The Suluk maidens called him Imam (Holy Man). Their soft eyes shone with adoration for him. As the soft breezes wafted across Darvel Bay, they ran to him on naked feet.

At his command, they would divest themselves of their clothing. Their dark skins would reflect the light of the dying sun. Their smooth muscles would ripple in a rhythm of enticement as they began their dance of passion.

Later, he would lie comfortably with his head nestled against the soft naked bosom of a naked native girl. Quick fingers would play their lascivious games over his body. They'd exert their practiced pleasure against his thighs, travel their light path across the matted hair of his chest, reach eagerly for the heavy silver belt buckle.

While the other native girls chattered happily, waiting their turn, Wilhelm Smuts would lift the Suluk beauty in his arms and carry her to his private chamber.

For any normal man, a life of unrestricted lust in a tropic paradise would have been more than enough. But Imam Wilhelm Smuts was no ordinary man. There were rope burns which had never quite healed under his arm pits. His back was latticed with thick white scars. He walked with a slight limp. His eyes held a mad gleam. And for this, the daughters of the European settlers of Sarawak would pay a fearful price.

It hadn't always been that way. Smuts had been a young and handsome seamen who had joined the Dutch East India Company in search of adventure and wealth in the year 1754.

He had found his adventure in the arms of Beatrix Van Loon, the nymphomaniac daughter of the skipper of the windjammer, Lansdaam. The Lansdaam had been assigned to fight the British and Spanish in the Archipelago in the undeclared trade war. Her home port was Sempoma.

Smuts had conducted a clandestine affair with Beatrix Van Loon. Although she was a mere eighteen years old, her bedroom proclivities had been unbelievable. Practically insatiable, she had instructed Smuts in all the baser manifestations of sex.

One of her delights had been to watch the cruel punishments meted out to natives who were suspected of having helped the British. Like a little girl she would clap her hands in glee as the Suluk was bound hand and foot and left in the tropical sun until his eyelids burned off. She would make strange little sounds deep in her throat when her father would seize a parang and hack away the native's nose and lips.

Beatrix had been swarming all over Smuts in her naked lust when the sounds of her panting had been interrupted by the slamming of the door below. Smuts had frozen at the sound of the heavy tread on the stairs of the Van Loon house. A seaman taking his dalliance with the skipper's daughter would hardly have fitted into the pattern of acceptable shore leave behavior. He envisioned a month of being confined to quarters aboard ship.

But Smuts had failed to reckon with the diabolical cunning of his bedmate. Suddenly, she sat bolt upright. Beatrix raked his face and chest with her nails. He felt the sticky blood running down his flanks.

"Help!" she shrieked at the top of her lungs. "Help me! He's raping me!"

A second later, Van Loon burst into the room, surveyed the scene, gathered his sobbing daughter in his arms, and at the same moment unholstered the side arm and held it scant inches away from Smuts' head.

Three mornings later, the ship's piper blasted a mournful tune. Stripped to the waist, a parang prodding him forward, Smuts was securely bound to the mizzenmast. His eyes locked with the limpid blue eyes of Beatrix Van Loon, who stood demurely by the ship's rail. The twin red spots on her cheeks and the furious undulations of her firm breasts told him of the anticipation she felt.

The boatswain stepped forward, flicking dried bits of flesh from the cat. His biceps quivered. The cat whistled and splattered, tearing the skin from Smut's back. He bit down hard, almost severing his tongue in his refusal to give his erstwhile lover the satisfaction of hearing him scream.

On the tenth blow, Smuts shrieked like a woman. On the twentieth, he vomited. On the thirtieth he fainted. But even after the fiftieth, his punishment didn't stop.

He was only barely aware of the rope halter being run around his chest and under his armpits. Not until the brine closed over his head and ate its way into his wounds did he realize that Van Loon was also having him keelhauled.

Down he plunged through the murky water. His body banged sickeningly against the hull. His lungs caught fire as he fought to save what little breath was left to him. Then there was the sensation of having his shoulders dislocated as the line to the halter was jerked taut. With agonizing slowness he began to ascend from under the Lansdaam's very keel.

Twice more the process of keelhauling was repeated. At last, more dead than alive, Smuts had been lashed to a raft and tossed once again into the sea to await the coming of the man-eating tiger sharks.

