Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Family That Stole Malaysia

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Robert is joined by Dr. Kaveh Hoda to discuss the Brooke Family.FOOTNOTES: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-british-family-that-ruled-in-borneo-as-white-rajahs http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,763444-2,00.html http://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Malaysia/sub5_4a/entry-3617.html https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-british-family-that-ruled-in-borneo-as-white-rajahs https://www.jstor.org/stable/41493196?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3Ad655695ae199b5bb8bb97150d8e70f8b&seq=9#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnists/2020/12/652051/revisiting-sarawaks-brooke-era https://www.brooketrust.org/history-of-sarawak https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/13/travel/sarawak-a-kingdom-in-the-jungle.html http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks:60180/SOURCE02?view=true https://journals.openedition.org/moussons/2642?lang=en Payne, Robert. The White Rajahs of Sarawak (pp. 25-26). Lume Books. Kindle Edition Barley, Nigel. White Rajah . Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's kind of kind of strung out? Honestly, my Robert Evans host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where I talk about bad people. But this morning I woke up like seven minutes before we started recording. And so I'm pounding coffee into my face. It's one and it's 121 p.m. just for the rush. Yeah, it's the morning, Sophie. It's the early morning. This is like 9 a.m. for you. Yeah, this is like 7 a.m. for me. I don't think anyone's ever awoke this early, except for my guest today, Dr. Kavehuda. Yeah, you just nailed that intro, by the way. That is professional broadcasting at its finest. Thank you. We just did the Rush Limbaugh episode, so I've been thinking of a true professional and trying to really nail it down,

which is why I got drunk last night and slept in until 12.55. I did not like that reference. To Rush Limbaugh? El Rushbo? Yeah. Kaveh, you are a podcaster, one of the hosts of the House of Pod podcast. Correct. You are my go-to source for medical advice. Mine, too. Poor bastard. Yeah. We got to hang out, one of the last times that I got to hang out with anybody outside of my riot friends in Portland right before the plague went down. That would have been, what, when I was on your podcast, that would have been like January of 2020? It's worth noting, because you came and I looked this up because somebody posted this and they posted the transcripts. I don't know how they did that, but they posted the transcript of the episode, which

we don't do, but someone else did. They posted it because it was like January 3rd, and I asked you, I said, listen, how is the world going to end? You said, here's what's going to happen. Some kids are going to go off to China for vacation. He's going to come back to his job at Starbucks, and he's not going to have enough insurance to cover his days off. He's going to have some sort of illness, and he's going to spread it to everyone at his job, and it's going to spread throughout the country, and it's going to be awful. And we were all like, all right, dude. It was a little paranoid. And then it happened. Like a couple months later, I remember very distinctively, and it was, I think you were one of our last in-studio guests too. So it was

early January. Don't you know the rule? Don't ever ask this fool to predict anything. He's like, goddamn nightmare. Yeah. It's creepy. I felt bad about that one. Well, thankfully, we do seem to be fingers crossed, knock on wood, nearer to the end than the beginning of this particular biblical plague, hopefully. So I thought we'd talk about a subject that has absolutely nothing to do with medicine or plagues. But does have a lot to do with Malaysia. In fact, we're talking about the family that stole Malaysia today. Have you ever heard of the Brooke dynasty? Are they the diamond people? No. I think they also owned a company that made cookies. But no, they are a family who is the only family in the history of imperialism that I'm aware of to steal an entire country for

their own personal property. That is like part of a country not as not steal it for the British Empire for themselves. For the Brooks. Yeah. For the Brooks. Yes. This one's for the Brooks. Yeah. A large chunk of Malaysia was their personal property for quite, for like a century. They gave it up in the late 1940s. Oh my God. No, I have not heard. I'm excited. Yeah. Yeah. This is a fun one. We're mostly going to be talking about James Brooke, who was the guy who actually stole Malaysia. But we'll chat a little bit about the rest of his family at the end here. So without further ado, let's talk about the Brooks. So once upon a time on the island of Borneo, there existed a powerful kingdom called Brunei. Now, there's still a Brunei in Borneo and it's

got a Sultan and he's super rich. Everybody's heard of this. Brunei used to be for a while, was a protectorate of the British crown and stuff. And how that happened is kind of in this story as well. Modern Brunei, though, is really tiny. It's like a micro state. Like, right? It's smaller than some people's neighborhoods. Back three or 400 years ago, though, Brunei controlled a large chunk of the island of Borneo. It was a sizable country and it was a big part of like kind of modern Indonesia, Malaysia. It was a powerful force within that area. The reason why it's a micro state today lays with the actions of a single British family called the Brooks. They're why it went from like a whole ass country to a tiny little micro state.

So today, Borneo is split between several Malaysian states. It's part of Indonesia and the kingdom of Brunei. So the island of Borneo, part of its Indonesia, part of its Malaysia, part of its the kingdom of Brunei. It's a very complicated place geographically. There's a lot going on with map lines there. But back in the early 1800s, it was pretty much just Brunei with a little bit of Dutch, the Dutch controlled a chunk of it for God knows what reason, mainly for trading spices and shit. The Sultan of Sulu, who was a vassal of the Spanish owned Philippines, also owned a little bit of the eastern part of Brunei or eastern part of Borneo, but mostly Borneo was controlled by Brunei. Now that changed in 1839 with the arrival of a very dumb young adventurer named James Brooke.

He was born on April 29, 1803, as the son of Judge Thomas Brooke and Anna Maria Stewart. It was you might guess from the judge part, James was born into enormous wealth and privilege. His father was an English judge. We're talking like, yeah, judges back when that means something, not like, not like now with our fucking bullshit. Sorry, I might be going to court soon. I probably shouldn't shit talk the concept. The judges are great. Judges are so kind. Judges are so good. They're so rad. Everybody loves a good judge with their wigs. Oh, man. Incredible look. Powder and mallets. Who doesn't like a mallet? These are judges from the powder and mallets era, and he's a judge in India. So he's got to wear like James's dad, Thomas, has to wear like

that whole judge get up and like sweltering 95 degree Indian summers. I do like some mallet situation, though. Like, I feel like I could I could do things. The past must have smelled so bad. You know, just all the stuff they wore lack of showers and bathing. Yeah. Just coating like themselves with powder on top of the extension. Be just to try and mask it just dousing themselves with tobacco smoke to try to dull it for everyone to burn their noses out. Yeah. Yeah. So, Thomas Brooke, James Brooke is born 1803 to a judge named Thomas Brooke, who lives in India. And he ruled upon the High Court of Benares, interpreting the laws of the East India Trading Company, which ruled India at this time. So he's not a judge for like the

