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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's colonizing my? So we help me out here. How do I introduce the the podcast? Hi, I'm Robert Evans, and this is behind the ******** 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, we gotta. I thought it was really. I thought it was OK. OK. Can I try? Can I try again? OK. Ready? Yeah. Hitler. I'm Robert Evans. See? You know, Sophie, you gotta admit, there's, there's it's it's there's there's something, you know, there's a power in just screaming. Name Hitler to introduce a podcast there's 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 ********. I just guess that twice 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, Doctor Kaveh Hoda of the House of Pod podcast, which deals with a whole bunch of cool medical stuff. Our our friend of the pod, Garrison Davis, was on it recently to talk about gun violence, right? That's right. Listen, yeah, had him on with a gun. We had him on to ask questions. Made gun violence researcher named Doctor Amy Barnhorst those that was a really fun episode. Good, good. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually holding a bullet right now. Bullet doesn't speak. She's just one of my desk bullets. Sure. Desk bullets, Robert. Yeah, and it just bullets. Sophie's holding up 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 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. That's a hoot. As long as it's wet enough outside, you don't want to do it during the dry summer days. 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 gonna be like, doctors who are gonna, you know, who follow our show, who are gonna be listening to this for the first time, and they're just gonna be like, wait, wait, hold on. What's going on? What's going on? Talked about Hitler in guns and what what has happened to cave? And that's OK. I'm OK. That's OK. Yeah, Speaking of what's happened? To cave. What's about to happen to Kavey is that he's about to hear about what happens next to James Brooke. The guy, when we left off, had just kind of at gunpoint, made himself into the governor of a sizable chunk of Brunei or Malaysia or whatever you wanna call it. Borneo. So he has he has gotten himself declared governor at gunpoint, which is the way to do it. You know, I've, I've considered that for a while. I would like to be governor. I think I'd be a good one. 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, this, obviously the actual leaders in 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 Badruddin, 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, we'll put up with this guy, I mean, by June, and I think really loved him. But Raja Hashim is more like, we'll 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. Yeah. 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 Mikoda and one of the sons of the Sultan of Brunei, were 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 Raider 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, as as is generally the case in history, nobody in charge is a is a good person or particularly righteous. This is often how colonial dramas would play out. You've got a ****** local leader, you've got differently ****** 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 imperialist 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 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 Raja to call off that Big diak 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 is about to get raided by these dialects, you might have supported James Brooke too, right? Because it's just like the sultans **** too, you know? And 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 gonna get tired at some point and go back to England and leave them alone. You would think that's what's gonna happen. I think that would be a reasonable assumption. Yeah. And yeah, I think that's kind of what's happening. They're like everything he's done isn't ******. 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 gonna stay here forever. He's a rich white boy. He's gonna 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 Besar, which means big Lord, which is kind of a rad nickname to get. Yeah, and 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 Kuching Malays, who were the folks in the interior. We're about to get rated from their rulers in Brunei. But his territory had an equal population of Dyax and they were not as friendly to him on the whole because he had stopped some of them from raiding these coaching malaise. So James knew that if he was going to hold on power, he already had the Kuching people like kind of on his back. He needed to win over these diacs to his side. And in order to do that he took a leaf out of the British empires playbook as he later wrote quote dividend govern is the motto. I must govern each by the other. So do you understand what that means? This is, again, what the British Empire does in yeah, we talked about in the in the Idi Amin episode, 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 Sarah. This gave those nobles the right to legally take any dyac property they happen to, like if they saw a dyac. But 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 Sarah is an unpopular. System among the Dyaks, and James Brooke abolishes it as soon as he comes to power. But again, not a bad call so far. He's pretty much 2/2 in my book, you know? Yeah, so he also decided early on not to mess with the local religion. I should clarify it. 