Ada Pryer, A Decade in Borneo.

Ada Pryer, A Decade in Borneo. Susan Morgan, editor. The Literature of Travel, Exploration and Empire Series. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7185-0197-7, pp. viii + 183.

A Decade in Borneo was first published in an East Asian edition in 1893, and in London in 1894. It is clear from her letters to friends that Ada Pryer was far from pleased with the first edition and even before the London printing appeared had started to work on an enlarged second edition. Although this second edition never materialized, her corrections and additions did survive and the latter were published separately, with parts of her diaries, in 1989. (1) The present volume is a reprint of the London first edition, and while certainly welcomed, does not contain these later additions, regrettably so, as they add much of interest, including a substantial chapter on the "Dusuns or Ida'ans" and a good deal more on William Pryer's first five years in Sabah, before his marriage to Ada. Once again, Ada Pryer, it seems, has been ill-served by her publishers.

Remembered today as the founder of modern Sandakan, William Pryer was a significant figure in the colonial history of Sabah. He accompanied Baron Overbeck when the latter negotiated leases to what is now Sabah from the sultans of Sulu and Brunei and was immediately afterwards put ashore in Sandakan Bay, on 11 February 1878, at the site of what was then a small gun-running settlement known as Kampung German, named for the nationality of at least some of its transient traders. Given the title of "Resident of the East Coast," he was provided with an "administrative staff' of two Eurasian assistants and a West Indian servant. That he survived his first years in Borneo at all is something of a miracle.

Unfortunately, the editor of this reprint, an American Professor of English, has little apparent knowledge of Sabah or its history. Even the cover illustration, a painting of riverside vegetation in Sarawak, has nothing in particular to do with Sabah, nor do most of the other illustrations in the book. Seemingly, any scene of colonial Borneo would have sufficed. In the same vein, the editor begins her introduction with a chronologically mismatched comparison of William Pryer and James Brooke. As she sees it, in the "mythologized public rhetoric" that she asserts drove British popular acceptance of imperialistic policy, William Pryer supplied "an appealing alternative of colonial enterprise to the aggressive adventure image" offered by James Brooke, particularly when presented, as here, in the form of a "feminized narrative." That Ada Pryer's slender volume should figure in grand rhetorical projects to promote imperialism and undermine the "mythic" appeal of the first "White Rajah" seems hardly credible given the book's late publication date and its modest nature. Worse still, this view distracts from what are the volume's genuine virtues. By the time William Pryer arrived in Sabah, James Brooke's long reign was already over. His nephew Charles had been Rajah of Sarawak for a full ten years, and, by the time A Decade in Borneo appeared, fifteen years later, Charles was deeply engaged in the prosaic task of creating a recognizable administrative system that, whatever its limitations, would prove far more effective than anything that the British North Borneo Chartered Company would ever succeed in establishing in Sabah. Indeed, it is not clear that the editor herself is entirely aware of the difference between James and Charles Brooke. Thus, rather off-handedly, she writes, "James himself never married, though he appears to have had sexual relationships with Malay and tribal women" (p. 5). While the former may be true of James, the latter applies certainly, not to James, but to Charles.

The editor, in this connection, makes gender the principle lens through which she assesses the significance of A Decade in Borneo. Without doubt, considerations of gender have added a wealth of insight to historical studies, including, notably, those of recent Southeast Asian colonial history. Here, however, the editor's treatment of the subject resembles caricature more than analysis. Thus, she tells us that, as a "feminine narrator," Ada Pryer "radically modifie[d] the masculinized iconography familiar to her imperial readers" (p. 20). Dominating this iconography was the first White Rajah of Sarawak, James Brooke, who, she tells us, achieved "mythic significance in Victorian imperial discourse" as a romantic and "aggressively masculine hero," an archetypal fantasy of an isolated white man ruling over savages. This fantasy, she continues, was "at its best in boy's adventure stories" (p. 19). In these tales, meant to "fulfill the dreams of English schoolboys," Sarawak was "masculinized." "[T]here was no place for women," but, instead, the hero's masculinity was "demonstrated by dashing through the jungle with weapons and waging battles." Inconveniently for this line of argument, the first author to express in print an idea of James Brooke as a "romantic model" for English school children was, in fact, another "feminine narrator," Harriette McDougall, whose book, Letter from Sarawak, Addressed to a Child, was, in many ways, the Sarawak precursor of Ada's own book. Moreover, McDougall's James Brooke bore little resemblance to the much later adventure-story heroes described by the editor. Nor, for that matter, did James Brooke, in life, much resemble the editor's portrayal of him. In this connection, she seems totally unaware of the controversy that surrounds the question of James Brooke's sexuality. Despite a veritable publishing industry devoted to dissecting his character, James Brooke remains in many ways an enigmatic figure. Whatever the ambiguities, however, it is clear, as John Walker has noted, that James's most intense emotional ties were with young men, officers in his service, midshipmen, and, in the final years of his life, English colliery lads. (2) His masculinity, in short, was far more complex than anything the editor imagines.

The editor, nonetheless, argues that in A Decade in Borneo, by contrast, William Pryer is "portrayed," by his wife, "as an amicable arranger...more feminine than masculine." His Malay allies are full of "feminized sensitivity and charm," and his colonizing project aimed at nothing less than banishing a violent "masculine past" and replacing it with "a new feminized present" (p. 20). That William skillfully managed to gain the grudging support of contending local leaders, many of them at serious odds with one another, hardly diminishes his masculinity. In any event, he had little choice given the scant support provided by the Company. Moreover, one can only imagine how scandalized Ada would have been by the suggestion that her husband was anything but a paragon of Victorian manliness. Ada plainly adored William, and one of the great charms of her memoir is the loving portrait she presents of her husband and her own keen championing of his projects.

