* It was a time when British conquistadors could still seize new provinces for the empire. In 1838, a young adventurer called James Brooke, son of an EIC judge in Calcutta, chartered his own ship and intervened in the internecine politics of the sultanate of Brunei. His defeat of Malay pirates and Dayak tribesmen in 1842 persuaded the sultan, Omar Saifuddien II, to appoint him hereditary raja of Sarawak. ‘The white raja’ tried to ban Dayak headhunting, but he also used Dayak auxiliaries to crush opposition. In London, accused of atrocities, he defied his critics but struggled to organize the succession to his strange monarchy. As a boy Brooke may have fathered a child, but he was a secret homosexual who fell in love with a Brunei prince, Badruddin, and a series of young English aristocrats and street children to whom he wrote feverish love poems. Since he had no legitimate sons, he appointed a nephew as heir, then fell out with him. The raja spent his old age in Totnes, pursuing and being blackmailed by local boys. When he died he left his raj to a younger nephew, Charles Brooke. The dynasty ruled Sarawak until 1946.
* Ward was a filibuster, a commander of American private armies who had served in the navy, then joined the filibuster William Walker in his attempt to conquer a private empire in Mexico before travelling to China, where he enrolled as a pirate hunter. Next he set up a small Colt-wielding group of mercenaries, the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps, which developed into an army, until he was killed aged thirty. His successor was a blue-eyed general’s son and fervid evangelical with a Jesus complex who regularly conversed with St Paul. Gordon served in the Crimean War before serving in China. He was disgusted by what he heard of Elgin’s ‘vandal-like’ sacking of the Summer Palace. Joining Cixi’s war against the Taiping, ‘this splendid Englishman’ won thirty-three battles, surrounded by his blue-clad bodyguard, showing unusual mercy in a brutal conflict and earning promotion from the emperor. On his return to England, he became a social worker among the poor boys of Gravesend, inviting these ‘scuttlers’ to stay in his house. Often wishing he had been castrated, he was probably a repressed homosexual.
* Garibaldi had earlier fought for Uruguayan independence. While in south America, he had sought out Manuela Sáenz, Bolívar’s paramour. Garibaldi had lost his own Manuela: during the Uruguayan war, he had fallen in love with a Brazilian gaucho, Anita de Sousa, who joined his freedom fighters. She combined ‘the strength and courage of a man and the charm and tenderness of a woman, manifested by the daring and vigour with which she had brandished her sword and the beautiful oval of her face that trimmed the softness of her extraordinary eyes’. They had four children together and in 1848 she returned with him to fight for Rome, dying of malaria as French and Austrian troops crushed the revolution. Garibaldi always wore her poncho and scarf.
* Douglass was born enslaved on a Maryland plantation, to an African-American mother while ‘My master was my father.’ Escaping from his bondage, he made it to Massachusetts, where he started to campaign against slavery. There Douglass, handsome and charismatic, a beautiful writer and superb speaker, celebrated his freedom with ‘joyous excitement’: ‘I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.’ He added, ‘I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life.’ But he felt he had no part in American democracy: ‘I have no country. What country have I?’ His autobiography, published in 1845, rallied the anti-slavery movement.
* It was typical of Grant too that when Ely Parker, born Hasanoanda, a full-blood Seneca Native American, who was trained as lawyer and engineer, offered to raise a Native American regiment and was turned down by Lincoln’s war secretary, he was employed and promoted by Grant.
* Gladstone, son of Britain’s biggest slave owner, was still conflicted about slavery. He described ‘the principle of the superiority of the white man and his right to hold the black in slavery’ as ‘detestable’ and favoured emancipation of slaves, yet he supported the Confederacy, claiming that ‘Slaves would be better off if the States were separated,’ and that the Confederacy ‘had made a nation of the South’. Even in 1864, when the war was almost over, he criticized the ‘negrophilists’ who ‘sacrifice three white lives in order to set free one black man’.
