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Gather around the gas fire and you shall hear a tale of
Bintulu, a saga of poets and pirates, of princes and
traders, permeated by the reek of sago and the crash!
crash! crash! of surf rolling in from the South China
Sea.
Bintulu was a fishing village on the coast
Borneo, a few days' sailing from the royal capital
Brunei. In good times, this proximity offered
protection and trade; in bad times the sea side
community was prey to marauders who plundered shipping
bound for the Kemena river mouth and ransacked the
village.
Bintulu first got into the news when one Robert Burns
decided to make his fortune by mining antimony here.
This was in 1847, six years after James Brooke had been
installed Rajah of Sarawak by the Sultan of Brunei.
Bintulu lay a long way from the Rajah's lands, but kind
Mr. Brooke took good care of Burns.
Brooke advised the Bintulu headman to be
hospitable to Mr. Burns, and informed him in the same
breath that his men weren't obliged to work for or
trade with the fellow if they didn't feel like it.
Burns. Who seems to have had a tasty temper, found it
impossible to recruit labour after this sort of
assistance; the mining was not success. A short time
later he was being sued for debt by a Brunei Malay,
then he was refused a passage to Bintulu by the Royal
Navy. Soon the Sarawak authorities were in a position
to report that he "stole people's wives, and ordered
(Baram) tribesmen to kill anyone who entered the
river." Next he was charged with assault by a ship's
captain-but who wants to hear all of this? Burns
carried on until, gun-running in northern Borneo, he
was killed by Pirates.
The next trouble to hit Bintulu started in Mukah, a
township in the sago-producing coastal wetlands. A
staunch enemy of James Brooke was made governor of this
district. His first official act was to close Mukah to
all shipping from or via Sarawak. People who only
remember sago as one of the more revolting nursery
puddings will fail to appreciate the villainy of this
act. Sago was a major item of commerce in the 19th
century, both to the producers (now reduced to penury by
their new governor's heroic principle) and to the
traders. The sago refineries in Kuching lay idle. James
Brooke's heir and nephew Charles, a man not lacking in
heroic principle himself, invaded Mukah with good sized
fleet. But as the Sarawak squadron was about to open
fire, the acting governor of the British island colony
Labuan blustered in with a veto. It may be noted that
H.E. was travelling on board the well-armed East
Indiaman Victoria-gunboat diplomacy does work!
In 1861 James Brooke convinced the ageing
Sultan of Brunei that "Mukah and all that" was more
trouble than it was worth. Why not cede the area up to
Kidurong Point to his friend James, thereby
incidentally double Sarawak's territory? At the time
of cession, James visited Mukah for a month. He
personally directed the re- building of the town-ship;
he was accessible and dynamic and affable like a newly
elected politician HMS Charbydis with a complement of
2000 bluejackets rode at anchor in the river all the
while. Then Sir James proceeded up the coast, built a
fort in Bintulu, and they lived happily ever
after.
Or so Sir James thought when he left Sarawak for the
last time in the new year. Frederick Boyle FRGS, who
visited Bintulu in 1864, described the fort in some
detail and added:
"We were told on good authority that if
one of the large guns on the first floor were fired,
it must inevitably burst from its seizing and crash
through the abode of darkness beneath."
Boyle didn't think much of Bintulu's defence. But he
was impressed with the prosperity he saw up and down a
coast devastated and depopulated by constant pirate
attacks only a few decades earlier. Bintulu chiefs and
traders were building large residences for their
extended families, mansions which were still a feature
of the place fifty years later.
The traders didn't spend all their gold on building;
some of it they wore on their sleeves. During Boyles
visit, a dispute overpayments for some gutta percha was
heard in court. Boyle took along his sketchbook:
"Nicodah Druman spread himself out like a
peacock in his armchair as soon as I expressed a wish
to take his portrait. On his head was a gracefully
folded Javanese handkerchief with an edging of
gold-lace an inch broad; his jacket of thin black
cloth was closed at the throat with ~ gold buttons;
wide trousers of crimson satin with a pattern of
leaves and flowers almost concealed his bare feet; a
sarong handsomely embroidered with silver was wrapped
round his waist, and over that was another of thick
silk woven in bars of purple, and green, and crimson,
and yellow."
The defendant wore a pengiran jacket of blue silk
with a high collar which like the cuffs, front and
seams, was stiff with gold work; his head was adorned
with a laced handkerchief like Nicordah's and his silken
trousers were profusely embroidered in gold. He wore
only one sarong, but that was of crimson silk and each
square of its tartan was ornamented with a design in
gold thread. On the whole I should think the clothes on
either of the two, if fairly valued, would be found
worth as much as the gutta percha in question."
