has the power for king, like a rich king, and
he like these are not you can't really be consensual relationship.
There's a lot going on here. These are the complicated

(47:07):
relationships that Herman Melville left out of Billy Bud in
Moby Dick. You know. Yeah, and this is like again
like the cabin boy gets buggered, right, that's the that's
the fact of naval life in this period of time.
And it does kind of seem though, like what goes
on in this voyage is beyond what naval men are
familiar with, and naval men have a lot of tolerance

(47:30):
for this kind of thing, because again it's that's how
the Navy works at the time. But they like other officers,
like people who are on board. Note that there's a
lot of coolness from the older officers to James Brooke
because of his relationship with these boys, because it's so
scandalous and so shameless, right, there's an expectation of some buggery.

(47:50):
He's like cavorting with a half dozen young men in
his room loudly at all hours of the night, and
that's not considered to be okay. Um. And James was
noted as being particul reularly friendly with Charles Grant, a
boy he had met at age fourteen and immediately showered
with expensive weapons, clothing, and jewelry. James wrote an erotic
poem for this boy, which he framed as it's it's

(48:12):
about sex, but literally the poem is about a bunch
of young boys eating a plum pudding. Um, I'm gonna
read you. I'm gonna read you. An excerpt from this
rotic pudding poem. So stands Doe Citadel, a virgin post
and captured, though begirt with many a host like other
virgin places that I want and captured. Yet because a

(48:35):
sailed not smoking, it stands and seems to dare the
worst the storm of strife, not Cara when it burst.
And youthful Dottie Dotty is his nickname for this boy
fairly firmly stands his ground, unflinching. Still he's swallowed full
of pound. What I like about this poem is how subtle.
It is, very subtle, very subtle, No, not at all.

(49:02):
One of the things that's tough here is it's very
hard to define when you're talking about a lot of
the relationships in this period. A lot of them are
profoundly abuse of A lot of them would be considered
pedophilia today. There's also a lot of these young men
for whom like they consider this to be like kind
of their homosexual and this is like the only kind
of relationship they get they get to have that is

(49:23):
that is not going to get them in trouble. So
it's really fucking complex, Like the dynamics of sexuality in
the British Navy in this period is a complex story
that we're not doing enough justice too. I think it
is fair to say that it definitely seems James Brooke
is more on the pedophile end of things, right, he is.
He has a marked preference for fourteen to seventeen year

(49:44):
old boys, and while they may be considered adults at
the time, there's a massive power and balance and what
he's doing is very sketchy and I would heart you abusive,
although a number of these boys right very positively about him,
which is not unheard of an abusive situations, especially given
the socio dynamics at the time, and he's grooming all
these kids, you know, he's grooming exactly very complicated situations.

(50:05):
But I do think it's fair to say it seems
likely he was sexually and emotionally abusing these kids, even
if some of them went on to think fondly of
him because he showered them with gifts. You know, I'm
starting to think he's not a great guy. Yeah, scout,
masterly fumbling, you know that that's what's going on here.
James dedicated another poem entirely to Charlie's pimple's um and

(50:26):
actively it's pretty bad. I'm wanna put this to a song.
I want to I want to hear the lyrics. I'm
gonna I wanna make a song out of it. I
did not come across that poem, and I don't really
want to. The pudding one was uncomfortable enough. Um. He

(50:46):
encouraged the boy to join him in Sarah Wakin serve
in the colonial government, and Charlie did eventually do this.
To try and win over Charlie's parents, James Brooke gave
his mother a golden bracelet and his father promises that
he would put away five thousand pounds in a trust
for the boy. He never actually did this, but Charlie
went to join him in the administration of Sarah Wak
Corneyway didn't do it. He's such a fucking piece of ship.

