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

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Robert is joined again by Dr. Kaveh Hoda to continue to discuss the Brooke Family. 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 in 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 colonizing my... Sophie, help me out here. How do I introduce the podcast? Hi, I'm Robert Evans, and this is behind the bastards podcast about the worst people from history. And today, and my guest is... That doesn't sound like me. No one's gonna buy that, Sophie. Can I try again? Okay, ready? Hitler! I'm Robert Evans. See, you know, Sophie, you got to admit, there's something, you know, there's a power in just screaming the name Hitler to introduce a podcast. There's a reason why I've done it so many times. It gets attention. It gets attention. It gets attention. People pay attention when you just shout the name Hitler into their ears as they're driving to work in the morning.

This is, of course, behind the bastards podcast. Bad people talk about them. Sometimes we introduce it by shouting Hitler, but this time we introduced it with a meandering discussion about how bad I am at introducing the show. My guest again is Dr. Cavehota of the House of Pod Podcast, which deals with a whole bunch of cool medical stuff. Our friend of the pod, Garrison Davis, was on it recently to talk about gun violence, right? That's right, yeah. Had him on with a gun. We had him on to ask questions of a gun violence researcher named Dr. Amy Barnhorse. Those were, that was a really fun episode. Good, good. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually holding a bullet right now. It's just one of my desk bullets. Sure, desk bullets. Robert's holding a desk

bullet, Sophie's holding a blood orange cake, you know. I just got a crate of 250 tracer rounds of 308, which is fun because you can light things on fire with them. So I'm excited to find some things to light on fire when I go shooting next. Sometimes if you hit a tree stump because of all the sap in there, it'll light the whole stump on fire. It's a hoot. Oh, that's a hoot. As long as it's wet enough outside, you don't want to do it during the dry summer day. So we're in the last couple of months where I can light a stump on fire and not burn down the forest. There's going to be like doctors who are going to, you know, who follow our show, who are going to be listening to this for the first time, and they're just going to be like,

wait, wait, hold on, what's going on? What's going on? Just talked about Hitler in guns, and what has happened to Kave? And that's okay. I'm okay with that. Speaking of what's happened to Kave, what's about to happen to Kave is that he's about to hear about what happens next to James Brook. When we left off, had just kind of at gunpoint made himself into the governor of a sizable chunk of Brunei or Malaysia, whatever you want to call it, Borneo. So he has gotten himself declared governor at gunpoint, which is the way to do it, you know? I've considered that for a while. I would like to be governor. I think I'd be a good one. I'm going to open up whatever state I'm in or lock it down, depending on wherever it is. I'll do the opposite of whatever

they were doing before. It's a safe bet for governors. Change. Change. That's what people want is change, whether or not it's good change or reasonable change or change people have asked for. Just change things. Robert, can you just do the podcast? Yes, Sophie. That doesn't sound like something I do. Anyway. So, yeah, James had threatened himself into being a governor. And this obviously the actual leaders in Brunei at the time, like the different royal people, most of them were not super happy with it. So the sultan of Brunei doesn't like that he's been forced at gunpoint to make this guy a governor. Now, there is a chunk of royals as there are kind of anywhere there's British imperialism. There's a chunk of the ruling class that likes

what's happening, right? And in James's case, it's Prince Badrudin, the guy that he's got the hots for, and Raja Hashim. And both of these guys kind of supported him because even though he was super problematic and kind of disrespectful, he also had a bunch of modern cannons. And they were more worried about their local rivals than they were about this British guy who they assumed was going to leave eventually. So they were like, well, put up with this guy. I mean, Badrudin, I think, really loved him. But Raja Hashim is more like, well, put up with this guy, and he'll use his cannons to help us against our rivals. And that'll be a good deal for us. And for a while, this worked pretty well. But the whole time James was kind of solidifying

his hold on Sarawak, his rivals, who included Prince Makoda and one of the sons of the sultan of Brunei. We're working behind the scenes to take back their land from this usurper. And obviously, it's worth noting that none of the people fighting over Sarawak had a good moral claim to the land, right? The sultan of Brunei and his kin are all bad people. They let raiders bribe them to rob and murder their citizens. James, meanwhile, wanted to rule Sarawak for the sake of his ego and to live out his boyhood dreams of Eastern adventure. Nobody's nobody in charge is as is generally the case in history. Nobody in charge is a good person or particularly righteous. This is often how colonial dramas would play out. You've got a shitty local leader,

you've got differently shitty foreign imperialist interlopers, and you've got a bunch of normal people caught in the middle. That's kind of the story of imperialism. And part of why it part of why imperialists get traction in places is because a decent number of locals are always willing to sign on with the imperialists because like, well, but our current leaders suck too. You know, like that's the thing that happens a lot, which is great. So James had a decent amount of support among some folks in the area. A lot of Malay and Dayak people who'd rebelled against the sultan liked him because even if he had won the war against them, he'd spared their lives and he'd done it against the wishes of some of the local powers. Meanwhile, a number of folks in

the interior liked him because he'd gotten the Rasha to call off that big Dayak raid. So the point is he had a bunch of local support. He was not like it was not just him imposing his will on the local people for guns. Because of things he did, a decent number of people who lived in Sarawak and didn't like the leaders in Brunei supported him. And honestly, if you were living in Sarawak at the time, given the options, especially if you're one of the people who was about to get raided by these Dayaks, you might have supported James Brooke too, right? Because it's just like the sultan's shit too, you know? And these people aren't dumb. They get a sense of this guy and clearly everything he's done up to this point would lead you to believe that he's probably

going to get tired at some point and go back to England and leave them alone. You would think that's what's going to happen. I think that would be a reasonable assumption. Yeah. I think that's kind of what's happening. They're like, everything he's done isn't shitty. He's helped us out in a couple of things we don't like about our leaders. He's a white dude. He's not going to stay here forever. He's a rich white boy. He's going to go home at some point. Let's use him while he's here. You know, I think that's the bet a lot of people make. Now, at the point in which he became kind of total ruler of his own little country, James Brooke was 38 years old. He started using the title Raja, which was not strictly legal because he was not royal in any way, shape, or

form. He had been made a governor, but he starts calling himself the Raja. The locals called him Tuan Basar, which means big lord, which is kind of a rad nickname to get. Yeah, that's not bad. He started off his reign pretty well by releasing a bunch of hostages who'd been taken during the Civil War. So again, kind of ingratiating himself with the local people, not a bad move. Now, he'd come to power by defending the Couching Malays, who were the folks in the interior that were about to get raided from their rulers in Brunei. But his territory had an equal population of Diyaks, and they were not as friendly to him on the whole because he had stopped some of them from raiding these Couching Malays. So James knew that if he was going to hold on power, he already had the

Couching people like kind of on his back. He needed to win over these Diyaks to his side. And in order to do that, he took a leaf out of the British Empire's playbook, as he later wrote, quote, divide and govern is the motto. I must govern each by the other. So you understand what that means? This is, again, what the British Empire does. And yeah, we talked about in the Idi Amin episode how there were certain tribal groups that they would support an arm to control other tribal groups, right? It's the same thing the Belgians do. Yeah, he's learning. He's learning. That's what he figures out he's going to do. So his first step was to demolish an old system set up by both Bruneian and Malay aristocrats called the Serah. This gave those nobles the right to legally take

any Diyak property they happened to like. If they saw a Diyak boat they fancied, they could cut a gouge in the top. And that was a legally binding signal that the boat was now their property. Nobles were also given the right to set prices for produce that they bought from peasant farmers and gatherers. So like you gather a bunch of food or farm a bunch of food, and the rich people get to decide what they pay you for it, which is not a great deal for the actual people making the food, you know? So if these little people didn't produce sufficient quantities of food stuff, their children and spouses could be sold into slavery. So the Serah is an unpopular system among the Diyaks, and James Brook abolishes it as soon as he comes to power. But again,

