THE PIRATES OF BORNEO, 1844
George Steward, East India Company
St. Mary's, Blundeston, Suffolk
The Man
Ironically, given that he died fighting pirates, George Steward was the grandson of a privateer. His grandfather, Timothy (1733-93), owned the Dreadnaught, a “private vessel of war”, which in 1781 captured a Swedish vessel named the Sophia, and brought her into Yarmouth as a lawful prize. As Britain was not at war with Sweden this seems a dubious escapade, but Timothy got away with it. The Sophia was carrying pitch and tar to Bordeaux, so my surmise is that as Britain was at war with American rebels, and as France was aiding those rebels, then any vessel trading with France could be seen as a legitimate target.
Legitimate or not Timothy took the proceeds, adding to the family wealth on his way to establishing a mercantile dynasty of some importance in Norfolk. His three sons, William (1760-1844), Timothy (1762-1836) and Ambrose (1770-1837) all became prominent merchants, shipowners and brewers; of the three it is Timothy that we are most interested in.
Timothy had five sons and two daughters. The fate of one daughter, Mary Anne (b. 1799), is unknown, but the other, Amelia (1804-42), married into a landowning family. Of the five sons the eldest, another Timothy (1795-1858), took over the running of the family brewing business. Thomas (1796-1880) became the professional of the family, a leading Yarmouth solicitor. Arthur (1801-1869) followed the mercantile route, concentrating on the Yarmouth businesses. Charles (1798-1870) inherited the seafaring gene, and eventually commanded an East Indiaman, a ship of the East India Company’s mercantile navy, and it was Charles that the youngest son, George (born 1805), followed after he had completed his education at Norwich Grammar School.
George will have had high hopes of following Charles’ success and gaining command of a Company ship, but he was born a few years too late. In industrial Britain the East India Company’s monopoly over trade in Asia was viewed as an anachronistic barrier to development, and in 1833 the Government of India Act abolished the monopoly. As a result the Company dispersed much of its fleet and men like George Steward, who would have expected a captaincy with its associated wealth, found themselves unemployed. George returned to Norfolk, to a leisured and, one feels, bored life of bachelordom, waiting for an opportunity to gain the success and status achieved by his elder brothers.
The Background
Meanwhile, back in the East, a Norwich School contemporary of George’s was making a name for himself. Having served with the army in Burma James Brooke had turned to trading, using an inheritance to purchase a schooner, the Royalist, in 1833. In 1838 he was in Sarawak when a rebellion broke out against the ruling Sultan of Brunei. Ever an adventurer, Brooke contributed to the rebellion’s suppression, and then settled in the country. In 1841, having put down another uprising, he was offered the Governorship of Sarawak, followed a few months later by the granting of the title of Rajah, and independent status.
These exploits gained Brooke some fame in Britain, and the concept of an English kingdom in the Far East awakened mercantile interest. We don’t know whether George Steward namedropped an old school acquaintance with Brooke, but he did set up a partnership with a merchant named Henry Wise, who was Brooke's agent in London, fitted out a trading vessel called the Ariel, and in 1843 set sail for Sarawak.
When he arrived he found Brooke, having established himself in his kingdom, focusing his attention on the eradication of piracy from Borneo. This meant extending a campaign beyond just Sarawak, but Brooke was determined to succeed. One reason was that, despite his tolerance of, and respect for, native traditions, Brooke abhorred those he considered barbaric – slavery and headhunting. The other reason was that he wanted to boost trade, for the profit of both Sarawak and Britain, and the common enemy to both objectives was the constant threat of piracy. The well-established Borneo pirates were headhunters, they captured and traded slaves, and, most importantly, their presence hindered and deterred merchant shipping.
That latter consideration was probably what led to the British Navy becoming involved, as Brooke’s lobbying eventually led, in 1844, to the Royal Navy China Station dispatching HMS Dido, a corvette (and thus suitable for action in coastal waters and navigable rivers) under the command of Captain Henry Keppel. In the summer of 1844 Brooke and Keppel set out on a punitive expedition against the pirates; the party consisted of the Dido, which would probably have had about two hundred men and twenty-four guns, and Brooke’s force, a mixture of Europeans and friendly Malays and Dyaks. It also included a “merchant volunteer” in the person of George Steward.
The Conflict
Moving along the Borneo coast, and penetrating up rivers, the force systematically destroyed pirate strongholds, burning villages and ships, and executing captured leaders. By mid-August they had reached the mouth of the Sakharan River, the main centre of pirate activity.
On the morning of August 19th, anticipating battle, Keppel and Brooke sent a spy boat ahead, under the command of a chief named Patinga Ali. The lightweight boat, with a single gun in its bow, carried amongst its crew George Steward, who had either volunteered to go or had slipped on without permission; depends which story you want to believe. Keppel stresses that the boat was under orders to turn back as soon as the enemy were sighted, but when two praus, or war canoes, appeared on either side of him Patinga Ali, instead of turning back, went on, making for the gap between the praus. In Flashman's Lady George Macdonald Fraser has him doing this deliberately, to draw an attack and so save the main force from ambush, but in doing so, whether it was through strategy or daring, he sealed the spy-boat’s fate.