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. He decides I'm not going to let like missionaries come in and **** with the Muslims because I think people have the right to their own religion and that's great. However, the Dyax were animists right? So they they have kind of a more not a it's they're they have a religion. But it's not a judeo-christian religion, and thus it's not a religion that James Brooke recognizes as a religion. And so he is willing to let evangelists go kind of proselytize to them because he doesn't think they have a religion because he doesn't understand it. Yeah, exactly right. Sure, he's been exposed to Islam because he's all this time and, you know, the Indian subcontinent. So it's not foreign to him. This whatever. I mean, I don't know what they were following. Yeah, dyax. But yeah, totally foreign to him. Yeah, he doesn't know what it is. So he thinks they have no religion. His biographer writes that he considered the Dyax 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 under 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 has not committed, above all, it ensures the independence of the native Princess, 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 and spoilers, we're going great here. But like that's the, 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. 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. Well, anti Concord 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. Oil now? Yeah, the Brooke diamond. 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. Yeah, yes, but not so much of the diamonds. OK, 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 it's very, 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 £5000 per year and although even the 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. See, particularly pure hearted. 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 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 8 barrel. Yeah. So he gets frustrated like he's he 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 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 8 barreled cannon? Because I have become an have to kill more of these people to civilize them properly, so I need a better gun. He's sad. He's not immediately knighted. So he's like, can I have a can and that's the can I have a cannon? Yeah, an 8 barreled cannon. I mean, that makes sense. 1 barrel's not enough to kill you. Mother, Queen Mother, Queen Mother. Well, James's letters home this. Events a distinct sense of insecurity. After taking power, he took actions against pirates, often with the aid of a local British naval captain and 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 A5 year old Dayak Boy named Situ this kid. As 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 responsibility 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 his tactic for raising this boy. Give him 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 Boyle daily, and the clammy sheets of unrequited lust. Engaged in a little vague scout, masterly 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 an 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. It's kind of symbolic of his relationship with Sarawak in general. So he's both portraying himself as. Honestly and kind of heroically taking this, 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. That might be what's happening. It's definitely what's happening with Sarah. We don't know if it'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, I actually there's this guy in general is not the most bastardly ******* 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. I don't think it is either 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 like it's 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. Gout? 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, yeah. Yeah. Imagine if he really was a good ruler. There wouldn't be much, you know, the much don't do much gambling in there. If if he was a good ruler, there might be actual professional judges, right? Yeah. 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, let's 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 intelligence. There he meets with these pirates because there's a pirate problem in his domain and he's just like is thirsty as **** over. These young guys are great. I don't know why everyone complaining about these pirates. What's the Super handsome? These guys are snacks. And he writes to 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 to allow them to go head hunting in his domain. Brook'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 were your countrymen? Do I have 100 scrying? I will have 100 string. That's the name of these pirate people's heads for everyone you take here. He referred 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 behead 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 buyers? Maybe I'm not going to get grandkids. Yeah, I don't. I don't think I'm gonna have grandkids out of this one. Ohh man. Talking a lot about the thighs of these sexy pirate boys paragraphs on his quads. Something's up really. A quad man. Definitely, 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 he he. I mean, there's a lot of them are teenagers, but older teenagers, I don't know. Well, like, 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, right. He's also like, now the Governor, king of a province. And. Right. Not. Just a bunch of these young local teenagers. But later on he starts bringing in young, 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 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 that support this this podcast. And I did not like that one. Umm, well, they won't, Sophie. Yeah, I know, but you didn't. 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, I you are right. No, I don't know. We know what? We've seen Jeff Bezos's sex. 