Paul Spencer Sochaczewski

The Real First White Rajah of Borneo

Posted on 28. Mar, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles, Sultan and the Mermaid Queen

 

The Real First White Rajah of Borneo
How Can You Become King or Queen (Your-Name-Here) the First?

 

MALUKA, Kalimantan, Indonesia

I belong to a small group of people curious about the life and times of Alexander Hare. When we get together, we ponder an improbable question: How did an ambitious 19th-century slave-owner, harem-builder, and political arriviste become the First White Rajah of Borneo?

The bigger question: How does one become king or queen numero uno? More specifically, how might I become the first Supreme Leader With Wisdom Like Solomon Whose Eyes Spot Prey Like an Eagle and Whose Courage Rivals That of a Tiger of my own country?

Turns out it’s a bit like becoming a star baker. Follow the instructions, have some innate talent and creativity, hire a good PR agent, and create a made-for-TV backstory that preferably involves wondrous miracles, military victories, and a direct line of descent from a notable divinity. Add a dollop of anti-establishment vigor, a rambunctious sense of humor, and a bucket of renegade chutzpah and you’re on your way.

* * *

First, a quick quiz for students of Asian history. Who was the first White Rajah of Borneo? No points if you answered Sir James Brooke, the Englishman who was appointed Rajah of Sarawak in 1841 by the Sultan of Brunei for fighting pesky Dayak headhunters on the sultan’s behalf. James Brooke was rewarded with the territory of Sarawak to govern as he saw fit.

The true first White Rajah of Borneo was the Englishman Alexander Hare, who had his moment in the Borneo sun some 30 years before James Brooke.

Hare left behind no monuments, no lasting social innovations, no glittering palaces, not even a flattering “swagger portrait” as was often commissioned by proud British nobles. He was not a patron of the arts nor was he keen on landscaped gardens. What he did leave were hundreds of illegitimate children and thousands of miserable slaves.

Alexander Hare (1775–1834) was an English merchant who joined a trading company in Portugal around 1800, then moved to Calcutta several years later where, according to apocryphal legend, promptly set up housekeeping with a 14-year-old dancing girl named Dishta.

He later settled in the Malaysian port of Malacca, where he met Stamford Raffles, soon to be the lieutenant governor of British Java (sorry, this gets confusing; the Malaysian city of Malacca has no relation to Hare’s territory of Maluka in Borneo — which is sometimes written Moluko, Molucco, Molukko, or Maloekoe — nor to the far eastern Indonesian Maluku Islands, also known as the Moluccas). Hare had already exhibited his proclivity for young women, and Raffles’s biographer, Tim Hannigan, says that in Malacca, Hare ran “a highly irregular household with barely post-pubescent Asian women of various races tumbling out of every bedroom.”

With these sterling credentials for foreign service, Raffles sent Hare to Borneo in 1812 to become political commissioner of the government for the native states in Borneo and resident of Banjarmasin (technically, the term referred to a diplomatic post, but in reality, the resident was responsible for ensuring the ruler adhered to his treaty agreements).

During the 1811–1816 British Interregnum, when England took temporary control over Java from the Dutch (who were busy losing battles closer to home against Napoleon), Raffles responded to a request from Sultan Sulaiman al-Mutamidullah of Banjar for help in suppressing lawlessness and piracy (similar to the reasons the Sultan of Brunei sought the assistance of James Brooke some three decades later). Raffles saw the opportunity to establish an exclusive trading relationship — timber, gold, and diamonds among the most valuable commodities — with Banjarmasin, located on the southern tip of the island of Borneo, and appointed Hare to establish the bond.

The sultan welcomed the economic benefits and military protection such a treaty with Britain would provide, and as a sign of good intent (or as a generous bribe), gave Hare a chunk of swampy, unproductive land six-times the size of Singapore.

It was hardly a salubrious base, but Hare wasn’t picky. He set himself up as ruler of a personal kingdom called Maluka, issued his own coinage, and indulged in a personal business that was illegal in British-controlled Indonesia: slavery.

He also pursued his predilection: young women. Lots and lots of young women.

Shortly after Hare arrived in Banjarmasin, he immediately broke East India Company policy and Raffles’s own regulations for British Residents at native courts. A resident was not allowed to accept any kind of gift from a king, including gifts of land. (Perhaps trying to distance himself from Hare, Sultan Sulaiman later complained that Hare’s land was meant to be used for his private residence and was not intended to house unruly convicts who frightened the local citizens.)

