Between two worlds: research in Sarawak, 1965-66.

Pringle, Robert

What follows is an edited version of a chapter from an unpublished account of family and professional life primarily in the US Foreign Service. The tentative title is "Fires: A Memoir of Domestic Diplomacy." (1)

This is a story of research in Sarawak at a time of fundamental change. The colonial era was ending and the British were leaving. The question of how the Bornean people would fare under the new Malaysian regime was on everyone's mind.

My topic was the history of the Iban people under Brooke rule. I saw this history as part of the larger story of minority indigenous peoples across Southeast Asia, often "hill tribes" in remote areas, and their relationship with colonial regimes and their successors. After World War II such groups had often found themselves wary of nationalism and sorry to see the imperialists depart. Sarawak was unusual in that its "tribal" population was relatively large, while the quasi-private colonial power had been anything but typical. My job was to analyze this relationship in detail. The results, I hoped, as historians always do, would have implications for the future.

The immediate product would be a Ph.D. thesis published as Rajahs and Rebels, the Ibans of Sarawak under Brooke Rule, 1841-1941, first in 1970 by Macmillan (UK) and again, with a new author's introduction, by the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) Press, in 2010.

I obtained a grant to do this research from the London-Cornell Project for East and Southeast Asian Studies, established in 1962 to encourage cooperative social science research on Southeast Asia and China between the London University complex (2) in the UK, and Cornell in the US. The Cold War had stimulated funding for such research and I had no trouble in obtaining a grant. Shortly before my research was to begin I married Barbara Cade, just graduated from Cornell with a specialization in Medieval European History and certified to teach in New York State schools. When I informed the London-Cornell Project of this development, the faculty member in charge (3) told me calmly they would simply have to raise my stipend to cover this expense. There was simply no question of her coming with me, unfunded, to Sarawak, a conclusion that would have been rare to unthinkable in later, leaner years.

My thesis adviser and Ph.D. committee chairman was Oliver (O.W.) Wolters. He had started his career before World War II as a Chinese specialist in the Malayan Civil Service. During the war he was interned by the Japanese and worked on the infamous Thailand-Burma railway. After the war he served as a district officer in Perak and elsewhere, and later as an adviser to General Gerald Templer during the Malayan Emergency. Then he retired to academia and, using his Chinese language skills, wrote a massively learned Ph.D. thesis on the early Malay empire of Srivijaya, (4) before coming to Cornell to continue a distinguished career

No surprise, given this background, that Wolters was not your average professor. He was a brilliant, magnetically interesting teacher, but what also made him special for me was his very British mandarin background, eccentricities and all. When it came to Sarawak, he had been there, done that. Where the average American academic might have seen my goal of a diplomatic career as a waste of a good education, Wolters saw it as totally natural and praiseworthy. He was also interested in Iban culture because he recognized it as one expression of pre-Islamic Malay culture, perceiving the relationship, for example, between "sea gypsies" (or "pirates") and warlike, slash-and-burn nomads. He told me that because my topic was both unusual and drew on perishable sources the resulting study would have a long shelf-life, which is already proving to be true. The importance to me of his strong interest and support is hard to overestimate.

The Cornell Southeast Program was seeking additional research locales, and its head, George Kahin, had no difficulty obtaining the required sponsorship of the Sarawak Museum, meaning Tom Harrisson, for my work. He gave it on the condition that I would cooperate with Benedict Sandin, later to be its Curator, on a book he was writing, a thoroughly fair and mutually advantageous requirement. Barbara's role was not defined, but we hoped she would be able to find a teaching job of some kind in Kuching.

The London-Cornell agreement was intended to improve research capabilities by making the strengths of each institution available to the other. Cornell, for example, was stronger on Indonesia and Thailand; London on Burma and Malaysia. In my case, it was decided that I should begin in London by additional course work in anthropology, (5) research in the Colonial Office archives on topics such the British Navy's campaign against Iban "Pirates," egged on by James Brooke on his way to becoming Rajah of Sarawak, and interviewing retired Sarawak civil servants, most of whom were living in picturesque small towns in Kent and other relatively warm comers of southern England.

Stephen Morris, on the anthropology faculty of the LSE, was my guide and mentor in London. Morris had served as the Melanau expert on the team of anthropologists that had done base-line studies on the peoples of Sarawak when it became a British colony, and the most important thing he did for me was to provide sound advice on how to get along with the notoriously mercurial Harrisson. Finally, both Barbara and I studied Malay with a pair of retired Malayan colonial officials, Barett and (Haji) Bottoms.

This pleasant and productive interlude lasted six months, after which we departed for Sarawak via Singapore, where we met with local friends and Southeast Asianists. On April 17th, 1965, we took the weekly Comet (jet) flight from Singapore to Kuching.

Arriving in Sarawak

Our landing was a bit rough. The Sarawak Museum was our official host under the new arrangement with Cornell. Not unrelated, Tom himself, about to lose his job because of the transition to Malaysia, was thinking of a job at Cornell. But the Museum had misread our cable and met a lesser morning flight.

The arrival of the once-a-week Comet, however, was a Happening, and half of Kuching seemed to be always on hand to meet it and have a drink at the airport restaurant. When no Museum representative showed up, a couple of friendly New Zealanders employed by Caterpillar gave us a place to stay--they were about to leave town for a few days--and the use of their car, while we made contact with Tom and settled in.

The actual transfer of power from British Colonial Sarawak to Malaysia was just getting underway as we arrived. Senior British civil servants, including Tom Harrisson, still manned most key posts. Many of them were disturbed by the forced delivery of Sarawak to its wealthier neighbor, and they feared for the future of the non-Muslim native peoples, like the Ibans, who they thought would be forced into a Muslim Malay mold once they lost the protection of a sympathetic and generally progressive colonial regime. "Confrontation" with Indonesia over the creation of Malaysia was sputtering along the land border, and the ethnic Chinese were restive and partially radicalized. Into this complex situation marched a colorful array of British and Commonwealth military: special forces (more correctly, Special Air Services in British idiom), helicopter and fighter units, intelligence specialists and renowned army units, including Gurkhas, with all the trappings of Empire.

After our arrival, things moved quickly. I met Harrisson and Sandin, who was the unofficial historian of his people and had already written many locally published books and articles on Iban history and folklore. However, Tom felt he needed a more substantial publication to achieve sufficient prestige to be an effective curator. It was my job to help him do it. In return, Sandin would help me sort out the relationship between the Brookes and the Ibans. In addition, I would also have access to the Sarawak State Archives, hitherto closed to foreign historians. My relationship with Sandin turned out to be a model of collaboration between foreign and local scholars, who all too often did not contribute much in return for the information they collected. In addition, and convinced of Barbara's qualifications, Tom agreed to help her get a job at the Batu Lintang teacher training college, and he did. His help was needed because the British educational establishment, still in power, regarded Barbara's New York State certification as dubious at best.

The advent of Malaysia had inspired the British to get serious about education for Sarawak's rural people, hitherto largely neglected. This meant training students with only primary education to go into upriver areas, often accessible only by boat, to teach and open new schools. The training college, Batu Lintang, Sarawak's first tertiary education institution, was located on the site of a World War II Japanese internment camp and used many of its buildings.

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We stayed temporarily in Museum guest quarters, a tiny house on Satok Road, on stilts with a row of orchids trained on a big trellis in front. Barbara wrote to her family:

   This place has one thing in common with [state park cabins in the
   US]--ants. I could curse them; they get in everything. They spoiled
   a pound of sugar, invaded some cookies which I salvaged by
   re-baking, got our dinner which I left in a pan on the stove one
   night when we went to look at a house, and devoured two bananas
   another night. Now I hang bananas from the ceiling and put
   everything in the ice box. The other drawback is a baby monkey, a
   family pet next door, who wails for his mother for about an hour
   just before dawn every morning. Even Bob can't sleep through him. (6)

We didn't realize that the monkey was a full-grown gibbon, not a baby, and that gibbons are famous for calling loudly just before dawn. It is supposed be the one of the more romantic sounds of the tropical forest. We finally adopted the tactic or throwing him (her?) several overripe bananas each morning, which gained us an extra hour or so of rest.

Within a few weeks we located a house to rent for the balance of our stay. The owner, a Chinese customs officer, had been posted to Miri, near Brunei. It was a small concrete row house with the kitchen, dining room, and carport underneath, and a bedroom and living room upstairs. It had a squat toilet and no hot water, which made it hard to wash dishes, especially after cooking (Australian) lamb, the cheapest meat available in Kuching. There was a small balcony where every evening we split a can of Tiger beer (the top Malaysian brand) and listened to the news being broadcast from the capital: "warta berita dari ibn kota negara, Kuala Lumpur," words that still resonate with us. We watched the sunset and an occasional RAF Delta Dagger fighter lazily returning to its base from a patrol over the Indonesian border, its rockets clearly visible under its wings, reassuringly unexpended

Just beyond our house began an ethnic Chinese settlement, where every wattle-and-daub house was hidden by vegetation--a horticultural maze of gardens, fish ponds, banana and coconut trees and dwellings. From where we sat on our balcony it looked like an imaginary tropical rain forest. It was reputedly full of communist sympathizers and we once saw an army patrol going into it. Rumor had it they were looking for a clandestine printing press.