government. I mean, he is, but the government is a corporation. Like he is a corporate judge. It's very cyberpunk, even though it's happening in 1803. You know, you have to like put in reference to something I can understand. So yeah, because I have, you know, the most part, a pretty awful American education. So you have to like put it in reference to a game or some sort of Disney movie that that covered this that helps. It's like it's like Blade Runner, but everyone's dying of cholera all the time. So James had a few siblings. He had an older brother who joined the army. And again, the army is the corporate army and died immediately, leaving James to be the sole

inheritor of the family fortune. He also had four sisters, two of whom died young, not in India, but in the filth-strewn Petri dish that was 19th century Britain. Now, somewhat unusually for a boy born into his social class, James spent the first 12 years of his life in India. He fell in love with the country, its culture and the feeling of adventure that seemed ever present on the outskirts of empire. But he also grew up very aware of the many failures of the East India Company. The first great Bengal famine, which may have killed as many as 30 million people, a court occurred in the early 1770s about a generation before James's birth. Benares is on the outskirts of Bengal and the shockwaves of so much death and social collapse would have been

evident even in his youth, you know, 20, 30 years after 30 million people die, you're going to see some of the shockwaves of that. It hasn't passed entirely. Now, we've covered that on a previous episode of Behind the Bastards, but the short of it is once the East India Company stole Bengal, they uprooted millennia of agricultural traditions to maximize profits and wound up starving the whole country to death. So unlike many imperialists of his era, James did not grow up with a rosy idea of the British Empire. His biographer Nigel Barley notes, quote, India became, to the whole Brook dynasty, an enduring and terrible example of how not to run a country. So if you've ever been to India, Benares is, it includes, is a region that includes a modern day

city called Varanasi, which is where James would have spent a lot of time. Varanasi is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet. And it's the city that it hosts what's called the Burning God, which is where you can stand along the banks of the Ganges every night and watch people burn the bodies of their loved ones. It's a place you can actually like, I've been there. It's, it's a pretty powerful place to see. It's one of the most intense places I've ever been. And it would have been, it was that intense when, when James was there. And he grew up as a big kind of like childhood event of his watching these, these burnings on the banks of the Bhanji, the Ganges in Varanasi. And this has an impact on him. So yeah, now, obviously, the European dwellings

in Benares were deliberately built up river from where the actual like native Indian people lived. But it would have been hard to miss this entirely. And in general, James Brook got to explore a lot in his youth in India, because Thomas Brook was bad at imposing boundaries on his son. He was not a particularly bright man. He's described by biographers as not really clever, but a good talker, which in 19th century English terms means he had a dull mind, but he went to a good school. So he was a dumb guy who had a good education. The dad. Yeah, the dad. Yeah. And this is like, you'll hear the people describe this way a lot in British imperial history. These are the kind of men who build the British empire.

They are dumb men who are well educated, which is a very dangerous combination. Those are the kind of guys that will do genocides for profits. So Thomas was a doting father, which is probably part of why he allowed James to stay in India so late. Normally a kid like James born to the upper crust would have left India at age six to go attend school in England. It was that was it was uncommon for them to stay in India too long, in part because India was seen as being very dangerous, but in part because if you're an upper crust kid, you want to get into that British education system as quickly as possible. Now, so again, the fact that he waited until he was 12 was kind of odd and probably

good for James. When one considers all of the inhuman crimes of the British empire, it's worth noting that said crimes were carried out by men who'd been separated from their parents at age six and shoved into a boarding school when they were kind of kindergarten age. Right. Well, the thing I'm sure I'm going to hear more about this, but the sense I'm getting is that even though he's seeing all this bad stuff and he has the opportunity to be like, this shouldn't happen or he sees the drawbacks at least of this colonialism, he's not going to learn the right lessons from it. That's the sense I'm going to get just because I know the show and it bums me out already. He is not going to learn the right lessons of it.

But he's also going to grow up to be very different from a lot of the other imperialists of his era because he has a different background, right? The whole British education system is geared towards producing the kind of men who can who can further the empire. And he doesn't really get trapped in that in the same way that other people do because his parents keep him out of it for a much longer time. So when he's 12, he finally gets sent over to England to go to boarding school. And the fact that he goes so much later than his peers makes it a lot harder for him. All the other boys of his age group had had five or six more years of formal schooling than him by the time he arrives at boarding school. He also had to adapt from the freedom of unsupervised

life in India to being the prisoner of a boarding school. One of his biographers, Johnson Jinn writes, quote, the want of regular training was of infinite disadvantage to young Brooke, who thus started life with little knowledge and with no idea of self control. So he's kind of a wild kid by the standards of, you know, British society at this point. His education at King Edward the sixth grammar school in Norwich was something of a disaster. He hated arithmetic and grammar and he much preferred doodling in his notebooks. His early biographers who were all propagandists of the British Empire, guys like Robert Payne, will write quote, it was remembered that he never told a lie and demonstrated at an early age a character of the utmost nobility.

They'll say that he was seen by the other boys as a natural leader. And these are all lies. There's no evidence of any of this. And he was a very good liar later in life. So this, this, this is just kind of like traditional biographer lying nonsense. The reality seems to be that he was somewhat ostracized. His one good friend was another boy named George Western. And one year, instead of going off to holiday, George announced that he was heading to sea and joined the Navy as a cabin boy. He probably died horribly. But James thought that the whole idea sounded terribly romantic. And he couldn't stand to stay at school without his only friend. So when George leaves, he borrows money from a schoolmate and left with a very public announcement that he too was going

to see. Now the reality is that he actually took the money he'd taken from a classmate and headed to hide at his grandmother's yard. He camped in her garden until her servants caught him. Actually, I'm starting to like him now. Yeah, no, I mean, there's, there's parts of this kid that are fun, you know. Yeah. So he, he camps in his grandma's yard until her servants find him. And she sends him back to his school headmaster. But the headmaster refuses to admit him because he'd proven himself to be quote, a rebel. This could have caused great scandal, but not long after his parents returned from India. So his father could retire and being again, very indulgent parents, they just hired a private tutor for their son. They described him as a wayward pupil.

We might say he had severe ADHD because he went on to quote, torment and terrify this poor teacher, which sounds like some cousins I've had. This kid is, this is just so interesting, like, you know, to imagine what these kinds of kids would be like now. Like, I think one thing that probably has not changed is if you come from money, no matter how bad a student you are, no matter how many social failings you have, you're still going to be okay and end up running a small country. Yeah, you're going to like, even if you're a bad student, even if you, you, you can't abide by the rules, you're going to wind up conquering like a large chunk of Malaysia.

