By the time London’s National Portrait Gallery reopened its doors last summer after its three-year long makeover, Sir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, had moved across the Thames to the vaults of the NPG’s Southwark storage facilities.
Give or take the odd loan for an exhibition, Brooke’s portrait had been on display ever since it was acquired in 1910. A bequest from Brooke’s long-time secretary, Sir Spencer St. John, it was driven up to London by a family member, strapped precariously into the back of a Model-T-era motor car. He had written ahead to warn the gallery that the painting was on the large side.
Sir James Brooke, by Sir Frances Grant. Oil on Canvas, 1847. National Portrait Gallery, London.
The artist was no less a figure than Sir Francis Grant, a future president of the Royal Academy, whose patrons already included Queen Victoria herself. It shows a figure in undress naval uniform, at the same time both casual and dynamic, standing against a backdrop of palm trees and a tropical river. Painted in 1847, this is Brooke on his first return to England; a feted celebrity and national hero at the height of what a rare sceptic described as ‘a sentimental mania’. He was a new phenomenon, ‘the Englishman as sovereign of a foreign land’; a land seen to have been won through fortitude, character and the slenderest of personal resources (albeit with considerable assistance from the Royal Navy). He had, the British public were told, brought the civilising promise of British values and the rule of law to faraway Borneo, a vast and exotic island known to them hitherto only for stories of piracy and thrillingly barbaric customs of ‘headhunting’. As the venerable Edinburgh Review put it, he was ‘a very Knight-Errant of justice and humanity……. lighting like a new Prometheus, a fire in the hearts of Savages’. It was a measure of the moment that Grant offered the painting gratis.
Captain Henry Keppel RN, Brooke’s close friend, and a comrade-in-arms for many of his freebooting exploits, wrote in his breezy journal of accompanying Brooke to a sitting at Grant’s studio. Keppel may have been along to handle Brooke. Grant, it seems, felt the gesture of offering his services went unappreciated by the great man of the moment; private letters among Brooke’s team suggest he was quite right to sense that Brooke did not want to be there.
In Grant’s portrait, Brooke is a picture of health and vigour, maybe in his late thirties – certainly well preserved for his 44 years at the time. Keppel remarked in his journal on the excellent likeness. Years later, as his biographer, St John chose his words carefully: the painting was a wonderful reminder of Brooke before he had been worn down by illness and the burdens of his responsibilities. By 1847, he had already suffered both serious physical injury and life-threatening bouts of tropical disease. Another contemporary who had met with Brooke at his hotel during this London visit expressed frank surprise at the image. He had found him an impressive man of ideas, but had put him somewhere in his early fifties.
Sir James Brooke, by Thomas Woolner. Marble bust, 1858. National Portrait Gallery, London
The NPG holds a bust too, created a decade later, this time by Thomas Woolner, sculptor, poet and founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The caravan had moved on, so this time there was a fee - albeit one settled by an admirer. On meeting his subject Woolner was impressed. ‘He has the slow weighty movement of the head that you see in a lion, and tho’ he roars with laughter and is full of geniality, you see when talking of hostile matters his mouth clench like a vice with determination.’
Born and raised in the ancient city of Benares on the River Ganges, today’s Varanasi, Brooke was the restless son of a well-heeled East India Company judge. Wounded in action and invalided out early from a military career in Bengal, he passed comfortable but aimless years as a young man in England. On his father’s death, he used a handsome inheritance to commission an armed schooner, the Royalist, and set off for the Far East with ambitious if ill-defined plans to make his mark and fulfil his country’s ‘civilising mission’. Opportunity knocked when a semi-official errand for Singapore’s authorities took him to Borneo.
Arriving in Sarawak, a tract of the island’s Northwest about the size of Yorkshire, he found the Sultan of Brunei’s regional governor mired in a local rebellion that had descended into a long-running phoney war. Brooke and his crew, probably bolder and certainly far better armed than anyone else involved, intervened decisively and quickly suppressed the rebellion. Rewarded with local residence, and now the cuckoo in the nest, Brooke soon persuaded the governor, more or less at gunpoint, that it would be altogether better if he took over. His naval friends stationed in the region, men like Keppel, were easily persuaded that the raiding parties of Sarawak’s hostile neighbours along Borneo’s turbulent coast were ‘pirates’, the very kind of adversary they had been tasked to suppress. Brooke’s demonstrable ability to summon such overwhelming fire power to intervene on his behalf in local struggles eventually brought the cowed Sultan of Brunei to cede his rights over the territory entirely, leaving a now sovereign Brooke as the idiosyncratic and high minded, if often brutal, ruler of the now expanding Sarawak.