not a bad call. So far he's pretty much tutu in my book, you know? So he also decided early on not to mess with the local religion. I should clarify, he decided not to mess with the religious beliefs of the local Malays who were Muslim. So he sees that like a lot of the population are Muslim in kind of an uncommon move for a British imperial ruler in this period. He decides, I'm not going to let like missionaries come in and fuck with the Muslims, because I think people have the right to their own religion. And that's great. However, the Diyaks were animists, right? So they have kind of a more, not a, they have a religion, but it's not a Judeo-Christian religion. And thus it's not a religion that James Brook recognizes as a religion. And so he is willing

to let evangelists go kind of proselytized to them, because he doesn't think they have a religion, because he doesn't understand it. He's been exposed to Islam because he's all the time, you know, in the Indian subcontinent. So that's not foreign to him. This whatever, I mean, I don't know what they were following the Diyaks, but totally foreign to him. Yeah, he doesn't know what it is. And so he thinks they have no religion. His biographer writes that he considered the Diyaks to be, quote, children of nature without true religion, since their most cherished beliefs were dismissed in the eyes of civilization as mere childlike superstition. So again, not your worst case for an imperialist overlord, because he respects some of the local beliefs,

but not your gentler imperialist slightly. Yeah, to some people, I guess. Now, in all, Brooke championed what he considered to be a hands-off approach to rulership. He didn't want to engage in the kind of full-scale colonialism that he had seen in India. Instead, he only wanted to bring in a few Europeans, and he saw himself as assisting the native leaders, giving them the benefit of his big European brain rather than taking over. He felt that this tactic had, quote, never been fairly tried, and it appears to me in some respects more desirable than the actual possession of a foreign nation. For if successful, the native prince finds greater advantages, and if a failure, the European government is not committed. Above all, it

ensures the independence of the native princes and may advance the inhabitants further in the scale of civilization by means of the very independence that can be done when a government is a foreign one and their natural freedom sacrificed. So that's his attitude here. I'm struck by how well he writes. And this is kind of some like US and Vietnam style thinking, where it's like, we can't invade this country or declare war, but we can send in advisors, and that way, if we, if it goes badly, we're not committed, which didn't work in Vietnam, in spoilers, it'll work out great here. But like, that's the thought process that he has. So critics will point out that Brooke was regularly heavy-handed in his leadership,

although he wouldn't admit to this personally. His years in power included numerous rebellions and brutal crackdowns on insurgent campaigns. They will also note that his enlightened colonialism may have been preferable to him because it was cheaper. James Brooke definitely had dreams of exploiting the mineral wealth of Sarawak, but he never ever gained any kind of competence at trade or business. But land he conquered was also not rich in the kind of gyms and precious metals he wanted. He just did send back one stone that his laborers found, which he called the Brooke Diamond. He sent this to like England to try to drum up like enthusiasm for his reign. But when it was appraised in London, it was found to be a worthless opal.

Yeah, the Brooke Diamond. I wonder if that's why I thought the name Brooke was related to diamonds. I wonder if I'd ever heard that before. I don't know. I don't know. They may have a cookie company. Yes, but not so much of the diamonds. Okay. Not so much of the diamonds. So the irony is that the land he'd stumbled into controlling held a tremendous amount of crude oil. That's why the Sultan of Brunei today is a billionaire, right? Like there's actually a very valuable land to control. But at the time, crude oil

was kind of useless. There were plenty of valuable commodities, though, within Sarawak. But through financial incompetence, James Brooke repeatedly failed to capitalize on them. When he took power in like he kind of estimated the revenue of his country at about 5,000 pounds per year. And although even this sum was inflated, but as time went on, like he would never make a profit out of this, he would eventually go broke running Sarawak because he just like had no head for actual business. It would not be fair to say that his motive in Sarawak was pure, pure venal profit seeking. But neither was he particularly purehearted. For James, ruling was about stature. He didn't want to get rich off of the wealth of Sarawak. He wanted to be a big man who had to be

respected because he was the governor of like he was the king basically of an entire country, right? To that end, he started sending home excerpts from his diary and inflated stories about the rebellion and his campaigns fighting pirates in the area. These started to pick up a leadership in part because he had an agent back and like he has like a like a press agent who he sends back his diaries to and who pumps him up in the imagination of the local people in England, which is not done. These started to pick up a readership. But James was incensed because like while his stories were popular, the Queen didn't automatically knight him. And he wrote back to the British government, who still had not acknowledged his reign, asking for an eight barrel

who gets frustrated. Like he does all the time this like work to puff himself up. And the British government's like, I don't think we should recognize this guy. This seems like this might go bad. Like let's let's just let's just kind of keep quiet for now. This makes him angry. And he writes back to Britain being like, you guys have to support me. I'm doing the right thing in this country. I'm trying to civilize them. And by the way, would you send me an eight barreled cannon? Because I think I'm going to have to kill more of these people to civilize them properly. So I need a bigger gun. He's sad. He's not immediately knighted. So he's like, can I have a cannon? That's the one I have a cannon. Yeah. An eight barreled cannon. I mean, that makes sense. One

barrel is not enough to kill these people. Queen mother. Queen mother. Queen mother. So James's letters home this period events a distinct sense of insecurity. After taking power, he took actions against pirates, often with the late aid of a local British naval captain in his ship. But the lack of formal recognition of his own government rankled alongside the fact that his status as governor had only been confirmed by the words of the Raja. There was nothing written by the Sultan of Brunei that made his position clear. As the new unchecked ruler of Sarawak, James inherited a number of things, most notably a five year old Dyak boy named Situ. This kid was a prisoner of the war that he had just fought. And in his writings, James's care for Situ comes

across as genuine and frankly, somewhat heroic. He wrote, quote, the gift causes me vexation, because I know not what to do with the poor innocent. And yet I shrink from the possibility of adopting him. My first wish is to return him to his parents and his tribe. And I find I cannot do that. And if I find I cannot do this, I believe it will be better to carry him with me, then leave him to become a slave of a slave. For should I send him back, such will probably be his fate. So for a time, he keeps this five year old boy. And James later wrote that he was able to make Situ content and happy by giving him a bunch of tobacco. So that's like his cigarettes. Kids love cigarettes. This will make him happy. Now, Brooke did write regularly about

wanting to find and return this boy to his parents. But as Nigel Barley writes, it's not easy to tell how honest he was about wanting this. Quote, his relations with Situ are cast in exactly the same terms of chest beating morality as his relations with the whole of poor suffering Sarawak. He will take in the devastated orphan province, protect it, train it up, give it the means to earn a living if only as a servant, and give it back its self respect, regardless of the cost to himself. Above all, he will give it love. And the greatest of these is love. No wonder then that it becomes a matter of deep concern whether Situ and other boys were, as claimed, objects of selfless love or active lust to James Brooke. To debauch Situ would be to metaphorically debauch innocent

Sarawak in general. He would no longer be the founder and protector of a model state, but the abuser of innocent trust. Sarawak, indeed, is like a foundling at which you first protect with hesitation and doubt, but which foundling afterwards repays you your cost and your trouble. We will never know whether, as Raja James boiled daily in the clammy sheets of unrequited lust, engaged in a little vague, scoutmasterly fumbling, sublimated desire under a stiff rictus of avuncular benevolence, or reached a sensible standing arrangement with one or more of his young men. So again, we don't know if he was sexually abusing this young child, or if he was just like because of kind of the way things are written. It's possible that he was,

it was possible that he was like engaged in perfectly consensual sexual relationships with other adult men and men that were considered adult at the time. It's also possible he's abusing this kid, and we don't really know which is going on. But Nigel Barley considers the idea that he may have been molesting this child as kind of symbolic of his relationship with Sarawak in general. So he's both portraying himself as honestly and kind of heroically taking this boy and this province under his wing, trying to help it, trying to raise it up. And the possible reality lurking under the surface is that he's abusing both of them. Like that might be what's happening. It's definitely what's happening with Sarawak. We don't know if it's what's happening with the boy

or not, but it's kind of hard. I get why Barley kind of draws a comparison between the two. Yeah, that's tough. I mean, actually, this guy in general is not the most bastardly bastard you've covered. It's not. So I kind of want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don't feel like that's the smart play. I feel like he's doing something very bad. And it may not have been with Situ. It may have been that his sexual relationships were all with people. We would call it pedophilia still, but 15 year olds are kind of legally adults at this point, right? Which I'm not saying makes it right. But if they're like lieutenants in the military and stuff, that might be what he can fight. We don't really know. Or he may have been molesting this