I feel like this could be like George W. Bush's story. Like if this, we put this like into a different time. Yeah, I will say one of the differences between him is he strikes me as one of those like, you know, every now and then you have those like rich kids who drop out of fancy college and just like join the military or something because they've just got so much fucking energy. He's kind of that, that sort of kid. He really has this, like he's bad at school. He doesn't really learn any of the things he's supposed to learn, but he's, he's devouring all of these like cheap kind of pulp fiction novels that are coming out about fighting pirates and fighting bandits in India and like, you know, these stories that are written to propagandize

the men who are building the British empire. Like he falls in love with that shit. The whole Alan Cordermane sort of shit, right? Yes. That's who he wants to be is Alan Corderman. I don't know if that fiction comes in at this point in time. I don't know if it had been written, but like precursors to that were out at least. And he, he grows up desperately wanting to have a life of adventure in the near, in the Far East, you know, like that's the, you know, he wants to meet what they would call like strange and foreign cultures and, and find gemstones and romance princesses and all that stuff. Yeah. And because he comes from wealth and privilege, he's going to get a chance to try to do all of that, which is maybe why fiction

should be illegal. So adulthood, adulthood came early to Englishmen in those days. At age 16, he was old enough to join the military, which is, it's actually not all that different now. Like I have friends who joined at 17, so it hasn't changed a lot. So being hungry for glory and generally unable to focus, that's the path that he chose. He rose through the ranks quickly, not on merit, but due to the fact that rich families in those days could purchase ranks for their sons. By age 18, he was a lieutenant, a job even his most fawning biographers admit he was, quote, wholly unfitted for. He was stationed in India where Robert Payne writes, quote, James was in fact a bad soldier with a happy go lucky attitude towards the army. His main task

was drilling the native troops. And he liked to tell the story of how he was once drilling them and marching them across the parade ground when it occurred to him to tell them to march over a neighboring hill. He never saw them again. He collected scandalous stories. Like they, like they just left. They're like, yeah, they just left. They were like, you know what? I don't think this British empire thing's going to go anywhere good. That's an awesome story. This may not be the empire for me. I hope that's true. He collected scandalous stories. This is not, this will not be the first time that his troops run away from him. He collected scandalous stories about the officers and their wives

and liked retelling them. The army amused him but made a few demands on him. There were occasional big game hunts. There was always some pig sticking somewhere, but it was altogether more pleasant to bait the senior officers. He knew obscurely that something was wrong. He was bored by the society of white men, thirsting for action and devilment. He was in a strange mood, caring and not decided and caring and not caring, decided and not decided. No woman seemed to have interested him in India and he spent a good deal of time composing poems, no better and no worse than hundreds of poems written by his contemporaries. We'll read one of his poems later. It's weirdly erotic. He wrote constantly to his parents while he was stationed in India and his focus was

rather predictably self-centered for a man of his age. Mostly he spread gossip about different wars and conflicts breaking out across the empire and his hope that he might get to participate in them. He crowd over his promotions and he repeatedly begged his father for money. For a long span of time, he repeatedly requested that his father buy him an elephant as he, quote, simply cannot manage without one. I want a Tesla, dad. The elephants are the Teslas of the day and considerably better for the environment. If Elon Musk was just trying to get everybody to ride elephants, I would have less of an issue. Yeah, that would be rad as hell actually. Everybody with a houda like fucking shooting bows at each other from the top of an elephant. Imagine

bow hunting comes back into vogue too. Oh, probably still guns. Yeah. I mean, that would also be pretty rad. I would love to get into a gunfight from the top of an elephant. Anyway, you know you want to get into an elephant-based gunfight, Sophie. Come on. I don't. Grand Theft Auto, but everyone's got a fucking elephant. That's actually, someone's going to make that game. Someone's got to make that game. Yeah. They'll be cross-fired and then the elephants will get hurt and then I'll be sad. Now I feel bad. Now you made me feel bad for laughing at the elephant gun thing. Plus, whenever I think of elephant fights, I think of that really scary, those evil elephants from Lord of the Rings. Oh, the oilophants? Yeah. They're not evil, they're just being used by

evil men, Sophie. Yeah, no, but they're so scary and they get hurt and it hurt my heart. You know what doesn't hurt my heart though, Robert? The products and services that support this podcast? You know it. I hope one of them is an elephant manufacturer. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And I just want to thank Elephants International for sponsoring this podcast. Elephants International, when you want an elephant, they're basically your only choice. The only elephant brand I know is a skin care

racist skin care brand, Drunk Elephant. Don't buy them. Oh, Jesus. That seems pretty racist. Yeah, it's a bad start. The name. I will say from the few months I spent living in India, I did run into in a couple of cities, once in Delhi and a few times in Jaipur and in one or two other places, people riding elephants in traffic with like 18 wheelers next to them and stuff. And it's always seeing like a crowded city street full of traffic and just a dude sitting on an elephant is just the most powerful flex I've seen in my entire life. Just the look of those men just riding their elephant through town, just like, okay, you know what, that's unbelievably powerful energy. If they have like a boombox with them while they're doing it, I'm all for it.

I think that would be amazing. That would be rad as hell. So at this point in his life, newly on the cusp of adulthood, Brooke dreamed of making a quick fortune in the foreign service. There was always opportunity for graft and bribery in the service of the East India Company. And then after he made his money, he planned to make a glorious return to the comfortable life of an English gentleman. He wrote home, quote, my prospects are now so good that a few years hence I hope to return to England with with a fortune which will render unnecessary my revisiting this country with what joy shall I give with what joy I give up what are termed the luxuries of India for a cottage and a snug fireside. This I am determined to do.

So he seems to have initially wanted to like, well, I don't really want to stay in India. I want to make my money come buy a farm at home and never leave again, you know, that's his initial goal. But this changes with his first experience of action. In late 1894, the company went to war with Burma. Now, since this was a company army, much of the fighting was done with irregular units, which had been risen up and organized for profit by a corporate like entity whose employees acted as militant subcontractors. James volunteered to raise up a unit of irregular cavalry, locals who would act as scouts for the campaign. Nigel Barley notes, quote, he had found his niche, a big fish in a small pond operating on the margins of established order.

And this was the kind of position to which he would gravitate all his life. So he finds this like very enticing and a lot better than, you know, traditional military service. So once he'd put together this unit, he had to show it off to his superiors. And his standard way of doing this was to like get all of his soldiers organized out and order them to charge. Charging was in fact the only drill training that he ever gave his men. Just blitz. He was a every blitz every play kind of guy. Yeah, yeah, just blitz. Just just go rush at those guys. Then one day, there's an actual battle and he orders his men to charge a group of Burmese fighters, which they promptly did, but then forgot to come back and he never saw his soldiers again.

