Pangeran Indera Mahkota

Pangeran Indera Mahkota was born Pangeran Mohd Salleh, in Sambas. Pangeran Indera Mahkota is actually his title given by the Sultan of Brunei, but was better known by his title than his name.

He was a well-educated man, educated in Batavia (Betawi in BM, present-day Jakarta), and furthered his studies in Holland. Around 1820, he was summoned back by the sultan and made governor of Sarawak. He first founded Kuching, at a site previously known as Lidah Tanah.

Indera Mahkota was said to be a man of outstanding talent and sophistication, an orator and a poet as well as a skillful politician.. James Brooke himself acknowledged this in his diary:

"His education has been more attended to than others of his rank. He both reads and writes his own language, and is well acquainted with the government, laws , and customs of Borneo."

"My greatest enemy I know to be Mahkota, who with a few other leading men, resists all my attempts to fulfil (Muda Hashim’s) engagements’." (On Muda Hashim’s delay of fulfilling the promise, largely due to pressure from Pengiran Mahkota who could probably see the long-term consequences.) 

Spenser St John, Brooke’s private secretary who later acted as British Consul-General in Brunei, thought that he was ‘the most talented man I met in Borneo’.

Indera Mahkota knew the promise between Muda Hashim and James Brooke (to cede Sarawak to Brooke) would weaken Brunei, and devised to get rid of James Brooke; he also convinced Muda Hashim to delay handing over official power to James Brooke, causing Brooke to attack the royal palace at Kuching and threatening to release all his cannons and guns unless he was ratified as the governor of Sarawak.

Pengiran Mahkota favoured increased trade but he could see the consequences of European territorial ambtion in Borneo. In his own way, Pengiran Mahkota was a Borneo patriot who had the gift of political foresight. Unfortunately, his vilification by the Brooke court historians continues to obscure his real achievement.

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1. https://historytothemax.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/pengiran-indera-mahkota-part-1/
2. Our Sarawak – Persatuan Kesusasteraan Sarawak, 1983