(51:08):
Is a giant piece of ship. For the next twenty years,
James Brook faced few threats to his sovereignty. One of
the most serious was a parliamentary inquiry and a trial
conducted in Singapore over the massacre of pirates during his
his his rule. And the story here is complex because
the specific series of events, the specific massacre of pirates

(51:28):
that James has tried for, is actually one of the
cases which he was probably justified. He and he and
his men are attacked by pirates. They killed like a
hundred of them, but they let the rest go and
choose not to capture or massacre them because he doesn't
want to. He knows that that will like incite more
of an insurgency against him, which is in the broad
strokes of his time ruling Sarah Wak one of the

(51:49):
less unethical things he did. Um. But a group of
kind of anti colonial activists in the Parliament decided to
try him for this and basically claim that he was
massacurring civilians and in the guys of fighting piracy, which
he absolutely did in his career, but probably not in
the specific case they tried him over. Right. It's a
very it's a frustrating situation of like, you're right about

(52:11):
this man, you picked the wrong specific incident to get
angry about him over you know, um, And yeah, uh
it was, And a lot of it's mixed up also
in there's genuine anti colonialists who rightly see James Brooke
as immoral and what he's doing as immoral and want
to fight him. There's also a lot of selfish people involved,

(52:32):
like he he fires his agent at some point and
his agent gets involved in the campaign against him to
like get revenge against him. So it's there's a lot
going on here and his his fired agent creates something
called the Aborigines Protection Society to drum up public outrage
about James Brooks crimes and a lot of what this
says our lies, but their lies that are like, he's
making up things that James Brooke did for real and

(52:53):
they just didn't get evidence of over there. So it's again,
it's very messy. It's like the Project Lincoln of the time. Yeah, exactly,
it's yeah, it's that's exactly the the Lincoln project of
colonialism that you guys aren't wrong. You're also not doing
this for the right reason. Yeah, and one of you
was probably also a pedophile, as was the case with
the Project Lincoln guy. So James survived the trial and

(53:17):
was eventually acquitted, but the process was brutal and savaged
his reputation back home. It seems fair to say that
both the specifics of the outrages he was accused of
in Parliament were often inaccurate and unfair, and that the
actual terrible things he did and wasn't tried for more
than justified the public outrage he he finally received. So
I guess that's good. I don't know, I don't know

(53:38):
how to classify that public turns against him for a while. Yeah,
yes they do, um so, But this doesn't he he
doesn't get convicted and the last great challenge to Brooke
rule in sarah Wak would finally turn the public back
on his side. Unfortunately it came in eighteen fifty six.
As I noted last episode, James had always hated Chinese people,

(53:58):
but he had recognized at they had a lot like
they He brought them in. He encouraged their immigration into
sarah Walk, which fundamentally changed the ethnic dynamics of the country.
Because he wanted them to improve the local economy, he
wanted to tax them, and he knew that they would
like if he invited these Chinese people who owned businesses
and wanted to set up trading businesses in his country,

(54:18):
it would improve his tax base. Um And, because he
was so constantly short on money, even though he was
very racist against the Chinese, James came to rely on
them entirely for his like the taxing that funded his reign.
He mainly did this by taxing opium heavily, which led
to the smuggling of opium into sarah Walk, which led
to a thriving population of the Triads and sarah Wak,

(54:39):
so he creates the space for organized crime by bringing
all these people in and then taxing opium heavily, which
creates a market for untaxed i legal opium, which brings
gangs in, you know, like that. Like that, that's the
process that occurs here. Unrest built and built, and since
by the geopolitical situation at the time, there's a bunch
of conflicts between the British and Chinese government rents and

(55:00):
the fact that a British man is governing and sarah
Wak makes a lot of these particularly these Chinese folks
who connected the Triads angry, and eventually a plan starts
to form within a segment of the Chinese community to
murder the Rajah and his officers and to take control
of sarah Wak for themselves. And part of why they
think they can do this is they watch James do it,
you know, like it doesn't seem like give me that

(55:21):
hard to kill you, like you don't have a standing mill.
They we can just kill you take power like you did. Uh. Now,
Brooks had an intelligence agency basically had like people keeping
an ear to the ground, and they hear about this
plan to coop him before it could be executed. He's
actually away um in in a Brunei at the time
when they find evidence of this plot, and one of
his officers orders the garrison called up, gets like a