Bintulu fashions are all very well, but
where are the pirates? The worst was over by 1864, two
years earlier they had been shot to pieces by the
Bishop of Labuan and Sarawak.
The Rt. Rev. Francis Thomas McDouball was on a Cruise
with John Brooke when an alarm of pirates was reported
off Bintulu. The Rainbow, aided by the Jolly Bachelor,
engaged a squadron of Illanun boats and trounced the
pirates. Some 180 pirates were killed, as well as few
who had been captured only days earlier in Bintulu. The
worthy Bishop, who had grown up in Mediterranean
garrisons before studying medicine and theology, was in
the thick of the action. He retired below deck to tend
the wounded after the first clash, but until then he
showed a thoroughly secular competition with a gun.
Soon McDouball was under fire himself.
Eminent Victorians were aghast at the spectacle of a
Terry breech-loader (a type of rifle) in Episcopal
hands. And who had told them about this excellent
weapon? The Bishop himself, in a letter to The Times
written to arouse public opinion against the scourge
of piracy. He certainly aroused public opinion! Few
readers stopped to consider that even a Bishop has a
right to defend himself when accosted on the high seas
with "long brass swivel guns called lelahs, ferocious
swords, and plenty of muskets."
The last pirate fleet in Sarawak waters was defeated
off Bintulu years later; the country was getting
peaceful. Italian naturalist Odoardo Beccari visited
Bintulu in1867; he commented on the "ruinous condition"
of the fort, noting however that this token of stability
induced people to move down the Kemena River and settle
within reach of the township. Men fished and grew sago
for a living, the Melanau women pounded small shrimps
into a pungent paste called 'belacan' which
indispensable to local cuisine.
Bintulu's earliest claim to fame is that
it is the cradle of Malaysian democracy. Here, on
September 8,1867, the first Sarawak General Council
met. This consultative body continued to meet at
irregular intervals after its inauguration in Bintulu;
eventually it settled in Kuching. Bintulu dozed on to
the sound of crash! crash! crash! when Fort Keppel was
built, when a lighthouse arose to guide shipping at
Tanjung Kidurong, when Rajah Charles shifted the
boundaries of his land from Kidurong to Baram River,
and then to Limbang.
World War II was over, the independent principality
of Sarawak become a colony. The faithful little steamers
Auby and Angby chugged up and down the coast. Bintulu
celebrated Malaysia with a new Post Office. The Gazette
records a Miri-Bintulu Road in 1967, with the prudent
disclaimer "up to Batu Niah". The 143rd Mile of this
road was opened by the Prime Minister in 1973, and there
is no doubt that a few hundreds metres were smoothed for
the occasion. But the grant personages flew in and out
by helicopter, leaving the stony track called Sarawak
No.1 Trunk Road well below them in the dust.
And then, in 1978, Bintulu woke up. It is
known whether the surf stopped crash-crashing for a
couple of beats; maybe it did. Central Luconia gas
field had been discovered offshore. Bintulu was to
become a gas town, a boom town, a centre of
unprecedented growth.
Growth started with bulldozers and lorries and
workmen and mud. A sudden influx of people exploded upon
the village, thousands of Sarawakians plus 7000 Koreans!
"I don't know to this day on which side of
the road cars drive in Korea" a Melanau school-teacher
avers. In the late of 70s you saw lorries careening
down the Bintulu roads on the right, the left and
centre. The wisest thing was to get out of the
way-fast"
The transitional period didn't last long. The BDA
(Bintulu Development Authority ) was founded
specifically to cope with the rapid development, to
provide the human environment in which town can
flourish. Gas started Bintulu, gas still fuels the town;
Malaysia's is the world's third exporter of LNG after
Indonesia and Algeria.
Today, Bintulu Port is Malaysia's second
busiest, incorporating a crude oil terminal, an LNG
terminal and a palm oil bulking installation. Besides
petroleum-based and heavy industries, Bintulu is
diversifying into aqro-based processing and service
industries including tourism.
By world standards, Bintulu is not much more than a
village. But its population has grown 100% over 15 years
without major social upsets. Yet there is no slum in
Bintulu. The 800-odd squatter houses "would be
considered palatial in other parts of South-east Asia"
according to a Filipino journalist. Parks and roadsides
blossoms; as soon as the bulldozers have finished on yet
another new site the BDA moves in with ready-to-plant
turf, scrubs and saplings.
And our tale is done, and the surf is
still crashing, and the gas fire burns on. It tears a
reddish slash into night and stabs a pale white hole
into the day, but it does not go out.
That fire is Bintulu.
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