White Rajah_A Biography of Sir James Brooke by Nigel Barley

Author:Nigel Barley [Barley, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference, Biography, history, travel
ISBN: 9780349139852
Google: J1YzAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00GU2VLWI
Goodreads: 19367101
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bishop Wilson of Calcutta was very different from his lissom great-nephew, William Brereton. He was seventy-two years old, huge and fat and eccentric and, by the obscure rules that govern Church geography, he was nominally in charge of the Sarawak mission. Like many deaf men he shouted and accused the rest of the world of mumbling and this excess of volume somehow strengthened his own opinions and made those of others seem pale and indeterminate and even more in need of his constant direction.

When the bishop made his first visit, Frank had struggled into unaccustomed ecclesiastical black and gone downriver to pilot in the boat. He normally did this anyway if it was anything more than a small local craft. It was one of the reasons the McDougalls always ended up housing the junior officers of visiting warships – some of them quite ungodly men – which task might more properly have fallen to the Rajah. And if it wasn’t the Navy drinking up the medicinal port, it was the Dayaks gobbling the rice. Later would come wild-eyed, haggard men from the out-stations whose clothes had rotted away on their backs and who had to be wooed back to civilisation. Frank called it ‘docking and tinkering’ and worried that these men, so irked and chafed by unaccustomed shirts, looked more like pirates than churchmen. Money and supplies were a constant headache. And now the Bishop of Calcutta. Well, they would all have to be filled up with heavy puddings and the remains of the Christmas venison. The mission house was too far from the landing stage for Bishop Wilson to walk, so he had to be borne in triumph on an improvised palanquin by muscular Chinese coolies, trained in the transport of rice sacks and the occasional procession of joss-house figures. By the time they struggled up the curving path to the mission house, their thin blue trousers and shirts were soaked in sweat and clung to their bodies to the point of indecorous physical revelation. From the top of the hill Harriette could hear the bishop at the bottom favouring Frank with his views on the Indian castes, cattle-raising and the problems of ecclesiastical marriage, and ear-trumpeting back shouts of ‘Eh? What? Who? How much?’

He had not come unattended. He had a physician, Dr Beale, and the Rev. Moule from Singapore, both good eaters. There was Archdeacon Pratt, accompanied by his tall, icy wife. The Malays stared at her in awe. White women were still a novelty in Sarawak, a new species whose general characteristics remained to be defined and generally agreed. Over the next weeks they would flock to the house, not to see the bishop, but simply to look on Mrs Pratt’s white throat, set off by jet beads and flounced bodice. There was something about that throat that strangely stirred and fascinated them. Having silently stared their fill, they would go home nodding, quietly satisfied. There was a pale young missionary, Mr Fox, paper-skinned and trembly

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