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| Pierre Duyckaerts and Sebastien Bardos |
“The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave,” wrote Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born English novelist of Heart of Darkness, Almayer’s Folly, and An Outcast of the Islands. When French documentary maker Sebastien Bardos of Elephant Doc contacted me in late March about his project “Conrad’s Malaysia” he asked me a question. Of course, Conrad had been to Borneo where he had set several of his novels, but the question posed to me, had he ever been to Sarawak? The short answer is no, but the long answer is, without Sarawak, Lord Jim would never have been written.
Sebastien
works
with Laure Michel, who came to Sarawak in 2017 for a Somerset Maugham and Sarawak
pepper documentaries, which I had blogged about in the five-part series “Somerset Maugham and Me.” Like Maugham, Conrad will be filmed for the Franco-German
Cultural Channel Arte for the program “The Invitation to Travel” or L’Invitation
au Voyage to be aired in October 2019.
Sebastien will be working with Karen Shepherd, who had worked with
Laure on the pepper documentary and her husband Peter John, featured in the
segment “A Personal Invitation”. On the
previous production, Karen and I worked closely with Laure, recommending
people and sites. We did the same with
Sebastien until he hired fixer Edgar Ong, who for thirty years had worked in
the local filming industry including such notable films as Farewell to the
King (1989) with Nick Nolte and The Sleeping Dictionary (2003) with
Jessica Alba, both set in Sarawak.
Edgar would partner with Adrian Cornelius who scouts
locations and deals with logistics.
Adrian is also involved with the on-again-off-again film The White Rajah, about the life of James Brooke, that dates
back eighty years to the mid-1930’s when Errol Flynn was originally scheduled to
star, until delays and World War Two came along. I met Adrian last year with Rob Nevis while
discussing taking part in The Road to Nationhood series. Initially I was considered for a non-speaking role of Charles
Brooke but ended up playing smaller roles, including a man who was beheaded
(sadly cut from the documentary) and Captain Henry Keppel—who, as it turned
out, gave Joseph Conrad a helping hand in writing Lord Jim. More about that later.
Edgar had called for a meeting in May to work out some preliminary
details and suggestions for locations (I had suggested Fort Margherita for my
segment), but the day that we had agreed upon proved problematic for me. My Bidayuh mother-in-law had passed away and that
was the day of her funeral.
Getting reacquainted with Joseph Conrad, I reread Almayer’s Folly
and Lord Jim and delved into the thorny issue of his connection
to Sarawak. Born in
1857 at the height of the British Empire, Joseph Conrad started writing late,
in his thirties, after twenty years in the merchant marines, four with the
French and sixteen with the British.
Conrad always viewed himself as a writer who sailed, rather than a
sailor who wrote, and used the pen name Joseph Conrad for his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, set on the coast of
Borneo. Almayer’s Folly, together with its successor An Outcast of the Islands, laid the foundation for Conrad’s reputation
as a romantic teller of exotic tales, a label he disliked; he felt it was a
misunderstanding of his purpose and it would frustrate him over his career.
Although Conrad had never been to Sarawak, he
did have three significant connections to Sarawak that greatly aided his
writing of Lord Jim. Published in 1900, Lord
Jim was famously based, at least the second half of the book, on James
Brooke, the first White Raja of Sarawak.
An English adventurer, Brooke sailed into Borneo in 1838 and earned the
title White Raja after assisting Pangeran Muda Hashim of Brunei in defeating
the rebels led by Datu Patinggi Ali.
The first half of Lord Jim, however, deals
with the Patna incident, whereby the captain, the first mate (Lord Jim)
and two crew members abandoned what they thought was a sinking ship leaving
hundreds of passengers to their own fate.
This episode was based on an actual event. In 1880, the S.S. Jeddah travelled to
Singapore to Penang en route to Jeddah and began to take on water during a tropical
storm; the captain and some crew abandoned ship with 700 passengers
aboard. The ship didn’t sink, so there
was a huge outcry and a trial in Singapore over their cowardly actions.
Coincidently, James Brooke had an Official
Inquiry in Singapore over misleading the British about killing so-called
pirates to collect bounty, when in fact he was fighting natives defending
their land. Like the character Lord Jim,
James Brooke had been living under a cloud.
Resisting British imperialism, Brooke founded
his own dynasty, the White Rajas that ruled a jungle kingdom larger than
England for one hundred years. James
Brooke became a cause celebrity, often written about in Illustrated London News, which was founded in 1842, coinciding
with the start of Brooke’s ‘war’ against the so-called pirates. Brooke was mythicized as an Imperial Hero,
capturing the imagination of would-be romantics and adventurers. In addition to being the model for Lord Jim, James
Brooke was the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be
King”. Conrad was hailed as ‘the Kipling
of the Malay Archipelago’.