For three days he floated on the water's glassy surface. Then, as if the hand of fate guided it, a quartering wind picked up the raft and plunged it onto the beach above Tungku.

The Suluks who would have slaughtered a white man had he not been turned out by his brothers, accepted Smuts. Their women nursed him back to health. Once again his limbs grew strong. But something had snapped in his brain for all time to come. While he accepted the favors of the satin skinned Suluk beauties, he roamed their village at night like a disembodied specter. His strangled cries for vengeance rang on the sultry air.

The madness became a diabolical cunning. He needed the Suluks for the plan which was maturing in his head. With their help, he would wreak his terror on the colonists.

The Suluk women were quick to accept Smuts as Imam. The males were a trifle more cynical. Not until he had led them on a raid against a Tungku outpost, and stripped, raped and mutilated a white woman before their eyes, would they acknowledge that he was fit to command their kumpits.

Smuts would do better than that. He would capture one woman and bring her back to Darvel Bay. Here he would show the tribesmen there were other ways—better ways—to treat a captive white woman than simple rape and death. He would show how worthy he was of their trust.

The fog which rose from the sea as the kuropit nosed its way towards Tungku covered most sounds. Nobody heard the muffled cry of the girl as the heavy blanket was tossed over her head. Nobody saw her legs flailing, revealing the perfect symmetry of her calves and thighs as Smuts carried her back to the kumpit and the native oarsmen flailed the water with their paddles. Thus did Whilhelm Smuts and Beatrix Van Loon meet again.

On their return to the hidden caves of Darvel Bay, Smuts ordered that a great feast be prepared. He had cause to celebrate. He laughed maniacally as he removed the blanket from his captive's head.

Beatrix Van Loon blinked at him stupidly for long minutes. Then her soft, almost petulant mouth bowed into a scream that reached beyond the grave. Smuts gripped her long blonde hair and wrenched the terrified girl to her feet.

"Noooooooooooooooo!" she wailed. She shrank back against the uneven stone wall, feeling its cold dankness against her flesh. One soft hand was stuffed into her mouth, and her even white teeth clamped down hard on her own flesh to stifle her cry of terror.

Smuts advanced slowly towards her, making each step a signal of the horror to come. He emitted strange grunts which were more animal-like than human. His fists flexed and unflexed.

The Dutch girl watched his advance. Her eyes grew large. Now they focused on the Suluk girls who had crowded into the cave behind them. She raised her arms in supplication.

"Please!" she shrieked. "In the name of humanity, do not let the dead man have me!" The native girls stared at her impassively for the moment. Then a ripple of delight filled the room. The golden one had said that Smuts was dead. If this were true then he must be reincarnated. He was in reality an Imam.

"You see, my little one," Smuts sneered at here, "now I am the captain of a crew of my own. It is you who are alone, and it is I who am all powerful. Before you betrayed me, you showed a considerable interest in the delights of pain. Now you will have the opportunity to learn of those delights first hand!"

"Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!" screamed Beatrix in protest. "Don't hurt me!"

Smuts only smiled at her protest, and his voice rang out over the jabbering of the Suluk women. "Tie her up by the wrists and pull her into the air!" he ordered.

Inexorably, her arms were drawn upward and her wrists were crossed. A rope dangled from a pulley in the ceiling, driven into solid rock by Smuts in preparation for this moment, and one of his women wound it securely around both of Beatrix's wrists and knotted it tight. Two other women pulled on the other end of the rope and pulled her arms into the air. They continued to pull while Beatrix danced about frantically, jerking on the rope, until her feet were drawn free of the cave floor. The rope sliced into her agonized wrists, the pain so excruciating that her struggles ceased and she rotated slowly before her captors. Sweat was now flowing freely from every pore up and down the length of her body, making her clothing sodden.

She hung suspended in her agony, continuing to twist, forced to watch her erstwhile lover take his dalliance with the most beautiful of the softly alluring Suluk girls.

"Savage!" Beatrix finally cried, driven beyond reason by her pain and terror. "Beast! Free me this moment!"

"Savage. Beast. You have an insubordinate tongue, dear Beatrix," Smuts leered. "Well, I will free your tongue for another song. A song you taught me well."