The local Hash House Harriers, a TGIF-style institution which combined hounds-and-hare running with copious drink, especially popular among Commonwealth expats, once did a run through the community, which probably did little to win hearts and minds. The primary school in this "rural" Chinese maze-cum-village had among the best scholastic record of any in Kuching. The address of our house, quite the most poetic we have ever had, was 123 Iris Garden, 214 Mile Rock Road, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia.

Iris Garden (Orchid Garden would have been more accurate) was quite convenient to Batu Lintang, a little less so for the Sarawak Museum where I worked, but excellent exercise on a bicycle, and we immediately bought two of them for the commute. We enjoyed the ongoing controversy in the Kuching press about whether or not cyclists should be allowed to pedal "two abreast," regarded as a basic human right by the peddling cohort and a nuisance by the far less numerous motorists, who lost the argument.

My work with Benedict Sandin consisted of helping him compile a history of the Iban people before colonial (Brooke) rule, drawing on his vast collection of oral genealogies (so-and-so, the son or so-and so, etc.). I tried to use them for dating by estimating the number of years between generations. They go thirty or more generations into the past, but at about fifteen generations before present they are grafted onto a standard corpus of mythology, so before this demarcation all of them are largely the same.

Tom Harrisson, to his great credit, made sure that my cooperation with Sandin was substantial, and Benedict did indeed produce a solid book, The Sea Dayaks of Borneo before White Rajah Rule. (7) Harrisson then sweet-talked Macmillan (UK) into publishing both Sandin's book and mine and, at about the same time as mine, his own study of the Sarawak Malays (8), promised originally as part of the Colonial Office series on Sarawak's ethnic groups organized by Edmund Leach. Tom told Macmillan that the Americans were madly buying any books even remotely relevant to the Cold War and that they could only make lots of money from publishing these books, which surely did not turn out to be true!

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Life in 1965 Kuching

We led a varied and interesting social life. We got to know Barbara's fellow teachers at Batu Lintang, Colombo Plan and other aid workers, US Peace Corps volunteers and staff, the British and commonwealth military, quite a few of the departing British civil servants, and all kinds of visiting scholars. One of our favorite Brits was Tim Marten, the Deputy High Commissioner, the Queen's representative in Sarawak, who took me on some fascinating tours of military posts and development projects. Marten, Winchester and Oxford educated, created a mild stir by marrying Anne Tan, a lovely Chinese girl. He explained that some of the older Sarawakians still expected him to be all plumes and pith helmet, and not to fraternize, especially with the Chinese.

We overlapped with two US Consuls, Bill Brown and Bob Duemling; the latter became a life-long friend. Duemling was a skilled amateur architect and made the consulate residence into a showpiece. When we had him to dinner at Iris Garden he was shocked by our squat toilet and suggested that I was maltreating Barbara by housing her in such a place. The Kuching consulate was established only because of Confrontation, allegedly as cover for a CIA listening post, and there were only three consuls before it was closed, depriving me of achieving one of my greatest Foreign Service ambitions. (9)

Kuching, reflecting the best side of post-World War II British colonialism, was easy to live in. Its rain-washed tropical climate was pleasant, and it was spacious and sparkling clean. Thanks to a new waterworks, you could drink the water, and malaria had been eradicated all over Sarawak (it has since made a partial comeback especially in the interior). It was virtually untouched by World War II, unlike Jesselton, its counterpart capital in Sabah, and its colonial charm was yet to be disrupted by development. On one side of the Sarawak River was the English Gothic Astana (palace) of the Brooke Rajahs, later used by British and Malaysian governors, as well as Kuching's whitewashed old fort, which was purely symbolic. There was still no downtown bridge; you had to pay three cents (US) for a hand-paddled water taxi to get across.

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Downtown Kuching was on the other side of the river. Facing the Astana was "Main Bazaar," a row of Chinese shop houses dotted with small but pretty Chinese temples affiliated with the different language groups. Behind that were more shops and most of the Brooke-era government offices. There was a "night market" where you could order food from surrounding food stalls, where everyone liked to eat out. Iban vendors were often there peddling wooden hombill carvings and other handicrafts.

Not far away was the parade ground, or padang, the best hotel, the Sarawak Museum, the residences of senior civil servants, and the Anglican Cathedral. The Malays (by definition Muslims) had their own quarter of stilted houses and canals, near the big mosque. In front of the mosque was a pushcart that sold curry seasoning paste. You asked for enough paste for X pounds of Y meat (lamb, chicken or fish). The first time I bought some I got it wrong and mistakenly ordered X pounds of paste, resulting in the world's hottest curry. After trying to dilute the heat by recooking the meat with lots of potatoes and new coconut milk, we finally had to admit defeat and threw it away.

In back of the Museum there was a park and an ornate bandstand where the police band played every Sunday and people of all backgrounds dressed up and came to listen and eat kacang es, a concoction of shredded ice, sweetened condensed milk, a bright green gelatin, and red beans. We liked it too, and since Kuching had a clean water supply, indulged in a glassful whenever we could.

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On weekends we could bike down to the excellent municipal swimming pool, or go to the races, which featured ponies from North Borneo adept at galloping through tropical downpours. We remember losing two dollars Malay (sixty cents US), the minimum bet. Friends on leave sometimes loaned us their cars, which enabled us to visit Land Dayak longhouses south of Kuching. One of them, Kampong Giam, had a small waterfall excellent for swimming. It was there that we once unexpectedly spent the night and participated in a harvest festival, during which, dressed in a borrowed white shirt, I handed out prizes for the children's field day. The Land Dayaks or Bedayuh are different ethnically from the more numerous and warlike Sea Dayaks, the old term for Iban, and in the Brooke era they had more often been victims than headhunters. However, they kept the heads they had taken in a separate head house, which we got to see. Long into the night, the eating, drinking, and dancing continued.

North of Sarawak, toward the sea, Bako National Park was a good weekend destination. It didn't have much except a murky beach, this being a coast of mud and nipah palm swamp, where the rivers bring down too much sediment from the rainy interior for coral to survive. On one outing Barbara collided with a large jellyfish (she never saw it) resulting in a very painful sting. Fortunately there were British troops nearby equipped with gin and some kind of pain-killing salve.

Late in our stay, we chaperoned a joint Girl Guide-Boy Scout camping trip from Batu Lintang to Santubong, not far away. All we remember is the hassle of persuading the students to hire two boats to go downriver, rather than dangerously (by our standards) overloading one. The boys had planned to sit on the roof, but few of the students could actually swim.

Bako was where Tom Harrisson and his wife Barbara had a project, one of the first of its kind, to teach jungle survival skills to orphaned orangutans with the help of a bad-tempered wild adult. For years I relished and told a story about how Tom took a very senior colonial official and his pompous wife to see the project. The visit ended disastrously when the mentoring orang, named Arthur, assaulted the party and went prancing back into the forest with the top of the official wife's bathing suit wrapped around his head, munching on her camera. This supposedly led to the relocation of the project to Sabah. Unfortunately my diary, read recently for the first time in decades, has a less colorful version, which merely states that Arthur was a bit neurotic and enjoyed "mildly mauling" sightseers. (10) This demonstrates how too many cocktail parties can make a hash of oral history.

At first I worked mainly with Benedict Sandin on his own project. Then I began going through Brooke-era records with the indispensable help of archivist Loh Chee Yin. I would frequently ask Sandin for his views, and often got another version of events which usually agreed on basic facts but often, to my delight, provided a very different interpretation of them. Benedict was from the relatively well-educated Saribas district, and many people assumed that his knowledge was restricted to his home region, but this was not the case. Indeed the Ibans had more history in common--and sense of shared cultural heritage generally--than most people realized.

Later Benedict would accompany me on long interviewing sessions in remote areas, sitting on the longhouse verandah with the tuai rumah (headman) as they counted back on their respective genealogies. They would keep track of the generations with bits of straw placed on the floor mat, as they sought a common ancestor-bespectacled Sandin with his short hair and white shirt, every inch the missionary product, the lean, wiry headman with tattooed throat and long hair, the picture of a retired headhunter. Sandin also interpreted, because although I had some knowledge of Iban, which is close to standard Malay/Indonesian, I could not deal with rapid-fire exchanges or specialized vocabulary.

When in Kuching I would bicycle downtown for lunch, select a small restaurant on the ground floor of a Chinese shop, of which there were dozens, and order a bowl of yellow noodle soup with slices of pork on top. The Chinese, inveterate snackers, are always eating. Kuching is famous for laksa, a coconut and shrimp curry soup favored as a mid-morning snack, as is "pao," large round dim sum, as yet unheard of in the US, stuffed with meat or bean paste. Coffee was made in what looked like a long, very dirty sock hung around a metal rim through which the shopkeeper poured boiling water with much fancy arm motion, served with sweetened condensed milk. Yum!