He's the worst. I love it. It's the worst. Yeah, it's very funny. So in January of 1825, James saw his first close combat against the Burmese in Rungpur, Assam. After shouting out what he what he described as a few inspiring words to his comrades, he charged headlong into a well defended elevated position, which is what most military experts would call a bad idea. One has to say that James Brooke was at least fully willing to engage in the same foolhardy acts of bravery that he demanded of his men. And on this occasion, stupid bravery worked. The Burmese were so shocked to see a single man charging them down, raving a saber and shrieking like a hellion that they broke and ran. James earned a commendation for

bravery and was written up repeatedly for his raw physical courage. However, this kind of bravery tends to bite people in the ass. From the book, White Raja quote, a few days after the general in command heard of a strong stockade being in front and sent out Lieutenant Brooke to Reconoiter, but he was not able to return in time to prevent the advance guard from falling into an ambush gate. As the foremost company turned a corner in the road, they were received by a volley which knocked over a number of men. In the midst of the confusion, Brooke came galloping up, putting himself at the head of the men, charged and foremost fighting fell. When the affair was over and the enemy driven from their stockades, Lieutenant Colonel Richards asked after Lieutenant

Brooke, who he had seen fall, and he was reported dead. Take me to his body, was his reply, and they rode to the spot. Poor Brooke said the Colonel, getting off his horse to have a last look at him, kneeling over him, he took him in his hand. He's not dead, he cried, and instantly had him removed to camp. So, Brooke's active military career had asked that like his actual time fighting had been about two days. And because of the severity of his injuries, he was spent the next five years recovering. So, that's kind of the next half decade of Brooke's life, as he gets shipped back home, because his injuries are so severe, and he spends most of it like in bed or in hospitals. The doctor in me just kind of wants to know, maybe they didn't say it, but do they say what his

injuries were? That brings us to one of the great mysteries over James Brooke. You're going to like this one. So, most sources at the time would note somewhat surreptitiously that he had been shot in the junk. This rumor is common even today. I found a Daily Beast article that included the line, a painful war injury in what Victorians delicately called his private parts, probably discouraged Brooke from marrying, because this guy, again, he conquers a large chunk of land. He never has natural descendants, right? So, one of the rumors that was kind of spread, may have been spread by him, was that he had been shot in the junk, and so he was unable to reproduce, and that's why he never had any descendants. Now, more reputable modern scholarship suggests that this may have been

a face-saving lie, because depending on what you read and who you ask, it's likely that Brooke was either gay, a pedophile, or a bisexual man with a quasi-sexual interest in extremely young men. We don't really know. We'll talk about this a lot throughout the episode, and I'll see where you land on this, because one of the reasons why we don't really know if he's gay or a pedophile is a lot of times, he's romancing people who are called boys, but who are also legally adults in the society that he's in. So, they're 16, 17, but that's also, they're adults who are like lieutenants in the military. So, I don't know how you, it's odd. It's very uncomfortable, and there's a lot of very abusive stuff in Brooke's background with this, but we don't know,

I don't know entirely how to characterize the man, but it seems likely that he was not, in fact, shot in the junk, but that was a kind of a face-saving thing, because he was not interested in women, as a general rule that seems accurate to say, not super interested in women, and he needed, you know, you could get punished with execution for being a gay man in these days, and it happened, like the British put people to death for being homosexual. So, if he was, even if he was just kind of not straight, like even if he may have been sort of like more on the asexual side of things, we don't really know, he had to come up with a reason why he wasn't having kids, and may have been shot in the junk was the reason. It's a good way to get sympathy.

Yeah, good way to get sympathy, good way to have people not ask anymore about what happened. Yeah, right. That conversation ends pretty much right there when you talk to somebody. Yeah, well, I have a terrible injury, and it's rendered me infertile, you know? People aren't going to ask much more. Yeah, right, got it. So, we don't exactly know how he was injured, but it was bad, you know, five years of recovery time is a pretty severe, pretty severe injury, and obviously, medicine back then is mostly like screaming and mercury, but it's a little bit better today. I should also note that information would come forward in the early 1950s to suggest that he had at least one bastard son that he hit away from the public eye. Again, we don't really

know, it's all very muddled with this dude. We'll talk some more about this later. So, in any case, whatever the matter of his actual injury is, whatever the case of his sexuality is, Brooke spent nearly five years recuperating. He was better by 1830, but his journey back to India to resume his service with the company was dogged by bad weather and worse luck. He didn't arrive in Madras until 12 days before his deadline to return to service. Now, his dad, being like an influential person within the company, was able to kind of pull some strings to get him more leave time. But Brooke, like, didn't want to, basically what happens is he winds up arriving late, realizes he's not going to get to India in time for his deadline. So, he applies for a position

to serve the company in Madras, and that was refused. And this made James Brooke very angry, so he resigned rather than get dismissed from the company. This was his public claim at least. Now, the reality seems to be that his journey back through company-controlled Southeast Asia had really, like, he'd seen a lot of things that made him angry at the way the company did things, and he no longer wanted to serve them. And I'm going to quote from a write-up by the University of Canberra here. Brooke's subsequent musings in his journal suggested growing divergence between the company's activities in India and his own emerging ideas about Britain and its role in Asia, which might have motivated him to seek new opportunities. He continued on

in Castle Huntley to China—that's the ship that he's traveling on—to China, via Penang, Malacca, and Singapore. With him on board were James Templer, whose brother John would become his close friend and supporter, and Arthur Cruikshank, who would also later become one of Brooke's protégés in Borneo. The ideas Brooke began to set down in his journal, Jejeune, in Payne's view, bemoaned the deterioration of the native character arising from their intercourse with the whites. So you see what he's saying? This is interesting because it talks about the kind of racist that Brooke is becoming, because you have different kinds of racists in the British Empire. You have the people—these non-white peoples are inferior to us, and we need to

rule them. And you have these non-white peoples are being hurt by us. And so I need to fix them, right? And then you have the idea that I need to raise up these people who are not inferior inherently, but have an inferior culture, I mean, to make their culture. But there's a couple of different kinds of racists. It's so close to getting it, but then just takes that left turn when you should just keep going with that thought. Yeah. And Brooke is, I don't know if you'd call this the least offensive kind of the racist that you could be in the British Empire service, but rather than being kind of the standard sort of white supremacist, he's the noble savage kind of white supremacist, right? And he felt that the decadent values of

modernity were responsible for ruining the noble natives of India. Now, interspersed within this bigotry was a morsel of truth. Brooke had spent his early career stumbling into a subcontinent that had seen its cultural substrate torn apart in the name of short-term profits. Intervillage crop and water sharing arrangements built up over centuries to mitigate the shifting tides of climate have been ripped apart by venal corporate administrators who wanted to suck as much money out of the area as quickly as possible. This had reduced many people who'd once been independent farmers to beggars on the street. The introduction of hard liquor had also had a visible negative impact on many of the now urban poor. James Brooke did not entirely blame his fellow English for the

state of affairs, which is again part of his racism. As he reached the Malay Peninsula, he had his first close contact with Chinese people, many of whom ran businesses and carried on trading operations in the region. And he blamed a lot of what he was seeing in India on the Chinese. He wrote, quote, their habits are most filthy, they're dressed in the most unbecoming, their face is the most ugly, and their figures the most ungraceful than any people under the sun. They appear cut out of a log of wood by the hand of someone skillful savage, their mouths are wide, their nose is snub, and their eyes small and set and crooked in their heads. When they move, they swing arms, legs and body like a paper clown pulled by a string. And to sum it up,

