Coastal Raiding and the Iban 1775-1860
Editors note: Most of the below account was presented by western writers. St. John, Keppel, Pringle, Beccari, Kennedy and the Rajah Brookes plus the Singapore Inquiry of 1849 are the only voices we hear in this narrative. Nowhere do we hear the Iban side of the story except for Rentap who said he needed more heads. To be fair, we do need the voices of the Iban during this tumultuous time.
The author defines a tribe among the Iban as one where they did not take one another’s heads. They were a loose group of relatives who were dispersed along the bank of a major river and its tributaries. Their main crop was growing dry rice on impermanent hillside clearings in the tropical rainforest.
The taking of heads was the idea about the magical powers of the human head. Raymond Kennedy gave an example:
A Borneo settlement has been suffering from epidemics, crop failures and infertility in women. Casting about to explain their ill-fortune, they decide their spiritual juice is running low. What they need is a fresh input of spiritual vigour.
One of the ways is to capture a new batch of heads from another group. The spiritual energy is concentrated in their heads and by getting some of these heads, they will divert part of the vitality into their community.
The attacked community now needs to plan a return raid to get back what they have lost. They need to restore the balance of heads. They will need to raid especially after they begin to feel misfortunes after having been raided. A good stock of heads is the glory of the Iban settlement.
Spencer St. John (secretary to Rajah James) adds:
The object of the raids is to make sure their rice grow well, to cause the forest to abound with wild animals, to enable their digs and snares to be successful in securing game, to have streams swarming with fish, the give health and to the people themselves and to ensure the fertility of the women. All these blessings, the possessing and feasting of a fresh head are supposed to be the most efficient way of securing (such blessings).
If one group, A, continues to raid another weaker group, the weaker group may pick up and move onwards leaving fertile land to the group A. Iban legends state they were taking both land and heads in these raids. According to traditions, a spread from the Iban homelands to Kapuas river valley began in the middle 15th century. Lands occupied by the expanding Ibans, first along the main rivers of the interior of Sarawak and then towards the coast wrested territory from the Bukitans, Serus and other mainly nomadic tribes. The Iban were slow in progressing down the rivers having not made contact with the coastal peoples until the later part of the eighteenth century.
There were other motives for Iban headhunting. The desire to terminate mourning periods where bereaved spouses could not remarry and other kin of the deceased could not wear good clothes. Other members of the longhouse were subject to lesser rituals. A fresh human head was thought to end this mourning period.
Odorado Beccari states:
Not infrequently an Iban starts on a headhunting expedition by himself. The tension is caused by a squabble with his wife or as relaxation. The tension could be caused by other factors including too many people in the longhouse, not enough food or intertribal conflicts.
Nineteenth-century writers emphasized the need for a woman as a motivation for headhunting (the author lists seven prominent writers). The satisfaction of group needs such as ending a mourning period or restocking of magic was much more important to the Iban than a selfish determination to obtain a woman.
The idea that seizure of land was the main reason for headhunting is negated by the author for earlier times but concedes it could have been a factor in the later episodes of conquest. The Ibans of the upper Rejang were conquering as they moved down the river taking both land and heads.
One thing that is quite clear is there was a change in headhunting in Sarawak’s second division, particularly among the Ibans of the Saribas and Skrang rivers. The coastal areas had the Malays, the Ibans and Malays living together in the middle zone while wholly pagan tribes lived in the interior. Once settled in the lower reaches of the rivers they came upon a different enemy and opportunity, the Mindano based Illanun pirates.
The Illanun people were trading along the coast of Mindano as peaceful traders dealing in gold and beeswax as early as 1686. The eruption of a volcano devastated their homeland. They then established bases on the west coast of Borneo in 1770. These pirates were probably among the first contacts with the Ibans.
The Illanun boats were large and swift prahus. They attacked boats large and small and raided coastal villages. According to tradition, the first large war boat built by the Ibans was in defence against the Illanun. It was built by a leader named Unggang who lived seven generations ago (around 1800) and constructed the ship to keep the Illanuns from sailing up the Saribas River. This might have been considered the beginning of Iban piracy.
(In the Malay kampong at Kampong Gersik, the children are still told to come home or the Illanun will get you. Pulang rumah! Kelak kitak ditangkap lanun ngan penyamun!)