(55:43):
bunch of soldiers called into action, hands out guns to them,
and man's a bunch of forts around the capital and
for a little while, this forces the plotters to delay
taking action because they don't want to attack a bunch
of fully armed forts and stuff. So James comes back
from Brunei in eighteen fifty seven and he finds all
of these four manned and his soldiers on high alert,
and this makes him furious because it's expensive to keep

(56:04):
a garrison active, and he basically yells at his officer,
what the funk are you doing? This Chinese threats thing
sounds like bullshit. Send these guys home and lock their
guns back up. As soon as this happens, six hundred
armed Chinese rebels attack, so his luck finally ran out.
H Yeah, and this makes it clear that it had

(56:25):
been more luck than brilliance, because this is a bad call.
So the rebels came in the night, and when the
attack started, James panicked and hid in his room. A
servant who realized that like they were under attack, tried
to rescue him, and James strangled the man. Then he
watched through the window while one of the eighteen year

(56:47):
old boys he'd collected and made an officer. This is
an English boy that he liked, you know, one of
his boys who he brought to Sarah with him. They
the Chinese catch this kid and mistake him for James,
and he watches from his room while this kid beheaded
and has his head shoved on a pike in the
front yard of his of his capital. So James abandons
his servant and everyone else and escapes through his bathroom

(57:08):
window and runs away to go hide in the jungle.
The insurrection was initially successful. Chinese fighters took over the
courthouse and most of the capital. They butchered many of
Brooks officers and local loyal leaders. James Brooke hid terrified, well,
a brave gup group of his Malay followers fought back,
launching an insurgent campaign against the Chinese occupiers. European writers

(57:29):
would later give James Brooke credit for this, saying he
inspired the resistance even though he was again hiding in
the jungle. At this point of time. The truth is
that he did nothing. Were an alliance of Malays Di
x and some European evangelists. There's like a church leader
who picks up a bunch of guns and goes to
fight against this. Uh insurrection actually fought back and forced
the Chinese forces out of the capital. A general massacre followed,

(57:52):
and this was probably incensed by a lot of the
racism that James Brooke had inculcated against the Chinese during
his reign, and about fifteen hundred of sarah four thousand
Chinese citizens were massacred in an orgy of blood letting
in thievery. So that's cool. Yeah, Well I don't cool.
I mean it's not great. It's not great. Not great. Um. So,

(58:13):
this insurrection didn't succeed in destroying Brooke ragin over Sarah Walk,
but it did break James. The experience aged him rapidly,
and within a few years he was all but unable
to handle the demands of Raja hood. In eighteen sixty three,
James handed over formal control of Sarah Walk, who his
adopted heir, a guy named Charles Brooke. Now Charles was
not actually James's son, as James had little interest in breeding,

(58:37):
but he this is the young boy basically starts as
a young boy who he gives control over two and
and James or Charles adopts the name Brooke and becomes
like his adopted son. Um. James would technically remain the
White Raja for the last five years of his life,
but in reality he fled sarah Wak for England, where
he lived out his last days doing the thing he
did best, obsessing over young boys. Nigel bar Early writes

(59:00):
quote in eighteen sixty six, he read in the newspaper
of a thirteen year old youth, Samuel Bray, who had
saved a friend from drowning in Devonport, and he became
unhealthily excited. He traced the lad sent him half a
sovereign and tried to open a correspondence with him. Oh man,
he never never gives up. God, this guy he just
you know what it does. He does the stuff that like,

(59:22):
you know, that cramping feeling you get in your gut
when you hear or see something so douchey, like these
douche cramps. Like that's like what I get from a
lot of this guy's actions. It's just like he's just
goes a little extra and he's just such a creep
with these young guys. He's a he's real creep. It's
not good. It is what happens. Um on Christmas Eve,

(59:44):
this is the best part. In Christmas Eve of eighteen
sixty seven, James Brooke has a stroke. Uh. This leads
to a series of strokes which ends his life in
June of eighteen sixty eight. So that's good. That's the
first thing he's done that I fully approved of. I'm
torn is a radical doctor. I never approve of strokes,
but I mean, if you're you know this in this case,
and it's not the worst stroke, that the worst stroke.