five year old boy. We don't know. I do like the phrase vague scout masterly fumbling. Yeah. So as ruler, James took responsibility for enforcing the law on himself. He had a house constructed to his own specifications, and he used it as both his home and the only law court in Sarawak. His subjects would attend mainly to gamble on the results of the proceedings. A fact James seemed largely unaware of. So like he starts, he becomes like, I am the law. I'll rule on all cases. And like an industry starts up gambling on how he's going to decide. Is it because he's just so haphazard that like it could, I imagine if he really was a good ruler, there wouldn't be much gambling in there. If he was a good ruler, there might be actual

professional judges. James also attempted to broker peace with the local pirates. To this end, he held a summit with several of their leaders. He seems to have fallen in love with them, describing one pirate chief as, as fine a young man as the eye would wish to rest upon, straight, elegantly, yet strongly made, with a chest and a neck and a head set upon them, which might serve Apollo, legs far better than that of his Belvedere, and a countenance mild and intelligent. He meets with these pirates because there's a pirate problem in his domain. And he's just like, he's thirsty as fuck over these young pirates. These guys are great. I don't know why everyone's complaining about these pirates.

What's the problem with these pirates? These guys are snacks. And he writes. I'm so afraid of them for. What's going on? They're great. He writes repeatedly about the fact that these young pirate kings didn't cover their thighs or their torsos, which again, profoundly thirsty. The pirates realized that the white Raja was kind of hot for them, and they tried to use his attraction to them to push him to allow them to go head hunting in his domain. Brooke's own writings relate to how one of these conversations went between him and a sexy young pirate named Matari. Quote. And this is Matari speaking. You will give me your friend. Leave to steal a few heads occasionally.

No, I replied. You cannot take a single head. You cannot enter the country. And if you or your countrymen do, I have a hundred scrang. I will have a hundred scrang. That's the name of these pirate people heads for every one you take here. He recurred to this request several times just to steal one or two as a schoolboy asks for apples. That's how James describes his pirate asking to the head people. At what point do you think like his mother was reading these letters and was like, hmm, he's really focusing on the thighs of these pirates. Maybe I'm not going to get grandkids. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to have grandkids out of this one. Oh, man. Talking a lot about the thighs of these sexy pirate boys.

Three paragraphs on his quads. Something's up. Really a quad man. Definitely a quad man. And this is part of why I think it might be less likely that he was molesting that little kid because most of his obsession is with like his. I mean, there are a lot of them are teenagers, but older teenagers. I don't know. You can decide how you want like what you think about James Brooke. Clearly something sketchy is going on just because a lot of these relationships are there's a huge power imbalance. Like outside of the fact that some of these people are teenagers. He's also like now the governor king of a province and not just a bunch of these young local teenagers, but later on he starts bringing in young British boys who are legally again, legally adults,

but are also he's taking like these 15 and 16 year olds into the country and like giving them positions. And it's highly problematic. Problematic, you would say. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, who won't try to molest young pirate chieftains? I really don't like where you're going here, but continue the products and services that support this podcast. I did not like that one. Well, they won't, Sophie. Yeah, I know. I think we can safely say that Audible has never thirsted angrily over a pirate attempting to take heads in their domain. Never doubt Bezos, man. You are right. No, I don't know. We've seen Jeff Bezos' sects. We know what he's into. And it's weirder than liking a pirate king's quads. Wait,

we have? Yeah. Have you not run into this? Oh my God. Google Jeff and all you at home who don't know what I'm talking about. Google Jeff Bezos, a live girl. Oh boy. Yeah. Go check into that while you listen to these ads. 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 get 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. It's nasty sharks. 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. 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

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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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back talking about talking about James Brook. By 1843, it had become clear that negotiation was not going to bring a conclusion to Sarawak's piracy problem. James Brook decided he had no choice but to go to war. Lucky for him, an East India Company warship that Diana had just sailed

into the area at the time. Again, this is like the second one of these coincidences that happens. James had attempted to enlist the company's warships in his military campaigns before, with mixed success. But the captain this time was a fellow named Henry Keppel, who was a very similar sort of person. Like James, he'd been raised on a steady diet of imperialist popular fiction, and he too dreamed of fighting pirates in the Far East. Now, Keppel's actual job in the area was to fight against a group of raiders who were harassing company shipping nearby. He was not there to travel around the waters in Sarawak and fight pirates. But James made a series of very effective arguments. First, he pointed out that since water was the primary means of transport

around Borneo, any criminals who were sailing on the water were by definition pirates. So, if the company had been sent here to fight raiders who were using waters nearby, pirates are the same thing as raiders. That means that your job is also to fight the pirates in Sarawak. You can justify it this way. Now, he also pointed out that it would be profitable for the company, because at the time, the British Parliament offered generous bounties to officers and men who killed or captured pirates. This law was a holdover from the 1820s, when the British government had declared a crusade against slavery and human trafficking. Pirates were a big part of the slave trade. And by monetizing the murder of pirates, Parliament created an underground

economy based around liberating slaves. Now, of course, those freed slaves were left destitute without any kind of restitution or compensation. And the people who killed the pirates got rich. So, it was, again, kind of a fucked up situation. But hey, what are you going to do? So, James Brook basically argued that the raiders' capital had been tasked to fight by the company. And the rebels and pirates threatening James' rule in Sarawak were one and the same. And again, James frames all this as fighting pirates. Some of them are actual pirates. Some of them are rebels who are fighting for other Brunei and princes in the area. Like, he just kind of lumps them all, because they're all on boats. They're all pirates to him, even though some of them are political

dissidents who are fighting against his regime, for, you could argue, justified reasons. He also points out to Keppel that if the company lets these pirate havens in Sarawak exist, the raiding of company ships will continue. Eventually, he had made like a good enough argument that this guy, Keppel, is like, yeah, okay, I'll come fight pirates with you. And this gives James Brook access to an army of company soldiers, one he would repeatedly use to butcher pirates and rebels. Now, best of all, the company helped him avoid maintaining a standing army or navy. This was very fortunate too, because it let him save money. Sarawak didn't have a formal military force. He would occasionally like raise up militaries. But that shit's expensive. If the company's coming in and fighting pirates

on his behalf, and they're being paid by the British government, and he's being able to argue these political dissidents are pirates, that means the British government is paying for the army that's helping him cement his rule, right? Does that kind of make sense what he's doing here? So after working out this arrangement, James Brook had the company landmen at his capital, where he was able to show them off to his people as a sort of veiled threat. Now, in actuality, the company's soldiers spent more time traveling around Brook's new domain and showing off their guns than they did actually fighting. There were several encounters with pirates, but since any locals in boats who had weapons were defined as pirates, we don't know if most or even any of

the people killed by company soldiers in this period were pirates. The violence quickly escalated, though, largely because Brook wanted it to escalate. Though their initial raids had led to a marked drop in pirate activity, Brook had Prince Badrudin and other local leaders send him letters begging for British help with the pirate menace. This paper trail helped Brook and Keppel justify their escalating use of force. Soon, he had gathered a force of more than a thousand local troops and company soldiers. He marched them deep into the jungle, burning villages as they went. What had started as an anti-pirate campaign quickly became something akin to a light ethnic cleansing. James promised his local Malay fighters the right to loot the villages of their enemies.

