All was not peace and benevolence, however. In 1857 there was an insurrection by Hakka gold-miners inland, resentful of Brooke's attempts to control them. Harriette McDougal, wife of a missionary, lived to describe it, but she was witness to many horrors.
The editor apologizes for having included only one woman author in his former collection. This time he has four. Among them is Marianne North, a globe-trotting painter and sister of the wife of the Victorian art critic John Addington Symonds. She, too, can command an ironic turn of phrase when the need arises. A party of Dyaks, she writes, "had come down the river in a long canoe from a great distance to ask leave to take the heads of another tribe which had insulted them, and had been told they must not have that pleasure. They seemed to submit without a murmur to the prejudices of civilization."
The oldest item, from 1780, notes with admiration the industry and efficiency of the Chinese merchants (who set up shops in their boats), and contrasts them with the resident Malay traders who were, it asserts, addicted to smoking opium.
Other parts of the island are not entirely neglected. There's a wonderful description of the ascent of Mount Kinabalu in 1925, with a detailed explanation of the topography of the summit that would still be of use to anyone making it up there. The accommodation the writer mentions as available on the route at Sayat Sayat is apparently still on offer.
In addition, there are innumerable colorful incidents illustrating how the Victorians conducted themselves in the tropics. A piano arrives, crocodile eggs are carefully studied (but rejected with horror when suggested as food), and a reported case of human sacrifice is recorded in what is clearly fascinated detail.
But James Brooke towers effortlessly over the other contributors. Here he is, for example, on the approaches to Kuching: "The tide from the Indian Ocean encounters and checks the flood from the eastward, and occasions the rise on shore; and the ebb from Pulo Pisang into the Indian Ocean allows the escape of the waters, causing the fall on the shore, whilst a current from the China Sea prevents their regular retreat." With such grandiloquent authority, it is hardly surprising few could find it in their hearts to resist him.
Generally, the tone declines as the date advances. Shooting animals merely for the fun of it appears to have begun to be popular at the end of the nineteenth century, and you end up relieved the collection stops in 1927. That there is no map is this excellent book's only real shortcoming.
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