(01:00:07):
How old was he? Jesus, he would have been like
sixty's for the age just a long time. And especially
considering the ship. This guy gets wounded a bunch of times,
he said, the tropics. You know, he gets a bunch
of illnesses. Um. So this is the end of James Brooke,
but not, of course, the end of the Brook dynasty.
Charlie Brooke, otherwise known as Raja Charles, lost no time

(01:00:30):
in going to war to expand brooke control of brune I.
He justified his conquests as a crusade to end the
barbaric practice of head hunting. Now, if you remember, James Brooke,
his predecessor, had encouraged head hunting and had used like
he had paid his diet soldier by being like, you
guys can take as many heads as you want, because
like having access to a bunch of heads like you
would like give them off in marriages and stuff. They're

(01:00:51):
a symbol of your virility in this culture. So James
takes advantage of that so he doesn't have to pay
them in money. And Charlie then uses like, there's all
these head hunters here for some reason, we have to
fight a bunch of wars to get rid of the
head on Dinga and that's how he expands his domain.
So weird, this thing happens over and over in the
British and you'll find people today who will kind of

(01:01:12):
whitewash British crimes of imperialism with stuff like, well, but
they stopped the barbaric practice of women throwing themselves on
the funeral pyres of their husbands in India, which is
a horrible thing. It's bad for it to be the
norm for women to commit suicide when their husbands die.
I would agree. The British weren't fighting that because it
was the right thing to do. It was used as
a justification for power graps, just like head hunting is

(01:01:34):
used by Charles, and just like the anti slavery crusades,
where uses the justification for a bunch of fucked up shit. Um. So,
Charles blamed head hunting on the local women because it
was kind of a sign of your virility if you
captured heads. So he uses that to blame the women
for basically what he he He not only conquers a
bunch of land to stop headhunting, he orders sexual violence

(01:01:56):
against Dyak women in order to punish them for like
supporting head hunting. Yeah, he's He's worse. He's much worse.
He's very bad. In his last years of ruling, after
the Chinese Insurrection, Rasha James had repeatedly attempted to convince
the British government to annex sarah Wak and incorporated into
the Empire. Officially, the government had never quite bitten on

(01:02:19):
this offer, and once Rossa Charles took power, he made
it clear that the Brook dynasty had no further desire
to sell out to the Motherland. Instead, Charles pursued expansion
at the expense of the Sultan of Brunei, which is
again now a British protectorate. This led to a conflict
with the newly established British North Borneo Company, which was
kind of running Brunei and was not interested in letting

(01:02:41):
the Brooks take over. Now through a series of military campaigns,
Raja Charles took over a region called the Limbang in
eighteen ninety, but he failed to conquer Brunei itself because
of the British, like the north Borneo Company um. And
this really frustrated Charles because he wanted to control Brunei.
He wanted to conquer everything, but he can't because of
this British company and the fact that the British north

(01:03:03):
Borneo Company had stopped him from taking Brunei leads Charles,
who was an imperialist Raja of a conquered land, to
become an anti imperialism crusader. Rebranding Yeah, he publishes well
he is again the White Raja of Sarah. He publishes
a pamphlet um titled Queries Past, Present in Future, in

(01:03:26):
which he critiques the specific sort of imperialism that ran
counter to the kind of imperialism he supported. It's a
remarkable document because in eighteen ninety this guy, who literally
ruled a conquered Asian nation based on the power of
Western guns, accurately diagnoses the problems of imperialism. Quote. It
is something dreadful to contemplate, and yet too true that nearly,

(01:03:48):
if not all, of our magnificently built colonial towns and
colonial developments of every description have their foundations upon the
bones of the aborigines of the soil. One asks if
the benefits bestowed upon their success are sufficient to justify
such sacrifices. I am fully aware that there are many
occasions when bloodshed cannot be avoided, and that a certain
amount of severity is necessary in governing all races, white

