We now zoom in on part three of our essay by Dr Lee English about the piracy around Borneo Island. Dr English also dwells on the attacks on Saribas and Skrang Dayak as pirates and the debate afterwards. The following was extracted and edited from Tides of Law by Tom McLaughlin of BorneoHistory.net.
One of the earliest known Japanese raiders who attacked Borneo was In the 1570s by the name of Sato Shinen. He was captured by the Ming dynasty and supposedly wrote an extensive report on what he had seen and experienced as a pirate. Interestingly, he focused on the origins of his comrades in piracy to Japan’s Eisho and Taiei Eras (1504 1527), where a band of warriors off the coast of Iyo accumulated great wealth by raiding into foreign lands, including both the Ming coast and into Southeast Asia as far as the Philippines, Borneo, and Bali.
The Iranun and Balaningi raiders from the Sulu archipelago were a particularly infamous group of pirates operating in the region. In the service of their Tausog overlords in the Sulu Sultanate, they focused primarily on raiding villages for slave labour, though they were not above attacking ships as well.
The Pirate Debate
One of the largest and most revealing debates was under the command of Captain Henry Keppel when he attacked the Saribas and Skrang Ibans in Sarawak. These were ethnic groups living on the outlying islands near Borneo. The attacks were at the behest of James Brooke, a British subject who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo in the name of the Sultan of Borneo.
Brooke justified the attack by accusing the Dayaks of engaging in piracy. Brooke admitted he was stretching the term “piracy” to the breaking point by doing so, but still felt strongly that they should be counted as pirates. Britain should follow the Dutch example of signing extensive anti-piracy treaties with local rulers, he felt. The treaties would allow for preemptive strikes against communities suspected of piracy.
While the attacks were celebrated at first, massive controversy began over whether the victims really did meet the definition of pirate as understood at the time, and if the attack was justified or excessive. The debate was discussed in public taverns to the halls of parliament.
Ultimately, the official inquiry refused to take a clear stance on anything in what has been termed “a spectacle of official befuddlement.
Treaty Controlling Piracy
The Treaty of Friendship and Commerce between Her Majesty and the Sultan of Borneo was signed in 1847. The agreement itself was specifically with “His Highness Omar Ali Saifadeen II of Brunei who sits upon the throne and rules the territories of Borneo,” and Her Majesty Queen Victoria. The treaty was framed as part of a larger effort to encourage commerce between Great Britain and “the independent Princes of the Eastern Seas,” and to make trading safe from the threat of pirates.
Article 7 of the treaty required Borneo to allow warships from the Royal Navy and the East India Company free access to all of its ports, rivers, and creeks, and it was further required to provide supplies to those ships “at a fair and moderate price”.
Article 9 has both states to solemnly swear to suppress piracy in their territorial waters, with the Sultan of Borneo further swearing to not give “shelter or aid” to any pirate and to allow the British navy the right to investigate and enforce that clause. Notably, it included slave traders with pirates.
In the case of Borneo, while the treaty may have favoured Britain, it elevated Brunei over regional rivals, promised aid against any internal rebellion against the Sultan, and helped reduce the threat of some other country inserting itself into Borneo at the Sultan’s expense.
This is further driven home by the arguments used by the opposition to Brooke and the Royal Navy most of which were based on the writings of Alexis Chamerovzow and George Foggo in their pamphlet Borneo Facts versus Borneo Fallacies: An Inquiry into the Alleged Piracies of the Dyaks of Serebas and Sakarran.
Chamerovzow and Foggo attacked Brooke’s behaviour from a variety of angles. For instance, they claimed there was no actual evidence of piracy on the part of the Skrang and Saribas groups that was not manufactured after the attack. It provided proof of the innocence of the Skrang and Saribas Dayaks by citing numerous eyewitnesses who had seen Malays and other groups of Dayaks engage in piracy but never mentioned the Saribas and Skrang Dayaks doing so despite describing their culture in some detail.
In particular, they point to the existing treaty with Borneo which allowed for the investigation of piracy but not military assaults on suspected piracy bases and villages.
Instead, they propose that the reason for the attacks was that the Saribas and Skrang had simply been political opponents who had refused to submit to Brooke after his rise to power in Borneo. While Brooke was from Britain, he was acting as the Rajah of Sarawak, theoretically working for the Sultan of Borneo, and as such Chamerovzow and Foggo felt the Royal Navy had no business being involved in the affair, since it was a local, internal power struggle.
Another argument made by Chamerovzow and Foggo in Borneo Facts versus Borneo Fallacies was brute force approaches to pirate suppression were both morally wrong and less effective than a humane approach. Specifically, they note that despite Brooke’s claims of having eliminated the threat of piracy from the region, records, specifically insurance claims and rates for British ships passing through the region, show little difference in either commerce or local raiding warfare.
Piracy around Singapore had been greatly reduced by way of engaging diplomatically with small, Malaysian states in the region, by co-opting local chiefs and providing them with economic rewards for encouraging their own people to engage in trade rather than raiding.
A furious debate arose over whether the Saribas and Skrang Dayaks targeted by “White Rajah” in 1843 were actually pirates under British law or just victims of Brooke’s greed and ambitions.
Notably, a key issue of the debate was whether or not the maritime headhunting style of warfare was to be considered “piracy”. Brooke and his supporters argued that it was, and thus the navy had done its duty of protecting British shipping and free trade by launching the attack.
His opponents insisted that headhunting was legitimate, if distasteful to British sensibilities, warfare which was practised just as much by the Dayak groups Brooke ruled as those he fought against, and furthermore, there had been no attacks on neutral shipping by the Saribas and Skrang Dayaks. As such, they concluded it was not to be considered piracy, but rather a local conflict between sovereign territories where the Royal Navy had no business interfering.
English, Lee Tides of Law A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA, 2024. The entire dissertation is available on Proquest type in Tides of Law.
BorneoHistory.net