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. Alive girl. Ohh boy yeah, go go check into that. Well, you listen to these ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one meant mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint family. Start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, Robert Evans here. It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision is still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask and my glasses fogging up and have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to, like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something. With me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know, I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. We're back talking about talking about James Brooke. By 1843, it had become clear that negotiation was not going to bring a conclusion to Sarawak's piracy problem. James Brooke 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? As 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 are harassing company shipping nearby. He was not there to travel around the waters and spective arguments first, he pointed out that since water was the primary means of transport around Borneo, any criminals who were sailing on the water. Whereby 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. And Sarah walk, 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. The 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, restitution or compensation. And the people who killed the pirates got rich. So it was again kind of a ****** ** situation, but hey, what are you gonna do? So James Brooke basically argued that the Raiders Keppel had been tasked to fight by the company and the rebels and pirates threatening James's rule in Sarawak were one and the same. And again, James frames, all of this is fighting pirates. Some of them are actual pirates, some of them are rebels who are fighting for other Brunei and Princess in the area. Like he just kind of lumps them up 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 rating of company ships will continue. Eventually, he had made like a good enough argument that the that this guy Keppel is like, yeah, OK, I'll I'll come fight pirates with you. And this gives James Brooke access to an army of company soldiers, one he would repeatedly used 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 a formal. Military force. He would occasionally, like, raise up militaries, but that ***** expensive. If the companies 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? That kind of makes sense, what he's doing here. So after working out this arrangement, James Brooke 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 soldiers spent more time traveling around Brooks 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. Were pirates. The violence quickly escalated, though, largely because Brooke wanted it to escalate. Though their initial raids had led to a a marked drop in pirate activity. Brook had Pence bowl. Prince Badruddin and other local leaders sent him letters begging for British help with the pirate. Minutes this paper trail helped Brooke and Keppel justify their escalating use of force. Soon he had gathered a force of more than 1000 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 promises Diak soldiers the right way, 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 2nd, everyone who might resist him sees oh, this guy can command a company military anytime he wants. I don't want to fight. **** 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 OK with this sort of stuff. They were not. A lot of people recognized at the time how immoral this was, how ****** ** 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. Wow. So there is actually a reason for him to make a paper trail and it's because. He knows there are people back whom we don't support, like any of the imperialism happening. Yeah, this is it's a little reassuring, actually. That makes me feel a little bit better. It's this in there. They're never successful really, right. It's the same thing with like when we talked about King Leopold and 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, a lot of elected leaders in England at the time were like, it's bad what we're doing like, right, right. We're committing crimes against humanity. We ought to stop, and that's important. It's the same thing as like there were founding fathers who were abolitionists and and recognized that slavery was a tremendous evil, and unlike Thomas Jefferson, didn't own slaves. While talking about slavery as right guys like Thomas Paine and I think you 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 strike for James Brooke, 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, four 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 the locals like they're just here to pick up a crew of a boat. That's right, like it looks like, oh, look, now there's a whole fleet of military ships at his beckon 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 peers, 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. Going to guess why he signs? Because there's massive warships pointing out capital. Yeah, and he literally. James has these four warships trained dozens of cannons on the Sultan's home. It is not subtle. This guy's like, well, he's presented with this offer and he looks at it if his window and there are dozens of massive artillery guns pointed at his house. Yeah, it Sultan had. No. There you go this guy again, blitzing every play. This is, this is. But this time it's working. Yeah, I 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 Sarah walks. This is a mugging, you know, so lucky this 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 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? He like his 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, Brooks settled into a pattern. Engaging in intermittent battle with local princes. He always described them as pirates. But their local leaders who don't like his him being in charge, right? Yeah, again, these anti 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, right? 