And the women running around servicing Hare, well, that just wasn’t the way British colonial officials were expected to behave.

* * *

According to the few historians who bother to study him, Alexander Hare was either a talented diplomat who secured a strategic treaty with an important sultan, or an egocentric, law-breaking scoundrel who used his position to assuage his own needs.

In his reports Raffles praised Alexander Hare, saying that under his administration, Banjarmasin had been “reduced to order and regulation.” Raffles effused that Hare was “a gentleman whose desire after useful knowledge and whose zealous exertions in the cause he has undertaken, are perhaps unrivaled.” Parroting Raffle’s praise, British diplomats reported that Hare “had been received at the Sultan’s Court with the most particular respect and attention, and had been hailed throughout his Highness’s [George III] dominions as the deliverer of that once powerful Kingdom.”

Not so, according to Tim Hannigan, author of Raffles and the British Invasion of Java: “The truth was that under Hare, Banjarmasin was reduced to poverty, disorder, and unprofitability.”

Historian Graham Irwin also takes a negative view, writing that Hare was “plausible, unscrupulous, and ambitious [and whose] desire was to found a kingdom of his own where he could luxuriate in oriental splendour surrounded by slaves and ladies of the harem.”

But Raffles defended Hare, noting that the strategy to engage the sultan had been Hare’s and there was not “any other person competent from local knowledge or respectability of character to whom the charge could have been entrusted.”

So, was appointing Hare a brilliant tactic or something Raffles would privately regret?

The general consensus is that appointing Hare was one of Raffles’s least successful management decisions. According to Hannigan, Hare was guilty of “unhinged despotism, flagrant disregard for British colonial law, and outright sexual excess.”

Hare’s blatant extravagances, oversized testosterone surge, and outrageous chutzpah led to a colonial embarrassment and two jolly British colonial sound bites, known interchangeably, as the Banjarmasin Enormity and the Banjarmasin Outrage.

* * *

Accompanied by my friend Joe Yas, I searched for Alexander Hare’s kingdom, located an hour’s easy drive south of Banjarmasin, a rambling city of some 700,000 in southern Kalimantan.

We visited a flat, featureless region of floodplains and muddy tidal estuaries, just a step up from a swampy morass, with rice paddies, rubber gardens, a pineapple plantation, and large windowless blockish houses designed to attract swiftlets whose saliva-constructed nests are the key ingredient in bird’s-nest soup. Here and there we passed the on-road commerce that one finds throughout Indonesia — motorcycle dealers, small restaurants offering duck rice, a few shops.

Some palaces are built on dramatic promontories or at strategic confluences of rivers. But the location of Hare’s palace is easy to overlook. Joe, who is a senior guide, a sterling raconteur, and a man-with-a-mission look in his eyes, stopped at the mouth of Sungai (River) Kurau, where we found a few scattered ruins from a long-forgotten fort. This location, in a protected harbor just a couple of kilometers from the sea, was a likely location for Hare’s palace.

We were welcomed into local homes in the nearby village of Maluka Baulin — the term “baulin” or “ba-ulin” refers to the ironwood trees once found in abundance in the region. The tree is native to the lowland rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo and is listed as vulnerable in the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List due to extensive logging. Its extremely durable wood is still prized to construct Indonesia’s distinctive phinisi sailing boats.

In the Lambung Mangkurat Museum, outside Banjarmasin, we had spoken earlier with a museum curator, Slamet, who showed us a scale model of a large wooden house of the period. Was this the type of elegant Malay-styled mansion Hare built for himself on this site — a swampy inlet with direct access to the sea, the location from where he ran his empire trading in ironwood and building sea-worthy ships to export Borneo’s riches and import young women?

* * *

Countries are being created and destroyed all the time. The US, of course, didn’t exist before 1776, and it has undergone numerous geographic changes since. Italy didn’t exist before 1866, and even then, it was missing Rome, which joined in 1870. A vast swath of African and Asian countries were mere pink blotches on the straight-lined colonial maps before the post-World War II period, and the 1990’s breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia created nation-building opportunities for many territories that previously were known only to geographers and stamp collectors. The UN had just 99 member states in 1960, but this number expanded quickly — South Sudan became the 193rd and most recent UN member in 2011.

