CHAPTER 6 History of the Labuk

1. The deep-throated growl of the Mantananis twin diesels slowed to a quiet throb, as Capt. Hussein brought it round in a wide sweep, out of the open water of the bay into the narrow channel which formed part of the delta of the Labuk river. We actually brushed against the overhanging nipah fronds on the far bank in order to avoid the shallow sand-bar in the middle of the river. The rock­ing motion of the boat stopped as we left the choppy waters of the bay. Immediately it was as if we had entered another world – a dark gloomy world. The mangroves crowded in on us and cut off any hint of the fresh breeze, which was blowing in the bay. It was stifling hot and humid. The river oozed sullenly through tidal mud-flats with no discernible banks other than the green wall of mangrove and nipah.
2. The first impression was of an evil, flat, monotonous region, which could have changed little since the days of the great reptiles. It took no great effort of imagination to visualize a dinosaur raising its head from the slime. Our bow-wave sloshed out over the mud and surged through the tangle of mangrove roots. From time to time a huge biyawak lizard slithered into the glossy water with a swirl. The only bird-life to be seen was the odd dull-colored darter, with its sinister snake­like neck turning left and right as it flitted silently up the river ahead of us. Almost on cue the sun disappeared and a sudden downpour drummed on the roof of the foredeck. The two deck-hands rushed round, letting down the awnings.
3. My two companions retired to their cabins, John Galpine to have his after­noon kip, our leader, firmly clutching a packet of Liquorice All-sorts, to "Write-up some notes," as he put it. I was to discover that distinguished visitors never, ever, take a siesta after lunch like ordinary mortals. No indeed! In spite of exhaustion, and in spite of the equatorial heat, they invariably retire to write up some notes. It was a hallowed tradition, which I was most careful to preserve when visiting our plantations, when I myself became chairman of UPI in London in due course.
4. Left alone on the now much cooler foredeck, I had a precious hour or two to browse through the reading matter which I had accumulated over the last few weeks. There was a dog-eared file which Miss Wright - or perhaps one of the Haes family - had passed over to UPI along with the lease; there was a copy of an old book Borneo - The Stealer of Hearts by one Oscar Cook, which, I was told, had a chapter or two on the Labuk; finally there was John Galpine's recent feasibility study. Together, these papers gave me a potted history of the Labuk Valley. It was a bloody tale of death and disaster, floods and failure, pestilence and piracy.
   
   March/April 1887
   
   I turned first to the file. It contained some ancient newspaper cuttings and some visit reports dating from 1887 to 1911. The earliest item was a cutting from the British North Borneo Herald of 1 June 1887 containing a report by one Capt. Beeston, Commandant British North Borneo Constabulary, addressed to the Government Secretary, Sandakan. It described a fifty-day expedition, which he had made in March/April 1887 into the Labuk Valley with a group of over forty constables and NCO's to settle a blood-feud between the tribes of the Labuk and the Kinabatangan Rivers. The report was a masterpiece in its way. Capt. Beeston diagnosed the problem as being due to the head-hunters in the Labuk having taken some twenty-two heads more from the Kinbatangan tribes than vice-versa. The recent fracas was due, he reported, to the Kinabatangan lads trying to even-up the score. He went on to mention quite casually, that during the period of the discus­sions, the Kinabatangan party had taken back four heads, leaving a balance at the end of the negotiations, of eighteen heads still outstanding.
5. Capt. Beeston did not indicate the total number of heads taken by both sides, but if the balance owing by one group to the other was at one time twenty-two, this indicates that a fairly large number of natives must have lost their heads during the entire feud. I liked Capt. Beeston's style. He was a typical Victorian man of action, direct and effective, but compassionate. In his report, he comments kindly on his constables, his NCOs and his interpreter. He mentions in passing (but not by way of complaint) that it rained for forty-five of the fifty days he was on the expedition and that he was flooded out and had to move camp four times during his stay in the Labuk. He is quite matter-of-fact regarding the head-hunting. His report makes it read almost like a football competition. One could imagine hearing a sports broad­cast in Sandakan on a Saturday evening :
   "And now the results from the Senior Head-Hunting League - Labuk 82: Kinabatangan 60. In the Sugut away-match with Kudat, a couple of late heads taken by the home centre forward enabled his team to move to the top of the league-table. "
   I often feel that it is sad that when the colonialists come along they put an end to the natives' traditional sports and pastimes.
   When Capt. Beeston's report was written, my grandfather, Leslie MacGregor, would have been twenty-three. I reflected that the bloodthirsty headhunters of 1887 could therefore equally well be the grandfathers of the gentlemen amongst whom I was about to take up residence. I took some comfort from the fact that Capt Beeston said that he felt confident that he had settled the head-hunting in the Labuk Valley once and for all. His last words were..."Feuds on the rivers will not I think, be heard of again." I just hoped he was right.
   