He promised his DIAC soldiers the right to take heads, which they stole both from corpses of the slain and from ransacked graves. We'll never know how many people were killed in this anti-pirate crusade or how many of them were actually pirates, but it did serve to kind of wipe out any resistance to him. Because among other things, first, he's killing a bunch of the people who don't want him to be Raja. And second, everyone who might resist him sees, oh, this guy can command a company military anytime he wants. I don't want to fuck with that. I guess I'm a little surprised that he even needed a paper trail. I feel like no one would care if he did it from the English side. That's actually not true. And this is one of the things that I think when we talk about anti-imperialism

is not mentioned enough. It's often kind of, I think people tend to think like everyone in England was okay with this sort of stuff. They were not. A lot of people recognized at the time how immoral this was, how fucked up all of it was. And there was there were even within parliament, there was a significant anti-imperial parliamentary faction. And we'll talk about that later here. He goes on trial for some of this stuff. So there was actually a reason for him to make a paper trail. And it's because he knows there are people back who don't support any of the imperialism happening. Yeah, this is the same thing. It's a little reassuring, actually. That makes me feel a little bit better. They're never successful, really. It's the same thing with like when we

talked about King Leopold in Belgium, right? There was an anti-imperial movement that four years was fighting against what he was doing. They didn't succeed in stopping the genocide until it had killed 13 million people. But I think it is important to note that they exist in part because it means this is not a everyone at the time thought it was fine. No, a lot of elected leaders in England at the time were like, it's bad what we're doing. We're committing crimes against humanity. We ought to stop. And that's important. It's the same thing as like they were founding fathers who were abolitionists and recognized that slavery was a tremendous evil. And unlike Thomas Jefferson, didn't own slaves while talking about slavery as a guy's like Thomas Paine.

And I think you need to highlight those folks because it makes it clear how immoral everyone else was. Right. Yeah. Good to know. Good to know. So after this quick, brutal little war, Keppel sailed on and another company vessel entered into the area soon after his departure. And in a very another wildly lucky like strike for for James Brook, this next company ship that sails into Sarawak strikes a rock and capsizes. Now, the crew and captain are rescued and James gets to take them into his care in his capital while he waits for company reinforcements. And the company sends an entire fleet of ships to pick up these guys. And this is really lucky for James because for all of the locals know for massive warships sail into Borneo. And as far as

they know, he has some power over these ships. They're not like he doesn't make it clear to his locals like they're just here to pick up a crew of a boat that's like it looks like oh, look, now there's a whole fleet of military ships at his beck and call. So James takes advantage of the opportunity and he convinces all of these company warships to sail with him to Brunei, which is the capital of the region where the Sultan lives. And he goes ashore to meet again with the Sultan and ask him for an official declaration confirming his appointment as governor of Sarawak and now granting him the powers of governor, not just to him, but to his pairs, his heirs on into perpetuity. Right. Wow. So this declaration also guaranteed in writing that the Sultan could not dismiss him

from his throne for any reason. This is a bad deal for the Sultan. But the Sultan signs. Want to guess why he signs? Because there's massive warships pointing at capitals. Yeah. And he literally, James has these four warships train dozens of cannons on the Sultan's home. It is not subtle. This guy, like, well, he's presented with this offer and he looks out of his window and there are dozens of massive artillery guns pointed at his house. Yeah, it's all didn't have no. There you go. This guy again, blitzing at every play. This is this is but this time it's working. Yeah. I am not again, the Sultan's a bad person, too, as pretty much all Sultans in history have been. But you can't consent when someone's pointing dozens of cannons at your home. I think

it's fair to say that is not like free consent, you know. Yeah. This is basically armed robbery. That's how he gets Sarawak. This is a mugging, you know, so lucky guy. Yeah. Yeah. Very fortunate. Yeah. So the Sultan signs this declaration. And yeah, one historian Stephen Luscombe states that Brooke quote gave the distinct impression that he could seize the entire kingdom for himself if he was so disposed to do so. And that's why the Sultan like gives him Sarawak, basically. Yeah. So most people again, we had talked about there's resistance to this. There's people who you see what James is doing as a moral. It is also important to note most people back in England see him as a hero for this, right? Like he's continuing to send his diaries and dispatches back.

His agent is putting them into the popular press and he becomes wildly popular for what he's done. And most people credulously accept his version of events that the people of Sarawak had basically demanded he take rule and use his enlightened white wisdom to fix their country. And for the next several years, Brooke settled into a pattern, engaging in intermittent battle with local princes. He always described them as pirates, but they're local leaders who don't like his him being in charge, right? Yeah. Again, he does also fight pirates, but a lot of the people he calls pirates are just local leaders that don't want him to be in charge. Yeah. Yeah. The East India Company took his words at face value whenever he said someone was a pirate, they assumed he was telling

the truth. In 1844, they helped him depose a local Brunei and Prince and annex that Prince's former territory. So the agreement he'd signed with the Sultan had included a promise that he would not act outside the borders of Sarawak. And like a year later, he conquers a bunch of land outside of Sarawak and annexes him. Because he doesn't like, he doesn't feel like he has to actually abide by this. He sees this, this agreement as like limiting the Sultan's power, but he doesn't see any of the limitations he agreed to as binding in any way. Now, whenever he would conquer, he does this the few times where he'll fight a war against some local leader, calling them a pirate. He'll conquer their land. And in order to make it seem legitimate,

he'll arrange what he calls a conference where local leaders will come out in view of company representatives. So he has witnesses who are white and ask him to take control of the territory. It's a whole show. It's a whole thing. Yeah. He knows what he's doing. And his friend Captain Keppel wrote about one such encounter. On this occasion, I had the satisfaction of witnessing what must have been from the effect I observed it to have produced on the hearers, a splendid piece of oratory delivered by Mr. Brooke in the native tongue with a degree of fluency I had never witnessed before, even in a Malay. And again, he's saying, wait, he speaks better than the natives. Is that what he said? That's what this guy who doesn't speak the local language thinks.

He hears this guy saying words he doesn't understand was like, this guy's better at speaking their language than they are. Of course, I don't speak their language, but was he actually, was there any evidence that he actually spoke the language or was this just like, I think he did. I mean, he ruled the country. He lived there for most of his life. I believe he did gain a fluency, but I don't know if it's more fluent like neither and neither does this guy, right? Because he doesn't know that it's a splendid piece of oratory. He says that he thinks it is because of the effect it has on the people hearing, but he doesn't know what they're saying. It's just this is like this, this guy, this Captain Keppel speech here is like, the

peakest white man ever of like, well, he, I can tell by the way they're reacting that he must be better at speaking their language than they are. It's amazing. From these people, many assurances were received of their anxiety and willingness to cooperate with us and are laudable undertaking. And one in all, we're like urgent that the government of their river should be transferred to the English. So again, he doesn't speak the language, but he assumes like, oh, they are really, they are all on lockstep that we should take over this area. How can we not? They all clearly want it. I assume I'm being told by other white men that this is what they're saying. This is why it's so important to speak a little bit of another language.

A little bit. This is all you need is a little bit. A little bit. Yeah. Now, in this manner, James Brooke was able to portray his gradual conquest of more and more Bruneian territory is entirely legal and not just legal, but driven by the demand of the locals. In 1845, James executed a plan that, if successful, would have given him command of the Sultan of Brunei himself. He started by sending Prince Hashim away from Sarawak and back to the capital, along with his beloved Prince Badrudin. The idea was that Badrudin would keep an eye on Hashim and that they would back each other up because Hashim was now second in line to the throne of Brunei. And the Sultan was an old man. So basically, he wants his men in the capital

so that when the Sultan dies, Hashim can take power. And James can kind of carry out a soft coup because he sees how Hashim and Badrudin is basically they'll do anything I say. So if I can put this guy on the throne and this guy next to him, I'll be in control of all of Malaysia, basically. Like that's it. Or all of this point is Brunei. But that's his plan here. And this also would have been legal, right? Because Hashim is the legal heir. So if I can get this guy on the throne, who will do everything I say, I'll be, I'll be right and pretty, you know? That's his, that's his idea. Yeah. I should note here that James sending Badrudin away was practical because he trusted the Prince and he wanted him to help him like take over this country. But it also fit

part of a pattern that Brooke had with the young men he fell in love with. The Brooke, the book White Braja describes this pattern, quote, the flattering attention, the seeking out of the company of the new young find, the selfless, selfless bestowal of patronage, the concern with his education and development, the breathy descriptions of his qualities and letters to others. And usually, finally, the emotional retirement of the loved one to become a Sarawak official. So this is kind of his pattern that when he gets over a crush, he sends them off to, like, control some, to take up a little, which he grooms them, he has his way with them and then he sends them off. Yeah. And several of these guys die doing the jobs he gives them after he

sends them off. Spoilers. But before we get into that, you know, who never sends off their former lovers to die in Malaysia, the products or services that support this podcast. 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