Some of the shine soon came off Brooke’s rose-tinted reputation with news of a disastrously successful naval engagement that pitched the first British ironside steamships against a large flotilla of men in canoes, armed only with traditional weapons; it became known as the ‘Borneo Massacre’. Largely forgotten today, Gladstone once coupled the incident with the reprisals following the Indian Mutiny as the two prime examples of Nineteenth Century British atrocities. But after years of parliamentary motions and eventually an official enquiry, Brooke rode out the storm, with opinion forever polarised but his reputation still more or less intact. Passing rule on to his nephew Charles, he retired to a small Dartmoor estate paid for by public subscription, and duly took his posthumous place in the late Victorian imperial pantheon.
The Brooke family were to rule Sarawak, eventually the size of England, for a hundred years. In 1946, after the Second World War and the ravages of a Japanese occupation, the territory passed formally to Britain in its very last act of colonisation. Today it is part of the Federation of Malaysia.
In any national narrative, everyone needs to fit into a category; Brooke was an ‘Empire Builder’. He himself would have found the label painfully ironic; despite the knighthood and many honours, he was never able to persuade a reluctant British government to accept responsibility for his jungle kingdom; his frustration even led to flirtations with France and Belgium. Today he and others like him have made way at the NPG for broader and fresher perspectives on British Empire. But in truth this was no ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ moment. Brooke has not been cancelled; gradually, and quite some time ago, he just dropped from the national conversation.
Accurate or not, Grant’s picture is the iconic image of Brooke. If it seems familiar, that might be from the cover of a once ubiquitous Oxford World Classics paperback edition of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, a novel grown on the trellis of Brooke’s story, and full of the most lightly coded references to his life. There are bits of him too in the dark figure of Kurtz, the Belgian ivory trader in the Congo at the centre of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s other meditation on an isolated European holding sway over indigenous tribes - Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, the story’s Vietnam updating.
Le Tigri di Mompracem, by Emilio Salgari, 1900
Brooke lived on elsewhere in a different guise. The prolific Italian pulp author Emilio Salgari was more or less Conrad’s contemporary. His eleven Pirates of Malaya novels, with their hero Sandokan, have been a cultural phenomenon spawning almost as many films. For a generation of Italians, the theme tune of the 1970s TV series became an indelible memory. Sandokan, cited by some as the spiritual godfather of Clint Eastwood’s character in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, is the wandering scion of a buccaneering dynasty of raiding Malay pirates. He dispenses rough and ready justice on behalf of the oppressed and seeks revenge for his family and home, destroyed by British forces led by his arch enemy, ‘the Exterminator’ – James Brooke. For generations brought up in Southern Europe, or indeed Latin America, Brooke is the Sherriff of Nottingham to Sandokan’s Robin Hood.
Brooke almost made it as a romantic lead in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Errol Flynn, the Australian star of many a swashbuckler was taken with a script, and pressed Warner Brothers to produce a star vehicle for him. The effort dragged on for years, but never made it out of development. It is said that a stumbling block was the challenge of introducing the necessary love interest; the screenwriter, a Brooke herself, declined to be involved in inventing a love life for Sir James that ran counter to the reality of his gay sexuality.
But what of Sarawak, where the story began? Grant’s painting may have been relegated to the archives in London, but not here. Museums display facsimiles of varying quality (here and on the mainland in Kuala Lumpur); the selfie-oriented ‘interactive displays’ of the Borneo House Museum even offers visitors the opportunity to pose with a life-size three dimensional waxwork of the image. That is only the official part of it. Visiting Kuching, Sarawak’s capital, an NPG curator noted with wry amusement ‘the very liberal and unlicensed use of our picture on everything from boat tour advertisements to restaurant menus’.
Edge of the World. Margate House Films
Brooke, the movie, finally came in 2021. Rob Allyn, a Texan independent film producer, found the bulk of the money for Edge of the World not in his native America but from Asia, much of it from Malaysia. In this telling, a dashing, dynamic but world-weary Brooke is drawn into the rich complexities of Borneo’s violent culture, and falls in love with a local noblewoman. When a British warship arrives to call him back to England and his family, he searches his soul and resolves to stay. For the first time he realises that, for him, home is now Sarawak.
James Brooke’s story is no longer British. If indeed it ever was.