all their color is a dirty yellow. So he is a really racist against Chinese people. So he has this view that like Indian people are noble savages inherently noble and we've corrupted them. And they've also been corrupted by these like by the Chinese, right? Who he is super racist against. Like, and this will continue to be a major factor in his life. He is a huge anti-Chinese bigot. And as a huge anti-Chinese bigot, James and a group of these guys that I mentioned are on the boat with him. Yeah, yeah, the guys described as his protege. These are his friends. They might also be his lovers. It's kind of hard to tell. But at one point while they're in Southeast Asia, um, they dress up in yellow face. Uh, yeah. Oh, man. No, that's rough. Yeah. A jade involved him

and shipmates disguising themselves as Chinese at the Feast of Lanterns in order to penetrate the city declared out of bounds to Europeans. Being once in the whole party threw off disguise and broke some of the lanterns, which were accounted precious. They barely escaped with their lives and how escape was possible is the marvel. James would always have. Yeah, it just it cracks me up because if they really did that, it cracks me up because it's like they, do they really believe that they'd fold anybody? Did they actually, we're getting away with this. They don't even know. They don't even know. We're dressed in local garb. Look at us. We're nailing it. We're nailing this. They don't even know. Yeah, they're, they're, they're bad at this and they do get caught.

Um, so James would later learn to work with Chinese traders in the land that he eventually conquered, but he never got over his bigotry against them, which would eventually lead to horrific bloodshed. But at this point, Brooke had been kind of, he recognized the evils of the East India Company and some of the evils of colonialism. He knew there was something immoral going on in all of this. Um, but unfortunately his reaction to this was to invent ways that he might do colonialism, but nicer, right? His solution to this is obviously an, an unethical system is I can do it better as opposed to maybe we should get the fuck out of here. Yeah. He even picked out a spot Penang in Malaysia that he thought was ripe for his kinder sort of colonialism. And

I'm going to quote from the university of Canberra again. He toyed with the idea of Penang as the spot on which the experiment should be made for a permanent British colony in which individuals could reap the rewards of their own efforts, unlike under the company's monopoly. Later, his interest grew to include Sumatra. Brooke and his companions soon developed a plan to return to the Eastern archipelago for his, and seek for adventure. They called it the schooner plan, awaiting only the financial means to implement it. So I just don't like this dude. Like, he's not likable. There's no qualities I've seen that are redeeming. He's just like a fucking piece of shit. Yeah. I mean, they all, they all kind of are like, it's, it's, he's, he's a, he's a young,

he's a man who was raised to believe that he and people like him ought to rule the world. And he recognizes the people actually ruling are bad at it. And the solution is for me to do it better, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it's not great. He's, he's, he sucks. I don't like it. Well, yeah, this is behind the bastards. So you might have heard of it. Yeah. Why thank you, Robert. Thank you so much. No, but I'm just saying a lot of times when you're, when we do these episodes, it's like, you can find like one thing where you're like, Oh, okay. This guy. Well, the, the, the one redeeming thing, I mean, this is such a small thing, but he does seem to have a genuine affection for India, at least, which is very little. And it's a slightly more mellow form of

racism. But that's, I guess, something for the time. I don't like him saying it now. I'm still on the fence. I'm still on the fence about this guy. I'm not, I'm going to wait till the end. So I make up my mind. I'm like, 40 minutes in, not into him. He could still pull out of this tailspin. He does not. He does not. So the schooner plan and a schooner is a type of boat was very much the dream of an upper class English schoolboy. Basically, his idea was that like he and his best buddies that he'd like met and hung out with on this boat and traveled around Southeast Asia with, we're going to like learn how to navigate and sail together under, get a ship and sail to get away under his leadership to have like adventures and participate in glorious

battles and get rich. It was his biographer describes it as quote, and all boys adventure writ large upon the real world. So again, it's the kind of shit that he, he, he reads in these, in these fantasy books that are very popular among young English boys of this day. He just wants to do it for real. And because he's a rich kid, he's going to get a chance to. How old is he at this point? He's like 20, 20s, early 20s, early 20s. Yeah. So it was always unclear how the schooner plan was going to lead to wealth and influence for, and especially how it was going to lead to them creating colonies in Malaysia. When James returned home to England and broke the news to his doting dad that he'd resigned his commission with the East India

company. He tried to convince the old judge to invest money in the scheme. He assured his father that with the vehicle quote, equally capable of fight and or flight, he and his friends would be able to make a fortune trading through Southeast Asia and having adventures in between deliveries. Now, this is, have you seen stepbrothers? This is the scene where they show the stepdad, the video boats and hoes, boats and hoes, and they're, they're trying to build their media company. Check it out. We see the boat where it's going to be awesome boats and hoes. That's all he needs. And that's, so it's like, it's, it's like, that's what's happening. But he's saying, we need to buy us a warship. Like we need, we need to get like a battleship so that we

can sail around and have adventures. And that will be profitable somehow, dad, trust me. So it's more like boats and guns and boys as opposed to boats and hoes. Now, being a practical man, James's dad told him that his plan was nonsense, warned him that he had no head for business and that even if he was good at business, working on a trading vessel was one of the most dangerous and miserable jobs that a person could get. But James kept badgering his old man. And as he'd done with the elephant, his dad eventually threw down the money to buy a 290 ton slaver brig. It's called a slaver big because it used to be used for transporting slaves, you know? No, we got that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, great. Yeah. So if he's liking this guy less and less,

less and less, dad also not it. This is the era where slavery has been outlawed and the British Empire is fighting a crusade across the world against slavery that allows them to do more colonialism. Like they're conquering land and subjugating people in the name of ending the slave trade. That's a lot of what's happening in this period. So that's like, like this is in the news right now, like, but there's been a couple of cases recently where it was some fucking, I think it might have been Pierce Morgan. Somebody, some British person was like, nobody's done more to fight against racism than the British Empire. And what they're referring to is all of these different anti-slavery wars and crusades that the British Empire fought. And what they neglect

to mention is that they were always used to subjugate people. They were used as justifications to militarily occupy places and deny people their sovereignty. Like that was the only reason for these crusades. It was, it was, I don't know, modern Americans can't imagine this, but imagine seeing a real problem and your government uses that real problem to justify conquering a people and taking their stuff. Again, very hard to very hard to visualize. Yeah, it's a little foreign. Yeah. Yeah. So James had only been home a few months when he convinced his dad to buy the boat. And by all accounts, those few months had been much more than enough for him. He wrote to a friend that quote, I feel the irksomeness of civilized society greater than ever and its bonds shall