Meeting with some success in their defence of the longhouses, the Iban then began building and attacking similar long powered craft and, by 1820, the Ibans were the scourge of much of the coast of northwest Borneo. Ambitious young Ibans also served as apprentices on Illanun ships. Some of the ways of the Illanun were learned by the Ibans.
Like pirates, the Iban differed from the Illanun in one important respect. Their major goal was to take heads. When the Malay Sultans used them to extort interior peoples such as the Bidayuh and other peoples of the interior, some brassware, guns, gold and silver were taken but the major objective was still the heads. By the late 1830’s Iban raiders were ignoring large quantities of rich merchandise and were content with the heads of their victims.
It is not surprising that in the debates that raged in England in the early 1850s about Rajah James actions in Borneo and particularly the massacre of hundreds of Skrang and Saribas Iban at the Battle of Beting Maru in 1849. The key issue would be were the Iban pirates. On the one hand, Brookes opponents were able to argue with some merit that the Ibans were not “pirates by profession” but headhunting expeditions. Captain Henry Keppel, a friend of James Brooke, stated the Iban were “above all on heads” as they went forth on their expeditions. The character of piracy had been altered and rendered more bloody by the infusion of the Dyak element.
Keppel also stated that Iban boats swept the seas and devastated the shores of Borneo over considerable distances. Others also noted the Iban maritime expeditions as far south as Pontianak and at least as far north as Mukah.
The Iban, in contrast to “real pirates”, never appeared to have abandoned their home communities. They did not make raiding their main activity. Instead, they often made raids during the agricultural slack season, either after clearing and planting rice or harvesting their rice. They customarily returned home after one raid. The Iban depended on their livelihood from the farms and not on the raids.
Other raids in which the Iban in war boats attacked river villages and killed and beheaded hundreds of people were described at the Singapore inquiry of James Brooke. Accounts were given of the killing and decapitation of entire crews of Malay trading prahus. When the Iban took these prahus by surprise, nobody in them would survive and when the prahus managed to reached shore, the Malays ran from their bloodthirsty pursuers.
The Ibans did on occasion take prisoners who were then sold to their Malay overlords or, in the case of young women and children, adopted them into their group. Apart from this, however, killing and taking of heads with abandon were the rules and entire districts were desolated as the result of Iban raids.
This was headhunting, but it was headhunting without rules, headhunting directly against distant Chinese towns in the Dutch controlled regions where no land would become part of the homeland as against neighbouring groups.
Why had this extensive headhunting developed? Part of the answer must lie with the relative ease with which the Iban from Saribas and Skrang river could obtain heads from the coastal areas in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. Before, determined opposition and journeys of over a month to take heads were the norms. Another problem was the Malay Sultanates. In absence of control by Brunei, the Sarawak Sultans hired the Ibans and Illanun to expand their powers.
There also seemed to be a problem among the European powers. Dutch vessels policed the coast to a limited extent until the beginning of the nineteenth century. When Holland became a vassal state of Napoleon’s empire, her ships were attacked by the British ones and were kept away from the East Indies for years. The British, already burdened by the European war, did not take up the role of policing the Eastern Seas. The Chinese, who had come as gold miners, were living as self-governing communities.
The Saribas and the Skrang were two of the largest Iban communities along the coast. In absence of any real authority, the Ibans could make their raids with impunity. There was an advantage for them with people, such as the Malays and Chinese, being afraid of them. People learned to run away on merely seeing them.
Some resistance did develop. The fisherman of the Mukah river sounded alarms when the Iban approached. War prahus were built for defensive purposes at Mukah settlements. Some people went to sea only in large parties to avoid encountering Iban without having sufficient numbers to resist them. Trading prahus carried leelas (brass cannon) with which the Iban could sometimes be repulsed. However, all of these were defensive measures.
The elite among the Malays in northwest Borneo in the nineteenth century were the Brunei nobles. Joining them were the so-called Arabs ostensibly of Arab blood and distinguished by the title of Sharif or sayid.
Beneath them in rank was a diverse group of Chiefs attached to a particular river. The Chiefs, even if they did acknowledge the formal suzerainty of Brunei, sent little or no tribute. Below them were rice farmers and fishermen but they were too few to be a real force. Therefore, the Malays had to rely on pagan communities. In river communities where the majority were Ibans, it was better to join them. The Ibans were amenable to the arrangement because the Malays had salt and salt fish which they were able to exchange with the Ibans for rice. However, the Iban never gave enough support for one Malay Sultan to gain control over a large region.