New countries require leaders, whether they be presidents, kings or queens, celestial emperors, beloved leaders, grand wizards, or lord high executioners. These leaders might be muffin-like grandparent-types or trident-wielding war-mongering bloodthirsty pirates. But how difficult is it to create a new country? The world is awash in micro-nations, defined by Encyclopedia Brittanica as “an entity that claims to be an independent state but whose sovereignty is not recognized by the international community.”

There is an international convention for being able to call a geographical entity a true country. The Montevideo Convention on the Right and Duties of States, accepted by 198 signatory states, and adopted by the League of Nations in 1933, says that any entity that meets its four criteria — population, territory, government, and the capacity to enter into negotiation with other states — can be regarded as sovereign under international law. Note that under the Convention a country does not have to be recognized by other states; it only has to have the capacity to do so.

So, why not give it a go?

 

 

* * *

Some people are already from a noble family and want to move up the royal totem pole. Such was the case with Nancy Valerie Brooke, the third daughter of Charles Vyner Brooke. Nancy was third (and last) of Sarawak’s White Rajahs whom reporters dubbed “The Siren of Sarawak” and “Princess Baba.” She dreamed of buying an island in the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) with her professional wrestler husband. She was going to name it “Babaland,” where “every man would be Rajah.” In his book Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters, Philip Eade quoted Nancy as saying, “We’re going to have a democracy but with a court and things — maybe an aristocratic democracy. I think a country without lots of uniforms and braids is no fun.”

*

But what options exist for commoners?

A wannabe emperor might heed the advice of His Excellency President Grand Admiral Colonel Doctor Kevin Baugh, the founder and president of the Republic of Molossia. His house and garden near Reno, Nevada, form the nation’s territory, population 27, which boasts a flag, stamps, currency, customs house, radio show, and post office.

Baugh’s advice for people who want to start their own nation:

“First off, use your imagination. It’s not necessarily all an imaginary thing, but it requires you to think outside the box when you’re starting your own country. Learn about what other nations do. You know, learn a little bit of history — how countries have started and eventually stopped. And then, of course, build it from what you know. Your flag should represent you and your country — your coat of arms, all that kind of thing.”

*

About the time that Hare was installing himself and his concubines in Maluka, in 1811 an American whaler named Jonathan Lambert declared himself sovereign and sole possessor of the island group he named the Islands of Refreshment. The idyllic name for his kingdom was not due to the islands’ swimming pools and piña coladas but because the islands were transit stops for restocking supplies used by American cruisers sent to prey on British merchant ships. The islands, now named Tristan da Cunha, are part of the British overseas territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. They form the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world, lying roughly midway between Argentina and South Africa.

*

For $145, you can become a citizen of the Principality of Castellania in Austria, where Prince Ralph I, formerly a burgher named Otto Hubner, has sold more than 2,000 citizenships in 25 years of independence.

*

In November 1998, Philippines police raided a hotel in Olongapo, near Subic Bay, and arrested a Briton, an Australian and a Malaysian. They had been running an internet scam that offered passports for a fictitious nation called the Dominion of Melchizedek, named after Jerusalem’s high priest who blessed Abraham after he rescued his son Lot and his family from Sodom.

The Dominion of Melchizedek’s bubble burst when a man who identified himself as “His Serene Highness Gerald-Dennis Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein” tried to open bank accounts in Hong Kong with checks issued by phony Melchizedek banks. The 22-year-old unemployed Austrian, who had been living in the passenger terminal at Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong, turned out to be a baker, not a prince. During his trial, it was discovered that he had visited several Asian countries with his Melchizedek “diplomatic passport.” He was convicted for bank fraud and jailed for six months.

*

In the geographical United States, you could become a citizen of the Republic of Roadkills-R-Us, whose motto is “Tread on Me.”

*

In 2015 a Czech named Vit Jedlicka proclaimed the Free Republic of Liberland on seven square kilometers (three square miles) of land that was previous terra nullius, unclaimed by either Serbia or Croatia — a quirk of an ongoing border dispute between the two former Yugoslav countries. One attractive provision in the nation’s proposed constitution “significantly limits the power of politicians so they could not interfere too much in the freedoms of the Liberland nation.”  Applications for citizenship are accepted only by email, since Liberland does not have a post office.

*

Indian gurus have embraced the nation-building dream.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the creator of transcendental meditation and the guru to the Beatles and Beach Boys, created the Global Country of World Peace in 2000 in the U.S. state of Iowa.