Arrogantly, he disengaged himself from the embrace of the dark-haired, dusky Suluk girl. Slowly he strode toward the bound, golden-haired one with ivory skin. Beatrix saw the thick leather whip slithering across the floor behind him, and her entire body went rigid.

Beatrix was twisted away from Smuts, but she stiffened as she heard the sound of the lash cutting through the air. The first blow curled around her shoulders, spinning her body, and the tip of the metal-tipped lash caught at and tore clothing and skin as Smuts jerked his arm back, ripping the leather back and spinning her the other way. Her scream rose over the heads of the watching natives, and her legs kicked out spasmodically. Before it had subsided into a muffled gasp, it shot up again, borne on the wings of the lash which now swirled around her waist. Beatrix cried out again as the whip cut a slash through the material of her shift.

It took another dozen lashes from the whip to reduce the shift she had been wearing when captured to shreds. Only then did Beatrix realized that Smuts was using the bullwhip to strip her, to humiliate her before the natives, to show them her weakness. But she could do nothing to protect herself, and it took only a few more strokes before she saw the shift falling away from her.

Now that she was completely naked in front of Smuts and the tribesmen, she felt the dank air wafting over her skin, drying the sweat where it lay along the column of her spine. But she had little time to consider such things, as the lash now seared into her bare skin. It lash followed every contour of her body under Smuts expert arm, finding her every sensitive area and outraging it. Her back, her hips, the plumpness of her thighs, the softness of her breasts: All were subjected to the kiss of the whip as the endless minutes of savage agony passed.

Only when she finally fainted did the whipping cease. The vengeance cries of Wilhelm Smuts went unheard, but he threw the whip to the floor and ordered buckets of salt water brought in to revive her and to assault her bleeding stripes. Beatrix came back to consciousness shrieking as the salt sank into the many lacerations from her calves to her shoulders.

When she finally ceased to scream, Smuts ordered her lowered to the ground. Turning to the watching men of the tribe, he said, "I give this white woman to you, that you may be certain of my spirit. Take her as you would one captured from another tribe, but do not hurt her more than you can help. I have many other delights for her to enjoy when you are through."

Then, taking several of his concubines, Smuts left the cave for his own hut, close enough so that he could hear Beatrix's screams as each of the men of the tribe raped her.

It was several hours later before Smuts returned, and by that time, the men of the tribe had finished with Beatrix Van Loon. They had left her, tied, dirty, whimpering, and showing the signs of the gang-rape she had just endured while they drank and sang the praises of the Imam who had brought them such a tender morsel. The Suluk maidens turned up their noses at her condition and dragged her off to clean her up and fortify her for what she would experience at the hands of their Master.

When they returned, Beatrix was clean and revived, looking more like the girl with whom he had conducted the clandestine affair before being betrayed. As soon as the group entered the cave, Beatrix's eyes were drawn to what had been prepared while she was being washed and fed reviving herbs and elixirs by the Suluk women. A rectangular pit, about three feet wide by five feet long, had been dug in the soft earth at the mouth of the cave, and it had been filled with hot coals and embers from the large fire at the center of the village. A strange contrivance of two wood poles formed an "X" and had been sunk into the earth with the bottom ends of the "X" on either side of the fire-pit.

As she was dragged toward the pit, Beatrix instantly realized the general form of her peril and began to struggle against the maidens who held her arms. But the Suluk maidens were made of sterner stuff than a colonial daughter used to being waited on hand and foot, and they had no trouble dragging her to the side of the pit. "Noooooooooooooooooo!" shrieked the terrified Dutch girl. "Don't burn me! Please don't burn me!"

"Oh, we won't burn you to death, dear Beatrix," mocked Smuts, lounging on a rough seat with a half-naked Suluk maiden pressed up against his side and possessively running her hand up and down Smuts hairy leg. "Not tonight, at least, though you will get scorched a bit. But my ladies want to show how effective small twigs set alight and single coals can be at pulling screams from the mouth of a traitorous bitch like yourself!"

Beatrix tried to pull away as a pair of Suluk women held her left arm up against one upper arm of the "X" and wrapped several loops of rope around her wrist and the stout pole, binding it securely. Then they began to pull her right arm over to the other arm of the "X," and Beatrix was forced to step over the glowing fire-pit with her right foot to avoid being pulled into the coals. She danced about, screaming, as her feet had now been pulled to the edge of the pit, and the tender soles of her feet had come down on numerous small coals on the dirt at the edge of the pit. Quickly, her right arm was secured, and then the Suluk women bent and secured her ankles to the bottom of the "X."

