Pip’s Patch

Joy Bausum‘s great, great, great grandmother’s first overseas assignment came to an abrupt and sad ending:

Jemima Poppy, the school mistress from Maidenhead, must have wondered if she would ever begin what she saw as being her life’s work. She successfully completed her probationary period in early 1842 but then had a lengthy wait before she was appointed to an overseas position. When it was agreed she would go to Kalimantan the SPFEE found a ship captained by a man they could trust to take care of single women. But then he died – and they had to search for another vessel. Finally, in March 1843, Jemima sailed from Gravesend little realising it would be over a year before she reached her destination.

In early 1844 she was in Singapore and wondering how she could get to the American mission base in Pontianak for the seas around Kalimantan were infested with pirates. The problem was solved when she managed to hitch a lift with James Brooke who had just become the white rajah of Sarawak. His adventures would inspire the term Sarawaking which stood for white adventurism that turned ordinary men into kings of far away domains. He was one of those upon which Kipling based his book The Man who would become King. George McDonald also drew on Brooke’s life for his Fraser Flashman books. Jemima’s story was equally as amazing.

Brooke would certainly have told her about the head hunting Dayaks who lived in Kalimantan. Yet from Pontianak she faced a four to five day journey by canoe deep into the forest. Today tourist agencies organise adventure holidays into that area offering the great jungle experience, braving rapids, staying overnight in Dayak longhouses and meeting the tattoed descendants of the headhunters. At the end there is a comfortable hotel with all mod-cons and the internet on which to share experiences. Back in the 1840s it could take up to six months for mail from the States to reach Pontianak.

So, although Mrs Thomson had requested the SPFEE to send an agent, she had no idea that anyone had been sent. “No previous advice of her coming had reached me; she had landed quite unexpectedly at our far-distant missionary premises in the wilderness of Borneo,” she wrote to the SPFEE after Jemima arrived.

It had been in the autumn of 1842 that her husband and the Rev William Youngblood had chosen a site by the river ten minutes walk from Karangan, having already gained the permission of the local Malay ruler at Pontianak. As it was difficult to find local labourers to help clear the almost impenetrable forest the Americans had to do most of the work themselves, clearing a 24 acre site so they could have a large vegetable garden and orchard as well as space for the mission buildings. It was tough work for, with Pontianak on the equator, there was no escape from the heat or the myriads of mosquitoes. The two bamboo and wood houses they built were raised up on posts to help keep them dry and free from snakes and other wild life. The roofs were covered with broad leaves and slabs of bark. Thomson brought his wife and children to Karangan in early 1843.Within two years the land they had cleared had groves of plantains, coffee, fruit trees, spice trees, and pineapples. The latter were grown beside the houses because their thorns kept out rodents and other animals.

The wild and often pathless forest around them provided cover for porcupines, wild cats, scorpions and centipedes. So it was very difficult for the ladies to visit their neighbours. Nor did they find it easy to understand the Dayaks. They could not comprehend their unwillingness to learn to read, how they lived together in large groups, or their animistic beliefs. Seven months after her arrival Jemima wrote: “Our prospects are very dark at this time. The people at the nearest kampong (longhouse) avoid coming near us, unless it is to steal or to beg, or in hope of some sordid gain: they seem entirely to refuse instruction, and try to perplex us in every way they can, yet, we hope not from a spirit of malice or hatred, but because they like to show their importance, or to show how far they dare go in deeds of darkness. They seem to feel a savage pleasure in thinking themselves able to perplex a white man.”

There was certainly much to perplex the missionaries. Not only did the Dayaks have no written language but there were several dialects within a small area. There was no big centre of population but rather 3,000 people scattered in 15 villages within a day’s walk. Mr Thomson and Mr Youngblood often got lost on the poorly marked trails and had to wade through swamps. When they reached a longhouse the Dayaks would usually share their scarce food supplies with their visitors such as rice, eggs, pumpkins, cucumbers and cocoa water. But they had to eat these surrounded by smoked human heads which the Americans found revolting. The Americans, however, noted that the custom of head hunting seemed to be in decline in that area and that the Dayaks there were peace-loving, inoffensive and docile. The Dayaks loved a good story when everyone gathered in the longhouse in the evening. They especially enjoyed stories about the Creation and the Flood, and the doctrine that all (including Dayaks) were equal before God.

By 1844, however, the American mission at Karangan was struggling to survive. Mr Youngblood moved his family to Pontianak as his wife was not well and a single man joined those at Karangan. Then came the fatal blow when in December 1844 Mrs Thomson died. The men at Karangan reported later: “One whom we were disposed to regard as all-important to our comfort and efficiency, has been taken from the midst of us… Since her decease, every feasible attempt has been made to attain the same end, but all has proved unavailing. A family circle is a sanctuary, which a missionary to such people needs above every other external comfort.”

Mrs Thomson’s presence had safeguarded them from suspicion and much more.  The Dayak women now expected sexual favours from them, something the missionaries found unthinkable and embarassing. Lady Sylvia Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak (1885-1971) wrote: “The Dayaks ravish my senses, the boys as much as the young girls, who, with uplifted breasts, were simple and unashamed, and had delicate swift movements like little wild fauns.”

By the time he left Karangan Mr Thomson had buried two daughters and a son in the little cemetery there. Emma Thomson was buried at Pontianak where she had died. With two daughters left, one by each of his wives, Mr Thomson headed West. At St Helena he sent his oldest daughter on to America to her maternal grandparents in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He travelled with his youngest daughter via Marseille to Berne, where he died in March 1848.

By 1845 Jemima had realised that her hope of living and dying among the Dayaks had come to an end. She told the SPFEE: “Oh what a brittle thread do all our earthly hopes hang! Blessed indeed shall we be if we learn, by all the Lord’s dealings with us, to hold our souls in readiness for whatever He may send, so that, whether he fulfills our desires, or blight our hopes, we may bow with perfect submission, and, with his servant of old, say, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.’”

She heard about the need for a school superintendent in Penang and moved on.

Sources: The records of the SPFEE in the special collection at Birmingham University; the History of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East published in London  in1847 by Edward Suter; Mission to Borneo – The Historical Society of the Reformed Church in America Occasional Papers No 1, by Gerald de Jong, 1987;  Queen of the Head Hunters by Sylvia Brooke, Sedgwick & Jackson, 1970.