All Chinese coffee shops were operated by Hailam Chinese--people who speak the Hailam language, originally from Hainan off the south coast of China. Several of about half a dozen Chinese language (not dialect) groups in Sarawak had similar occupational-linguistic linkages--as in, if you speak French, you must be a pastry chef. Another example: all Henghuas were either bicycle shop owners or fishermen. Shop owners lived over their shops and never really closed. The colonial government had valiantly tried to make them do so on major holidays--based on the most un-Chinese assumption that too much work is unhealthy--but the shop door was usually left open a crack, in case you really wanted to buy something. One of my favorite Chinese enterprises was the Borneo Studio, at 57 Carpenter St, which sold photo supplies and developed film. The proprietor did the best black-and-white processing I have ever experienced anywhere. Even his smallest prints were superb, and his work adorns this article.

Barbara at Batu Lintang

Barbara enjoyed our shared adventures as much as I did, but most of the time I was sequestered in the Sarawak Museum archives. She needed a job of her own, one that would contribute to her own professional future. There would be little opportunity to pursue her interest in medieval European history, but she could surely teach somewhere. However, despite Tom Harrisson's intervention, mentioned above, the Sarawak education bureaucracy, still almost entirely British, took a full year to recognize her American teaching credentials, meaning that she was paid much less than other (UK or Commonwealth) expatriates working at Batu Lintang. This stupidity had a happy ending: when it was finally corrected, Barbara received a welcome bonus of about $1,000 (US) to spend on the way home.

That glitch aside, Batu Lintang was a wonderful experience. In Barbara's words:

   Sarawak was my first encounter with a non-Western society, and Batu
   Lintang was loaded with special challenges. The first major lesson
   I learned (I was already supposed to know it, but sometimes
   experience is a better teacher than books) was that whatever you
   are trying to teach, you have to start at the level your students
   have already reached. No curriculum can change that basic
   truth--though you might have to admit that you didn't get the whole
   curriculum taught, in the very real sense that your students don't
   know all of it yet.

So, for example, when she decided to make a timeline in Sarawak history class one day and found out that her students did not know how to measure with rulers, she wound up teaching them how to use a ruler and to read inches and feet. They had to skip learning Western concepts of time, like centuries. This was a class of young men with four years of schooling, from the Iban longhouses farthest upriver. Their parents, or some of them, were expert oral historians who knew how to date events by linking them to generations, not by written timelines.

Those at the college ranged from students like this, many older than she was, who would go on to staff, or even create, schools that reached only to Primary Four (the fourth year of primary school). Their own best students would go somewhere slightly less remote to finish Primary Six. The vast majority of our students at Batu Lintang were themselves Primary Six graduates who were preparing to teach in outstation towns and less remote longhouses. Leaving the mainly urban Chinese language schools aside, only the very best students in the primary grades in Sarawak would finish their educations with four years of secondary school, and be high-school graduates after ten years.

Batu Lintang had one class of high-school graduates, ten Chinese from various towns, one Iban, and one Malay. They were the elite and were aiming, if successful in their first years at an elementary school, to go on to further training and become secondary school teachers themselves. The secondary schools in 1965 were the province of expatriate teachers, a few Malays from Malaysia, and only the occasional Sarawak citizen. Many of our Peace Corps friends were involved in something called the Primary English Medium Teaching Scheme, designed to train local teachers to teach all subjects in primary grades in English.

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Fast forward: when Barbara and I returned for a visit in 1972, we were astonished to find not a single foreigner still teaching at the primary or secondary level in Sarawak. All the teachers were Malaysian, some from Sarawak, many from the Peninsula--and all classes in primary school were taught in Malay. English was taught as a second or third language, and only began to be used as a language of instruction in other subjects in secondary school. In 1965, we would never have believed such a rapid transformation would be possible.

Even Barbara's elite class had a long way to go when they arrived at Batu Lintang. One day in Sarawak History, they were studying Iban culture, the Ibans being of course the feared headhunters of former days. One of the urban Chinese students asked his Iban classmate if he would still take a head today if given the chance, and the immediate reply was "Yes," clearly implying "of course," to the consternation of his classmates. In fact, inter-ethnic relations among Sarawak residents had been generally calm since the end of World War II, but Barbara's students certainly gained a new idea to think about that day.

Her Chinese students were subjects as well as consumers of her Sarawak history teaching. She asked them to record what Chinese linguistic group in Sarawak they belonged to, where their forbears had first settled, and what their fathers did professionally. They turned out to be in four of the commonest language groups, Hakka (or Kheh) being the most numerous, with 12 students, then Foochow (10), Hokkien (5) and Teochew (4). All were learning Mandarin and English, but the old distinctions were only beginning to fade. The surveys helped the students, and Barbara, to understand the Chinese role--and their own places--in Sarawak history."

Faculty was expected to participate in all aspects of the college activity, and so one of her contributions was to be leader of the senior Girl Guide company. This led to marching in various parades, the famous boat trip to Santubong described above and undoubtedly numerous long forgotten service projects.

Batu Lintang also got Barbara involved in Sarawak history. Not that she didn't have a dose of that at home. But my study concentrated on the period from 1831 to 1941, and she was teaching on the site and in the buildings of what had been the World War II Japanese internment camp for European women and children in the Dutch East Indies. She doesn't recall whether she had read Agnes Keith's Land Below the Wind and Three Came Home before she arrived, but if she hadn't, someone lent them to her early in her stay. Of course, preparation for the Sarawak history course lessons led her to find out more.

The proof-by-by archeology lesson came when the college decided to dig a demonstration fishpond, so that students could replicate this protein-enhancing activity in any school at which they would teach. One Saturday morning, all faculty and students gathered at the chosen site, a field on one side of the campus, and dug out the dirt in a huge rectangle. It must have been clay soil, because it was deemed ready to hold water, and it was duly filled to the top. The mistake was to stock it with fish the same day. On Monday, when someone went over to inspect the pond, the water had vanished and it was full of dead fish. Investigation revealed that an old drainage pipe had been nicked, and that is how the water had seeped away. That pipe could have come from only one place, the old Japanese internment camp drainage system.

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Batu Lintang also got Barbara involved in Sarawak art. No one who visits the state, even now, can fail to be attracted by the curvilinear designs in black, red, yellow, white and green that characterize the painting and carving of the upriver people. The art teacher, a long-time expatriate resident named Susie Heinze, encouraged the use of local motifs and subjects while she introduced students and Kuching artists to new techniques.

One of her most successful young artists was the batik painter Ramsey Ong, from a famous Kuching Chinese family. Together they were experimenting with this technique using Ritz dyes, which require boiling to bring out maximum color and to set it. But batik is a wax resist technique, and strong German cold-water dyes were not yet available in Sarawak. So the two attractive paintings which she bought from him, muted in color to begin with, faded further from the sun as they hung in our living room in Kuching for a year. Stenciled designs painted on fabrics were more successful, and Barbara modeled at the Batu Lintang fashion show, and enjoyed wearing for years afterwards, a blue shift decorated with a spray of stenciled white flower blossoms made in this way.

There was no shortage of art to collect. We acquired several carvings, including two hombills and a canoe carrying hunters, from upriver people who came into the night market to sell their work. In the Sarawak Museum shop we found several ikat Iban blankets, called pua, that we liked and could afford, which meant that they were not of highest quality, as measured by the clarity of the design; fine ikat work is not supposed to be fuzzy, as many cheap textiles from Eastern Indonesia today are. Somewhere, right at the end of our stay, we acquired a much smaller piece, of much more delicate and exact weaving, that had been a woman's skirt.

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Although we were not collecting beads at that point, we could not help but notice the Kenyah, Kayan, and Kelabit beadwork, and we brought home a lovely small basket decorated with seed beads, as well as a man's throat decoration of seed beads wound in a cylinder and two interesting women's strings of beads, both made primarily of large, deep red apparently camelian beads, one with turquoise beads interspersed. (12) As I recall, much of our beadwork was purchased in longhouses, but a young woman we met at Nanga Antawau on the upper Rejang was the only weaver we ever encountered in a traditional setting, and she was weaving for ritual use at home, not for sale.

Travels in the Interior

Not until June of 1965 did we get our first look at Iban country. The proximate cause was Barbara's trip to oversee nineteen of her students doing practice teaching at Betong in the (then) Second Division, about 125 miles west of Kuching by mostly dirt road. She was assigned to a vacant government house, a small blue bungalow on stilts. It was the dry season and very hot as well as dry; every house had a rain barrel to catch runoff from the roof--a system which we were later amazed to find is rarely used in other arid, underdeveloped countries. One virtue of this practice was that, having been unoccupied for a while, the house had a barrel lull of water, so Barbara and the three women students could wash and bathe in comfort. The male students, on the other hand, had to hike the better part of a mile to a stream, where they bathed, washed their clothes, satisfied other needs, and then, hopefully upstream, filled cans with drinking and dishwashing water.

