Tales of the Malayan Coast Part 6

Brooke was a king at last. His empire was before him, but he was only king because the reigning Sultan relinquished a part of his dominions that he was unable to control. The tasks to be accomplished before he could make his word law were ones that England, Holland, and the navies of Europe had s.h.i.+rked. His so-called subjects were the most notorious and daring pirates in the history of the world; they were head-hunters, they practised slavery, and they were cruel and blood-thirsty on land and sea. Out of such elements this boy king built his kingdom. How he did it would furnish tales that would outdo Verne, Kingston, and Stevenson.

He abolished military marauding and every form of slavery, established courts, missions, and school houses, and waged war, single-handed, against head-hunting and piracy.

Head-hunting is to the Dyaks what amok is to the Malays or scalping to the American Indians. It is even more. No Dyak woman would marry a man who could not decorate their home with at least one human head. Often bands of Dyaks, numbering from five to seven thousand, would sally forth from their fortifications and cruise along the coast four or five hundred miles, to surprise a village and carry the inhabitants'

heads back in triumph.

To-day head-hunting is practically stamped out, as is running amok among the Malays, although cases of each occur from time to time.

As his subjects in the jungles were head-hunters, so those of the coast were pirates. Every harbor was a pirate haven. They lived in big towns, possessed forts and cannon, and acknowledged neither the suzerainty of the Sultan or the domination of the Dutch. They were stronger than the native rulers, and no European nation would go to the great expense of life and treasure needed to break their power. Brooke knew that his t.i.tle would be but a mockery as long as the pirates commanded the mouths of all his rivers.

With his little schooner, armed with three small guns and manned by a crew of white companions and Dyak sailors, he gave battle first to the weaker strongholds, gradually attaching the defeated to his standard. He found himself at the end of nine years their master and a king in something more than name. Combined with the qualities of a fearless fighter, he had the faculty of winning the good will and admiration of his foes.

The fierce Suloos and Illanums became his fast friends. He left their chiefs in power, but punished every outbreak with a merciless hand.

One of the many incidents of his checkered career shows that his spirit was all-powerful among them. He had invited the Chinese from Amoy to take up their residence at his capital, Kuching. They were traders and merchants, and soon built up a commerce. They became so numerous in time that they believed they could seize the government. The plot was successful, and during a night attack they overcame the Rajah's small guard, and he escaped to the river in his pajamas without a single follower.

Sir Charles told me one day, as we conversed on the broad veranda of the consulate, that that night was the darkest in all his great uncle's stormy life. The hopes and work of years were shattered at a single blow, and he was an outcast with a price on his head.

The homeless king knelt in the bottom of the prau and prayed for strength, and then took up the oars and pulled silently toward the ocean. Near morning he was abreast of one of the largest Suloo forts--the home of his bitterest and bravest foes.

He turned the head of his boat to the sh.o.r.e and landed unarmed and undressed among the pirates. He surrendered his life, his throne, and his honor, into their keeping.

They listened silently, and then their scarred old chief stepped forward and placed a naked kris in the white man's hand and kissed his feet.

Before the sun went down that day the White Rajah was on his throne again, and ten thousand grim, fierce Suloos were hunting the Chinese like a pack of bloodhounds.

In 1848 Rajah Brooke decided to visit his old home in England, and ask his countrymen for teachers and missions. His fame had preceded him. All England was alive to his great deeds. There were greetings by enthusiastic crowds wherever he appeared, banquets by boards of trade, and gifts of freedom of cities. He was lodged in Balmoral Castle, knighted by the Queen, made Consul-General of Borneo, Governor of Labuan, Doctor of Laws by Oxford, and was the lion of the hour.

He returned to Sarawak, accompanied by European officers and friends, to carry on his great work of civilization, and to make of his little tropical kingdom a recognized power.

He died in 1868, and was carried back to England for burial, and I predict that at no distant day a grateful people will rise up and ask of England his body, that it may be laid to rest in the yellow sands under the graceful palms of the unknown nation of which he was the Was.h.i.+ngton.

His nephew, Sir Charles Brooke, who had also been his faithful companion for many years, succeeded him.

Sarawak has to-day a coast-line of over four hundred miles, with an area of fifty thousand square miles, and a population of three hundred thousand souls. The country produces gold, silver, diamonds, antimony, quicksilver, coal, gutta-percha, rubber, canes, rattan, camphor, beeswax, edible bird's-nests, sago, tapioca, pepper, and tobacco, all of which find their way to Singapore, and thence to Europe and America.

The Rajah is absolute head of the state; but he is advised by a legislative council composed of two Europeans and five native chiefs. He has a navy of a number of small but effective gunboats, and a well-trained and officered army of several hundred men, who look after the wild tribes of the interior of Borneo and guard the great coast-line from piratical excursions; otherwise they would be useless, as his rule is almost fatherly, and he is dearly beloved by his people.

It is impossible in one short sketch to relate a tenth of the daring deeds and startling adventures of these two white rajahs. Their lives have been written in two bulky volumes, and the American boy who loves stories that rival his favorite authors of adventure will find them by going to the library and asking for the "Life of the Rajah of Sarawak."

There is much in this "Life" that might be read by our statesmen and philanthropists with profit; for the building of a kingdom in a jungle of savage men and savage beasts places the name of Brooke of Borneo among those of the world's great men, as it does among those of the heroes of adventure.

One evening we were pacing back and forth on the deck of the Rajah's magnificent gunboat, the Ranee. A soft tropical breeze was blowing off sh.o.r.e. Thousands of lights from running rickshas and bullock carts were dancing along the wide esplanade that separates the city of Singapore from the sea. The strange old-world cries from the natives came out to us in a babel of sound.