On
6 July, I arrived at The Ranee Boutique Suites at the Waterfront
where Edgar Ong introduced me to Sebastien Bardos and Pierre Duyckaerts,
who had flown in from Penang on about two hours sleep. They found the heat in Penang oppressive and
had been sweating nonstop. I didn’t have
the heart to tell them that Kuching might be worse because of the humidity;
luckily for them, it was partly cloudy outside.
Sebastien told me that for the Conrad story they had previously interviewed
Jean-Luc Henriot in Singapore, Serge Jardin in Kuala Lumpur, and in
Penang, Gareth Richards, who runs the Gerakbudaya bookstore. Serge Jardin, who I believe I met in Penang many
years ago, lives in Malacca and took part in the Somerset Maugham documentary.
Sebastien informed me that my book Trois autres Malaisie, the French translation of Lovers and Strangers Revisited, was being listed in French travel guidebooks to Malaysia, good news for my French
publisher, Editions GOPE.
Over coffee and tea, Edgar ran through the shooting schedule for the
next three days. Before leaving the hotel, Pierre hooked me up
with a microphone. The plan was for
Adrian to drive us across the Sarawak River to Fort Margherita, but I suggested
it would be better for Sebastien and Pierre to take a tambang across,
which I thought would be more interesting and quicker than a roundabout drive
and risk getting stuck in traffic.
Adrian could meet us at Fort Margherita.
Sebastien and Pierre were expecting a bigger boat, perhaps like the one
the tourists use for the Sarawak River Cruise, so they seemed taken aback when
I pointed out the tambang waiting for us. We ducked our heads and climbed aboard. I sat up front looking out at the river while
Pierre filmed me taking in the view and also the steersman, while trying to catch
the splashing sounds made by the tambang. Once we reached the other side, they filmed
me climbing out onto the small jetty where a few passengers were waiting to
board. Unfortunately they had to wait
a little longer since Pierre wanted to film the steersman in front of the tambang. The waiting passengers watched with amusement.
After filming the tambang departing the jetty, Pierre filmed
another arriving with Kuching as a backdrop.
He took more shots of the Waterfront and then filmed me standing at the
edge of the jetty. I was told to keep my
lower body planted (and to avoid falling into the river behind me); however, I
could move my upper body as I talked about Joseph Conrad, who died in 1924, on
the 3rd of August, which happens to be my birthday. Sebastien and Pierre wore hats while I melted
in the late-morning, partly cloudy sun.
Thankfully, Sebastien had an umbrella, which provided us shade in
between shots.
In addition to Conrad and his connection to James Brooke, I was asked
to speak a little about Kuching—its history, its reputation as a river city,
the Waterfront and the antique galleries at the Main Bazaar, as well as my own
impressions when I first visited Kuching twenty years ago. I purposely did not talk about the
ubiquitous cat statues; Kuching means cat in Malay.
We
took a short hike up to Fort Margherita and found Adrian who offered us
lime-flavored 100Plus isotonic drinks, their first. Pierre then filmed me with the fort behind me
in the distance as we continued with the interview. Fort
Margherita was named after the Second White Raja’s wife, Ranee Margaret
Brooke, author of My Life in Sarawak. I pointed out another, though minor Sarawak
connection, when Conrad wrote a letter to the Ranee, praising her Uncle, James Brooke.
“The first Rajah Brooke has been one of my boyish admirations,
a feeling I have kept to this day strengthened by the better understanding of
the greatness of his character and the unstained rectitude of his purpose. The book that has found favour in your eyes
has been inspired in a great measure by the history of the first Rajah’s
enterprise and even by the lecture of his journals as partly reproduced by
Captain Mundy and others.”
Conrad knew the Malay Archipelago as a sailor. In writing Lord Jim and other Borneo-based novels, he could rely on his own
observations for the natural surroundings and the sea. His landfalls, however, were limited to four
stops at Berau in East Kalimantan, which he used as a setting for Almayer’s
Folly. Instead, he relied on reading
first-hand accounts by others including James Brooke’s journals and those who
had written about him, as mentioned in the above letter. He also relied heavily on a second major connection
to Sarawak, Alfred Russel Wallace, of the Wallace Line fame, who was based in
Sarawak for fourteen months, collecting birds and beetles and other specimens
to ship back to England.
Wallace travelled extensively throughout the region
and wrote about his experience in The
Malay Archipelago (1869), highly
regarded as a great travel book and the most famous book on the Malay Archipelago—the
very reason Conrad kept the book handy at his bedside, which he had used for
several novels. Conrad not only relied
on Wallace’s description of the area but also used Wallace himself as a model
for the character Stein in Lord Jim. Stein was the man whom Marlowe had convinced
to hire Lord Jim to work for him in some remote, out-of-the-way locale…so he
was sent to Patusan, a third connection to Sarawak.