Life in Iban country was a real adventure for some of Barbara's students, especially those (mainly Chinese) from urban areas. "Mrs. Pringle, Mrs. Pringle!" one of them told her on our first day in Betong, "Some of my students live in longhouses!" (13)

I accompanied Barbara and her students on the trip out, occupying myself by visiting local longhouses and chasing down old court records at the administrative headquarters. In Betong as elsewhere, the architecture of Brook rule was still apparent in most outstations: a government fort, named after a female Brooke relative (in Betong it was "Fort Lili") where the Resident or District Officer had his office; a cluster of Chinese shop houses usually strung along the river under the fort; a Muslim Malay village or two downriver, and Iban longhouses upriver, scattered along streams coming down from the interior.

This geography was fascinating because it expressed the Rajahs' ideas of what was proper and administratively convenient. There were no Chinese in rural areas before the Brookes arrived, and Muslims and pagans were not separated from each other. But the Brookes were wary of Muslim influence over the pagans because Muslim nobles had preceded them as rulers, and so they decreed the upriver/downriver separation. They also made it illegal for Chinese to "live amongst Dayaks" (i.e., in longhouses), because they thought the Chinese might cheat the Ibans, who might react by taking Chinese heads.

I also interviewed old men who had served on the Rajahs' expeditions against rebels, which sometimes included thousands of warriors. Men subject to being "called out" for such service were not paid, but they were allowed to take the heads of the enemy, and because of their military function they paid lower taxes than other people. This practice, unique to Sarawak, enabled the Brooke state to survive in its earliest days, and it continued well into the twentieth century. Near Betong I interviewed one old man who had killed and beheaded a famous rebel in 1918 and was still mad because the District Officer later made him return the head to the rebel's family so that peace could be made with the insurgents. (14)

I did not stay with Barbara the whole time she was in Betong. Instead I returned to Kuching periodically, sometimes by bus, sometimes by hitching rides with aid workers or British military. I felt pangs about this arrangement and wrote her at least one letter in addition to making several visits:

Dear better half: Some how this business of a month [apart] didn't seem nearly so long until it happened. Well I suppose we will both survive.

   I am worried about you and I confess that I feel slightly guilty
   about leaving you in Betong, especially with all the alarming
   headlines. (15) Thank heaven for the Peace Corps anyway. (16)

A few days later Barbara wrote reassuringly to her parents in Cincinnati:

   Bob definitely got the worst of this deal by having to go back to
   Kuching and read [Sarawak] Gazettes. I've spent the weekend
   absorbing Dayak [Iban] life firsthand. I went with a charming girl
   student of mine [McKenna Samuel] to visit her uncle's longhouse
   over Sunday night (Monday was a holiday--Prophet Mohammed's
   Birthday). The house was interesting because it has followed all
   the Agriculture Department' instructions about chickens in coops,
   pigs in pens, cats and dogs properly cared for. Therefore there are
   no pigs groveling below the house or mangy dogs or chickens fouling
   the ruai [common veranda]. Without Bob (i.e., a woman only) I
   didn't cause much of a stir, and got a chance to see daily life in
   full swing. In the morning all the young adults leave to tap
   rubber--the trees grow helter-skelter on the hillsides. The women
   come home and wash and cook; the men prepare the latex into
   sheets--smells horrible. The main pastime is talking; the radio is
   mainly a young people's entertainment. (17)

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At a neighboring longhouse, she also attended an all-night funeral mingling Christian and pagan ceremonial, part Anglican church service, part recital of long traditional chants. The coffin of the dead was displayed on the veranda and the funeral featured much drinking of rice wine and spirits--the dreaded "arrack"--plus speeches about the dead man, and a midnight snack. Then Barbara went to sleep, provided, as a visitor, with a mattress, but through it she could hear the women at the coffin wailing until at 6 a.m., when it was taken to the missionary church for a burial service. "I came home, fortified myself with a cup of coffee and went off to watch four poor lessons and one good one by my practice teachers," (18) she wrote.

Later we were to see a four-day long gawai antu (feast of the ancestors) at Melayu, a neighboring longhouse. This was a major celebration, one of the most important in Iban tradition. They were held only every decade or two, the same kind of ritual as Barbara had seen but on a much grander scale, attracting hundreds of visitors, including many foreigners, a sizable proportion of whom drank too much, as was expected. Barbara joined the young women processing around the veranda wearing Iban dress (with tops covered, perhaps due to missionary influence).

Travel between Kuching and Betong was interesting because for a considerable distance the road paralleled the Klingkang Hills which marked the frontier with Indonesia, and at least twice we had to stop because a British rubber-tired tank just in front of us was firing shells toward the border. Once we caught a ride in a similar vehicle after escorting some of Barbara' students home from a track meet. "Eyes did pop somewhat when this iron-coated monster disgorged us not far from Fort Lili, in front of our little blue house," 191 wrote.

Things got even more interesting after an Iban policeman who happened to be the half-brother of the new Chief Minister of Sarawak was killed in late June during an attack on a police post, eighteen miles from Kuching, an area populated mainly by Chinese pepper farmers. As a result they were all moved summarily into Malayan Emergency-style "New Villages," guarded compounds where they had to remain at night. It was never quite clear to what extent the pro-communist Chinese were in league with the anti-imperialist Indonesians, but the military assumed they might be. On one trip we picked up a Chinese language leaflet dropped by the military warning all Chinese (only) where they had to be after dark. (I pasted it in my diary.)

I wrote on July 6, after returning to Kuching:

   For the next fifteen miles we drove through Sarawak's new
   Emergency, still wet behind the ears. Numerous checkpoints and we
   were almost flattened by a tank careening around one corner at 40
   mph plus--you'd never dream a tank could corner so well! I had
   heard the Chief Minister's broadcast early this morning ... telling
   those [the Chinese] inconvenienced that it was their own fault for
   nourishing subversion.... the bazaar [at Samarahan] was jammed with
   Chinese. Military everywhere. Just beyond the bridge, shiny new
   barbed wire fencing going up--watch towers at the comers--lights
   strung along the fence .... Only they aren't New [Villages] at all.
   What they are doing ... is moving the Chinese rural population into
   bazaar areas where they will sleep in houses and schools! There
   will be five such areas between 25 and 15 Mile [indicating distance
   from Kuching]. (20)

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I doubted that New Villages would work as well as they had in Malaya because the ethnic mix in Sarawak was very different and all of this was going on within sight of a hostile Indonesian frontier. Maybe so, but as things turned out the villages ceased to be needed because Sukarno passed from power in 1966, Malaysia worked pretty well when it came to making money, inter alia from stripping away Sarawak's hitherto pristine forests, and radical Chinese youth grew (and sobered) up for multiple reasons.

Back in Kuching my relationship with Tom Harrisson was never dull. I wrote to Cornell friend Milton Osborne:

   Harrisson allows as how he's been offered a job, or rather what I
   gather would be a Claire Holtish (21) sort of sinecure, at Cornell;
   this has made my position here a good deal easier. I see very
   little of him, which is just as well, since the difficulties of
   working with him have not been exaggerated. He is even better than
   my female relatives at doing 99 things at once, frantically, in
   order never to have to really face up to any of them. Surviving
   involves ignoring endless bluster and insult, but I'm working at
   it.

   I recently showed him a paper I'd
   written on the early Brooke state--the
   same one I sent to Dr. Wolters (22) before
   leaving London -and he criticized
   it on the grounds that I'd pictured
   J[ames] Brooke as economically
   motivated, which I certainly had not,
   in terms of American power politics,
   whereas in fact his motives derived
   from something mystical in the ethic
   of the English gentry. He also said
   the paper was snide, facile, etc. etc.
   Then he turned up at the Museum
   this afternoon, peering seriously
   over his semi-spectacles, assuming
   that I would be in a terrible temper because of his comments. I
   never met anyone with such a capacity for reading his own
   personality into other people. (23)

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I wrote in my diary, "I am becoming everyone's consultant about how to get along with TH [although] the fact of my survival owes little to me personally--don't we know it!" (24) In fact my survival had everything to do with Harrisson's pending Cornell employment, which I couldn't talk about. In the event, Tom's relationship with Cornell was brief, although his wife Barbara had a longer stay there.

Life at 923 Iris Garden settled down into a pleasant regime. We acquired a cat and a dog creatively named Kitty and Puppy. As we recall, Kitty came from a longhouse near Betong; like most local cats she had a kink in her tail, according to legend so that Malay princesses could hang their rings on it when they bathed. We christened her "Pepper" for the color of her feet but could never get over calling her Kitty. Puppy staggered in our gate one day and collapsed in a pile of skin, bones and mange, but we nursed him back to health with a generous diet of frozen (Australian) kangaroo meat, very cheap, from Ting and Ting, the local supermarket, plus the ministrations of the local vet.

After a period of mutual hostility the two of them learned to play with each other, with Kitty usually initiating the romp, adding to the animal cacophony of the neighborhood. Next door to us was a wealthy Chinese family from Shanghai, their house protected by floodlights, a stout barbed-wire fence and big guard dogs. That was alright but the local curs on their nocturnal prowls enjoyed calling these well-fed hounds names through the fence. When we complained about the resulting uproar and loss of sleep, Mr. Shanghai said "Outside dogs come and make noisy, what can I do?" On the other side was another Chinese, Mr. Ha, several of whose ornamental goldfish Kitty--to our astonishment--had the gumption to slip through his fence and eat.

