A Short Time Ago The
Reigning Prince, Who Does Not Appear To Be A Cypher, Came With A Great
Train Of Followers, Some Of Them Only Wearing Sarongs, A Grandson, To
Whom He Is Much Attached, And The Deposed Sultan's Two Boys, Of Whom I
Told You Before.
They are in Malay clothing, and seem to have lost
their vivacity, or at least it is in abeyance.
Before I came here, I
understood from many people that "His Highness" is very generally
detested. So, also, says Sir Benson Maxwell in _Our Malay Conquests_.
Major M'Nair in his amusing book on Perak says: "He is a man over
middle age, and is described as being of considerable ability, feared
and hated by many of the chiefs, and as being of a fierce and cruel
disposition, but he was a proved man as to his loyalty" (to British
interests), "and there being no desire on the part of the Government to
annex the State of Perak, his appointment was the wisest course that,
under the circumstances, could be pursued." This is all that the
greatest apologist for British proceedings in Perak has to say.
I was not prepossessed in his favor before I came, for among other
stories of his cruel disposition, I was told that it was "absolutely
true" that three years ago he poured boiling water down the back of a
runaway female slave who had been recaptured, and then put a red ant's
nest upon it. If "piracy" is to be the term applied to levying
blackmail, he was certainly a pirate, for he exacted a tenth of the
cargo of every boat which passed up his river, a Rajah higher up doing
the same thing.
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