As the boat broke through the narrowing gap a further four praus, each bearing about a hundred men, emerged, whilst behind appeared two large bamboo rafts, moving to block the river. Swinging round, the spy-boat headed straight for the blockade, bow-gun firing. Keppel describes the end – “when last seen Steward was endeavouring to board the enemy, but his own boat sank beneath him, and every soul on board, sixteen in number, perished”.
Patingi’s diversion worked. Pre-warned, Brooke and Keppel defeated the pirate forces, and, although there would be further punitive expeditions over the years, the pirate threat was effectively ended. Steward received a special memorial in Keppel’s narrative of the campaign, and he and Patingi Ali came to dramatic ends in Macdonald Fraser’s novel ‘Flashman’s Lady’: Patingi “with a pirate swung up in his huge arms”; Steward “stuck like a pin-cushion with sumpitan darts, toppling into the water”.
Afterwards
By the close of the 1840s Brooke had broken (almost completely) the piracy issue and he was to remain Rajah of Sarawak up to his death in 1868. His family ruled the kingdom until it was ceded to Britain in 1946. All three White Rajahs are buried in Sheepstor, in Devon.
Henry Keppel went on to become Commander of the China Station and eventually an Admiral of the Fleet. He died in 1904, aged 93.
In 1837 Timothy Steward merged his brewery with that of Peter Finch to create Steward, Pattison, Finch & Co., which grew to become Norfolk’s largest brewery until taken over and closed by Watney Mann in the 1960s (do not get too sentimental; Steward & Co closed many breweries themselves in the intervening years). Peter Finch must have been childless, as he named as his heir one of Timothy’s sons, who had been named after him, Peter Finch Steward. The inheritance was on condition that he dropped the Steward surname, and be known as Peter Finch. Unsurprisingly he did so, bought a house in Hurst in Berkshire, and brought up his family there. One son, Percy Finch, features in another of these stories.
The mystery question is what happened to George's daughter, because he did have one. Although he died in 1844 there are records of a half-caste girl called Julia Steward being with the family of Christian missionaries, Francis and Harriete McDougall, and described as an orphan. She stayed with the family for twenty years, was sent by them to be trained as a teacher at the Irish Church Education School in Dublin, and returned with them to Sarawak. In 1865 she married, then a few years later was widowed, then remarried. She then appears to disappear from sight. It is intriguing to think that somewhere in Sarawak live descendants of that 18th-Century East Anglian privateer.
IN MEMORY OF GEORGE STEWARD ESQ OF THE HONBLE E I COMPANY'S SERVICE WHO WAS KILLED IN A GALLANT ATTACK ON THE PIRATES OF BORNEO ON THE 19TH AUGUST 1844 AGED 38 YEARS
Sources
Photos
Memorial tablet to George Steward, St. Mary's, Blundeston - author
St. Mary's Church, Blundeston - author
Borneo pirate - 'Borneo & the Indian Archipelago, with drawings of costume and scenery', by Frank S. Marryat (Longman, Brown, Green & Lingman, London, 1848) - online Project Gutenberg
Military
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brookehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rajahs
'The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido. The Suppression of Piracy', Captain The Hon. Henry Keppel (Robson, Levey & Franklyn, London, 1867) - viewable online at Google Books
'Flashman's Lady', George Macdonald Fraser, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1977)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Albion&month=0808&week=a&msg=bevDVqHRO9fmnYchSQRHXg&user=&pw= - a discussion board dealing with one of the crew of The Ariel
Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk
family.kiwicelts.com - a personal family history site covering, among others, the Steward family
www.findmypast.co.uk
'Memoirs of Francis Thomas McDougall, D.C.L., F.R.C.S., sometime Bishop of Labuan and Sarawak, and of Harriete his Wife', Charles John Bunyon, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1889)
'Sketches of our Life at Sarawak', Harriete McDougall, SPCK, London, 1882
ⓒ Jonathan Dewhirst March 2014
Photos
Memorial tablet to George Steward, St. Mary's, Blundeston - author
St. Mary's Church, Blundeston - author
Borneo pirate - 'Borneo & the Indian Archipelago, with drawings of costume and scenery', by Frank S. Marryat (Longman, Brown, Green & Lingman, London, 1848) - online Project Gutenberg
Military
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brookehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rajahs
'The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido. The Suppression of Piracy', Captain The Hon. Henry Keppel (Robson, Levey & Franklyn, London, 1867) - viewable online at Google Books
'Flashman's Lady', George Macdonald Fraser, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1977)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Albion&month=0808&week=a&msg=bevDVqHRO9fmnYchSQRHXg&user=&pw= - a discussion board dealing with one of the crew of The Ariel
Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk
family.kiwicelts.com - a personal family history site covering, among others, the Steward family
www.findmypast.co.uk
'Memoirs of Francis Thomas McDougall, D.C.L., F.R.C.S., sometime Bishop of Labuan and Sarawak, and of Harriete his Wife', Charles John Bunyon, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1889)
'Sketches of our Life at Sarawak', Harriete McDougall, SPCK, London, 1882
ⓒ Jonathan Dewhirst March 2014