In the footsteps of James Brooke

In 1839, James Brooke, an independent English adventurer, sailed east from Singapore in his own 142-tonne schooner in search of commercial opportunities. At Kuching he met the presumed heir to the Sultan of Brunei, Muda Hasim, who was at his wits' end trying to suppress pirates operating from inland. Brooke, with all the advantages of European technology, sailed upriver and blew the pirates' forts to pieces. In gratitude, Muda Hasim made him Governor of Sarawak, shortly afterwards granting him absolute powers in exchange for an annual tribute.

Thus, at the age of 39, James Brooke became the first Rajah of Sarawak. He was knighted by Queen Victoria five years later, and placed in order of precedence immediately after the maharajahs of India.

It is interesting to note that it had been the offer to suppress pirates that had given the Portuguese their entry into China four hundred years earlier, when they gained the use of Macau for the same purpose.

Inevitably, Sarawak dominates this collection of travel writing about Borneo. Whether it was the stability established by the Brooke family (who continued to rule there largely independent of the government in London until the Japanese invasion of 1941) or the intrinsic attractiveness of the location, far more accounts survive from there than from anywhere else on the world's fourth largest island. Despite the tropical climate, the dense jungle and the head-hunting traditions of the local Dayaks, many considered it a paradise on earth.

In fact, in this sequel to the same editor's , The Best of Borneo Travel, the Dayaks come in for particular praise. One notable visitor, Ida Pfeiffer, a woman who at the age of 45 had left her husband in Vienna and taken to traveling the world, judged them for honesty and modesty "above any of the races I have ever known." Their head-hunting was simply an unfortunate custom, and one relatively newly acquired.

Pfeiffer and Brooke both stand out as people who display no trace of arrogance or patronizing feelings of superiority. Brooke believed he had a mission to preserve local customs, head-hunting excepted, and to save Sarawak from the degradation he believed would inevitably follow the arrival of unrestricted Western influence. As for Pfeiffer, she took her rest in longhouses next to the dried heads (the place of honor), traveled through west Borneo -- now Indonesia's Kalimantan -- where the Dutch had only a nominal presence, and in the forest slept when necessary on the bare ground.

Brooke had his would-be imitators, but none were successful. One represented here is James Erskine Murray who tried to secure a foothold at Kutei in 1844, but died of gunshot wounds in the process.

It wasn't long before anthropologists and naturalists arrived, eager to catalogue the wonders of the interior. One such was Hugh Low, eager among other things to satisfy the growing enthusiasm among collectors for orchids to beautify European conservatories. His entry is marked by fastidiousness preserved in the face of a sometimes hostile environment. In the jungle, he advises, "the rattan will answer all the purposes of a corkscrew, if the benighted wayfarer be fortunate enough to have occasion for its services." He must himself have been among these fortunates -- at times it took 30 men to carry his equipment.