Some experts have argued
that Patusan, the setting used in Lord
Jim, was based on Berau in East Kalimantan, a place Conrad had visited. Others suggested that Patusan was located in
Java; however, convincing arguments have been made that Patusan was in fact
based on an actual site on the Batang Lupar river in Sarawak that was called—Patusan. Although Conrad was never there, he did read about
Patusan in a book by Captain Henry Keppel.
A friend of James Brooke, Keppel wrote about their exploits in Borneo in
The Expedition to Borneo on HMS Dido for
the Suppression of the Pirates—another significant tie to Sarawak.
More importantly, inside of
Keppel’s book was an actual map of Patusan, identifying the fort and village
that Conrad had put to good use since he had never been there himself. By looking at the map, you could see that Conrad
followed it closely in his descriptions of the fort and the village, the river,
the tributaries—integral to the ending of Lord
Jim.
That map, along with Keppel’s
descriptions of Patusan, was perfect for Conrad to use in Lord Jim—in
lieu of actually visiting the location—just as Conrad had based the Patna
incident on the real S.S. Jeddah and the subsequent trial in Singapore.
Incidentally, although
Joseph Conrad never visited Sarawak or Patusan, present day Sri Aman, another famous
English writer did—Somerset Maugham.
Maugham, in fact, nearly died in Patusan in the 1920’s in a tidal bore and
wrote a story about the incident, “Yellow Streak.”
When I finished speaking, we went to another
side of Fort Margherita so Pierre could take some more shots. He then brought out a drone and I
couldn’t help but recall what happened to the drone used in other French documentary;
it went around a bend and struck an overhanging branch and was lost in the
river. Pierre used the drone to film
me walking alongside Fort Margherita; then walking down some steps and
approaching the entrance.
Later, after enough footage had been taken
outside of Fort Margherita (after Sebastien and I had finished solving the
world’s problems), Pierre packed the drone away and we entered the Fort. Pressed for time, we had to bypass the nicely
done Brooke Gallery@FortMargherita. They filmed me inside the fort climbing the stairs and making my way along the
parapet walk on two sides, past a bolted but unlocked door containing some
heads. I had first seen the human heads
about twenty years ago, which they kept in a suspended rattan basket, but now covered
with traditional cloth to keep tourists from disturbing them. Previously I had blogged about seeing heads
at a Bidayuh longhouse and being disturbed that evening at my wife’s village by
an actual spirit—my first and hopefully my last encounter.
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| by Paul Carling |
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| by Paul Carling |
I kept asking Sebastien if they wanted
me to open the door to have a peek inside but they didn’t seem to understand
the significance, so I would glance at the door each time I passed by, only natural
since there was a skull painted on the door.
Sebastien did press me about my views of how
the Bidayuh revered James Brooke because he had put an end to their seemingly endless
slaughter by the Iban head-hunters. Back
in the 1840’s, village after village, including my wife’s village, Quop, had
been decimated.
At a lookout tower, they filmed me
gazing out at the Sarawak River, slowly turning my head from right to left. Back on the parapet walk, despite the mid-afternoon
sun beating down on me, the clouds having long since departed, we continued
with the interview. I talked about the tragic fates that Conrad gave to the principle
characters of his novels and stories. He
often saw the darker side of man whether it was The Heart of Darkness in the Belgian Congo, The Secret Agent,
or the elusive anti-hero of Lord Jim,
trying to escape the shame of abandoning the Patna, while still remaining noble—not
an easy task for any man to do. This was
also the theme of Lord Jim, the restoration of a man’s honor and pride.
In many ways the character Lord Jim is
one of us…tragic; a part of him would always be kept secret so we would never
know like others will never know our own secrets.
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| view of Old Courthouse with Cat |
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| Stockade |
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| Astana |
After
wrapping up the filming at Fort Margherita, we dropped off Pierre at the hotel
so he could take some shots of the nearby historical building since there was
still sun. Adrian then took Sebastien
and me to the Old Courthouse where we met with Karen Shepherd, who would be
talking more in depth about Alfred Russel Wallace, and Peter John, about the
local inhabitants.
Edgar
Ong joined us. Sebastien and the others tried
to finalize the details and the logistics for the next two days of filming in
Kuching. They had just settled on an
itinerary—Santubong for one day and Bau, Siniawan and the river along Suba Buan
for the other day—when Sebastien asked about seeing some wildlife, particularly
the proboscis monkeys or the orangutans, to work into the documentary. Since they couldn’t do both (located in
opposite directions) and still complete the other filming in Bau, they settled
on Bako National Park where they could see plenty of wildlife in addition to
the proboscis monkeys and some jungle shoots for Karen.
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| Proboscis monkey, Sarawak Tourism |
Since
my part of the Joseph Conrad filming had come to an end, I called it a day, feeling
rather burnt out from way too much sun, yet feeling satisfied in knowing that
without Sarawak, Joseph Conrad would never have written Lord Jim.
—BorneoExpatWriter
Beheaded
on the Road to Nationhood—Part I
Beheaded
on the Road to Nationhood—Part II