not hold me long. My own family speak to me of the years we are to pass together and that it always makes me sad to think that in my innermost heart, I have determined to plunge into some adventure that will bestow activity and employment. So he's, he comes home and quits the company and his family's happy to have him back. And they're like, oh, we're all going to get to live together in England. And James kind of feels bad because he has, again, the kind of the shot of adrenaline that he had participating in that war, his experience traveling around his convinced him like, I'm not going to stay in England, like I'm going to go get into dumb adventures in Southeast Asia. And he knows that. And so in early 1834, James finds himself with a giant boat purchased by

his dad, which had a half dozen cannons and a hold for full of merchandise that he was going to trade in Singapore. He hired a crew and a captain and he brought along some friends who, again, probably were romantic interests. And he set sail for the Far East. The trip was almost immediately a disaster. James knew, James knew very little about boats or the nautical life, but he insisted on being in command over the venture even though he'd hired a perfectly good captain. That said, his main issue with the captain he hired is something most of us will find sympathetic. Back in the early 1800s, British naval discipline was held up with what I think Winston Churchill later described as rum, sodomy and the lash. So basically,

the reason that like our boats are able to function is that we get our crews drunk at night, they get to fuck each other and we beat them when they break any rules, right? Like that. And the beatings were vicious. Like the kind of whipping sailors would receive from minor infractions of discipline are not unsimilar to the kind of whippings you would hear about slaves getting. Like people would get sentenced to sometimes hundreds of lashes with a leather whip in the back. Like people, sailors died getting whipped. It was pretty, pretty ugly naval discipline in this period of time. Now, this was seen as necessary because obviously when you're on a boat, especially the kind of boats they had back then, fucking up can get hundreds of people killed,

right? Sure. Which is not to say that it's cool to whip people for a problem like that, but that's why they saw it as necessary. If you don't have strict naval discipline, you're going to get everyone on the boat killed. James was not comfortable with cruelty. He preferred kindness and he felt that sailors could be kept in line just as well by a loving attitude. He later wrote on the subject of discipline, quote, it was necessary to form men to my purpose and by a line of steady and kind conduct to raise up a personal regard for myself and an attachment for the vessel. Now, we don't really know if this worked on board his first voyage, but it definitely pissed off the captain and made for a tremendously unpleasant trip.

Now, to make matters worse, James was as horrible as trade as his father had expected. He eventually sold their cargo for a massive loss in Macau and sailed back to England of failure, but he was still a rich failure because his parents were rich and his parents also had no desire to chastise him for his fuck ups. Soon after he landed back at home, his dad died and left all of his surviving children a considerable inheritance. James received some 30,000 pound sterling, which is the equivalent of about four or five million dollars today. So now he's independently wealthy. His first voyage has been a massive failure, but his dad dies and he's rich. He doesn't have to ask his family for anything else. So as soon as he gets back,

he sells his old boat and he buys a new one. And this one is a yacht. And when I say yacht here, I'm not talking about like just a rich guy boat. A yacht in this period of time is a military vessel. This was actually one of the old royal yachts that he buys. And it has a full complement of cannons. It's got something like a dozen big guns. And because of how British naval law was at the time, it legally counted as a military vessel. This gave James the right to fly a special naval flag and to wear a special naval uniform and to receive salutes from British naval vessels. While English sailors would know that this was not really a ship of the Royal Navy anymore, these perks meant that as far as any foreigners knew, James was captaining a British Royal Navy

vessel and representing the British government. And he will never go out of his way to disabuse them of this notion, right? That's going to be important for what comes later. So the British are just okay with this because it's like, this is a super rich guy and this is how we treat our rich people. They can do whatever they want. Is that what's happening? Again, a lot of the British kind of military apparatus at this point is corporate. So they're not against the idea of people of private entities representing the empire with military vessels. He buys a naval vessel that is still part of the Navy. And because of what this vessel is, he retains the right to represent himself as kind of like almost like a naval national guard sort of thing, right? And I

think that is part of the idea. If there's an emergency, all of these guys who own these different boats, we can call on them to serve. But yeah, that's kind of the situation. Yeah, it's, it's got to get, it's got to get fun. So with his yacht, which was called the Royalist loaded with firepower and of course, a bunch of new friends, some of whom were probably lovers, James Brooks sets off on a new adventure. And again, the goal was Malaysia, this time a place called Sarawak ruled over by the Sultan of Brunei. They left port on July 27 1839. Upon arrival, their first task was to carry out a series of gun salutes, which means firing cannons wildly into the air. This was how Brooke decided he was going to signal his peaceful intentions to the locals. I see this

going wrong. As you might expect, there's a couple of I mean, cannon salutes are common things at this time. So it's not necessarily an aggressive act, but it's also not for nothing that he does this because it lets everyone in Sarawak know, oh, this guy's got a bunch of giant cannons, right? Like that. It's, it's, it's, it makes it clear that if you fuck with this guy, he's got, he's got some shit. So, you know, James fires his cannons and then he sends a boat ashore to meet the local ruler, Raja Muda Hashim. Now, this guy Hashim is basically the local governor under the command of the Sultan of Brunei. He's one of the Sultan's uncles, I think. So he and Hashim smoked tobacco from footlong cigarettes and they drink tea, they listen to a band and they do all of the polite

stuff you'd expect from a royal welcome. Hashim and his people assumed Brooke was there representing the British Empire since he was dressed in his ship bore the flag of the Royal Navy. James Brooke told the Raja that he was just a private person, but he also presented the ruler with official documents that he claimed were from British authorities. As a result, everyone there assumed he was in fact an agent of the British government. He told them his plan in the country was just to survey the coasts and collect specimens of the local fauna, but no one believed this either. When they got to talking, the Raja told Brooke that he was in an air in the area to put down a rebellion by the local Malays who were laying siege to the local capital and were purported to be

allied with a nearby unfriendly Sultan. Raja, the Raja's forces were not well armed or well trained or particularly numerous and neither were the rebels. In practice, this meant that this war was mostly just a bunch of inconclusive street fights, with neither side able to really bring things to a close. The Raja initially tried to downplay the rebellion, framing it as more of a mild squabble between children. James offered to help him anyway, and this sort of led the Raja to believe that he was doing this on behalf of the British Empire. Nigel Barley writes, quote, they, being the authorities in Brunei, had no idea they were entering into a political alliance, not with a government, but with a spoiled young man from Bath squandering his inheritance.