(01:04:11):
or dark. But as we rule at present, I fail
to see any hope of improvement respecting the real elevation
of the natives by intellectual culture. If we look upon
the sad side of the picture of the making of
our immense empire, we should pause a moment and ask
if there will not be a day of reckoning in
the near far and the not far off future. Do
all them yet so like that, that's not unreasoned, that's

(01:04:32):
very accurate. Actually he doesn't see that, you're just as
much a part of this as the British North Thornio Company.
But it's accurate. Russia. Charles goes on to list British
imperial possessions that had been won by conquest and aptly
diagnosed the evils perpetuated, perpetuated in those places, quote New Zealand,
years of warfare to subdue as finer races ever on

(01:04:52):
trod God's Earth. What are they now? Australia Mostly he's
talking about the Aboriginals here Australia mostly killed off by
native police raised for this purpose, the Aborigines being found
somewhat dangerous to Europeans gold workers and farmers. India, frequent
collisions and battles occur, the interior still being much unsubdued,
and its inhabitants very strong, Burma fighting occasional battles, and

(01:05:14):
the natives put to the sword when the country was annexed.
So he's again very accurately calling out the genocides of
Aboriginal people, thing about this, that's weird. Yeah, while order
ordering campaigns of sexual violence against the women of the
country in order to stop a cultural practice that his
direct successor had. Man, I want this to have I
shouldn't say this as a doctor, but I want him

(01:05:35):
to stroke too. Yeah, yeah, you do, you do? You
want them all kind of a couple of more Strokes
could have really handled things well from Malaysia here. So,
after again very accurately describing the evils of imperialism Russia,
Charles botched the diagnosis of their cause in a profoundly
self lagrandizing way. The problem, he said, was not imperialism,
it was the fact that quote, the right men to

(01:05:57):
deal with the natives are not chosen, and such men
should be very carefully picked. So Charles Brooke was not
against white men ruling foreign lands for profit, but they
had to be the right white men him. He got
that from James. From James, Yeah, yeah, he did. Now.
Raja Charles replaced the courtroom chairs his adopted father had
set up with an iron bench, which he considered a

(01:06:19):
symbol of the immutable power of his law. And he was,
in general a more toxic version of everything his adopted
father had been. And while Raja James had failed to
actually spawn, and he recognized descendants Russia. Charles took seriously
his royal imperative to make heirs to the throne. Three
of his children survived to adulthood, including a man who
would succeed him as the third Brook, Raja Charles Viner

(01:06:40):
Brook and I'm gonna quote from the Daily Beast here.
In nineteen eleven, Charles's son Viner married Sylvia Brett, who
would eventually embraced the crude title. One headline writer gave
her the Queen of the head Hunters. When Sylvia first
arrived in sarah Walk with her brother, he found the
place very different from what I had anticipated. Far safer,
far more advanced, far happier, far more civilized, a very

(01:07:01):
happy country, guided by European brained, but untouched by European vulgarity.
The magic of it all possessed me. Sylvia would recall
sites sounded sense there was in this abundant land everything
which my heart had yearned for. Now. Eventually, Sylvia's self
dramatizing streak eclipsed her aesthetic sense, playing up in eleven
books and countless headlines. The exotic anomaly of these British

(01:07:22):
blokes running a jungle kingdom, The rainy Sylvia ended up
downplaying the progress that Rasha's in their country made. She
and her husband had also had numerous affairs and encouraged
their daughters to be equally libertine. The three princesses, Leonora,
Elizabeth and Nancy, nicknamed Gold Pearl and Baba by reporters,
dressed like quote tarts, had flamboyant escapades with numerous men
and married eight times, including to a band leader and

(01:07:44):
a boxer. Thank God I haven't had four daughters, Byner claimed,
what a family? So yeah. One of his daughters, Mary's
a jazz musician, the other Mary's a wrestler, um and
the daughter who marries a wrestler. Princess Baba travels to
Hollywood to try and sell screenplay based on the life
of James Brooke. Princess Baba also repeatedly floated a plan