Why did the Ibans want heads?
Some of the coastal raiders were motivated by misfortune especially deaths. When Abdul Kassim was asked in the inquiry (Rajah James in Singapore) whether Rentap had any quarrel with other tribes he attacked “He did not mention any cause; there was no other cause but the desire for heads.” In a similar vein, when St. John once met an influential Saribas Chief and found he was “dressed in nothing but a dirty rag around his loins, and thus he intended to remain until the mourning for his wife should be terminated by securing a head”.
It is also possible the young Ibans from the Saribas and Skrang men felt no need for reasons; it was enough for them to engage in headhunting because of the adventure involved and because they knew the activity to be a good thing and the custom of their ancestors.
The Brooke Years
A few times, the Saribas and Skrang were made to pay heavily for their coastal raids. Brooke was able to persuade Captain Henry Keppel and other naval commanders to regard the Ibans as pirates and therefore fodder for the men, guns and ships of the British navy. The expeditions of the 1840s in which the navy acted in concert with Brooke resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of Skrang and Saribas Ibans and the destruction of numerous longhouses and boats. From but one battle, the Battle of Beting Maru, the British sailors received a bounty for each of the 500 “pirates”.
Brooke was denied British naval support after 1849. He then turned to fortified downriver outstations commanded by British officers intended to keep the Ibans marauders from reaching the coastal areas. In early 1842, James Brooke received several visits from Matahari, a Skrang leader. He asked if either the Skrang or the Saribas pirated on my (Brookes) territory what he intended to do. Brookes answer was to enter your country and lay it to waste. He replied,” You will give me, your friend, leave to steal a few heads occasionally.”? He referred to this request several times.
After an expedition against Saribas in 1843, Captain Keppel led British Naval forces against Skrang in 1844. Two years later Rajah James wrote in his diary:
“In the midst of general prosperity and increasing happiness of the tribes within the territory of Sarawak, I have suddenly received information that the Sakarran Dyaks have been at sea with a force of seventy and not less than 1,200 men, perpetrating many ravages, burning villages, carrying off women and children into slavery, and laying waste the country, wherever their arms could reach”
Brookes hope for help from the British warships was not quickly realized and three more years passed without further British naval action the Saribas and Skrang. When Keppel called at Sarawak on his way to China at the end of February 1849, he found:
“The insolence of the pirates had by this time so increased that they had sent the Rajah a message of defiance, daring him to come out against them, taunting him with cowardice and comparing him to a woman. This tone of security in the Serebas was certainly rather to be lamented that wondered at : they had lately with impunity captured several trading boats, devastated two rivers, burned three villages and slaughtered four hundred persons -men women and children. Why does the navy sleep?”
At the beginning of March 1849, a large Saribas force said to have comprised between sixty and 120 boats raided the upper Sadong River in the Rajahs territory in the First Division and took “upwards of one hundred heads. In July, the ships of the Royal Navy arrived and the massacre of the Battle of Beting Maru ensued.
The effects of the losses at Beting Maru and the establishment of fortified outstations seems to have caused a lull in coastal endeavours by the Iban. However, in 1853, the Ibans were trying again. When asked if the Skrang and Saribas Ibans had given up their “forage by sea” St. John replied that the Ibans sent boats down the Sakarran river and fired into the fort. They sent only two bankongs and the return fire caused “great apparent injury to the bankongs.
Two attacks were made on the fort at Kanowit. Many attempts have been made to get to the sea, and in small numbers, they have succeeded in doing so, sometimes by small channels.
About four months ago, five or seven Chinamen, with 700 dollars worth of cargo, took clearance from Sarawak to Singapore. They were not heard of again until it was reported their heads were hanging in a Dyak house in the interior of Serebas.
When the Iban tested themselves against the cannonry of the outstation force, they could not prevail. Pringle stated ” The outstations, far more than the Battle of Beting Maru, put an end to the era of Iban coastal raiding.
From: Headhunting Near and Far: Antecedents and Effects of Coastal Raiding by Iban in the Nineteenth Century by Andrew Vayda in the Sarawak Museum Journal, 1975
Our book Sarawak River Valley Early Days to 1840 is available in e-book format on Amazon.Com.
