The river with many tales

“MY place of predilection”: that was how Ranee Margaret, wife of the second Rajah of Sarawak, Charles Brooke, described Lundu of the 1860s.

Lundu’s main river or Batang Kayan is as wide as the Sarawak River in Kuching.

Recently, the Kayan was in the news for the wrong reason. Sad news indeed!

At Kampung Selampit, the river had claimed three precious lives of schoolchildren: Alasma Jitwil, Vilkie Wilson and Helena Fasha Petrus. The boat ferrying the students across the river sank midstream.

Kampung Selampit, a village of the Jagoi-speaking Bidayuh, is some 15 or 20 miles upriver from the village where I was born, 87 years ago – hence, my interest in this unfortunate event.

I was so sad about the accident but what can I do except to pray for the repose of the souls of the departed, and to send my heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family members of the three children.

However, had the bridge across this river been built in 2017 and completed by early this year, those children would have used that bridge instead, to reach their school at Senibong.

While the authorities are still sorting out problems in terms of a suitable site for the bridge, I hope that all the necessary safety measures would be put in place to regularise the operations of the existing boats.

The safety of the passengers, who are still relying on those boats, is of paramount importance if another tragedy is not to be repeated.

My information, obtained through the jungle telegraph, is that it will be sometime before the bridge is being constructed.

Why? There is said to be an intense interplay of bureaucracy and politics amongst the parties interested in building that bridge.

If and when built, it will provide a shortcut to the Borneo Trunk Road for the trucks carrying fresh fruit bunches from the oil palm plantations near the Malaysia-Indonesia to the nearest Sarawak Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority (Salcra) oil palm mill at Stungkor.

That bridge, if and when built and completed, should be named after the victims of the recent river tragedy, if I may suggest. In their honour.

There is no particular reason for the name ‘Kayan’ for the river, because as far as I know, not a single Kayan can be found living anywhere in the area, and neither has any of them has ever laid claim to the Native Customary Rights (NCR) land on both banks of that river.

At Kuala Bandang, the Batang (River) Kayan flows into the South China Sea, its source being the Singai mountains.

Some 20 years ago, I am told, a helicopter belonging to the Malaysian Armed Forces had crashed somewhere at the mouth of that river.

Now I am told that the river has two courses, posing a danger to the marines who are not familiar with the location. There has arisen a sandbank that has developed into an island of mangrove trees.

This river is well-known for the catfish species (‘patin’, ‘labang’ or ‘tapah’), big prawns (‘udang galah’), and don’t forget, the man-eating crocodiles!

Those fellows have been increasing and multiplying at a remarkable rate since the river is not used as a main transportation route any more.

Maybe that was why none of the children in Selampit knew how to swim – the river is not safe for playing and swimming nowadays.

And now, my bit of history. By 1839, James Brooke sailed on the MV Skimalong up the Kayan (then known only as Lundu River) up to Stunggang.

He and his entourage of officials from the Astana of Raja Muda Hashim, the Sultan of Brunei’s representative in Sarawak, arrived at the village of the Sebuyau Dayak in the evening of Aug 31, 1839. They had a great time in the longhouse at ‘Tungong’ (Brooke’s handwritten spelling for ‘Stunggang’).

In Henry Keppel’s book ‘The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido’ (OUP, 1991), you can read extracts from James Brooke’s own journal about how he had taken the trouble to measuring the length and the breadth of the longhouse: 594 feet long and 21 feet wide.

He counted the number of people there, 200, and measured the sizes of the heads of the men of the longhouse. This was a part of 19th century science, I suppose.

By the time I was eight or nine years old, I saw only a few pieces of that longhouse.

By then, its original inhabitants had started to build single houses for themselves, following the example of the Malays from Brunei and Sambas living downriver from our village on both banks of the same river.

The ‘Tuai Rumah’ (Chieftain) at Stunggang during the visit of James Brooke was Orang Kaya Jugah, a descendant of Temenggong Nyambong of Sebuyau, one of a long line of chiefs in the service of the Brunei Sultanate.

Muda Hashim in Sarawak (Kuching) ruled Lundu through them.

Now, back to the river. This waterway is well-known for a lot of ‘keramats’ (burial sites of well-known Muslim figures). There is one at Pegayu near the village of Temelan, another at Simpang Pasir, not far from the Iban longhouses at Sebandi, and at Nek Sit, a rock formation regarded as sacred by some people, near the old village of Rasa, a village of Jagoi of the Seventh Day Adventists.

During the Japanese Occupation (1941-1945), the part of the river in front of the Lundu town was clogged with huge logs out of which the Japanese were hoping to construct ships.

When the Pacific War ended in 1945 and the Japanese had surrendered, the logs rotted away, buried in the mud.

No other means of transport except boats was available those days for the Christian missionaries.

They had come from England to Lundu in order to convert the Dayaks there.

The pioneering mission station at Stunggang was served by stalwart men like Gomez, Zehnder and others. The river was their only means of communication with Kuching for over 100 years.

For local forays, they had to walk – walk for days, sometimes!

* The opinions expressed in this article are the columnist’s own and do not reflect the view of the newspaper.