   July 1 1889
   
   Amongst the other papers in the Haes-Wright file were some further news­paper cuttings describing the development of the tobacco estate. "July 1 1889 - The Labuk Syndicate have succeeded in forming a Company in Hong Kong to plant tobacco on their 10,000 acres of land at Tungud, on the Labuk River. Mr E C van Marie is now commencing operations with a view to planting in 1890."
6. "September 1 1889 - At the Kuala Tungud, Mr van Marle is already hard at work for next year's crop. Road making and draining are in a very forward stage and forest-felling was begun before the end of the month. Mr and Mrs van Marle and Miss van Marie were in excellent health and spirit and the health of all the coolies was very satisfactory." (In the light of the comment of December 1891 in the same newspaper - see below, this must be in the running for a prize as the world's most inaccurate piece of journalism!)
   
   January 1 1890
   
   My predecessor, Mr van Marie appeared again, in a less favourable light in a press report from the District Officer a few months later:
   "January 1 1890: "On the Labuk a Javanese coolie upon being brought back to Mr van Marie's estate, from which he had run away, went amok. He killed one Kadazan coolie and wounded several others in a frightful manner. He was eventu­ally shot by Mr van Marie who unfortunately in doing so accidentally shot dead an innocent Sulok coolie."
   The sickness rate amongst the workers was referred to two years later in December 1891: "The new estate-hospital at Tungud is an excellently constructed building which reflects great credit on the new manager Mr J H Pattesson and his Assistants. There is ample room to accommodate 100 patients. The health of the coolies has wonderfully changed since the days of the late Mr van Marie, and doubtless as a logical consequence, desertions are few and far between. The late manager of Tungud acted in such a way as to induce his men to desert and when they were sick, he provided only the slightest modicum of medicines, with food in the same proportion. What was the result? A death-rate of 49.96% in six months. This, in plain English means a decimal point of a man left at the end of the year. And yet his coolies cost him $70 a piece in brokers fees."
7. This extract certainly gave pause for thought! The estate in 1890 was apparently employing around 600 workers. What the horrifying newspaper statistic shows is that of these, 299 died in a six-month period, probably of cholera, malaria and beri-beri. It is difficult to imagine it: Chinese workers imported from Hong Kong with no natural resistance to tropical diseases must have gone down like flies. Also rather horrifying is the newspaper's comment that workers cost "$70 a piece!" It makes them sound like some sort of livestock.
   
   4 May 1891
   
   I later found an interesting final comment on Mr van Marie, in Professor Tregonning's book, Under Chartered Company Rule. The writer quoted an extract from a report by the Governor to the Court of Directors, 4 May 1891:
   `Mr van Marie's estate has been carried on apparently upon a system of the most incredible brutality. The coolies have been swindled, cheated and half starved. They have been flogged in the most merciless manner and have been refused medical treatment when suffering from the wounds inflicted on them by the flogging whip - the tail of a sting-ray. The Manager (now in prison) has utterly ignored all orders given him by the Protector. Mr van Marie and his Assistant were sentenced to a year's imprisonment and then deported, and two of his overseers were gaoled as well, but the temperament of the Dutch Planters, and the difficulty of supervising them remained a problem.'
   
   March 1911
   The last item in the file was dated March 1911. It consisted of correspondence between yet another Dutch planter, Mr F van Houten, the manager of Tungud Rubber Estates Ltd, and the Deputy Governor in Jesselton. It was yet another sad story. Mr van Houten claimed that in 1910 he had accepted an offer of an appoint­ment by a London-based company connected with Sir Alfred Dent, who was an ex-Governor of the Colony.
   According to van Houten, he was sent to Borneo to plant rubber on the old tobacco estate which had been abandoned seventeen years earlier. He had proceed­ed to recruit coolies and an assistant, and he had renticed and felled 'a considerable area of jungle.' The London company had financed him to the extent of $4000, but he had now spent about double that amount and the London Group had either disappeared or at any rate had ceased to fund him. He had closed down operations but was asking the Governor to refund his losses. The application was refused and the unfortunate Mr van Houten was bankrupted. The rubber estate suffered the same fate as the tobacco estate had twenty years earlier. The jungle closed in once again.
   