Beatrix Van Loon was now securely bound to the sturdy poles, and, though she jerked madly at them as the heat began to attack her inner legs, they were immovable.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhh! Buuurrnnzz! It burns meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

"Of course, it burns you, slut!" snarled Smuts. "Why would we have tied you over the fire if we didn't want it to burn you? But look! Here come my ladies to show you that the fire of the pit is the lesser of the tortures you will not endure tonight!"

All of Smuts concubines except for the one who stroked his leg were gathering about Beatrix, and each of them held some form of fire to torment the soft, white flesh of this European invader. Some held twigs that were aflame, and Beatrix shrieked as the flame from one twig was held against the bulging underside of one soft breast. Some held single coals clamped tight between a pair of wooden sticks, and she shrieked louder as a coal was held against the soft swell of her belly, right under the indentation of her navel. And some held larger branches, which had been set well alight and then had the fire extinguished by waving the branch briskly. Now, the upper inches of the branch glowed with heat, and the Dutch girl screamed madly as a branch was held against one plump thigh.

The torture went on and on and on for the bound, helpless girl. She jerked and heaved against the ropes that bound her to the "X" as the heat from the coals assaulted her bare legs, reaching all the way up to the juncture of her legs. And there were always the Suluk women who pressed close about her with their small, fiery bits of fire. She threw herself about wildly, trying to avoid the searing sticks and coals that reached for her helpless flesh, but that only seemed to amuse the Suluk women. Fire touched her all about her body as the women took turns in keeping Beatrix screaming for their Master. Her heaving belly, her sweating, sexy armpits, her perfect buttocks, her arms, her legs, her feet. Her love nest at the juncture of her thighs and her soft, white breasts seemed to be a particular attraction, and Beatrix's screams seemed to escalate as these areas received far more attention than the rest of her delectable body, though no parts of her were forgotten.

The torture went on for hours, and it seemed to last a thousand years for the screaming captive, whose shrieks had become hoarser and hoarser.

"Give her water, and then stake her out where the sun can bathe her white skin while we take our rest," Smuts finally ordered, after Beatrix had fainted for the tenth time. "But don't let her burn too badly - she has much left to suffer before my vengeance is complete. When she's nice and red, bring her inside and tend to her hurts. I want her ready to return to the cave when it's dark.

The males of the tribe took care of that chore, spread-eagling the hated white woman on the ground in the dawning sunlight, her wrists and ankles bound to stakes driven deep into the ground. There she remained until the sun was most of the way to the zenith. The jungle insects attracted by the matted blood on her once white body came and feasted. The searing sun blinded her. She knew she must go mad with the torture. But she survived it until the women came to cut her loose from the stakes, give her water, and take her into the coolness of one of the huts to tend to her whip weals and her burns.

In the evening, Beatrix Van Loon returned to the cave to taste all of the delicacies which Smuts' maniacal brain could develop. And his concubines were eager to offer suggestions.

Flaming twigs were held to Beatrix's nipples until they blistered from the rim of one pink aureole to the other, and then the concubines used keen knives to gently trace around the blister and remove the greyish skin. The bound girl shrieked when one of the ladies drew a sharp fingernail over the raw flesh while another dribbled sea water on it.

The same keen knives traced around small patches of soft, white skin and peeled it away, leaving a square or a circle of red, weeping flesh. The exposed nerve endings of those areas were also susceptible to a long fingernail or the small flame on the tip of a twig.

She was hung by her thumbs in mid-air, and Smuts taught his concubines how to best use his beloved whip on the lush, white body of the screaming girl who thrashed about so energetically that she dislocated her thumbs. Before Beatrix died, all of them were almost as expert as the Master.

They replenished the coals in the fire-pit, but introduced a variant by removing the "X" from the ground and using stakes of wood to secure the bottom legs in place while the rope from the ceiling was tied to the upper arms. After Beatrix was lashed to the poles as she had been that first night, her horror commenced as the concubines began to lower the top of the "X" so the whole contrivance began to incline toward the fire-pit, with its screaming passenger shrieking and thrashing as her white body got closer and closer to the coals.

