James Brooke
James Brooke bought a schooner with his inheritance, sailed it to Borneo, and came away with a country, which his family then ruled for a century. He was born in Benares in 1803, the son of an East India Company judge, served in the Company's army, was shot through the lungs in Assam in 1825, and on his father's death in 1835 bought the Royalist, a 142-ton yacht, with the aim of trading and exploring in the archipelago. He reached Kuching in 1839 to find the Sultan of Brunei's uncle, Raja Muda Hashim, unable to put down a rising of the Malay and Dayak people of the Sarawak river against the sultan's governor. Brooke put it down for him with the yacht's guns and a few dozen men, and in 1841 Hashim, who had promised him the government of the district, was persuaded to make good on it. The sultan confirmed him as Rajah of Sarawak the next year, and in 1846 ceded him the territory outright. He governed it as a personal kingdom, with a handful of European officers, a Malay council and a system of law that kept native custom where he could, and he made war on the coastal Iban and the Malay sea-raiders whom he called pirates and the Royal Navy helped him kill, in numbers - some eight hundred in one engagement at Batang Marau in 1849 - that led to a Commission of Inquiry in Singapore in 1854 and a campaign against him in Parliament led by Cobden and Hume. The commission cleared him. He was knighted, made governor of the British colony of Labuan, survived a Chinese rising that burned Kuching in 1857, and named as his heir first one nephew and then, after a quarrel, another, Charles, who succeeded him when he died in Devon in 1868 after a series of strokes. Three White Rajahs ruled Sarawak until 1946, when the last ceded it to the Crown. Conrad borrowed him for Lord Jim.
- Lived: 1803 CE – 1868 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: head_of_state, adventurer
