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I first became acquainted with the story of the "White Rajahs of Borneo" when I visited the town of Kuching, Sarawak, in the late Seventies. The former capital of the Brooke Raj had since passed over to Malaysian government authority in 1963.

Kuching is a lovely place to visit, its people friendly and hospitable, and it charms the visitor by transporting one back in time, a picturesque and stately town, its old government buildings having taken on a sun-baked patina while the town homes and manses of the former European elite suffer from a benign neglect. There are only a few places left in the Orient that reflect that colonial inheritance so nostalgically. Of course, the colonial history of Kuching and of Sarawak is unique in all the world.

And this is primarily due to the astounding career of one ambitious and adventurous man—Sir James Brooke.

The career of James Brooke (1803- 1868) is one out of which the fiction of romantic adventures are made. In fact he was probably the original for Joseph's Conrad's novel, Lord Jim (1900), a portrait of an English sailor, haunted by an act of cowardice, who comes to rule an exotic land. Born into a family of administrators, Brooke worked for the British East India Company as a young man until he was almost fatally wounded during the Anglo-Burmese War of 1825. While convalescing in England, James read with enthusiasm the writings of another legendary adventurer, Sir Stamford Raffles. Raffles, who bought the island of Singapore in 1822, and helped to establish a lasting British presence in the Malay Archipelago, inspired the young Brooke to make his own mark in the exotic Far East.

Bad luck at first dogged Brooke's efforts but in 1841, he got lucky. He was so successful in helping the Rajah Mudah Hassim of Sarawak put down a rebellion that the rajah offered the young Englishman the rule of Sarawak itself, pending the approval of the Sultan of Brunei, the titular authority of North Borneo.

Hoping to see an increase in British influence to counteract that of the Dutch, the Sultan confirmed the Rajah Muda's bequest and James Brooke, at the age of 38, found himself a king in a land that had every evidence of being rich in gold, diamonds, and antimony. It was also a land rife with piracy and head hunters, and James found himself engaged in full-time battle to control these elements in the savage wilderness he had now made his home. So successful was he in these pursuits and bringing order to the life of the region, he was knighted by the queen in 1848.

Sarawak soon proved to be a financial headache, however, for the gold mines were not as rich, and the diamonds not as valuable, as he had been led to believe. He was fortunate in being able to secure the patronage of Baroness Angela Burdett-Couts, who used part of her personal fortune to keep him solvent during the difficult first years of his government.

As a private British citizen and ruler of a foreign country, Brooke's international status was anomalous and this caused particular problems in his relations with the British Foreign Office. The Rajah tried repeatedly to get the government to extend British protection to Sarawak, but he was unsuccessful. Powerful political enemies in England, who accused him of repressing his subjects for personal gain, and even of committing massacres, made his relations with the British government trying and difficult. Official British Recognition of Sarawak sovereignty did come, somewhat grudgingly, in 1863.

Brooke was a ruler with a very personal touch. Any Sarawak citizen, whether indigenous Iban, Chinese, Malay or European, could gain access to the Rajah and he encouraged the participation of community leaders in a consulting body, the General Council. To look after the needs of native peoples like the Ibans and Dayaks, he instituted a system of Residents, by which he hired young Englishmen to live and work in the wilderness for years at a time, administering everything from local disputes to medical care.

 Retaining traditional Malay titles and ceremonies for himself and those in line of succession, Brooke's rule was a blend of traditions, a benevolent autocracy, and somehow it all worked.

When he left Sarawak for the last time in 1863 he left his nephew and successor, Charles Johnson Brooke, a character in our story, a nation largely free of piracy, beginning to show the promise of prosperity, and one that had expanded to more than three times the size of the original 1841 bequest.

The Brooke Raj continued for another seventy years, first under the rule of Sir Charles Johnson Brooke (1829- 1917) and then Sir Charles Vyner Brooke (1874- 1963). They fostered the tradition of personal rule and, very cautiously, prepared their people for the challenges and stresses of statehood in the modern world. It remained a British Crown Colony for seventeen years. With the formation of the state of Malaysia, British control of Sarawak and the last vestiges of the Brooke Raj came to an end.

I had always wanted to write a story that used 19th century Sarawak as a backdrop and I made a step in that direction in the writing of my first book, a collection of short fiction inspired by postage stamp imagery, entitled The Mystery Box (Ana Libri Press, 1998). The preface of that book describes how a treasure trove of old postage stamps was traced to the Keris, a merchant vessel belonging to Sir James Brooke that disappeared in 1850 under mysterious circumstances. Also in 1998, Ulysses Vanders made his first appearance in print in the short story The Saramang Head, published in Global Stamp News, from which a scene served as the inspiration for the Rajah Charles Brooke’s birthday bash in Chapter Two of Ghost Eater.

Return in the coming weeks for an online rendition of The Saramang Head.