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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 offending 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. All right, we are, we are in fact back. So unfortunately for Prince Badrudin,

playing a part in the scheme of James Brook to take power would cost him his life. The Sultan of Brunei was not a dumb man, and he was fully sick of English adventurers taking over larger and larger portions of his territory. He was also, quite understandably, still irked about the time Brook aimed dozens of cannons at his house. So he started to plot, alongside one of his younger sons, about how to rid themselves of the Brook supporters in their own court, princes Hashim and Badrudin. Now, they did this in the bloodiest way possible. One night when Badrudin and Hashim were apart from each other in their own separate apartments, the Sultan dispatched several bands of armed men who attacked both brothers simultaneously. Now, Badrudin was a

fucking badass, and this guy like, he's got like four different retainers slash bodyguards with him, and they get attacked by like 50 men, and all of his friends get killed. And Badrudin is like fighting, standing in his doorway with a dagger alone, stabs a bunch of people, fights them off for quite a while, until one of them shoots him in the hand, and he has to flee and retreat. And he like runs back into his inner apartments and locks himself in with his, his sister, and his favorite concubine, and a favorite slave boy. And they're all kind of sheltering together from this attack. And Badrudin tells the slave boy to go run down and grab a barrel of gunpowder. And he then tells the boy to like, like save yourself, basically. And he gathers his,

Badrudin gathers his sister and his concubine to him, he spreads gunpowder around them, and then he blows them all up as these guys are like banging down. He's like suicide bombs his own house, basically. That's dramatic. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a flex. Like he's a, he very much goes down as kind of the like, and I guess, you know, and questionably moral to take your, your girlfriend and wife or your sister with you or whatever. But like, right. I don't know if they were so into that plan, but it, it's a storybook death though, right? It's like one of those like, like he goes out kind of like the way you're supposed to go in the legends or whatever, you know, fighting until you're too wounded to, and then blowing

yourself up with gunpowder. Prince Hashim tries to do the same thing, but fucks up and kills everyone in the room, but himself. So he has to shoot himself in the head in order to, once it becomes clear that he's going to be captured. So these guys get killed along with a couple of other Brooks supporters in the Capitol. And the news eventually reaches Sarawak and James Brooke is said to have gone nearly insane with grief when he realizes what's happened. He writes at the time, quote, violent passions and sleepless nights are hard to bear. I laid no blame on anyone. I look forward as much as I can and backward as little, but I ought not and cannot forget my poor friends who lie in their bloody graves. Oh, how great is my grief and rage, but the British government

will surely act. And if not, then let me remember I am still at war with this traitor and murderer. One more determined struggle, one last conclusive effort. And if it fail, Borneo and all for which I have so long earnestly labored must be abandoned. It gets very dramatic about this. And he desperately wants the British government to intervene and punish the Sultan. But the British government, this is for them a step too far. Because again, there is a veneer of legality to this. And as long as it's like, I want you to fight pirates. This guy wants us to fight pirates. He's got letters from the local leaders asking us to help fight pirates. We have this whole crusade against slaving pirates. We can justify that. But when he's like, the Sultan has under his legal

powers executed to him, and I want you to murder him. The British government is like, that's that's a little bit much for us, right? Like you might draw us into a war in Brunei. And we really don't necessarily want to do that. So it takes about six months of pleading to get the British to send a fleet. And they do send a fleet eventually, which sails up to the capital and demands entrance to talk about what had happened. And in a very in another stroke of luck for Brooke, the Sultan's men get kind of trigger happy and fire on the British fleet, which gives them the legal justification to blow burn down all of the defenses and sail into Brunei. So the Sultan flees during the fighting and the British are able to put a puppet, Hashim's brother Mohammed,

on the throne. And this is the start of the Brunei becoming a protectorate of the British Empire, right? That's how this happens is because there's this failed coup that the Sultan cracks down. The British send in ships to talk about the fact that he's murdered James Brooks's friends. And then the Sultan's men fire on the British and that lets them depose the Sultan. They had considered just making James Brooke the Sultan of Brunei, but they decided that would be a step too far even for the British Empire. And the fact that they've got a puppet Sultan on the throne works out better for them because it seems more legitimate. But they're able to convince this guy to give the British Empire an island full of coal nearby that they can use as a refueling station. And

the whole situation makes James Brooke a national hero again. His rule over Sarawak was now absolutely written in stone and all local resistance had been broken. There's no more authorities in the area who have any sort of resistance to him being in power. And so now that he's got his kind of rule settled for the first time, in 1847, he decides to travel back home to the land of his birth to bask in the glory of his fame. The Times of London, working with his agent, published a fawning piece on him just as he arrived in town. Quote, much as we go to guns and grapeshot, we are indebted still more to the peaceful and meritorious exertions of one man for the advances which have happily been made towards civilization and peace amongst the Malay people of whom we speak.

England owes a debt of obligation to Mr. Brooke, Raja of Sarawak, which she will not easily repay. Wow, journalism was not not fantastic at the time. They were really impressed with how peacefully he had burned down all of those villages in the interior. What a peaceful series of wars. He's delightful. Look at him. This guy is hailed as a hero when he arrives back home. Oxford gives him an honorary doctorate. The school he'd run away from as a boy, which had refused to take him back, announces a dinner in his honor. He was even given a personal meeting with the Queen herself. After six months or so, though, he'd had Phil his fill of the home country, and he booked passage home on a ship

commanded by his friend, Keppel, and stocked with a significant number of teenage boys. New officers. I have one request, Keppel. One request. How many boys will there be? And again, these these boys are all simultaneously old enough to command troops in battle and young enough that I think we should continue to call them boys, right? These are children. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That said, they're children who are given command of army sometimes. It's a weird time. So James is got to spend this this this voyage back to the east is a blissful period of his life. He gets to spend months locked on a boat with a bunch of young boys. One of his friends who was present on the voyage later wrote, he had a nephew on board, Charles Johnson,

a staid sublutinent who endeavored to preserve order, but it was of little avail. The noisy ones were in the ascendant led by a laughing, bright faced lad who when he was a midshipman on the Agincourt in 1845 to 1847 had become acquainted with Mr. Brook and whose fondness for Cherry Brandy was only equaled by his love of fun. No place in the cabin was respected. Six or seven would throw themselves on the bed, careless of whether Mr. Brook was there or not, and skylock over his body as if he were one of themselves. In fact, he was as full of play as any of them. This is of course in reality what's happening because there's probably a bunch of these guys there that just have no choice but to fawn over him because he had so much power over them.

And this guy is this quote, he's quomoing it at this point, you know. Yeah. It is also there are references made in his biography and in other books at the time of like, if you were a young British boy on a boat, like a naval aid or one of these things, you got molested. That was in in some cases, it would be like it's obviously some portion of these these folks like that they wind up being into it, which doesn't mean it's not abusive. It's complicated. The Navy is kind of one of those few places where people who are homosexual, like you can have gay relationships in the Navy and they're kind of there. No one considers it gay because you're on a boat, you know, like that is that is a factor in all this. That said, James is also clearly he is the

powerful young he is the powerful king, like a rich king. And he like these are not you can't really be consensual relationship. There's a lot going on here. These are the complicated relationships that Herman Melville left out of Billy Budd in Moby Dick, you know. Yeah. And this again, like the cabin boy gets buggered, right? That's the that's the fact of naval life in this period of time. And it does kind of seem though, like what goes on in this voyage is beyond what naval men are familiar with. And naval men have a lot of tolerance for this kind of thing. Because again, it's that's how the Navy works at the time. But they like other officers, like people who are on board note that there's a lot of coolness from the older officers to James Brook because of his

