'Why, oh, why, Don S., did you have to spoil it all by this thoughtless and ungenteel behaviour, and after such a jolly cruise?' I cried. 'It is most disobliging of you!' 'I could not bear the torture of seeing you possessed by another!' cried he. I asked, 'Why, who do you mean, Don S.?' 'Your husband!' cries he, 'but, by heaven, he shall be your husband no longer!' and springing up, he cried that my Spirit was as matchless as my Beauty, which he praised in terms that I cannot bring myself to repeat, although I daresay the compliment was kindly intended, and adding fiercely that he should win me, at whatever cost. Despite my struggles and reproaches, and feeble cries for an Aid which I knew could not be forthcoming, he repeatedly subjected me to the assault of his salutes upon my lips, so fervently that I fainted into a Merciful Oblivion for between five and ten minutes, after which, by the Intervention of Heaven, he was called on deck by one of his sailors, leaving me, with repeated oaths of his Fidelity, in a state of perturbed delicacy.
There is still no sign of pursuit by H., which I had so wildly hoped for. Am I, then, forgotten by those dearest to me, and is there no hope indeed? Am I doomed to be carried off forever, or will Don S. yet repent the intemperate regard for me - nay, for my mere Outward Show - which drove him to this inconsiderate folly? I pray it may be so, and hourly I lament - nay, I curse - that Fairness of Form and Feature of which I was once so vain. Ah, why could I not have been born safe and plain like my dearest sister Agnes, or our Mary, who is even less favoured, altho' to be sure her complection is none too bad, or *Oh, sweet sisters three, gone beyond hope of recall! Could you but know, and pity me in my affliction! Where is H.? Don S. has sent down a great posy of flowers to my cabin, jungle blossoms, pretty but quite gaudy.
* At this point a heavy deletion of two lines occurs in the manuscript, doubtless to excise some unflattering reference to Lady Flashman's third sister, Grizel de Rothschild, who edited the journal.
[End of extract, which passes belief for shamelessness, hypocrisy, and unwarranted conceit! - G. de R.]
We dropped down Kuching river on the evening tide of the day following, a great convoy of ill-assorted boats gliding silently through the opened booms, and down between banks dark and feathery in the dusk to the open sea. How Brooke had done it I don't know - I daresay you can read in his journal, and Keppel's, how they armed and victualled and assembled their ramshackle war fleet of close on eighty vessels, loaded with the most unlikely crew of pirates, savages, and lunatics, and launched them on to the China Sea like a damned regatta; I don't remember it too clearly myself, for all through a night and a day it had been bedlam along the Kuching wharves, in which, being new to the business, I'd borne no very useful part.
I have my usual disjointed memories of it, though. I remember the long war-praus with their steep sheers and forests of oars, being warped one after another into the jetty by sweating, squealing Malay steersmen, and the Raja's native allies pouring aboard - a chattering, half-naked horde of Dyaks, some in kilts and sarongs, others in loin-cloths and leggings, some in turbans, some with feathers in their hair, but all grinning and ugly as sin, loaded with their vile sumpitan-pipes and arrows, their kreeses and spears, all fit to frighten the French.
Then there were the Malay swordsmen who filled the sampans - big, flat-faced villains with muskets and the terrible, straight-bladed kampilan cleavers in their belts; the British tars in their canvas smocks and trousers and straw hats, their red faces grinning and sweating while they loaded Dido's pinnace, singing 'Whisky, Johnny' as they stamped and hauled; the silent Chinese cannoneers whose task it was to lash down the small guns in the bows of the sampans and longboats, and stow the powder kegs and matches; the slim, olive-skinned Linga pirates who manned Paitingi's spy-boats - astonishing craft these, for all the world like Varsity racing-shells, slim frail needles with thirty paddles that could skim across the water as fast as a man can run. They darted among the other vessels - the long, stately praus, the Dido's pinnace, the cutters and launches and canoes, the long sloop Jolly Bachelor, which was Brooke's own flagship; and the flower of our fleet, the East India paddle-steamer Phlegethon, with her massive wheel and platform, and her funnel belching smoke. They all packed the river, in a great tangle of oars and cordage and rubbish, and over it rang the constant chorus of curses and commands in half a dozen languages; it looked like a waterman's picnic gone mad.
