The Burns Boys

This book recounts the tale of Robert Burns, a grandson of the Bard, who sailed to Singapore in 1846 and worked as a trader in Singapore, Labuan and along the North-West coast of Borneo. He was a courageous, at times foolhardy young man, who was the first European to explore a major river system in the country that is now the East Malaysian State of Sarawak and which was then controlled by the Kayan, one of the fiercest tribes of head-hunters. Inevitably, Burns fell foul of James Brooke, the first white Raja of Sarawak and he lost his livelihood as an agent of a Scots-based firm in Singapore. Undaunted, Burns traded on his own account, but on his last voyage in the schooner Dolphin, he was murdered by pirates at sea, off the Northern tip of Borneo. Burns’s death evoked a furore in Singapore, Scotland and the House of Commons, where Brooke was under continuous attack by the Radical Leader, Joseph Hume, a native of Montrose. The tortuous attempts to reveal the young man’s true identity end with a newspaper report and the discovery of a letter from a hitherto unknown brother who practised as a ‘surgeon’ in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.In a century replete with accounts of great explorers, this is the extraordinary story of two very ordinary men from Scotland.