So within hours, this spoiled young rich kid with a yacht had turned himself to the ostensible commander of a foreign military in their efforts to crush an insurgent rebellion. If he understood the gravity of the situation, James did not show it. When he landed on Sarawak shore, he convinced himself that he was the first white man to set foot there, and so he went barefoot through the jungle. This proved to be a bad idea, and his feet got horribly infected, which rendered him unable to walk under his own power, and he would have to be carried around for the next several days. Why is he so stupid? He's doing so great in life, though. He's so dumb. He's nailing it. He just blitzes. Failed upward. Yeah, fails upward at every turn. He has failed upward

into commanding the royal effort to fight an insurgency in Malaysia. I mean, just like the, like, scam of it all, and like, he does all these unnecessary things. I don't, I don't like him. Yeah, I mean, he's just having a good time. He's just having a good time. The injury did not dim Brooke's instant enthusiasm for the wilds of Sarawak. He took his boat sailing to the interior, where it was immediately attacked by pirates made up of another local people, the Diyaks. These Diyak pirates killed several Malays before being driven off, and James considered this all to have been very exciting. When it was explained that the Diyaks had a penchant for taking and preserving heads, he was even more excited. With very little knowledge

of either group, Brooke started stereotyping them. And I'm going to quote from the book White Raja again. His infatuation with adolescence was being fully extended to the, to include the whole supposedly childlike peoples. They were all becoming midshipmen under his special care, and already he was leaping to judgment, forming the stereotypes that would anchor Brooke rule. The Malays were natural gentlemen, but when bad could be sinuous and duplicitous, and they were lazy, the Diyaks were naturally honest, chaste, passionate, and faithful, people of the land, not the town. It was like the difference between cats and dogs. Repeatedly, the Diyaks are explicitly compared to hunting dogs with a bad master.

The master may be changed for a good one, but the dogs will take time to learn to not to snap and bite. But they were a good breed, and they would eventually be one by kindness. Yeah, yeah, real. And again, this all he starts coming up with these ideas about people, because he convinces this local ruler that he's a great military mind, and the ruler sends him to the interior, and he gets a bunch of people killed in an ambush. Oh, he's just the worst. These guys murdering all of my, these guys murdering all of the men I were sent out with, they're like good dogs with bad rulers. He's like, as long as Crookshanks is okay, I don't care. That it really is the attitude. No one white has died yet, so no one has died yet in his mind.

Yeah, right. You know who won't get a bunch of, a bunch of Malaysian volunteer soldiers murdered in an ambush, and then write racist propaganda about them. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in

Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found

himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. So with his adventure done and only some of the men the Raja had lent him dead, Brooke considered his visit to Sarawak a success, which again included him going into the jungle briefly and getting a bunch of people killed. He promised to return in a few months and then sailed off to fuck around in other parts of Southeast Asia. This wound up not being as fun as he expected, so he headed to Singapore after a few weeks, where stories of his pirate fighting exploits had spread. Now, local merchants who long had to deal with Dayak pirates praised him for bringing the might of the British Empire against those dastardly bandits.

Being recognized by a couple of dudes absolutely ignited James's ego and he wrote home to his mother, quote, I really am becoming a great man, dearest mother. The world talks about me. The rulers of England may threaten to write me. Newspapers call me patriotic and adventurous. The Geographical Society pays me compliments. Am I not a great man? No, bitch. You are not a great man. I know the mother of it all. His adventures include getting some guys killed in the jungle and then briefly firing a bunch of cannons at pirates in canoes. That's what he's done so far. And then completely fucking up his feet.

And completely fucking up his feet. The camp is awesome. This is amazing. Am I not a great man, mommy? Am I great yet, mama? So the British governor of Singapore did not think that James Brook was a great man. In fact, he yelled at James for inserting himself into politics with a sovereign nation. He's basically like, you're just a guy with a boat. How dare you stick yourself in the middle of a civil war? Like what is wrong with you? So there is at least a single rational person in

this story so far. Brook was so offended by this that he left Singapore straight away and sailed for Sarawak, where he could hang out more with his new friends, only some of whom he'd gotten killed the first time. Now, the Raja was happy to have him back or more accurately was happy to have his cannons back. And James was introduced to the Raja's younger brother, Pince Badrudin, who was hot as fuck. Let me, like this, this dude, smoking. You have to assume smoking because of the very thirsty letter that James writes back to his mom. Oh, interesting. Quote, I wish you could know the Pangeran Badrudin, who with the amiable and easy temper of his brother, Muta Hashim, combines decision and abilities quite astonishing in a

native prince and a directness of purpose seldom found in an Asiatic. As a companion, I found him superior to most of them, the most about me. And there is something particularly interesting in sounding the depths and shallows of an intelligent native mind and examining them freed from the trammels of court etiquette. Wow, it's amazing how even the dumb people back then could write well. It is right. Like he's so dumb, but he can actually, he actually put together words in the way that actually sounded okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's the values of a classical education I get. But he's, I mean, that's an incredibly horny letter. Yeah, yeah, he's thirsty. That's what the kids say. So Badrudin was very young. And at this point,

James had both the wealth and worldliness to seem very impressive to an inexperienced young prince. He adopted James as a mentor and started drinking wine and copying the way the Englishman dressed. James rewarded this behavior with lavish attention and constant praise. When it came time for James to go help the Raja with his war, there was no question that Badrudin would stay behind. The Raja had phrased the rebellion as less of a war and again more of a petty squabble between children. This was not quite accurate, but it certainly was not war as James had known it in Burma. In Sarawak, both sides tended to fight by building fortifications and engaging in short skirmishes in which people rarely died and then ran back to build more

fortifications. There was not much willingness to charge headlong into decisive battle. And this frustrated Brooke, who again only knew how to charge headlong into the enemy. He wrote, quote, We found the Grand Army in a state of torpor, eating, drinking and walking up to the forts back and again daily. But having built these imposing structures and their appearance not driving the enemy away, they were at a loss of what to do next. James took it upon himself to break the stalemate the only way he knew how, from the book White Raja, quote. The solution was, as always, that they should charge, even if this had to be on foot rather than on horseback as in India. And it was Badrudin's overawing presence that would make them. But the Malay's wrong footed

James turned things around and refused to attack, urging that they dared not risk Badrudin's precious royal life. Badrudin insisted that if I went, he would likely like ways go. And the Malay's insisted that if he went, they would not go. So Badrudin and James retired and directed the artillery from a place of safety. All went well until the surreptitiously advancing assault troops betrayed themselves by making the mistake of praying too loudly, attracting the attention of three old muskets in the hands of the defenders, at which they prayed still more loudly and swiftly retired. At the front, everyone built more forts and James looked for more things to charge. This is I realize now why why he likes boats, because that's like the one place his soldiers

can't run from him, you know, they're on a boat. They can't leave him because it sounds like everyone must think he's his soldiers must think he's an idiot. Yeah, they think he's he's he's danger in dangering their lives because again, the only tactic he has is run headlong at the enemy's guns. He's very zap Branigan energy. So eventually the fighting came down to James taking the field with his fellow Europeans, all combat veterans, charging the enemy. Yeah, this time he wears shoes and they do charge the enemy who breaks and runs. And after this, James decided continued battle would be tedious. He called a parlay and he told the rebels that if they quit, he would guarantee them their lives and

he'd stop the soldiers he was with from looting their villages. James had no authority to promise any of this. And in fact, one of the other local rulers, a prince named Makota, had already promised his men that they were about to get to loot all of these enemy villages. But James declared the formal rebels under his personal protection and insinuated that taking vengeance on them would be crossing the British Empire. And so as a result, this little war ends peacefully with a number but with a tremendous amount of anger on Prince Makota's part. The Raja, however, was overjoyed to have things over finally. He declared James a permanent resident of Sarawak and gave him the right to trade within the country. James briefly tried to set up a living as a merchant, bringing goods from