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Visitors continued: Otto and Barbara Doering (25) from Kuala Lumpur (where, because of them, my daughter Anne would be born five years later); Barbara's college classmate, Elaine Emling; George Elliston, polymath geographer met in London, who was doing research on a fishing village in Malaya; and Ferdinand and Delia Kuhn, authors and close ex-OWI (26) friends of my father, Henry Pringle. The Kuhns admired our little house which seemed quite comfortable for Borneo, and reported with great amusement to all and sundry when they got home that we told them we were historians, not anthropologists, and didn't need to live in primitive circumstances. When Barbara got sick (not seriously as it turned out), the Scottish ambulance unit quartered in some nearby Chinese shop houses took her to Kuching's clean, pleasant hospital, where, as a Sarawak Government employee, and thanks to her job at Batu Lintang, she paid thirty cents (US) a day and was soon well.

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We kept on traveling, a lot. In August we went up Sarawak's biggest river, the Rejang as far as Nanga Antawau (27) on the Balleh tributary. It marked the limit of migration imposed by the Brookes to keep the land-hungry Ibans under control and the limit was still maintained at the time of our visit. Further upstream there was still nothing but forest (alas--not for much longer). At Nanga Antawau we met young Iban women still weaving pua, the famous tie-dyed blankets; making one was the female counterpart of taking a human head. This skill, too, would have almost vanished by the 21st century; in the 1990's the wife of Leonard Linggi Jugah (28) (see below) founded a workshop in Kuching to help revive it.

At Kapit we met Linggi Jugah, on vacation from his studies at Hull University in England, the son of the most prominent Iban leader, Temenggong Jugah. We went down the Rejang and then back to Kuching by ocean-going launch, down one flaccid stream and back up another, through endless boring miles of nipah palm swampland, because there was not yet any road along the coast. We spent a night at Kabong, a big Malay fishing settlement of grey houses on stilts over grey mud. The trip took eighteen hours of boat travel; with the road that now exists it probably takes thirty minutes or less. Finally we reached Betong and the familiar route back to Kuching.

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At about this time we learned that Singapore had not seceded from Malaysia, as originally reported, but rather had been expelled by the Muslim Malay leadership of Malaya. This was a source of great concern to the pagan and Christian people of Sarawak, who now feared more than ever the consequences of integration in a Malay-dominated Malaysia.

In October I traveled alone to Lubok Antu on the Indonesian border, to see if it would be safe to return later with Benedict to interview Iban informants in the rugged headwaters of nearby streams. Lubok Antu itself was at a flat place on the frontier, a route between Sarawak and the great Kapuas River on the Indonesian side. It was a region that had figured heavily in Iban history. Now British military were in the old Brooke-era fort. The man in charge was a non-commissioned officer, Sergeant W. "Butch" Woodward, and his main job was gathering intelligence from Ibans who were still crossing the border freely despite Confrontation. There had been fighting nearby and every evening the British fired a couple of "harassing fire" howitzer rounds into Indonesian territory, mainly for psychological effect.

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Butch would ask his informants to give him news of the Indonesian units on the other side. Once, when a new artillery piece was reported, he gave one of them a camera so they could take a picture of it, which they did. On presenting him with the resulting film, the Ibans asked for extra prints, which they had promised to take back to the Indonesian gun crew. These Butch duly provided. It was definitely a laid-back kind of war. Butch didn't hesitate to share this kind of thing with me. He was concerned about mutilation of some British/ Commonwealth dead and asked me to write a description of Iban burial customs, which I did and sent back. I supposes that I am listed somewhere in old British intelligence files as a "source."

In December we went back to the Rejang, this time going all the way up the main river, passing Kapit and portaging around the famous Pelagus Rapids, as far as Belaga. To get there we needed a pass from the Resident of the Third Division at Sibu, then one of the very last expatriates to hold such a post.

Our pass form read: "permission is hereby given to visit areas above Kapit," then [typed in]:

1) They should report to the DO and Police Kapit & lodge copies of their programme with them.

2) They should not proceed above Belaga. [This was probably because there had been, months previously, Indonesian raids in the extreme upriver areas, and we ignored it.]

3) Valid from 8th to 20th December, 1965

Signed, A.R. Meikle, Resident, Third Division

I wrote beneath Meikle's signature "Last of the Mohicans!" (29)

From Kapit onwards we got a ride with a friendly British officer transporting some Punan Lusong to serve in the Border Scouts along the Indonesian frontier.

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We left Iban territory and passed longhouses of "Upriver Melanau," still-pagan peoples related to the better-known coastal Melanaus who had converted to Islam. Above Belaga settlement was entirely orang ulu, (literally upriver people) meaning, mainly, Kenyahs and Kayans, people with highly stratified class systems--hereditary chiefs, a middle class, slaves--the other end of a social spectrum from the classless, "democratic" (or anarchic) Ibans. From the orang ulu people came the famous art motifs widely associated with Borneo that Barbara had already encountered at Batu Lintang, displayed in painting and beadwork, not to mention music and dance.

Going upriver we saw a really big crocodile, at last, sunning on a sandbar. In the Archives' old Sarawak Gazettes (which I spent much time reading) there were constant accounts of people being "taken" by crocodiles, often snatched from their riverside bathing places, but by 1966 big ones were a rarity thanks to the skin trade.

At Belaga we stayed in the scruffy bazaar (twenty-one shops in two sections) with Russ Wilson, a gruff Australian Colombo Plan group headmaster, who was not pleased to see us, although he warmed up a bit after a day or two. Our biggest adventure was an overnight trip further up the Baloi (as the uppermost segment of the Rejang is called) to Long Linau.

From my diary:

   We are just back from.... a Kayan longhouse at Long Linau.... This
   thanks to the Tuai Rumah, one Tama Bulan, previously encountered at
   the [Sarawak] Museum, to which he was then flogging various Punan
   objets.... We left [Belaga] about 11 a.m., waiting two hours
   because the river, according to T.B., was too high. This we
   believed, later. Wong Bakun is the big rapids above Belaga, and it
   has to be negotiated to be believed. I have never seen nor dreamed
   of such a furious river. Thrills and chills were added to by the
   ailments of our 40 hp motor--it actually conked out at the head of
   one lesser but still scary rapids--they did get it started again in
   time. The problem here is sheer volume of water--had it been any
   higher our motor could not have pushed [our boat] through the fast
   parts and a couple of times as it was we were hanging....! [sic]
   Tremendous leaping swirling current between sheer rock walls. The
   scenery is often gorgeous--almost alpine hills dropping to the
   water's edge--one lovely stretch before the rapids covered with
   bright green hill paddy fields. The final approach to Long Linau is
   through a last dramatic gorge-rapids at the head of which the
   longhouse is located, together with a new dispensary and primary
   school.... (30)

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At Long Linau we enjoyed typical longhouse entertainment and I observed that Kayans were lovely to look at, especially the women. "Beadwork adds to the American Indian impression--the most spectacular is on the baby carriers which are apparently unobtainable at anything under a mile-high price." (31) (We finally bought a Kayan beaded baby carrier when we returned to Sarawak in 2007.) Boat, fuel, and crew cost under US$20 for the round trip from Belaga to Long Linau, which I felt was exorbitant. Today the entire river above Belaga has been flooded by a much and justifiably protested dam, named Bakun for the rapids we negotiated, that will--or may, some day--the transmission lines have not been built--provide power to mainland Malaysia.

On our return we got a ride in a Medical Department boat with a "traveling dresser" and, as assistant, Peace Corps volunteer Bruce Cheliowski. We stopped at twenty-nine longhouses, mainly Upriver Melanau but four Iban and some Kayan, to give triple shots (Diptheria, Tetanus, Whooping Cough). I wrote:

   People were by and large very cooperative about the shots, despite
   struggles and tears and shouts of "Enggai! "--"I don't want!"
   Frequently mothers couldn't bear to see their offspring jabbed, and
   the dirty job was delegated to Granny. (32)

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We found Punan Ba the most interesting, an upriver Melanau longhouse with 33 "doors" (families) and 303 people, It had huge belian (ironwood) house posts and a number of beautifully carved keliring burial posts, similar to the one in front of the Sarawak Museum, on top of which the preserved remains of chiefs were given "secondary burial." Each elaborately carved post was erected over a sacrificed human, or so we were told, and capped by a huge flat rock--until age and rot took its toll. (Punan Ba burned down in 2008, according to a YouTube entry.)

Much further downstream we turned left off the main Rejang at Kano wit, into the rugged hinterland, to visit a charismatic Scot, J.K. Wilson, who was running a famously unorthodox development program in an Appalachia-like region. We were physically much closer to "civilization" but in reality much further away, because these streams, often full of rocks and beautifully overhung by trees, were much harder to navigate than the main river, and the area had been fraught with Iban unrest for decades.