   1911 to 1919
   I then turned to Oscar Cook's book, Borneo - The Stealer of Hearts. It gave a fascinating picture of the Labuk a few years further on, at the end of the First World War. Mr Cook was obviously a complex character. He lived in North Borneo for eight years from 1911 to 1919. After being sacked as a planter from Woodford Rubber Estate and being unable to get any other estate company to employ him, he joined the Chartered Company. In his last two years, he was the District Officer of Labuk and Sugut, with his headquarters on the island of Klagan. A few sentences will show Mr Cook's feelings for the area:
   "The Labuk! Encircled with swamps and jungles, traversed by rivers, bound­ed by hills and sea. It is as if a soul were imprisoned within those mighty barriers; as if a slow, long, lingering tragedy were being enacted, as if through the years and years of the past, and through the years and years to come, this soul were striving for freedom, to reach the light of the sun. So, over the district there broods a spirit of somber sadness which touches and dwells in the hearts of its men."
8. Mr Cook goes on to quote the Colony's principal medical officer as stating that on no account should any European officer be stationed in the Labuk for more than eight months on account of its unhealthiness and isolation. Mr Cook mentions that his three expatriate predecessors in Klagan had all died tragically, whilst he himself was not in the best of circumstances and had not been accepted back for a further tour of duty in North Borneo. I was to find out later that the circumstances which Oscar Cook referred to were used by Somerset Maugham in his short story, The Door of Opportunity, in which the main character, Alban Torel was based on the unfortunate Oscar Cook. Mr Cook gives his version of the story in his book. I am sure it is more accurate than Mr Maugham's. In brief, the story was as follows:
   In 1918, although all activities on Tungud Estate had been long abandoned, there was one small tobacco estate, the Labuk Tobacco Co. which had been re­started a few miles further up the Labuk at the junction with Trusan Sapi. Both the Dutch manager and the assistant of this estate had been warned by the D.O. several times about their rough treatment of their workers. After the end of the war, a batch of Vietnamese workers who had recently been in the Allied pioneer labour corps in France, arrived on the estate. They were obviously not prepared to put up with the sort of treatment which the Dutch planters normally meted out to their workers. On Chinese New Year they revolted. They stole the assistant's gun, shot him dead, set fire to the tobacco sheds and set about terrorising the other workers and their families.
9. The estate manager was fortunate that he was out in the field when the riot started. He escaped with his life and fled downstream to Klagan to get help from the District Officer. Oscar Cook had a contingent of six armed police constables and a police sergeant on the station. The planter thought this force would be more than ample to restore order. Oscar decided however not to tackle the rioting workers with this group but instead sent off a message to Sandakan asking for help. He reasoned that the only European left behind on the estate, was already dead. The loyal workers, headmen and the fifty or so women and children who were in the hands of the rioters were, he said, 'Only Javanese natives.' He did not think it was worth risking any of his policemen to save them.
10. During the two days of waiting, the estate manager apparently begged Oscar without success to take the police up to the estate, or to let him take them up himself. Oscar says: "Then followed what will always seem to me to be the two longest days of my life - days of waiting - during which, although I was certain I had acted rightly, my mind foresaw the inevitable verdict of 'Coward', pronounced upon me by the great majority of the Europeans in the Territory."
11. On the third afternoon a contingent of 50 police arrived at Klagan. Oscar was able to persuade the Major in charge that there was no real rush, and that the attack should be the following morning. Oscar collected an additional group of around 50 natives armed with spears and parangs, to come with them. (I was lucky to get an eye-witness account of these events from one of these fifty natives, Orang Tuah Jaffri who was still living in the Lower Tungud, when I started operations. O.T. Jaffri's story agreed in most particulars with Oscar Cook's).
12. The party forded the Labuk at Paranchangan in darkness and arrived at the laborers' village at dawn on the fourth day. The workers surrendered instantly except for the leader of the rioting gang who fired four random shots from the direc­tion of a small hut. The command was given to fire. The policemen poured volleys of shots into the house. Unfortunately the four shots had been fired, not from the hut, but from the garden behind it. The occupants of the hut were in fact a Javanese worker, his wife and two babies who apparently had nothing to do with the riot. The father was killed and the Vietnamese who had fired the shots from the garden was later captured. Oscar reported that the weeping woman with her two children cling­ing to her was found on the steps of the hut with the dead body of her husband. He expressed no regret over this tragic incident. In fact he reported that he was, `greatly disappointed at the absence of a fight.'