(01:08:05):
to buy land next to the Sarah Walk and turn
it into a rival kingdom called Baba Land. Fun people. Yeah.
The Brooks of the twentieth century enjoyed little of the
positive pr that had turned James Brooke into a celebrity.
Much of this had to do with their libertine natures.
They're kind of sucking around and getting wasted constantly. At

(01:08:25):
one point, Rainey Sylvia was found dancing with two prostitutes
in a nightclub and then taking them back to her
palace to have their portraits painted. A visiting MP from
Westminster wrote that, quote a more undignified woman, it would
be hard to find. It was obvious to even casual
observers that the Brooks had turned sarah Wak, a land
with more than half a million citizens, into their private playground.
One critic noted with disgusted that quote everything in this

(01:08:48):
obscure little country bears the stamp of slackness and hopeless disorder.
The brook dynasty's end began with World War Two. One
of the benefits of being ruled over by the Brooks
was supposed to be the fact that sarah walk would
received the protection of the English Crown. British ships and
soldiers had regularly fought in sarah Wak to put down
internal rebellions and fight pirates, after all, but as soon
as the country was menaced by a real foreign threat

(01:09:11):
the Japanese Empire, British guns were nowhere to be seen.
When sarah Wak was liberated at the start of the war.
The destruction it had suffered was too extensive for the
Brook family to afford to rebuild. They finally handed over
control of their domain to Great Britain, who paid the
family two hundred thousand pounds for the Kingdom Sarah Wak
would mark the very last colonial acquisition of the British Empire.
The country finally received its independence in nineteen sixty three

(01:09:34):
and joined a federation with Malaya, North Borneo and Singapore.
The last white Rajah and Rainey had an uncomfortable retirement
in England. Sylvia hated being quote short of our glory
and faced with the necessity of adjusting to a world
in which we were no longer emperors but merely two ordinary,
aging people, two misfits in the changing pattern of modern times.

(01:09:55):
Oh my god, this family sucks. They suck, and they
would rule from more than a century god well into
based on dumb luck. So annoying. Yeah, all this stuff
with this family, I mean, has this has this guy
been popularized? The original James Brooke? Was he ever popularized

(01:10:16):
in like popular culture? Was there movies made of him
or anything? I'm assuming still to this day people probably
only the more common popular cultures speaks of him. Well right, yeah,
I think so. I mean, even like the stuff you'll
find written recently, articles will point out that like he
was a relatively benevolent ruler and he did this and
he did that, um, which I don't think is fair.

(01:10:37):
You could argue more benevolent than the East India Trading Company,
which perpetuated a genocide that killed thirty million people. Yes, yeah,
a very low bar. Oh there is um. Edge of
the World stars Hollywood actor John Rice Myers as Brooke,
Dominic Monahan as Colonel Arthur Crookshank and Hong Kong actress

(01:10:58):
Josie Hoe as Brooks, former of Madeline Limb. So yeah,
the movie Raja. Oh I guess Raj is the movie?
Um god? Oh it was retitled The Edge of the World. Okay,
oh this is being made in Oh my god, this
is yeah, that that February. This is not Oh my god,
what are you people doing? Stop? They've given they made

(01:11:20):
a Hong Kong actress his his love interest, the love
interest of a man who was almost undeniably at least
engaged in questionable sexual relationships with teenagers. And it worst
a a straight up pedophile predator, like desperate for they
had to go to this, I mean the hot God

(01:11:42):
damn it. Wait wait, god damn who who's starring? Is him?
What's his name? Dominic Monahan, John Rice Myers, John Rice Meyers. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he's yeah, I mean they made him hot. God damn it.
I'll put I'll put a picture in here. Fucking hell.
Why did they they did this? I mean, it was

(01:12:03):
okay when they did this for um, for um David
Koresh because he was hot. But this is just No
one questions that, No one questions, No one questions how
hot David Koresh was. But I guarantee you fucking James
Brooke was not this hot. Look at it, look at
and they get hired an Irish actor when in reality, yeah, yeah,