Wilson had worked for the Sarawak government but he was philosophically opposed to big-spending, top-down programs so he quit and set up his own private operation. He thought the Ibans should stay put, stick to their culture, and learn things that would benefit them within it. The few who had to get educated were best off in cold-water boarding schools in Scotland, where he sent quite a few of them. He bypassed Iban authority, such as it was, effectively becoming a chief himself. Missionaries? Not if he could help it. While there we saw a group of Ibans setting off to join the Border Scouts. The departure ceremony included killing a pig on the longhouse veranda and reading the lobes of its liver for omens. The Iban participants were the lean, muscled, throat-tattooed, mostly long-haired variety.

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We celebrated Christmas at Wilson's place, purchasing some Cinzano at the otherwise spartan longhouse co-op store as our contribution to the festivities. Barbara was as usual a big hit with the Ibans, who were familiar enough with European males but had seen relatively few European women, especially not young ones. "Are there others like you back in Kuching?" one old lady asked her. By this time we were used to providing evening longhouse entertainment, whether joining in the dancing (our inability to do the twist very well put us leagues behind most Peace Corps volunteers) or telling tall tales. Skyscrapers were a favorite tall tale subject, as were (white) Polar Bears--there could not be such things! (although they knew all about regular, brown bears) but that made it all the more fun to hear about them. On another occasion a woman lost her temper at me for showing the assemblage how contact lenses worked. She thought it was some sort of outrageous hoax. On a sadder note, a woman once asked why we had no children, and Barbara explained about birth control pills. That led to a conference among the women followed by a second question: if we had a pill not to have children, did we not perhaps have one that would enable would-be mothers to have them?

Further downriver in a different world around Sibu we had our first look at the Foochow Chinese. These Methodist Chinese and their American pastor, "Tuan Hoover of Borneo," had been subject to persecution in China following the Boxer Rebellion. Hoover persuaded the second Brooke Rajah to invite them to Sarawak and give them land around Sibu to grow rice. They soon discovered that they could make more money by growing rubber, and that no amount of government regulation could prevent them from getting more land from the Ibans. Before long these ferociously effective, cognac-swilling capitalists were also dominating the nascent Sarawak timber industry. It would rapidly get bigger and they richer along with it, and once the Borneo supply of logs was largely exhausted, Sarawak Foochow companies would be--still are at this writing--stripping tropical timber as far away as New Guinea and Suriname.

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All that was in the future, but I got a glimpse of it when I interviewed Ling Bieng Siew, boss of the as-yet embryonic timber business in the Rejang. He was a caricature of the gimlet-eyed Chinese tycoon with "a very airconditioned office and a very sexy secretary in a green dress." (33) He gave me a long lecture about the challenges and travails of entrepreneurship and a lot of baloney about how the timber further upriver (as yet unexploited) probably wasn't worth anything.

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Back in Kuching we celebrated Ramadan in late January by crossing the river, along with everyone else in town, to call on the Governor, Datu Abang Haji Openg bin Sapie'e, and ask his forgiveness, according to the standard Ramadan formula, for any offenses, physical or spiritual, that we might have caused him during the past year.

In April we visited Mukah, a small coastal town inhabited by Muslim Melanau people who lived by producing starch from the pith of sago palms. It was eaten in Sarawak and used for making laundry starch and tapioca abroad, and was once a major Sarawak export. These Muslims were the ones with the still-pagan ethnic relatives living in the deep interior, some of whom we had visited a few weeks earlier. The Mukah people lived in single houses (not longhouses) over canals stained a rich brown by peat. Some of the burial posts from their pagan past were still standing. One of them gave me an old Vietnamese ceramic jar in which he had kept a pungent liniment. We still (in 2016) have the jar, and it still smells of liniment.

In 2008 I sent copies of the pictures I had taken in 1966 to his family, via Ann Appleton, an anthropologist working in Mukah. By this time the man who gave us the little blue-grey jar was the village patriarch. The old photos enthralled him and his neighbors, and in return, they sent us new photos of the whole family posing with them. (Moral: never throw away old photos of Sarawak.)

By the time of the Mukah visit, it was clear that I would be ready to wrap up my research and leave Sarawak by early summer. However, I was not, under the terms of the London-Cornell program, supposed to be in London until the beginning of the fall term in September, so that I could give a seminar reporting my research results. What to do? The ever-generous London-Cornell Director, Professor Skinner, said not to worry, they would pay our way to travel around mainland Southeast Asia for two months, thereby using up the intervening time. It would, he thought, be good for my future career, whether he went into academia or not! And so it was.

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However, we still had not yet visited Sarawak's other great river, the Baram. There were not very many Ibans there, but we didn't want to miss the famous Kelabit people, or the "heart of Borneo" plateau into which then-Major Tom Harrisson had parachuted at the end of World War II as part of an operation to unleash the head-hunting dogs of war against the hapless Japanese. So we packed our baggage for direct shipment to the US, found a home for Kitty (Puppy had died of a type of distemper which attacked young dogs, before they could be vaccinated with the regular vaccine), and enjoyed a round of farewell parties. They were mostly at Chinese restaurants, causing me to comment that parting was such sweet-and-sour sorrow. The most memorable moment at these events occurred at a dinner given by Dr. Danny Kok and his former Peace Corps volunteer wife, Liz. There was a lull in conversation as we ate soup from a steamboat at the end of a long meal, and Barbara, endeavoring to transfer a fish ball with her chopsticks from the pot in the middle of the table to her bowl, dropped it into her beer glass. The loud hiss startled everyone, and led to much merriment about non-Chinese ineptitude with chopsticks, etc.

I revived an old relationship with the Quincy Patriot Ledger, (34) and would write several illustrated articles for them about our travel home. The first, however, was about the Peace Corps in Sarawak. It seemed to me, based largely on the views of the outgoing Peace Corps Director, that Washington had abruptly decided to send too many volunteers to certain countries that were welcoming. In Sarawak, it was getting to the point where they were forming little colonies in outstations and socializing with each other rather than getting to know the local people. Further, during our stay, as volunteers were posted further and further upriver, some were unhappy accepting posts in longhouses, rather than towns.

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Tom Harrisson gave a copy of my article to the Straits Times reporter who covered Sarawak, and the result was an article in that major paper about it, which was then picked up by the Singapore bureau of Pravda, where it duly appeared. Needless to say I was alarmed, fearing that it might end my prospects of joining the US Foreign Service. However the State Department security people apparently never noticed it. A few years later I discovered that the increase of Peace Corps Volunteers in Sarawak had been at least in part the result of a famous episode in Nigeria, where a new volunteer had written a postcard to her family telling them how awful it was, then lost it. The Nigerians found and read it and terminated the entire Peace Corps program, leaving a large contingent of Nigeria-bound volunteers-in-training who had to be sent somewhere else.

On June 1 we left Kuching by Air Malaysia DC3 for Miri, the town where Brunei's oil was refined. Then, from its airport at nearby Lutong, we caught the weekly "Twin Pin" (Twin Pioneer short landing and takeoff aircraft) for Bario, the principal Kelabit settlement. The airline weighed all of us, and when one quite fat Chinese trader was too heavy he had to leave his baggage behind. The Bario people knew we were coming, because Tom Harrisson had told them. So did the British military, which included a unit of the famous Ghurka mercemaries from Nepal. Our plan, which we more or less followed, was to remain in Bario for a few days, then hike down to the main tributary of the Baram, where we would hire a boat back to the district headquarters, Marudi, before ending our stay in Sarawak. Before leaving Bario, Barbara acquired a pair of Ghurka boots for the hike--they kept out the leeches much better than my tennis shoes did, and she used them for years.

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Our Baram adventure turned out to be one of the high points of our stay in Sarawak. It lasted from June 2, when we arrived in Bario, to June 27, when we left Marudi. (35) I had two Leicas, one each for color and black and white, and the resulting photos tell the story of our Baram adventure better than anything I could write.

We knew that everyone was accustomed to foreigners associated with the Sarawak Museum showing up asking for help with mysterious projects. Michael Fogden, an ornithologist and now a well-known wildlife photographer, had been in the same area not long before we were, so at first the Kelabits assumed we might also be looking for birds. No, we explained, we wanted to talk to people about history. Well, that was OK too. Unfortunately we didn't get interested in birds until we were in Mali many years later, and we didn't even have a pair of binoculars with us.

The Kelabits were different from anyone we had seen previously, with their irrigated rice fields (rare in Sarawak) and their stout, well-constructed longhouses. They seemed to be doing an exemplary job of pursuing modernity on their own terms. They converted to evangelical Christianity, but did not necessarily give up drinking, long hair or extended ear lobes for wearing ear plugs or suspended earrings.

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They had a great relationship with the British military, one that now seems almost impossibly harmonious in the light of later experience from other "low intensity" conflicts. It built on a heritage of good relations with the Brookes and the British who succeeded them, and the economic benefits--free helicopter rides, used fuel drums (excellent for all kinds of construction), and jobs building barracks as well as serving in the paramilitary Border Scouts. It also helped, we thought, that the British military were so light on the ground. The British didn't have the kind of heavy logistics and support infrastructure typical of US military practice and this seemed to make it easier for them to exist on more familiar terms with local people

As it turned out, the British military did not want us to walk over the first stretch of our proposed route because it meant going via Kubaan longhouse, from which (we later learned) their Special Air Services were running patrols into Indonesian territory. So they gave us a delightful helicopter ride to Pa Tik, which saved us three days' walk, and there we hired guides for the next stage.