relationship with these boys, because it's so scandalous and so shameless, right? There's an expectation of some buggery. He's like cavorting with a half dozen young men in his room loudly at all hours of the night. And that's not considered to be okay. Right. And James was noted as being particularly friendly with Charles Grant, a boy he'd met at age 14 and immediately showered with expensive weapons, clothing and jewelry. James wrote an erotic poem for this boy, which he framed as it's it's about sex, but literally the poem is about a bunch of young boys eating a plum pudding. Yeah, I'm going to read you. I'm going to read you an excerpt from this. Hold on. I'm getting ready. It's an erotic pudding poem. So stands Doe Citadel, a virgin post, uncaptured though begirt

with many a host, like other virgin places that I want, uncaptured, yet because a sail not, smoking at stands and seems to dare the worst, the storm a strife, not Kerai when it burst, and youthful Dottie, Dottie's his nickname for this boy, firmly stands his ground, unflinching still, he swallowed full of pound. What I like about this poem is how subtle it is. It's very subtle. Very subtle at all. No, not at all. One of the things that's tough here is it's very hard to define when you're talking about a lot of the relationships in this period. A lot of them are profoundly abusive. A lot of them would be considered pedophilic today. There's also a lot of these young men

and for whom they consider this to be kind of their homosexual and this is the only kind of relationship they get to have that is not going to get them in trouble. So it's really fucking complex. The dynamics of sexuality in the British Navy in this period is a complex story that we're not doing enough justice to. I think it is fair to say that it definitely seems James Brooke is more on the pedophile end of things. He has a marked preference for 14 to 17-year-old boys and while they may be considered adults at the time, there's a massive power imbalance and what he's doing is very sketchy and I would argue abusive, although a number of these boys write very positively about him, which is not unheard of in abusive situations, especially given the

social dynamics at the time. And he's grooming all these kids. He's grooming exactly. Very complicated situation, but I do think it's fair to say it seems likely he was sexually and emotionally abusing these kids, even if some of them went on to think fondly of him because he showered them with gifts. I'm starting to think he's not a great guy. Yeah, scoutmasterly fumbling. That's what's going on here. James dedicated another poem entirely to Charlie's Pimples and actively... It's pretty bad. I want to put this to a song. I want to hear the lyrics. I want to make a song out of it. I did not come across that poem and I don't really want to. The pudding one was uncomfortable enough. He encouraged the boy to join him in Sarawak and serve in the colonial

government and Charlie did eventually do this. To try and win over Charlie's parents, James Brooke gave his mother a golden bracelet and his father promises that he would put away 5,000 pounds in a trust for the boy. He never actually did this, but Charlie went to join him in the administration of Sarawak anyway. Of course he didn't do it. He's such a fucking piece of shit. He's a giant piece of shit. For the next 20 years, James Brooke faced few threats to his sovereignty. One of the most serious was a parliamentary inquiry and a trial conducted in Singapore over the massacre of pirates during his rule. The story here is complex because the specific series of events, the specific massacre of pirates that James has tried for, is actually one of the cases in which

he was probably justified. He and his men are attacked by pirates. They kill like 100 of them, but they let the rest go and choose not to capture or massacre them because he knows that that will incite more of an insurgency against him, which is in the broad strokes of his time ruling Sarawak, one of the less unethical things he did. A group of anti-colonial activists in the parliament decided to try him for this and basically claimed that he was massacring civilians in the guise of fighting piracy, which he absolutely did in his career, but probably not in the specific case they tried him over, right? It's a very, it's a frustrating situation of like, you're right about this man. You picked the wrong specific incident to get angry about

him over, you know? And yeah, it was, and a lot of it's mixed up also in there's genuine anti-colonialist to rightly see James Brooke as immoral and what he's doing as immoral and want to fight him. There's also a lot of selfish people involved. Like he fires his agent at some point and his agent gets involved in the campaign against him to like get revenge against him. So it's, there's a lot going on here. And his fired agent creates something called the Aborigines Protection Society to drum up public outrage about James Brooke's crimes. And a lot of what this says are lies, but they're lies that are like, he's making up things that James Brooke did for real, and they just didn't get evidence of over there. So it's again, it's very messy.

Yeah, it's like the project Lincoln of the time. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the Lincoln project of colonialism. That's right. You guys aren't wrong. You're also not doing this for the right reason. Yeah. And one of you was probably also a pedophile, as was the case with the project Lincoln guy. So James survived the trial and was eventually acquitted, but the process was brutal and savaged his reputation back home. It seems fair to say that both the specifics of the outrageous he was accused of in parliament were often inaccurate and unfair and that the actual terrible things he did and wasn't tried for more than justified the public outrage he finally received. So I guess that's good.

I don't know. I don't know how to classify that. So the public turns against him for a while. Yeah. Yes, they do. So, but this doesn't, he doesn't get convicted. And the last great challenge to Brooke Ruhlin's Sarawak would finally turn the public back on his side, unfortunately. It came in 1856. As I noted last episode, James had always hated Chinese people, but he had recognized that they had a lot like, he brought them in, he encouraged their immigration into Sarawak, which fundamentally changed the ethnic dynamics of the country because he wanted them to improve the local economy. He wanted to tax them and he knew that they would like, if he invited these Chinese people who owned businesses and wanted to set up trading businesses

in his country, it would improve his tax base. And because he was so constantly short on money, even though he was very racist against the Chinese, James came to rely on them entirely for his, like the taxing that funded his reign. He mainly did this by taxing opium heavily, which led to the smuggling of opium into Sarawak, which led to a thriving population of the triads in Sarawak. So he creates the space for organized crime by bringing all these people in and then taxing opium heavily, which creates a market for untaxed illegal opium, which brings gangs in. That's the process that occurs here. Unrest built and built, incensed by the geopolitical situation at the time. There's a bunch of conflicts between the British and Chinese governments.

And the fact that a British man is governing in Sarawak makes a lot of these, particularly these Chinese folks who connected the triads angry. And eventually a plan starts to form within a segment of the Chinese community to murder the Raja and his officers and to take control of Sarawak for themselves. And part of why they think they can do this is they watch James do it, you know? Like, doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to kill. Like, you don't have a standing military, we can just kill you. Take power like you did. Now, Brooks had an intelligence agency, basically. He had like people keeping an ear to the ground and they hear about this plan to coup him before it could be executed. He's actually away in a Brunei at the time when they find evidence of

this plot. And one of his officers orders the garrison called up, gets like a bunch of soldiers called into action, hands out guns to them, and mans a bunch of forts around the capital. And for a little while, this forces the plotters to delay taking action because they don't want to attack a bunch of fully armed forts and stuff. So James comes back from Brunei in 1857 and he finds all of these forts manned and his soldiers on high alert. And this makes him furious because it's expensive to keep a garrison active. And he basically yells at his officer, what the fuck are you doing? This Chinese threats thing sounds like bullshit. Send these guys home and lock their guns back up. As soon as this happens, 600 armed Chinese rebels attack. So not a bright plan. His luck

finally ran out. Yeah. And this makes it clear that it had been more luck than brilliance because this is a bad call. So the rebels came in the night. And when the attack started, James panicked and hid in his room. A servant who realized that like they were under attack, tried to rescue him and James strangled the man. Then he watched through the window while one of the 18 year old boys he'd collected and made an officer. This is an English boy that he'd like, you know, one of his boys who he brought to Sarac with him. They catch the Chinese catch this kid and mistake him for James. And he watches from his room while this kid is beheaded and has his head shoved on a pike in the front yard of his of his capital. Great. So James abandons his servant and everyone

else and escapes through his bathroom window and runs away to go hide in the jungle. The insurrection was initially successful. Chinese fighters took over the courthouse and most of the capital. They butchered many of Brooks officers and local loyal leaders. James Brooke hid terrified will a brave group group of his Malay followers fought back, launching an insurgent campaign against the Chinese occupiers. European writers would later give James Brooke credit for this, saying he inspired the resistance, even though he was again hiding in the jungle at this point of time. The truth is that he did nothing. Well, an alliance of Malays, Diyaks and some European evangelists, there's like a church leader who picks up a bunch of guns and goes to fight

against this insurrection, actually fought back and forced the Chinese forces out of the capital. A general massacre follower. And this was probably incensed by a lot of the racism that James Brooke had inculcated against the Chinese during his reign. And about 1,500 of Sarawak's 4,000 Chinese citizens were massacred in an orgy of bloodletting and thievery. So that's cool. I don't know if cool is not cool. It's not great. Not great. So this insurrection didn't succeed in destroying Brooke Reign over Sarawak, but it did break James. The experience aged him rapidly. And within a few years, he was all but unable to handle the demands of Rajahud. In 1863, James handed over formal control of Sarawak to his adopted heir, a guy named Charles Brooke. Now, Charles was not actually