(01:12:24):
that's not fair. Oh no, God damn it. They okay.
The synopsis on IMDb is at the epic tale of
Sir James Brooke, the British adventurer who became King of
sarah Look in the eighteen forties and embarked on a
lifelong crusade to in piracy and head hunting. This is
going to be awesome. Can we just get together, Let's

(01:12:48):
let's do that. Fuck this movie and fuck James Brooke
the British Empire. Yeah, agreed. Also check out the song
Fuck the British Army if you're if you're feeling feeling
more of those vibes. Um, oh, there's some good news.
The family of George Floyd reached a twenty seven million
dollar settlement with the City of Minneapolis in a wrongful

(01:13:09):
death suit. All right, that does kind of speak well
for what I hope will happen to Derek Chauvin in
the trial. Um, well, got it. You've got some plug
doubles to plug before we write out. Yeah, I should
promote our show a little bit better than I did
last time, or my co host will hurt me. So
we have a podcast called The House of Pod. It's

(01:13:30):
like a medical podcast, but it's like pretty relatable and
it's not just for doctors. So, um, we talk we
cover medical topics, but we also talk about things, um
like you know, systemic racism and medicine, sexual harassment in medicine.
We try to cover a lot of different topics that
we think are important, and we have guests ranging from
like the world expert physicians, like the best doctors in

(01:13:51):
the world, to you know, Robert Evans so you should
check it out. I think you'll like it. Um find
this at the House of Pod, at Twitter and anywhere
you do your podcasting. Yeah, check it out. Um Uh,
yell at the people making the movie about James Brooke, um,
because it seems like a bad idea. What the world

(01:14:12):
needs now is for us all to idolize a man
who conquered an entire country for his own self aggrandizement,
paid his mercenary local soldiers in the heads of their enemies,
and then gained a reputation as fighting head hunting. Um
that's great. I mean he did, like he had a
couple of anti head hunting like crusades and stuff throughout

(01:14:35):
his career, But when he needed the people who were
head hunting to fight for him, he paid them in heads.
So I don't I'm not gonna call him an opponent
of head hunting. Um. I just I just don't see
how in this day and age, people are still buying
the story. You know, Yeah, you know it's because, like
funck Man, I I it's hard. Not like I was

(01:14:55):
raised on a lot of impre like I read a
lot like King Solomon's minds and stuff. I've talked about
this someone episode, these books about like the the age
of exploration and adventure, and like there's always been like
I've made some of the decisions I've made in my
life because I wanted to have, you know, adventures in
places that that seemed exotic and strange and unfamiliar to me.
It's a powerful impulse, particularly within our culture. So you

(01:15:19):
there's a lot of desire for these guys to have
actually been heroes for what they did do have been heroic. Um.
And in part because it justifies further colonial adventures, and
in part because just people like a good adventure story.
But I think it's pretty harmful. I think it's pretty harmful. Yeah.
You know, I'm not mad at everyone who contributes in

(01:15:42):
a tiny ways to Orientalism, you know. I mean sometimes
it leads to people learning more about these cultures and
you know, more about like you know, Iron for example.
So it's not always bad, um, but it kind of
gets it does get so easy for it to go bad. Yeah,
I mean, it can in some cases be so of
the seed that leads someone to an actual nuanced understanding

(01:16:03):
of both like a different culture and and that can
be positive. Um. But more often I think it leads
to James brook You know James Brooke. Um, yeah, it's
not great. He's not great, but yeah he's not hot,
not as hot as they're making him, not nearly as
hot as David Karrett. Um. So yeah, I guess if

(01:16:26):
I'm going to ask my listeners to do anything, it's
think about David Koresh's unbelievably cut abs, just shredded abs.
Then check out the House of hod Um, or do
both at the same time. You can do both at
the same time. We may talk about his abs on
the show. We may talk about his abs. Abs are
an important part of health um And here's at the

(01:16:47):
end of the show.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: The Family That Stole Malaysia