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 Bruneian Prince and annex that Prince's former territory. So the 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. Yeah, 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 Sultans 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 and view of company representatives. So he has witnesses who are white and ask him to take control of the territory. His friend? Yeah, it's a whole show. He has a scripted 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 Brook in the native tongue with a degree of. Fluency I had never witnessed before, even in a Malay. And again, he's saying, oh 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. Here's this guy saying words he doesn't understand is 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 he ruled the country. He lived there for most, right? He should. I believe he did. OK, gain the fluency, but I don't know if it's more fluent. Like neither. And neither does this guy. Right? 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. Next. It's just this is like this, this guy, this Captain Keppel speech here is like like the peakhurst 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. Basic. Ohm from these people many assurances were received of their anxiety and willingness to cooperate with us and our laudable undertaking. And one in all, we're alike 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 all really are they? 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 the of another little, 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 Badruddin. The idea was that Badruddin 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 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 Hashim and Badruddin as 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 or all of at this point, it's 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 writing pretty. You know, that's his. That's his idea. Yeah. I should note here that James sending Badreddine 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 book the book White Braja describes this pattern quote the flattering attention, the seeking out of the company of the new Young Find, the selfish, 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 somebody to take up. Would you use 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 hate. 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For the first time ever in a book format, you can preorder stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. All right, we are we are in fact back. So, unfortunately for Prince Badreddine, playing a part in the scheme of James Brooke 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 Brooke 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 Brooks supporters in their own court. Princess Hashim and Badruddin. Now they did this in the bloodiest way possible. One night, when Badruddin 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 Badreddine was a ******* ******. And this guy, like he's got like 4 different retainers slash bodyguards with him and they get attacked by like 50 men and all of his friends get killed. And Badruddin 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 Badruddin 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. Quadrillion 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, kind of questionably moral to take your girlfriend and wife or your sister with you whatever. But I don't know if they were so into that plan. But it's a storybook death, though, right? It's like one of those like. Like he 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 ***** 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. Yeah. So these guys get killed, along with a couple of other Brooks supporters in the capital. 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 lay 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. So 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 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 2 men, I want you to murder him. The British Government is like, that's that's a little bit. Much for us, right? Like where you you might draw us into a war in Brunei, and we really don't necessarily want to do that. So it takes them 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 interest entrance to talk about what had happened. And in a very in another stroke of luck for Brooke, the Sultans men get kind of trigger happy and fire on the British fleet, which gives them the legal justification to burn down all of the the defenses and sail into Brunei. So the Sultan fleas 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. Of 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 cendan ships to talk about the fact that he's murdered James Brooks's friends, and then the Sultans 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. The island full of coal nearby that they can use as a refueling station, and the whole situation makes James Brook 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. Oh 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 in peace amongst the Malay people of whom we speak, England owes a debt of obligation to Mr Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, which she will not easily repay. Wow, journalism was not not fantastic at the time. They were really impressed with how peacefully. It 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 honour. 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, one request couple one. Yeah, let me look at 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. That said, their children who are given command of army sometimes. It's a weird time. So James is a got to 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. Wage later wrote he had a nephew on board, Charles Johnson, a stayed sub Lieutenant 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 Brooke, and whose fondness for cherry Brandy was only equalled 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 Brooke 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 is there's probably a bunch of these guys there that just have no choice but to fawn over him because he has so much power over them, and this guy is the this. Quote This, he's Cuomo doing it at this point, you know, yeah, it is. Also, there are references made in his biography and another books at the time of like if you were a young British boy on a boat, like a naval aide or one of these things, you got molested. That was. And in some cases it would be like because obviously some portion of these, these folks like that they 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, they're no one considers it gay because you're on a boat, you know. Yeah. 