James's son, as James had little interest in breeding. But he this is the young boy basically starts as a young boy who he gives control over to. And James or Charles adopts the name Brooke and becomes like his adopted son. James would technically remain the white Raja for the last five years of his life. But in reality, he fled Sarawak for England, where he lived out his last days doing the thing he did best, obsessing over young boys. Nigel Barley writes, quote, In 1866, he read in the newspaper of a 13 year old youth, Samuel Bray, who had saved a friend from drowning in Devonport. And he became unhealthily excited. He traced the lad, sent him half a sovereign and tried to open a correspondence with him. Oh, man, he never never gives up. Oh, God,

this guy, he just, you know what he does? He does the stuff that like, you know, that cramping feeling you get in your gut when you hear or see something so douchey, like these douche cramps. Like that's like what I get from a lot of this guy's actions is just like he's just goes a little extra. And he's just such a creep with these young guys. He's a real creep. It's not good. It is what happens on Christmas Eve. This is the best part. And Christmas Eve of 1867, James Brooke has a stroke. This leads to a series of strokes, which ends his life in June of 1868. So that's good. That's the first thing he's done that I fully approved of. I'm torn as a medical doctor. I never approve of strokes. But I mean, if you're, you know,

this in this case, I mean, it's not the worst stroke that I've seen. The worst stroke. How old was he? Jesus, 1860, he would have been like 65. Wow. Okay. Yeah. For the ages, a long time. And especially considering the shit, this guy gets wounded a bunch of times. He's in the tropics, you know, he gets a bunch of illnesses. So this is the end of James Brooke, but not, of course, the end of the Brooke dynasty. Charlie Brooke, otherwise known as Raja Charles, lost no time in going to war to expand Brooke control of Brunei. He justified his conquests as a crusade to end the barbaric practice of

headhunting. Now, if you remember, James Brooke, his predecessor had encouraged headhunting and had used, like he had paid his DIAC soldiers by being like, you guys can take as many heads as you want. Because like having access to a bunch of heads, like you will like give them off in marriages and stuff. They're a symbol of your virility in this culture. So James takes advantage of that. So he doesn't have to pay them in money. And Charlie then uses like, there's all these head hunters here for some reason, we have to fight a bunch of wars to get rid of the headhunting. And that's how he expands his domain. So weird. Where do these headhunters come from? So weird. This thing happens over and over in the British. And you'll find people today who will kind of

whitewash British crimes of imperialism with stuff like, well, but they stopped the barbaric practice of women throwing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands in India, which is a horrible thing. It's bad for it to be the norm for women to commit suicide when their husbands die. I would agree. The British weren't fighting that because it was the right thing to do. It was used as a justification for power grabs, just like headhunting is used by Charles and just like the anti-slavery crusades were used as the justification for a bunch of fucked up shit. So Charles blamed headhunting on the local women because it was kind of a sign of your virility if you captured heads. So he uses that to blame the women for basically what he

he not only conquers a bunch of land to stop headhunting, he orders sexual violence against Dayak women in order to punish them for like supporting headhunting. Oh my God. So I think I like this guy even less. Yeah, he's worse. He's much worse. He's very bad. In his last years of ruling after the Chinese insurrection, Raja James had repeatedly attempted to convince the British government to annex Sarawak and incorporate it into the empire officially. The government had never quite bitten on this offer. And once Raja Charles took power, he made it clear that the Brook dynasty had no further desire to sell out to the motherland. Instead, Charles pursued expansion at the expense of the Sultan of Brunei, which is again now a British protectorate. This

led to a conflict with the newly established British North Borneo Company, which was kind of running Brunei and was not interested in letting the Brooks take over. Now, through a series of military campaigns, Raja Charles took over a region called the Limbang in 1890, but he failed to conquer Brunei itself because of the British, like the North Borneo Company. And this really frustrated Charles because he wanted to control Brunei. He wanted to conquer everything, but he can't because of this British company. And the fact that the British North Borneo Company had stopped him from taking Brunei leads Charles, who is an imperialist Raja of a conquered land, to become an anti-imperialism crusader. Rebranding. Nice. Yeah. He publishes, well,

he is again the white Raja of Sarawak. He publishes a pamphlet titled Queries Past, Present, and Future, in which he critiques the specific sort of imperialism that ran counter to the kind of imperialism he supported. It's a remarkable document because in 1890, this guy who literally ruled a conquered Asian nation based on the power of Western guns, accurately diagnosis the problems of imperialism. Quote, it is something dreadful to contemplate and yet too true that nearly if not all of our magnificently built colonial towns and colonial developments of every description have their foundations upon the bones of the aborigines of the soil. One asks if the benefits bestowed upon their successors are sufficient to justify such sacrifices. I am fully aware that there are many

occasions when bloodshed cannot be avoided and that a certain amount of severity is necessary in governing all races, white or dark. But as we rule at present, I fail to see any hope of improvement respecting the real elevation of the natives by intellectual culture. If we look upon the sad side of the picture of the making of our immense empire, we should pause a moment and ask if there will not be a day of reckoning in the near, far, in the not far off future. Do all the, yeah, so like that's not unreason, that's very accurate actually. He doesn't see that you're just as much a part of this as the British North Borneo Company, but it's accurate. Roger Charles goes on to list British imperial possessions that had been won by conquest and aptly diagnosed the

evils perpetuated in those places. Quote, New Zealand, years of warfare to subdue as finer races ever trod God's earth. What are they now? Australia, mostly kill, he's talking about the aboriginals here, Australia, mostly killed off by native police raised for this purpose. The aborigines being found somewhat dangerous to Europeans, gold workers and farmers. India, frequent collisions and battles occur, the interior still being much unsubdued and its inhabitants very strong. Burma, fighting occasional battles and the natives put to the sword when the country was annexed. So he's, again, very accurately calling out the genocides of aboriginal peoples. There's only one thing about this that's weird. Yeah. While

order ordering campaigns of sexual violence against the women of the country in order to stop a cultural practice that his direct successor had. Oh man, I want this guy to have, I shouldn't say this as a doctor, but I want him to stroke too. Yeah. Yeah, you do. You do. You want them all kind of the couple of more strokes to really handle things well for Malaysia here. So after again, very accurately describing the evils of imperialism, Roger Charles botched the diagnosis of their cause in a profoundly self aggrandizing way. The problem, he said, was not imperialism. It was the fact that, quote, the right men to deal with the natives are not chosen and such men should be very carefully picked. So Charles Brooke was not against white men ruling foreign lands

for profit, but they had to be the right white men, right? Him. Yeah, he got that from James. See, he did hear it from James. Yeah. Yeah, he did. Now, Roger Charles replaced the courtroom chairs his adopted father had set up with an iron bench, which he considered a symbol of the immutable power of his law. And he was in general a more toxic version of everything his adopted father had been. And while Raja James had failed to actually spawn and he recognized descendants, Raja Charles took seriously his royal imperative to make heirs to the throne. Three of his children survived to adulthood, including a man who would succeed him as the third Brooke Raja, Charles Viner Brooke. And I'm going to quote from the Daily Beast here. In 1911, Charles's son,

Viner, married Sylvia Brett, who would eventually embrace the crude title one headline writer gave her, The Queen of the Headhunters. When Sylvia first arrived in Sarawak with her brother, he found the place very different from what I had anticipated, far safer, far more advanced, far happier, far more civilized, a very happy country guided by European brains, but untouched by European vulgarity. The magic of it all possessed me, Sylvia would recall, sight, sound, and sense there was in this abundant land everything which my heart had yearned for. Now eventually, Sylvia's self-dramatizing streak eclipsed her aesthetic sense. Playing up in 11 books and countless headlines, the exotic anomaly of these British blokes running a jungle kingdom, the reigning