The variety of weapons was an armourer's nightmare; aside from those I've mentioned there were bows and arrows, every conceivable kind of sword, axe, and spear, modern rifled muskets, pepper-pot revolvers, horse- pistols, needle-guns, fantastically-carved Chinese flint-locks, six-pounder naval guns, and stands of Congreve rockets with their firing-frames mounted on the forecastles of three of the praus. God help whoever gets in the way of this collection, thinks I - noting especially a fine comparison on the shore: a British naval officer in tail-coat and waterproof hat testing the hair-triggers of a pair of Man-tons, his blue jackets sharpening their brass-hilted cutlasses on a grindstone, and within a yard of them a jabbering band of Dyaks dipping their langa darts in a bubbling cauldron of the beastly white radjun poison.
'Let's see you puff your pop-gun, Johnny,' cries one of the tars, and they swung a champagne cork on a string as a target, twenty yards off; one of the grinning little brutes slipped a dart into his sumpitan, clapped it to his mouth - and in a twinkling there was the cork, jerking on its string, transfixed by the foot-long needle. 'Christ!' says the blue jacket reverently, 'don't point that bloody thing at my backside, will you?' and the others cheered the Dyak, and offered to swap their gunner for him.
So you can see the kind of army that James Brooke took to sea from Kuching on the morning of August 5, 1844, and if, like me, you had shaken your head in despair at the motley, rag-bag confusion of it as it assembled by the wharves, you would have held your breath in disbelief as you watched it sweeping in silent, disciplined order out on to the China Sea in the breaking dawn. I'll never forget it: the dark purple water, ruffled by the morning wind; the tangled green mangrove shore a cable's length to our right; the first blinding rays of silver turning the sea into a molten lake ahead of our bows as the fleet ploughed east.
First went the spy-boats, ten of them in line abreast a mile long, seeming to fly just above the surface of the sea, driven by the thin antennae of their oars; then the praus, in double column, their sails spread and the great sweeps thrashing the water, with the smaller sampans and canoes in tow; the Dido's pinnace and the Jolly Bachelor under sail, and last, shepherding the flock, the steamer Phlegethon, her big wheel thumping up the spray, with Brooke strutting under her awning, monarch of all he surveyed, discoursing to the admiring Flashy. (It wasn't that I sought his company, but since I had to go along, I'd figured it would be safest to stick close by him, on the biggest boat available; something told me that whoever came home feet first, it wasn't going to be him, and the rations would probably be better. So I toadied him in my best style, and he bored me breathless in return.)
'There's something better than inspecting stirrup straps on Horse Guards!' cries he gaily, flourishing a hand at our fleet driving over the sunlit sea. 'What more could a man ask, eh! - a solid deck beneath, the old flag above, stout fellows alongside, and a bitter foe ahead. That's the life, my boy!' It seemed to me it was more likely to be the death, but of course I just grinned and agreed that it was capital. 'And a good cause to fight in,' he went on. 'Wrongs to punish, Sarawak to defend - and your lady to rescue, of course.
Aye, it'll be a sweeter, cleaner coast by the time we've done with it.'
I asked him if he meant to devote his life to chasing pirates, and he came all over solemn, gazing out over the sea with the wind ruffling his hair.
'It may well be a life's work,' says he. 'You see, what our people at home will not understand is that a pirate here is not a criminal, in our sense; piracy is the profession of the Islands, their way of life - just as trading or keeping shop is with Englishmen. So it is not a question of rooting out a few scoundrels, but of changing the minds of whole nations, and turning them to honest, peaceful pursuits.' He laughed and shook his head. 'It will not be easy - d'you know what one of them said tome once? - and this was a well-travelled, intelligent head-man - he said: `I know your British system is good, tuan besar, I have seen Singapura and your soldiers and traders and great ships. But I was brought up to plunder, and I laugh when I think that I have fleeced a peaceful tribe right down to their cooking-pots.' Now, what d'you do with such a fellow?'
'Hang him,' says Wade, who was sitting on the deck with little Charlie Johnson, one of Brooke's people,24 playing main chatter.*(* Malay chess, an interesting variant of the game in which the king can make the knight's move when checked.) 'That was Makota, wasn't it?'
'Yes, Makota,' says Brooke, 'and he was the finest of 'em. One of the stoutest friends and allies I ever had - until he deserted to join the Sadong slavers. Now he supplies labourers and concubines to the coast princes who are meant to be our allies, but who deal secretly with the pirates for fear and profit. That's the kind of thing we have to fight, quite apart from the pirates themselves.'
'Why d'you do it?' I asked, for in spite of what Stuart had told me, I wanted to hear it from the man himself; I always suspect these buccaneer-crusaders, you see. 'I mean, you have Sarawak; don't that keep you busy enough?'