Arnoldo Chamorro, chief of staff for Paraguay’s agriculture ministry, was sacked in 2023 for signing a “proclamation” with representatives of the United States of Kailasa, supporting their admission in the U.N. as “a sovereign and independent state.” The micro-nation of Kailasa, which their website describes as the “revival of the ancient enlightened Hindu civilizational nation, which is being revived by displaced Hindus from around the world,” is led by self-styled guru Nithyananda Paramashivam, who is a fugitive wanted in the Indian state of Karnataka on charges of rape. Representatives of the fictional polity of Kailasa have managed to participate in two UN committee meetings in Geneva and the micro-nation has entered into cultural partnerships and sister-city agreements with some 30 cities, including Newark, New Jersey; Dayton, Ohio; and Richmond, Virginia. Two members of the U.S. Congress — Norma Torres (D-California, who sits on the House Committee on Appropriations) and Troy Balderson (R-Ohio) have granted Kailasa “special congressional recognition.”

*

Many young girls play at being princesses, but seven-year-old Emily Heaton’s father decided to make her a real princess.

Jeremiah Heaton, who lives in the American state of Virginia, searched online for unclaimed land. He found Bir Tawil, an arid region on the border between Sudan and Egypt that nobody seemed to want.

In 2014 he obtained permission from Egyptian authorities to travel to the rocky patch of desert, some 20-times larger than Manhattan, where he planted a blue flag with a crown and four stars and (rather unimaginatively, for my taste) named it the Kingdom of North Sudan.

“I founded the nation in love for my daughter,” he said.

Jeremiah says he’s confident that the African Union will welcome him and the Kingdom of North Sudan, even though neither he nor his family have ever lived in the nation.

Princess Emily shows signs of becoming a visionary ruler; she wants to make the kingdom into an agricultural production center.

*

Another nation-building role model is Lawrence W. Swan, an American biologist specializing in the ecology of the Himalayan region, where he searched for the jumping spiders of Everest, the springtail fly, and the ever-elusive yeti (which he concluded was a large mountain fox whose peculiar hopping gait left footprints that appeared to be those of a biped). He had the distinction of discovering two new species and having them named after him: a Himalayan frog, Rana swani and a flea found only in glaciers, Machilanus swani. More to the point of this chapter, Swan once “seceded” from both the US and Redwood City, California, protesting the order that he replace — at his own considerable expense — his “perfectly adequate and more efficient septic tank” with neighborhood sewer lines.

He anointed himself “Raja” of his own autonomous native-state, which he named the Kingdom of Cooch Nahai, a Hindi name meaning “absolute no have” or the State of Absolutely Nothing.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “Fortunately, [Swan] made a concession to the government’s right of eminent domain and continued to pay his taxes. But that did not stop him from providing Cooch Nahai with everything a small country needs. Cooch Nahai printed its own stamps — an annual philatelic issue containing the image of a forgotten element of natural history. It had a national holiday, June 21, the summer solstice; a national symbol, the extinct dodo bird; its memorial “Tomb of the Unknown Frog;” and the Great Wall of Cooch Nahai, which contained “mementos of global travels and conquests.”

*

The antithesis to Alexander Hare’s misogynist kingdom is the hardline misandrist Other World Kingdom, a resort/micro-nation in the Czech Republic, with its own currency, passports, police force, and courts. Its goal: “To get as many male creatures under the unlimited rule of Superior Women on as much territory as possible.” To become a citizen, “a woman must own at least one male slave.”

* * *

Perhaps I’m insufficiently arrogant and eccentric to start my own country. But still, it’s a fun exercise, one which you might like to join. So proudly sing your national anthem (mine is “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”), admire your national flower (Rafflesia), salute your national flag (golf clubs rampant), offer fresh marigolds to your national protective deity (Ganesha), tip your hat to the number-one secondary deity (Dinanukht), establish a national unit of measurement (the smoot), and breed your national critter (tardigrade). Final step: Print some business cards with your royal crest and a subtle HM for His/Her Majesty.

 

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This article is excerpted from Quests: Searching for Heroes, Scoundrels, Star-Gazers, and a Mermaid Queen.

ISBN: 978-2-940573-43-1 (paperback) | 978-2-940573-44-8 (ebook)

Explorer’s Eye Press
Geneva, Switzerland