Chinese in sampans and Malays in praus were gliding about our bows and back and forth between the great foreign men-of-war that overshadowed us. The Orient was on every hand, and I looked wonderingly at the slightly built, gray-haired man at my side, with a feeling that he had stepped from out some wild South Sea tale.

"Your Highness," I said, as we chatted, "tell me how you made subjects out of pirates and head-hunters, when our great nation, with all its power and gold, has only been able after one hundred years to make paupers out of our Indians."

"Do you see that man?" he replied, pointing to a stalwart, brown-faced Dyak, who in the blue and gold uniform of Sarawak was leaning idly against the bulwarks. "That is the Dato (Lord) Imaum, Judge of the Supreme Court of Sarawak. He was one of the most redoubtable of the Suloo pirates. My uncle fought him for eight years. In all that time he never broke his word in battle or in truce. When Sir James was driven from his throne by the Chinese, the Dato Imaum fought to reinstate him as his master.

"Civilization is only skin deep, and so is barbarism. Had your country never broken its word and been as just as it is powerful, your red men would have been to-day where our brown men are--our equals."

An hour later I stepped into my launch, which was lying alongside. The American flag at the peak came down, and the guns of the Ranee belched forth the consular salute.

I instinctively raised my hat as we glided over the phosph.o.r.escent waters of the harbor, for in my thoughts I was still in the presence of one of the great ones of the earth.

AMOK!

A Malayan Story

If you run amok in Malaya, you may perhaps kill your enemy or wound your dearest friend, but you may be certain that in the end you will be krissed like a pariah dog. Every man, woman, and child will turn his or her hand against you, from the mother who bore you to the outcast you have befriended. The laws are as immutable as fate.

Just where the great river Maur empties its vast volume of red water across a s.h.i.+fting bar into the Straits of Malacca, stands the kampong of Bander Maharani.

The Sultan Abubaker named the village in honor of his dead Sultana, and here, close down to the bank, was the palace of his nephew--the Governor, Prince Sulliman.

A wide, red, well-paved road separated the village of thatch and gra.s.s from the palace grounds, and ended at a wharf, up to which a steam-launch would dash from time to time, startling the half-grown crocodiles that slept beneath the rickety timbers.

Sometimes the little Prince Mat, the son of the Governor, came down to the wharf and played with the children of the captain of the launch, while his Tuan Penager, or Teacher, dozed beneath his yellow umbrella; and often, at their play, his Excellency would pause and watch them, smiling kindly.

At such times, the captain of the launch would fall upon his face, and thank the Prophet that he had lived to see that day. "For," he would say, "some day he may speak to me, and ask me for the wish I treasure."

Then he would go back to his work, polis.h.i.+ng the bra.s.s on the railings of his boat, regardless of the watchful eyes that blinked at him from the mud beneath the wharf.

He smiled contentedly, for his mind was made up. He would not ask to be made master of the Sultan's marvellous yacht, that was sent out from Liverpool,--although the possibility made him catch his breath: he would ask nothing for himself,--he would ask that his Excellency let his son Noa go to Mecca, that he might become a hadji and then some day--who knows--Noa might become a kateeb in the attap-thatched mosque back of the palace.

And Noa, unmindful of his father's dreaming, played with the little Prince, kicking the ragga ball, or sailing miniature praus out into the river, and off toward the s.h.i.+mmering straits. But often they sat cross-legged and dropped bits of chicken and fruit between the palm sleepers of the wharf to the birch-colored crocodiles below, who snapped them up, one after another, never taking their small, cruel eyes off the brown faces that peered down at them.

Child-life is measured by a few short years in Malaya. The hot, moist air and the fierce rays of the equatorial sun fall upon child and plant alike, and they grow so fast that you can almost hear them!

The little Prince soon forgot his childhood companions in the gorgeous court of his Highness, the Sultan of Joh.o.r.e, and Noa took the place of his father on the launch, while the old man silently mourned as he leaned back in its stern, and alternately watched the sunlight that played along the carefully polished rails, and the deepening shadows that bound the black labyrinth of mangrove roots on the opposite sh.o.r.e. The Governor had never noted his repeated protestations and deep-drawn sighs.

"But who cares," he thought. "It is the will of Allah! The Prince will surely remember us when he returns."

On the very edge of Bander Maharani, just where the almost endless miles of betel-nut palms shut from view the yellow turrets of the palace, stood the palm-thatched bungalow in which Anak grew, in a few short years, from childhood to womanhood. The hot, sandy soil all about was covered with the flaxen burs of the betel, and the little sunlight that found its way down through the green and yellow fronds drew rambling checks on the steaming earth, that reminded Anak of the plaid on the silken sarong that Noa's father had given her the day she was betrothed to his son.

Up the bamboo ladder and into the little door,--so low that even Anak, with her scant twelve years, was forced to stoop,--she would dart when she espied Noa coming sedately down the long aisle of palms that led away to the fungus-covered ca.n.a.l that separated her little world from the life of the capital city.

There was coquetry in every glance, as she watched him, from behind the carved bars of her low window, drop contentedly down on the bench beneath a scarred old cocoanut that stood directly before the door. She thought almost angrily that he ought to have searched a little for her: she would have repaid him with her arms about his neck.

From the cool darkness of the bungalow came the regular click of her mother's loom. She could see the worker's head surrounded by a faint halo of broken twilight. Her mind filled in the details that were hidden by the green shadows--the drawn, stooping figure, the scant black hair, the swollen gums, the syrah-stained teeth, and sunken neck. She impulsively ran her soft brown fingers over her own warm, plump face, through the luxuriant tresses of her heavy hair, and then gazed out at the rec.u.mbent figure on the bench, waiting patiently for her coming.

"Soon my teeth, which the American lady that was visiting his Excellency said were so strong and beautiful, will be filed and blackened, and I will be weaving sarongs for Noa."