Then came the fun part--three days of hiking along often leech-infested trails following a route once used by district officers but largely unmaintained since the advent of small aircraft. That brought us to Long Lellang, a magnificent Kelabit longhouse where we spent several fascinating days. We were given some nice old beads, and on a rainy day Barbara taught the Long Lellang people how to play shuffleboard with old tobacco tins and long sticks on their beautifully made verandah.

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After Long Lellang we walked for two more days through country populated by Penans, jungle nomads in varying degrees of settlement. We traversed "rice fields" made by felling old-growth trees, requiring us to scramble over and around their enormous trunks. In other places there was evidence of much larger populations in the past, reduced by epidemic of some kind. Everywhere we were warmly welcomed.

Once we huddled under a leaf and plastic sheet lean-to as it poured all night. Another time we sheltered in a slightly more substantial structure which was the Appalachian trail hut equivalent on this tropical route. Later we stayed in the first house a small Penan family group had ever built; we really had to watch as we stepped gingerly over the widely-spaced bamboo floor poles. Our hosts served us cassava seasoned with hot pig fat for dinner. And the Girl Scouts in Cincinnati thought they knew something about primitive camping! But no one could beat these Penan women for the lovely mats and baskets they wove as they sat in their rickety dwellings and survived on cassava, pig fat, and other wild edibles from the forest.

On June 16 we reached Lio Mato, the settlement at the furthest upstream navigable point on the Baram. Sitting on a large flat promontory, its fort had an outhouse with the best view in the world--no doors, just endless forest and streams and mountain mist to gaze out at. In the fort we witnessed a tamu (literally "meeting") between Penans selling jungle produce (wild rubber, monkey gallstones, etc.) and the women's woven products, and buying cloth, shotguns, Indonesian batik and other merchandise, with a government official on hand to make sure they were not cheated. Tamu were scheduled months in advance and the often illiterate Penan headmen were given a temuku tali, a string with knots in it. By untying one knot a day, they could tell when they should be at the meeting place.

After the tamu was over we hired a boat to go down the Baram, lined at long intervals by Kenyah and Kayan longhouses. This lovely trip ended at Marudi, the first Residential headquarters in the Fourth Division which was replaced by Miri in the 1920s. The delightful result, from an historian's point of view, was to preserve its Charles Brooke-era layout and buildings, and I enjoyed comparing the current town with old photos I had seen.

From Marudi, we proceeded by air and slow boat to our last stop, the Harrissons' archaeological site at Niah Cave. Only Barbara Harrisson was there, and she showed us the current excavations and explained how the local settled Punan guano and birds' nest collectors worked. The Sarawak Museum, at that point, regulated the activities of both. It restricted the number of birds nests which could be harvested, and when, to ensure the survival of the swift population in the cave. This was important because rights to collect in various parts of the cave were heritable, and over-eager owners could have done great damage by over-harvesting as better poles came with more trade and more modern materials. The guano collectors, on the other hand, seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, and were limited to four days' work a week so that the local, impoverished Iban population could collect "for their own gardens," but I said in my diary probably "for their own pockets" instead, one day a week.

It had rained quite a bit before our visit and the trail of boards to the cave was often submerged; we marveled at how the guano carriers could navigate them with their heavy loads. We stayed overnight in the Harrissons' little field bungalow, and I spent the following day interviewing the local Ibans, moved to the area several generations previously from Second Division, and not thriving in their current home. That evening we boarded a small, rickety launch back to Miri. Crossing the bar into the Baram delta, it bumped and pitched as the waves caused it to hit the sandy bottom, and I wrote that I could only think of Tennyson's poem as a boatman stabbed his red-and-white pole into the water calling out "Lima kaki se-tengah" (5 1/2 feet) over and over again.

When we arrived in Miri at 6:30 a.m., a former colleague of Barbara's from Batu Lintang, Mary Chua, welcomed us into her house for the day, to clean up and rest before our flight to Brunei. We were startled that she left the gas burners on her stove lighted when she went to school. Though there were no tiny children to get into trouble playing with fire, we turned them off, but when she came back, she laughed, "Oh, we all leave our burners on; it's cheaper than buying matches." It turned out that the oil company was simply providing the town with cooking gas (no question of needing to heat houses) that would otherwise be flared off at the wellheads. After treating us to a lavish meal at a Chinese restaurant, Mary put us on the plane for Brunei--a half-hour flight, but there was no road between Miri and Brunei Town.

On June 29, 1966, our Sarawak stay was over, and we were in the Sultanate of Brunei, with its big Italian marble mosque, built in 1959 with oil revenues, looming over a village built on stilts. It is the only surviving example of a "water city" style typical of Southeast Asia's early coastal states based on trade, the precursors of modern Singapore. We were hosted by our friend Pengiran Sharifuddin, the curator of the new Brunei Museum, and accommodated in its new guesthouse. He was just our age, had been educated abroad, and at the time we lived in Kuching had been at the Sarawak Museum to reclaim the cannons captured from the Sultan in various conflicts with the Brookes, and bring them back to his country's new museum. In fact, the outhouse for the guesthouse had been constructed of ex-packing crates for the cannons, and were still labeled "Sarawak Museum." Imagine any plumbing that primitive in wealthy Brunei today.

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The highlight there was an extraordinary dinner, to which Sharifuddin invited us, hosted by his uncle Haji Usop, the Chief Minister. All the other guests, including many senior British officials, old Malay-world hands now serving the Sultan, were dressed formally, but we had only what we had carried in our backpack from Bario. When we apologized to our host about our informality, he said "Oh, don't worry, the rest of them only do it to impress me!" Then he proudly showed us his collection of fancy cigarette lighters.

We had time to drive around and appreciate Brunei's varied population, and to buy some hand-woven, gold-thread silk brocade--much more expensive although not as well woven as what we would buy a few weeks later in Malaya for our future daughter Anne's wedding dress. It was originally to have been for one of Barbara's sisters, but Jane had married Ron before our return and fashionista Susie had other ideas.

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Following our instructions from London-Cornell to see more of Southeast Asia, we moved on to Sabah, where we spent five days. Sabah was a lot more developed than Sarawak, with extensive plantation agriculture as befitted a former "chartered company." Jesselton was a raw clutter, having been bombed flat during World War II. Sabah had a narrow-gauge railroad, and we rode it between Beaufort and Tenom (there was no road) through the spectacular Padas Gorge, where the train was stopped by a landslide. We had to get out and walk with our luggage to the train on the other side; its passengers were doing the same in reverse. The rolling stock was spectacular.

We visited Charlotte Cooper, a widowed friend of Barbara's Aunt Alice, a Peace Corps volunteer and "health visitor." It struck us that elderly PCVs were often more effective than younger ones in societies where age is respected; in fact, the only concession that seemed to have been made to Charlotte's age (this was just before "Miz Lillian," President Carter's mother, served as a volunteer in India) was that all her clinics were on the railroad--no hiking or jolting in 4-wheel-drive vehicles to get to them. And she baked a mean apple pie in her wood stove oven.

We reached the east coast of Sabah and the town of Sandakan on July 9 and found it depressing. Like Jesselton, old Sandakan had been destroyed by World War II. Now it was block after block of concrete buildings, the population entirely Chinese, the harbor crowded with freighters loading logs, for Sabah had gotten a jump on the rest of Borneo in the timber business. We saw no point in lingering there and on July 11 we flew to Singapore a day ahead of schedule. We did not climb Mt. Kinabalu.

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We spent the next two months exploring Malaya, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, with an eye toward improving my knowledge of these countries. The Vietnam war was raging, which meant we could not visit Vietnam. In Cambdia, we were among the few Americans in country, following Nixon's decision to bomb portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that passed through that country and the resulting collapse of official relations between Cambodia and the US. We did visit Laos, mainly to see something of the important tribal minorities there. After that we proceeded to Europe, where we split.

Barbara continued home via London to see her family and find an apartment for us in Ithaca NY, where Cornell is located. I went to Amsterdam, where I spent nine days interviewing retired Dutch colonial officials who had worked in the Iban areas of what was then Dutch Borneo.

This turned out to be extraordinarily easy. I got the names of the relevant officials from the Royal Tropical Institute near The Hague, then went to the government pension office to find out which ones were still alive (most of them were) and how to contact them by phone or otherwise. Language was not a problem since virtually all the retirees spoke fair-to-good English. One was a Eurasian with a son and two daughters in the US. Getting around Holland for the interviewing was simplicity itself. As for the telephones, they had instructions in seven languages and seemed miraculous after the British antiquities with their thrupenny bits and saucer-sized pennies. My only complaint with The Netherlands was that I couldn't find anywhere to stay for less than $5 a night, including breakfast.