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 is like, again. Like, the cabin boy gets ******** 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, know that there's a lot of coolness from the older officers to James Brooke because of his relationship with these boys, because it's so scandalous. And so shameless, right? There's an expectation of some *******. 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 OK, 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 ****** 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 gonna read you. I'm gonna read you an excerpt from this. Hold on. This ****** pudding poem. So stands Doe Citadel, a virgin post uncaptured, though begert with many a host like other virgin places that I want uncaptured. Yet because a sailed not smoking it stands and seems to dare the worst. The storm is strife, not kerai when it burst, and youthful. Dottie, Dottie's nickname for this boy, fairly firmly stands, his ground unflinching. Still, he swallowed full of pound. What I like about this poem is how subtle it is. You know, very subtle. Very subtle at all. No, not at all. Uh, 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. 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. For whom, like, they consider this to be like kind of, they're homosexual and this is like the only kind of relationship they get, they get to have that is, that is not going to get them in trouble. So it's really ******* like. The the the dynamics of sexuality in the British Navy in this. 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, right? Yeah, he is. 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. He's and he's grooming all these kids, you know, he's grooming exactly very complicated situations. But I do think it's fair to say it seems likely he was sexually and emotionally abusing these cases, even if some of them went on to think fondly of him because he showered them with gifts. You know, I'm starting to think he's not a great guy. Yeah, scout. Masterly fumbling, you know that. That's what's going on here. James dedicated another poem entirely to Charlie's pimples, and actively. It's pretty bad. I'm gonna put this to a song. I wanna. I wanna hear the lyrics. I'm yeah, I wanna make a song out of it. I I did not come across that poem, and I don't really want to. The pudding one was uncomfortable enough. Yeah. 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 5000 pounds in a trust for the boy. He never actually did this, but Charlie went to join him in the administration of Sarawak. Anyway, I didn't do it. He's such a ******* ***** ** ****. He's a giant ***** ** ****. 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 his his rule. And the story here is complex, because the specific series of events, the specific massacre of pirates, that James is tried for, is actually one of the cases in which he was probably justified. He and 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 doesn't want to. He he he knows that that will like 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. But a group of kind of anti colonial activists in the parliament decide to try him for this and basically claimed that he was massacring civilians and in the guise of fighting piracy, which she 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 colonialists who rightly see James Brooke as immoral and what he's doing is immoral and want to fight him. There's also a lot of selfish people involved like he 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 Brooks crimes. And a lot of what this says are lies, but their 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. Like the project linking of the time. Yeah, exactly. It's. Yeah, 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, right? 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 and 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 he finally received. So I guess that's good. I don't know. I don't know how to classify that. So they actually the public turns against him for a while, yeah, yes, they do so, but this doesn't he, he doesn't get convicted. And the last great challenge to Brooke rule in 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. 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, you know, like that. Like that. That's the process that occurs here. Hmm. 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. Immunity 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 watched James do it, you know, like, doesn't seem like it be that hard to kill. Like you don't have a standing middle. We can just kill you, take power like you did. Now, Brooks had an intelligence agency, basically had, like, people keeping an ear to the ground, and they hear about this plan to cool him before it could be executed. He's actually away in 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 an action, hands out guns to them, and Manns a bunch of forts around the Capitol. 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 forces 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 **** are you doing? This Chinese threats thing sounds like ********. Send these guys home and lock their guns back up. As soon as this happens, 600 armed Chinese rebels attacked. So is that a bright plan? Yeah, luck finally ran out. Hmm. 