Singapore to the isolated kingdom. But he proved to be as bad as trading as he had, you know, as he'd always been. He's never any good at business or making money. So in short order, he decided to go back to the only thing he'd ever really wanted to do, having adventures while pretending to represent the Royal Navy. When he'd left Sarawak, the Raja had promised to build him a house as a sign of gratitude. Hashim had also promised to have a large shipment of antimony ore, which was mined in the area, for him like ready for him to go trade in Singapore. Now when he landed though, he found out that none of this had been done. There'd been no ore gathered, there'd been no house built, and he was really angry. He was even more furious when he learned

that in accordance with ancient custom, the rulers in Brunei, which included the Raja's nephew, the Sultan, were about to allow 100 Dayak war canoes to row down the river and raid Malay villages on the interior. This was in fact brutal, but it was a crucial source of revenue for the Bruneians who ruled Sarawak. So basically, you've got the Sultan of Brunei who runs this country and whenever you have kind of like a small group of people running an entire country, they're going to do the same shit the British Empire always did, which is play different ethnic groups off of each other. And the way the Bruneians do this is they have an agreement with the Dayaks where they'll let them go and raid and murder and like take slaves and steal from villages in exchange

for the Dayaks paying bribes to the rulers in Brunei. And this is part of how the government perpetuates itself, right? This is kind of what they have instead of taxes on the Dayaks, is they let them raid and they get some of the money that they get from raiding. And it's also how they stopped the Dayaks from rebelling and fighting against them. The regular raiding season was seen as kind of like a safety valve for Dayak aggression. And this all made James furious. Like again, he comes into this system that has been set up for a while and as brutal as it is, is the system that things work by in Sarawak. And he thinks it's immoral. So he demands the whole thing be canceled. So he was ignored in this. The Raja was like, this is how we do things here.

You're just some like white dude who came in. I'm not going to, I'm not going to change our entire system of government for you. And when this happens, James Brooke gets angry and he sails his warship inland and he basically trains his cannons on the capital and threatens the Raja into action. So the Raja is like, well, I don't have any cannons, you have a warship. So I guess I'm going to call off the raid. But after his little stunt, James could tell the local leadership was no longer amenable to his presence. So he had been like the Raja had been happy to make him a permanent resident and give him like some official status here. After he threatens the Raja with cannons, this is kind of no longer the case, as you might expect. So James decides that since

things have become unfriendly, he's going to make some more threats, pointing out that he has the power to bring the British Navy down on Brunei, which is the capital of the entire region. Now, at just this point, purely by coincidence, a company's steamship entered the port to trade. This served and again, because James is in a Navy vessel, when the company's steamship goes in, they have to salute him. So they do this whole salute and it makes it look to the people on the ground, like this boat is coming in to support him. And it makes it seem more credible that like, oh, shit, he really can bring the entire Royal Navy down our asses. That's fortuitous that this happened at that exact moment. This happens like four times to him. He's the luckiest dumb guy.

Yeah. So this obviously serves to make James's boats more credible. And knowing a moment when he sees one, James sails to Brunei and marches on the pack on the Sultan's palace with a company of heavily armed men. So basically, after scaring the local rulers in Sarawak, he sails to the capital of Brunei and comes ashore with like 100 dudes strapped with rifles. So he comes to the Sultan with a bunch of armed mercenaries and a list of grievances, blaming Prince Makota for trying to kill him and trying to capture English soldiers. This was mostly nonsense, but it gave James a justification for what he was about to do next. Makota, James said, was a destabilizing influence in the area. The Raja was not safe with Prince Makota around. And in order to make things safe

for the Sultan in Brunei, the Sultan needed to make James Brooke the governor of Sarawak. For life, otherwise, James couldn't guarantee the Raja or the Sultan's safety. So, and again, he's saying that like, I'm here, I want it, you need to do this so I can protect you from Prince Makota. But he's doing this while pointing a bunch of cannons at the Sultan and with a company of armed mercenaries at his back. So this is actually pretty smart of him. This is like one of the smarter things he's done. Yeah, he figures out how to be how to be a white guy in this period. So again, and the Sultan at this point is not just staring at a bunch of guns. He's staring at a bunch of guns held and controlled by a guy who, as far as he knows, speaks with the authority of the Queen of England.

So the Sultan submits. James Brooke was made the governor of Sarawak. And in his mind, James kind of believed that he was doing all this for selfless purposes, or at least that's how he portrayed it to other people. I don't know if I'd say he believed it, but that's how he he kind of writes home about this. Nigel Barley, his biographer, writes, quote, James always considered his actions to be genuinely for the benefit of locals, whether the locals realized it or not, so that his interests in theirs would naturally coalesce. It was a fundamental tenant of his rule that the Brooks governed only by consensus, Bruneians by unprincipled Oriental despotism. But this was hardly the free entreaty or election by grateful natives that Brooke history would record.

So he would kind of he becomes the governor of Sarawak through threatening a guy with guns. But he justifies this by saying the Bruneians are dictators, right? They're and they're they're ruling by terror and fear and violence, which is true. But he also is kind of ignoring the fact that he became the ruler by threatening to gun down the the existing rights. Right. Pretty slick, though. I'll give him credit for that. It is slick. It is slick. And it it'll get sliggered because he's not he's not what he wants to be. At this point, he has been made the governor of a region of Malaysia for the rest of his life. And he's been made it through like a handshake agreement. He doesn't have any paper that like signifies this. He doesn't have his descendants

don't have any right to the position. So his next tasks are going to be finding out how to turn himself from like, governor of this island to basically King. So that's the journey we're going to cover when we go to part two of the James Brooks story. But for right now, it's time for part two of the Kava story where you plug your plugables. Oh, that was really good. Again, thank you. I am a professional professional broadcasting. I'm learning a lot. You can find us at the House of Pod on Twitter. And you can listen to our podcast pretty much in all the same places you listen to your other podcast called the House of Pod. It's a medical podcast. But, you know, I think you might enjoy it if you're not a doctor. People seem to do that. It's kind

of relatable. And if you want to hear how doctors actually talk when they're like, you know, talking to each other in nonfront of like, you know, like a lecture hall or something like that, this is the show for you. You like it. Try it. You don't, you know, three. That's a great pitch. I like that. Check out the House of Pod. And I don't know. Check out buying a naval vessel and conquering a chunk of Malaysia. Give it a shot. You know, it might work out for you. Always. That probably isn't a good way to end this episode. I can almost hear the music in the background. Yep. Here we go. Let's let the music distract the fact that I just endorsed imperialism.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that

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