Back in London, I stayed at London House, a fancy new University of London international hostel. I visited the Isle of Wight to meet A. B. Ward, a retired Brooke official; Otto Doering and I were helping him to publish his memoirs, Rajah's Servant. (36) I also attended the annual Sarawak cocktail party, a huge, noisy affair at the United Services Club. The toast was "Sarawak, coupled with the name of Brooke!" I saw Brooke family members again, including Lady Anne Bryant, niece of Vyner Brooke, the last White Rajah. I wrote:

   Lady Anne is very nice indeed. She says Sir Arthur [Bryant], her
   husband, an extremely successful historian, does make money writing
   books. I'll bet. She has amazing grey-green eyes. I wonder if those
   are Brooke?" (37)

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I must have given the requisite London-Cornell seminar on my research results, but I can't remember or find any record of it. On October 15, 1966, I flew back to the US, finding the service "drab and commonplace" after trans-Pacific travel.

Meanwhile Barbara had found us a furnished, second-floor apartment at 222 University Avenue, on the precipitous slope between the Cornell campus and downtown Ithaca, and within walking distance of the main Cornell library. My stepmother wrote to me, "You do seem to have arranged your fall schedule rather neatly to be able to walk into an all-settled home." (38) Barbara's father helped us to buy our first car, a rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair, of the-unsafe-at-any-speed variety that made Ralph Nader famous. It was good enough for us, but unstable indeed at any speed when going down Ithaca's steep hills, until we put sandbags under the hood in front.

Once moved in, which, since the apartment was furnished, involved unpacking the trunk from England, buying a few dishes and pots and pans, and dealing with the shipping crate from Sarawak once it arrived, Barbara began to work on an MA in medieval European history. It was a tough slog for her because her advisor, a Jesuit-trained paleographer, was extraordinarily rigorous, and the topic, on the well-worn subject of the emergence of genuine historical writing in the Middle Ages, was not exciting, but her thesis probably had more footnotes and a longer bibliography than mine. But with the MA she was well-placed to earn what then passed for a high secondary-school teaching salary.

Throughout this period I pounded away on my thesis at 102 West Avenue, the office of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project. It was a creaky old fraternity house that had been condemned as unfit for undergraduate use but deemed safe enough for graduate study. Every month or so, I took another chapter or two to Professor Wolters, who was unfailingly helpful. With continuing moral support from him I passed the US Foreign Service oral examination, meaning that I would begin working for the State Department sometime in 1967.

We entertained occasionally at our hillside apartment. On one unforgettable occasion in mid-April, we hosted a reception for a visiting London member of the London-Cornell Project. The Project paid for a gallon and a half of sherry. The guests, mostly male, had such a fine time that none of them went home, so Barbara roasted a chicken we happened to have in the fridge. "It is amazing how many people one chicken will feed if they've had enough sherry," she wrote. "The party ended at midnight and from the looks of people the next day, I figured it cost the Southeast Asian History department about thirty man-hours of work." (39)

I traveled to Washington in mid-August, leaving Barbara to finish her own thesis as well as getting mine in final form. It came to over seven hundred pages of typescript and cost about $700 to type, which we were later able to deduct from taxes because of book royalties, and I made two copies with photographs. Before long I would be working on the book version, Rajahs and Rebels, for Macmillan (UK) and eventually an identical US edition (required by law for US sales) for the Cornell University Press.

(1) From "Fires," a poem by Rudyard Kipling, slightly altered:

   How can we answer which fire is best
   Of all the fires that burn?
   We who have been both host and guest
   At every fire in turn.

(2) The relevant components for me were the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the London School of Economics (LSE) which has an excellent anthropology department.

(3) G. William Skinner, an anthropologist known for his work on the ethnic Chinese of Thailand.

(4) O.W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce: a Story of the Origins of Srivijaya, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1967.

(5) I was majoring in history, with minors in anthropology and political science.

(6) Barbara to Family, n.d.

(7) London, Macmillan, 1969.

(8) Tom Harrisson, The Malays of South- West Sarawak Before Malaysia: A Sociological Survey, London, Macmillan, 1970.

(9) Duemling later married Louisa Copeland Dupont, a Philadelphia Biddle by descent, was Ambassador to Suriname, and, after that, Director of the Building Museum.

(10) Diary entry for December 2, 1965. It refers to a "fat expat" being the victim of Arthur's misbehavior, not a senior official, and no mention of a bathing suit. It is true that the project was relocated to Sabah.

(11) The great book on this subject was Ju-K'ang T'ien, The Chinese of Sarawak, A Study of Social Structure, published by the London School of Economics' anthropology department in 1950. T'ien, who received his Ph.D. from LSE in 1948, had been part of the team assembled for the British Colonial Office to survey the various ethnic groups of Sarawak. As noted earlier, Stephen Morris, my mentor at LSE, was also on the team. Each member studied a certain ethnic group--Morris did the Melanau, William Geddes did the Bidayuh, then known as Land Dayaks; J.D. Freeman did the Iban, and T'ien did the Chinese. But T'ien had a big problem. His home, China, had just become Red China. Some of Sarawak's Chinese had become ardently Maoist. T'ien had been studying them--for the Imperialists! He was apparently quite apolitical, he just wanted to go home to his wife and family without being punished. He went to Morris for advice. Morris said "Don't worry, here's what you do. Next time [the most radical Chinese organization] has a rally, you go there and make a speech blasting the British and praising Mao and everything he stands for. It will be in the papers the next day, and the governor will expel you from Sarawak." And so it came to pass. T'ien went home and took up a professional career there. Only several years later did Morris hear from him. His message was short: Thank you, I am fine. That was not the end of the story, however; he was incarcerated and tortured during the Cultural Revolution, which broke out in 1966. But later he was able to resume his career as a respected specialist on non-Han minorities. In 2002 he paid a return visit to Sarawak at the invitation of the Chinese community he had studied decades previously. At the time he was Professor of Sociology at Fudan University in Shanghai. The latter information is from Clifford Sather, Editor of the BRB, see his "Notes from the Editor," BRB, Vol. 33 (2002): page 1.

(12) When we served in Africa years later we became seriously interested in old glass beads thanks partly to our Sarawak experience. At the time of the research discussed here, however, we did not know Heidi (Adelheid) Munan who has in recent years been the Sarawak Museum's Curator of Beads and the best known local expert on this subject. We knew of Tom Harrisson's interest and much later, in 2007, stayed with our friends Datu Stephen Wan Ullok and his wife Brigitte and saw their extensive collection of old beads, which are famously important in Kenyah culture.

(13) Bob and Barbara to Milton Osborne, July 9, 1965.

(14) Bob Diary entry for Aug 17. 1965.

(15) A reference to troubles with rural Chinese along the road between Betong and Kuching; see below.

(16) Bob to Barbara, July 10 1965.

(17) Barb to family, July 13 1965. There were two male Peace Corps volunteers in Betong. Rather than "protectors," they were friends, with whom she regularly dined, for thirty US cents a meal, each night at one of the shophouses in the Bazaar.

(18) loc. cit.

(19) Bob diary entry for August 17, 1965.

(20) Bob diary entry for July 6, 1965 recording several days' events.

(21) A reference to Claire Holt, author of Art in Indonesia, who although not a formally trained scholar had a well-deserved position at Cornell for many years.

(22) My thesis supervisor, O.W. Wolters.

(23) Bob to Milton and Rhondda Osborne, July 9, 1965.

(24) Bob diary entry September 4 1965.

(25) Barbara and Otto Doering. Otto, now a senior Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, had developed a lifelong interest in Sarawak and the Brookes during his graduate studies at the LSE (where he studied under Stephen Morris) and had introduced me to members of the Brooke family in London in 1964. By this time he was working for the Ford Foundation in Malaya.

(26) The Office of War Information, a US Government Agency established during World War II to mobilize public opinion behind the war effort.

(27) Nanga means "mouth of a stream," i.e. the place where a tributary flows into a larger river.

(28) Datu Linggi Jugah is also known today as the founder of the Tun Jugah Foundation, devoted to the preservation of Iban Culture. His wife Datin Amar Margaret Linggi, whom we never met, is deceased, but the splendid Foundation Museum reflects her expertise and interest in pua, and a second museum has been opened in the old fort at Kapit. We remain in contact with Linggi.

(29) I pasted the pass in my diary.

(30) Bob diary entry for December 13, 1965.

(31) loc cit.

(32) Bob diary entry for December 19.

(33) Diary entry December 6, 1965.

(34) The Patriot Ledger is an excellent small newspaper located in Quincy, Massachusetts, south of Boston.

(35) The portion of my diary covering this trip was published forty-four years later: Robert Pringle, "Bario Diary, June 3-June 27, 1966" Borneo Research Bulletin, 2010.

(36) A.B. Ward, Rajah's Servant, with a preface by Robert Pringle and Otto C. Doering III, Data Paper No. 51, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, 1966.

(37) Diary entry for September 24, 1966.

(38) Katharine Massel to Bob, Sept 14 1966.

(39) Barbara to her parents, April 14, 1967.