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 like, you know, one of his boys who he brought to Sarah with him. They kept 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 Brook's officers and local loyal leaders. James Brooke hid terrified, while a brave group group, 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. While an alliance of malaise dyaks in some European evangelists, there's like a church leader who picks up a bunch of guns. That goes to fight against this insurrection actually fought back and forced the Chinese forces out of the capital. A general massacre followed, and this was probably incensed by a lot of the racism that James Brook had inculcated against the Chinese during his reign. And about 1500 of Sarawak's 4000, Chinese citizens were massacred in an **** of bloodletting and thievery. Hmm, so. That's cool. Yeah, well, I don't know. Cool. I mean, it's not great. It's 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 Raja Hood. 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 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. Devonport. And he became unhealthily excited. He traced the lad, sent him half a sovereign, and tried to open a correspondence with him. Ohh man, he never, never gives up. Ohh God, this guy, he just, you know what he does? He does the stuff that like, you know that cramping feeling you're getting your gut when you hear or see something. So douchy like these douche cramps, like that's like what I get from a lot of this guy's actions. It's just like he's. Yeah, just goes a little extra and he's just such a creep with these young guys. He's a 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've fully approved of. I'm torn is 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? Uh, Jesus, 18. He would have been like 65. Wow, OK. Daddy, that's not for the age. That's a long time. And especially considering the ****. 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 Brook, but not, of course, the end of the Brook dynasty. Charlie Brooke, otherwise known as Raja Charles, lost no time in going to war to his. So this is the end of James Brooke, but not of course the end of the Brook dynasty. Charlie Brooke, otherwise known as Raja Charles, lost no time in going to war to expand Brook control of Brunei. He justified his conquests as a crusade to end the barbaric practice of head hunting. Now if you remember James Brooke, his predecessor had encouraged head hunting and had used like he had paid his dyak soldier. By being like, you guys can take as many heads as you want because like having access to a bunch of heads like you like, give them off and marriages and stuff there are 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 headhunters here. For some reason, we have to fight a bunch of wars to get rid of the head hunting. And that's how he expands his domain. Yeah. So when you say his head owners come from so weird it 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, 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 head hunting is used by Charles. And just like slit, the anti slavery crusades were used as the justification for a bunch of ****** ** ****. So Charles blamed head hunting 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 he not only conquers a bunch of land to stop head hunting, he orders sexual violence against diak women in order to punish them for, like, supporting head hunting. Oh my God. So I think I like this guy even less. Yeah, he's 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 book 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 N 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. Rajah 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 N Borneo company had stopped him from taking Brunei leads Charles, who is an imperialist. Baja of a conquered land to become an anti imperialism crusader. Rebranding. Nice. Yeah, he publishes. Well, he is again the white Rajah 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 weight 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 them. Yeah, so like that. That's not unreasonable. That's very accurate. Yeah, he doesn't see that you're just as much a part of this as the British N Borneo Company, but it's accurate, right? Russia. Charles goes on to List British Imperial possessions that had been won by Conquest and aptly diagnosed the evils. Perpetuate perpetuated in those places. New Zealand years of warfare to subdue us. Finer races ever on trod God's earth. What are they now? Australia mostly 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 thing about this. That's weird. Yeah. Well, order ordering campaigns of sexual violence against the women of the country in order to stop a cultural practice that his direct successor had encouraged. Man, I want this guy to 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 a couple of more strokes could have really handled things well from Malaysia here. So after again, very accurately describing the evils of imperialism, Raja Charles botched. Diagnosis of their caused 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 E him? Yeah, he got that from James. See, he did hear something from James. Yeah. Yeah, he did. Now, Raja 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, Russia, 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 Vyner Brooke, and I'm going to quote from The Daily Beast here. In 1911, Charles's son, Viner, married Sylvia Brett, who had eventually embraced 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 rainy Sylvia ended up downplaying the progress the Russians and their country made. She and her husband had also had numerous affairs and encouraged their daughters to be equally libertine. The three princesses Leonora, Elizabeth and Nancy, nicknamed Gold, Pearl and Baba by reporters dressed like quote tarts, had flamboyant escapades with numerous men and married 8 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 turn it into a rival Kingdom called Baba Land. So fun people now. Yeah, the books of the 20th century enjoyed little of the positive PR that had turned James broke into a celebrity. Much of this had to do with their libertine natures. They're kind of ******* 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, undignified woman it would be hard to find. It was obvious to even casual observers that the Brooks had turned Sarah walk a land with more than half a million. Medicines 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 Brook dynasty's end began with World War Two. 