Finally, the editor makes much of the different raisons d'etre advanced by the British North Borneo Chartered Company and the Brookes to justify their respective rule. Whereas the Brookes claimed for themselves the role of protecting native interests against European capital, and also, of course, against possible challenge to their rule from European investors and planters, the Company advocated open access by foreign capital to local markets, resources and labor, a position very much like that advanced today by proponents of "globalization." Like the latter, promised benefits proved largely illusory, and neither regime was particularly successful in financial terms. But, in Sarawak at least some heed was paid to indigenous sentiments. In Sabah, this was not so, and the Company's insensitivity soon opened a rift between William and the Company directors.

William Pryer, it should be noted, was not the first Englishman on the scene in Sabah. By the end of the 1870s, Britain already had had a long, if dissolute, history of engagement in northern Borneo. Starting with the Balambangan debacle in 1773, there followed a century of gun-running and private contraband trade. William Crocker, the Governor of North Borneo in Pryer's time, had himself been actively involved in this trade, most of it with the nearby Sulu Sultanate. Aside from cloth, the principal items traded were opium, guns and munitions. The latter fed directly into what was then, and had been for over a century, a flourishing regional commerce in slaves, coastal raiding and piracy. Private British traders were deeply implicated and played no small part in the corresponding rise of the Sulu Sultanate to a position of regional dominance. However, on the delicate issue of piracy, from at least Raffles' time onward, the principal British argument had been that it was not "free trade," but rather restrictions on trade imposed by Britain's European rivals that had caused the power of indigenous states to decline, and hence allowed for the rise of piracy.

Ada Pryer opens A Decade in Borneo with a fanciful version of this argument applied to nineteenth century Sabah. Thus, she writes, a bountiful era preceded the first appearance of Europeans. The countryside was tranquil and well-populated, and agriculture and trade flourished under a strong, but "passable order" imposed by native sultans and rajas. All of this abruptly changed with the coming of Europeans--not British, of course--but Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. Due to European meddling in neighboring waters, local authority gave way to misrule and chaos. "All the powers of evil seemed let loose to do their worst" (p. 38), and while pirates swept the Borneo coast, inland, "Dayaks, now unrestrained, indulged their passion for head-hunting" (p. 39). Nothing remained but for the Company to arrive, subdue the pirates and re-impose harmony and order. Here is clearly a case of mythologizing. It is not one, however, of which the editor takes much notice, due no doubt to the fact that her principal sources are Anglo-centric historians, who, in one way or another, largely embrace this argument, although in more sophisticated forms.

William Pryer was virtually alone among Company officers to have lived in the Philippines before coming to Sabah. This seems to have served him well, and in his own sparse writings, he showed genuine insight into the complex, factious politics characteristic of the polyglot population he encountered on the East Coast of Sabah. He also displayed rare sympathy for Tausug, Bugis, Malay, Arab and Bajau leaders, counting the latter, in particular, among his earliest allies. While advocating "modem commerce," it was, in fact, old-fashioned indigenous trade that paid the bills, and A Decade in Borneo is a useful source of information on the latter, including rattan and birds' nest collection. Ada describes nest collecting at Segalung and Madai Caves and writes of journeys upriver to visit trading stations in the company of William, including a trip up the Kinabatangan River. Here, there is little "femininity" on display, but rather incessant shooting of wild game--deer, boars and even rhinoceroses. There are also the familiar stereotypes of the times, of "slothful" natives (p. 98), for example, but, by and large, Ada, like William, is a sympathetic observer.

The editor is correct in stressing the Pryers' enthusiasm for what they saw as the commercial prospects of Sabah. Quite clearly, the aim of Ada's little book was to make North Borneo better known to a metropolitan public and to attract investors. What the editor misses is the undercurrent of criticism Ada directs in the book towards the Company government for its short-sightedness and inability to respond to local events short of rebellions. Troubles were already afoot in Sabah and growing local bitterness could not have escaped the Pryers' notice. By this time, William's own career had been sidetracked and well before Ada's book was completed, he had resigned from the Company's service. It is important in reading A Decade in Borneo to bear in mind that the largest and most damaging rebellion, the "Mat Salleh Uprising," as it came to be known, was on the verge of breaking out when Ada Pryer's book first appeared.

By the time A Decade in Borneo was published, William Pryer was no longer a Company officer, but was managing, as Ada relates, several commercial plantations in the vicinity of Sandakan. Undercapitalized, these soon failed and, in declining health, William, accompanied by Ada, left Sabah in October 1898, less than five years after the publication of A Decade in Borneo. Neither would ever see Borneo again. William died and was buried at sea near Port Said, while Ada continued on to England. Here, as a widow, she lived out the final years of her life near her parents' home at Newport. Later, the Company rule that William Pryer had helped to establish would come to an end with the Japanese Occupation of Sabah, and the Pryers' beloved Sandakan would achieve tragic notoriety, and be remembered thereafter as the site of perhaps the most infamous of all Japanese POW camps. The plantation agriculture they had championed would come into its own with a vengeance in post-colonial Sabah, with social and environmental consequences they would, in their innocence, never have imagined. (Clifford Sather, University of Helsinki. This review was originally published in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3. (2004) and is reprinted here with permission of the editor.)

(1) In Nicholas Tarling, ed., Mrs Pryer in Sabah, University of Auckland, Centre for Asian Studies, Resource Paper, No. 1.

(2) J. H. Walker, "'This peculiar acuteness of feeling': James Brooke and the Enactment of Desire." Borneo Research Bulletin, 29, 1998, pp. 148-189.