Sylvia ended up downplaying the progress the Rajas in their country made. She and her husband had also had numerous affairs and encouraged their daughters to be equally libertine. The three princesses, Lenora, Elizabeth, and Nancy, nicknamed Gold, Pearl, and Baba by reporters, dressed like quote, Tarts, had flamboyant escapades with numerous men and married eight times, including to a band leader and a boxer. Thank God I haven't had four daughters, Viner claimed. What a family. So, yeah, one of his daughters marries a jazz musician, the other marries a wrestler, and the daughter who marries a wrestler, Princess Baba, travels to Hollywood to try and sell a screenplay based on the life of James Brooke. Princess Baba also

repeatedly floated a plan to buy land next to the Sarawak and turned it into a rival kingdom called Baba land. So, fun people. Now, yeah, the Brooks of the 20th century enjoyed little of the positive PR that had turned James Brooke into a celebrity. Much of this had to do with their libertine natures. They're kind of fucking around and getting wasted constantly. At one point, Rainey Sylvia was found dancing with two prostitutes in a nightclub and then taking them back to her palace to have their portraits painted. A visiting MP from Westminster wrote that quote, a more dignified woman it would be hard to find. It was obvious to even casual observers that the Brooks had turned Sarawak a land with more than half a million citizens into their

private playground. One critic noted with disgust that quote, everything in this obscure little country bears the stamp of slackness and hopeless disorder. The Brooke dynasty's end began with World War II. One of the benefits of being ruled over by the Brooks was supposed to be the fact that Sarawak would receive the protection of the English crown. British ships and soldiers had regularly fought in Sarawak to put down internal rebellions and fight pirates after all. But as soon as the country was menaced by a real foreign threat, the Japanese Empire, British guns were nowhere to be seen. When Sarawak was liberated at the start of the war, the destruction it had suffered was too extensive for the Brooke family to afford to rebuild. They finally handed over

control of their domain to Great Britain, who paid the family 200,000 pounds for the kingdom. Sarawak would mark the very last colonial acquisition of the British Empire. The country finally received its independence in 1963 and joined a federation with Malaya, North Borneo, and Singapore. The last white Raja and Rene had an uncomfortable retirement in England. Sylvia hated being quote, short of our glory and faced with the necessity of adjusting to a world in which we were no longer emperors, but merely two ordinary aging people, two misfits in the changing pattern of modern times. Oh my god, this family sucks. They suck and they would rule from more than a century. God, well into the 20th century. Just based on dumb luck. It's so annoying.

Yeah. All this stuff with this family. I mean, has this guy been popularized? The original James Brooke, was he ever popularized in like popular culture? Was there movies made of him or anything? I'm assuming still to this day, people probably only the more common popular cultures speaks of him well, right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, even like the stuff you'll find written recently articles will point out that like he was a relatively benevolent ruler and he did this and he did that, which I don't think is fair. You could argue more benevolent than the East India Trading Company, which perpetuated a genocide that killed 30 million people. Yes, more benevolent than that. It's a real low bar. Yeah, a very low bar. Oh, there is edge of the world stars Hollywood

actor John Rice Myers is Brooke. Dominic Monaghan is Colonel Arthur Crookshank and Hong Kong actress Josie Ho as Brooks former love Madeline Lim. No way. Yeah, the movie Raja. Oh, I guess Raja is the movie. Oh, God. Oh, no, it was retitled the edge of the world. Okay. Oh, this is being made in 2020. Oh, my God. This is February 20. This is not out. Oh, my God. What are you people doing? Stop it. I they've given and they made a Hong Kong actress his his love interest, the love interest of a man who was almost undeniably. Don't look as if he's engaged in questionable sexual relationships with teenagers and at worst, a straight up pedophile predator like rad. Are we that desperate for lots that they had to go to this? I mean, oh, they made him hot.

Oh, God damn it. Wait, wait, who's who's starring as him? What's his name? Dominic Monaghan. Oh, no, sorry, John Rice Myers, John Rice Myers. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a I mean, he's one of the mission possibles, I think they made him hot. God damn it. I'll put a I'll put a picture in here. Fucking hell. Why did they? Yeah, they did this. I mean, it was okay when they did this for for David Koresh because he was hot. But this is a step too far. No one questions that. No one questions that. No one questions how hot David Koresh was. But I guarantee you fucking James Brook was not this hot. Look at it. Look at this. And they hired an Irish actor when in reality. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's not fair. Oh, for fuck's sake.

Oh, no. God damn it. They okay, the synopsis on IMDB is the epic tale of Sir James Brook, the British adventurer who became King of Sarawak in the 1840s and embarked on a lifelong crusade to end piracy and headhunting. This is going to be awesome. Can we just get loaded and watch this movie together? Yeah, let's let's do that. Oh, fuck this movie and fuck James Brook. Yeah. Fuck the British Empire. Yeah. Agreed. Also, check out the song Fuck the British Army if you're if you're feeling feeling more of those vibes. Oh, there's some good news. The family of George Floyd reached a twenty seven million dollar settlement with the city of Minneapolis in a wrongful death suit. Hey, all right. That does kind of speak well for what I hope will happen

to Derek Chauvin in the trial. Well, Covet, you got some pluggables to plug before we write out. Yeah, I should promote our show a little bit better than I did last time or my cohost will hurt me. So we have a podcast called The House of Pod. It's like a medical podcast, but it's like pretty relatable and it's not just for doctors. So we cover medical topics, but we also talk about things like, you know, systemic racism and medicine, sexual harassment and medicine. We try to cover a lot of different topics that we think are important. And we have guests ranging from like the world expert physicians, like the best doctors in the world to, you know, Robert Evans. So you should check it out. I think you'll like it.

Find us at The House of Pod at Twitter and anywhere you do your podcasting. Yeah. Yeah. Check it out. Yell at the people making the movie about James Brook, because it seems like a bad idea. What the world needs now is for us all to idolize a man who conquered an entire country for his own self-aggrandizement, paid his mercenary local soldiers in the heads of their enemies and then gained a reputation as fighting headhunting. That's great. I mean, he did like he had a couple of anti-headhunting like crusades and stuff throughout his career, but when he needed the people who were headhunting to fight for him, he paid them in heads. So I don't, I'm not going to call him an opponent of headhunting. I just, I just don't see how in this

day and age people are still buying the story, you know? Yeah. You know, it's because like, fuck man, I, it's hard not like I was raised on a lot of, like I read a lot like King Solomon's Minds and stuff. I've talked about this in one episode, these books about like the age of exploration and adventure. And like there's always, like I've made some of the decisions I've made in my life because I wanted to have, you know, adventures in places that seemed exotic and strange and unfamiliar to me. It's a powerful impulse, particularly within our culture. So you, there's a lot of desire for these guys to have actually been heroes for what they did do have been heroic. And in part because it justifies further colonial adventures and in part because

just people like a good adventure story. But I think it's pretty harmful. I think it's pretty harmful. Yeah. You know, I'm not mad at everyone who contributes in tiny ways to Orientalism, you know? I mean, sometimes it leads to people learning more about these cultures and you know, more about like, you know, Ron, for example. So it's not always bad, but it kind of gets, it does get so easy for it to go bad. Yeah. I mean, it can in some cases be sort of the seed that leads someone to an actual nuanced understanding of both like a different culture and that can be positive. But more often, I think it leads to James Brooke, you know, fucking James Brooke. Yeah, it's not great. He's not great. But or hot. What is? Yeah, he's not hot, not as hot as they're

making him not nearly as hot as David Gret. So yeah, I guess if I'm gonna ask my listeners to do anything, it's think about David Peres's unbelievably cut abs, just shredded abs. Then check out the House of Pod. Or do both at the same time. You can do both at the same time. We may talk about his abs on the show. We may talk about his abs. Abs are an important part of health. That's right. And here's the end of the show. 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 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 in 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.