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 Sarah Walk was liberated at the start of the war, the destruction it had suffered was too extensive for the brook family to afford to rebuild. They finally handed over control of their domain to Great Britain, who paid the pet family £200,000 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 N Borneo in Singapore. The last White Raja and Rainey had an uncomfortable retirement in England. Sylvia hated being quote. Lord of our Glory and faced with the necessity of adjusting to a world in which we were no longer emperors, but merely to ordinary aging people too, misfits and the changing pattern of modern times. Oh my God, this family sucks. They suck. And they would rule for more than a century. God, well into the 20th century based on dumb luck. So annoying. Yeah, all this stuff with this family, I mean, has this, has this guy been popularized, the original James Brooke, was he ever popularized in like, popular culture? Was there any movies made of him or anything? I'm assuming still to this day people probably only the 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, right? Yeah. Low bar. More benevolent than that, yes. It's a real not yeah, a very low bar. Ohh, there is edge of the world Stars Hollywood actor John Rice Myers as Brooke, Dominic Monaghan as Colonel Arthur Crookshank and Hong Kong actress Josie Ho as Brooks. Former love Madeline Lim. No. So yeah, the movie. Raja Raja is the movie. Yeah. God. Ohno was retitled to edge of the world. OK. Oh, this is being made in 2020. Ohm my God, this is a yeah that that February. This is not out. Oh my God, what are you people doing? Stop it. I they've given and they made it. A Hong Kong actress. His his love interest. The love interest of a man who was almost undeniably. It doesn't look as a state in engaged in questionable sexual relationships with teenagers and at worst a a straight up pedophile predator like rap. Are we that desperate for awesome plots that they had to go to this? I mean, they made a pot. Ohh *** **** it. Wait, wait, *** **** it. Who's, who's starring as him? What's his name? Dominic Monaghan. No, sorry. John Rice Myers. John Rice Myers. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's yeah. I mean just from one of the mission impossibles, I think. Yeah, they made him hot. *** **** it, I'll put a. I'll put a picture in here. ******* hell. Why did they? Yeah, they did this. I mean, it was OK when they did this for for David Koresh, because he was hot, but this is just a step too far. No one questions that. No one questions, no one. No one questions how hot David Koresh was. But I guarantee you ******* James Brooke was not this hot. Look at it. Look at it. And they get hired an Irish actor when in reality? Yeah, yeah. No, that's not fair. Oh, for ***** sake. Ohh no. *** **** it, they OK. The synopsis on IMDb is the epic tale of Sir James Brooke, the British adventurer who became king of Sarawak in the 1840s and embarked on a lifelong crusade to end piracy and head hunting. This is gonna be awesome. Can we just get loaded and watch this movie together? Yeah, let's let's do that. Ohh, **** this movie and **** James Brook. Yeah, **** the British Empire. Yeah, agreed. Also check out the song **** the British Army if you're feeling more of those vibes. Oh, there's some good news. The family of George Floyd reached a $27 million 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 Shovin in the trial. Well, covet, you got some pluggable to plug before we write out. Yeah, I should promote our show a little bit better than I did last time or my co-host 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 we cover medical topics, but we also talk about things like systemic racism and medicine, sexual harassment and medicine. We try to cover a lot of different topics that we think are important. 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 God, at Twitter, and anywhere you do your podcasting. Yeah, yeah. Check it out. Yell at the people making the movie about James Brooke because it's 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 head hunting. That's great. I mean he did like he had a couple of anti head hunting like crusades and stuff throughout his career. But when he needed the people who were head hunting to fight for him, he paid them ahead. So I don't, I'm not going to call him an opponent of head hunting. I just, I just don't see how in this day and age, people are still buying this story. Yeah, you know, it's because like, **** man, I I it's hard. Not like I was raised on a lot of like, I read a lot like King Solomon's Mines and stuff. I've talked about this one episode, these books about like the the the Age of Exploration and Adventure. And like, there's always been 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 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. Who have actually been heroes for what they did to have been heroic. Right. 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 a 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, Iran, 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 of both, right? Like a different culture and and that can be positive. But more often I think it leads to James Brooke, you know? Yeah. ******* James Brooke. Yeah. It's not great. He's not great. But what is? Yeah. He's not hot. Not as hot as they're making him. Not nearly as hot as David. So, yeah, I guess if I'm gonna ask my listeners to do anything, it's think about David Koresh'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 apps 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. Yeah. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. 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