13. This was the end of Mr Oscar Cook's career in North Borneo. His actions or rather lack of action, as he predicted, created a huge outcry amongst the local community. He was indeed branded as a coward and sent back to UK in disgrace. Was he just being prudent in abandoning the labor force to their fate for four days, or was it a cowardly action? To Oscar himself, his actions seemed be absolutely correct and prudent. However, I imagine Capt Beeston would have jumped into a canoe with six policemen and sorted the whole thing out in an hour or two.
14. John Galpine's report was next on my reading list and it brought the Labuk story up to date. It had the pithy title 'Preliminary Survey of the Haes Wright Property - Sometimes known as Tungud Estate in the Labuk and Sugut District of North Borneo, with reference to the Possible Establishment of Oil Palm Plantations. May 1960. 'It had been handed to me in London before I left. By now I knew most of it by heart. John was the best agriculturalist in Plantations Group. In the short time at his disposal he had made an astonishingly detailed study of the concession. For twelve days, with a team of local natives, he had cut several rentices through the bush, marking the topography at intervals of one chain, and digging soil pits every mile. His assessment was that about 45% of the concession consisted of hills or dry flat land, 40% was wet swampy land, subject to seasonal flooding, and 15% was implantable tidal swamp. Significantly, he assessed that: "Flooding of not very long duration may be expected annually over the whole area apart from the hills. About once in ten years a big flood can be expected when the whole river-bank will overflow and Klagan Island will be under water. Considerable development problems will arise and unforeseen losses of young plantings may come about."
15. As regards labor, John estimated that in the area surrounding the concession, there might be about 40 possible workers, some of whom were the descendants of the old tobacco estate workers. These would probably only be available on a seasonal basis and we would therefore be completely dependent on immigrants for the bulk of the thousand or so workers we would need to complete the development. He had found no traces of the old tobacco estate other than a few man-made drains in one corner. John's final summary was extremely guarded: "The soil itself gives the impression of considerable potential, and plant growth in surrounding small­holdings appears very good. There are prospects of developing a good property but costs are likely to be very high. It is felt that considerably better overall areas could be found in North Borneo but they would neither be available so quickly nor carry such favorable lease terms (999 years). The property strikes the mind as being both too low-lying and too closes to rivers prone to change course and to flood for comfort."
16. Well, no one, I thought, had ever said it was going to be comfortable! I had asked Colin about it. "He's a pessimistic bastard, old John", he replied. "We have discounted for this. You wait, we might find a patch or two of wet land on the concession, but our experts in London are all convinced from reading the State geological surveys and the meteorological figures from Beluran, that this will be a marvelous area for oil palm development."
17. It was a pity I thought that the 'experts' in London had not been able to actually visit the place. For my part I would rather accept John's verdict, which as it happened rather understated the difficulties. I had taken the opportunity when in Malaya of having a quiet chat with John. He did not think his report was pessimistic. He had in fact almost completed a much more damning first draft when he had received a telegram from London, which said "We look forward to receiv­ing your favorable report." Long skilled in the ways of UPI, and with a well-developed sense of self-preservation, John had gone back to the report and toned it down as far as he reasonably could, without perjuring himself. "What do you really think then," I had asked.
18. "I think I wouldn't touch it with the proverbial barge pole, old boy" he said. "You had better resign yourself to growing webbed feet!" Nothing much seemed to have happened in the Labuk area since the departure of Oscar Cook, except that after a huge flood which inundated the island in 1918, the Government had decided to move the District Office down to Beluran. The Labuk Tobacco Estate had been abandoned after the riot, and had never been re-opened. Of my expatriate predecessors in the Labuk, my countryman Robert Burns had lost his head, the vicious Mr van Marle, his Dutch assistant, and his two overseers had been imprisoned for brutality and expelled from the country. The rubber planter, van Houten had left the country bankrupt. The assistant of the short-lived Labuk Tobacco Co. had been murdered. The three District Officers who had resided in Klagan had died in tragic circumstances and Oscar Cook had been branded as a coward and kicked out of the country. The local inhabitants had fared no better. Large numbers had been killed over the years by marauding head-hunters and tribal feuds. As regards the workers imported to run the tobacco and rubber estates, huge numbers had died through the ravages of disease.
19. It was not a very happy picture. One wondered if Oscar Cook's comment about the "long lingering tragedy being enacted in the Labuk," did not summarize the position rather well. My afternoon's reading and the dank rain-swept forest which we were passing through almost began to dampen my enthusiasm, and made it rather easy to understand the "Spirit of sombre sadness which touches and dwells in the hearts of Labuk men!"
    Agriculturally, the history of the Labuk was a story of failure. No crop had as yet been successful in the tidal swamps of the Labuk. Tobacco and rubber had both failed. Was the oil palm going to be any more successful?