At Smuts' suggestion, the Suluk women rubbed pig grease all over the body of the bound Dutch girl and then lowered her to the point where her skin just barely started to sear before lifting her back to a vertical position. After about an hour of having her belly and breasts seared by the flames, the concubines turned her about on the "X" and lowered her again to roast the back side of her succulent body. They found the continuous pleas for mercy by the hapless Beatrix to be highly amusing, for mercy to an enemy was completely foreign to their tribal mentality, and they continued this excruciating torture until the sun arose.

After nearly three weeks of this horror, Beatrix was near death, and Smuts would have ordered his concubines to put the delirious girl out of her misery. But his concubines objected, so he allowed them to seat his one-time bed partner on a sharpened, two-foot high stake embedded in the ground in the center of the village. The Dutch girl was revived to shrieking reality as the rough stake went up her back passage until it rested deep in her belly and her thighs rested on the ground. But she still lived, so the concubines crossed her legs in front of her and secured her feet in place by driving wooden stakes through her ankles, in the notch between her Achilles tendon and her ankle bones. Then they built a fire in the open area between Beatrix's crossed legs, up against the blonde curls of her pubis, and settled down to watch her die.

It took her three hours, and the demented girl was insane from the agony well before she breathed her last. That night, a kumpit stole into the harbor at Tungku and dropped what remained of her once beautiful body on the pier.

In the time it took Beatrix Van Loon to die at the hands of Smuts and his concubines, his vengeance should have been complete. He should have been satisfied, but he was not. For Beatrix, the horror was finally over. But for the other daughters and wives of the Dutch colonists, it had just begun.

Now all European women became Beatrix Van Loon to the renegade seaman, with the willing assistance of his Suluk concubines. He reveled in their caresses, but they alone were not enough to cool the fever which raged within him. They became incidental to his need to plunder, his need to torture, to rape, mutilate and murder. Smuts became the most feared pirate in the Archipelago. Where he had been in command of one kumpit, he came to own an entire fleet.

His method of operation was simple. He would run in on the tide under cover of a dense fog. He would come ashore, strike, pillage, burn, kidnap the most beautiful woman available, and return to his Darvel Bay retreat. There the pulleys would creak, the binding ropes would grow taut, the fearful lash would sing its song of torment, the fires would sear soft, white flesh, and sharp knives would deftly bite into sensitive skin.

As the years went on, Smuts became more depraved. His concubines came to hold little interest for him, their function now being to assist him in the diabolical tortures he devised.

The Dutch East India Company put a price of gold on the renegade's head. British, French, and Spanish ships joined in crisscrossing the tropic waters in search of Smuts. But their navigators were no match for his wily seamanship.

And in his lair, the chains continued to rattle in outraged protest. The beautiful, naked, young woman hanging by her thumbs from the ceiling with her legs spread wide and bound to stakes driven into the ground, was the wife of one of the Dutch sea captains. She had been in Smuts' hands for a week, and she now looked down into Smuts' eyes as they drank in her agony. He was in the process of flaying her alive - he had so informed her, as she was being lifted into the air by his concubines—and the helpless young wife shifted her eyes to the glinting blade of the cruel paranga in his hand. It reached out for her, and she felt the blade's cold touch on the softness of her lush breast. Desperately she tried to swing her body away, hoping to somehow evade the pain to come.

But the paranga followed her motions. Its razor point traced a line around the base of her breast, and a circle of claret appeared on her alabaster flesh. The keen edge of the knife prised up a flap of skin, and the Suluk women began to use their long fingernails and their own knives to loosen her skin from the underlying tissues. The naked woman shrieked in horror and her screams echoed through the cave as she watched her own skin peeled from her heaving mound.

Smuts laughed his maniacal song as his concubines skillfully separated the skin of the young wife's dark brown aureole and nipple from her breast and continued working downward until he held up a circle until one of them held up a blood-stained circle of translucent, ivory skin.

The Dutch sea captain's wife, mother of his two children, had already lost half of her skin this night, peeled from her nubile body to the laughter of Smuts and the encouragement of his concubines. Now, a ladle of sea water was poured over her raw flesh to send the agony-suffused young woman into paroxysm of anguish. And, when her screams finally dwindled, Smuts drew another circle around her other breast.

As he had planned, Smuts and his women did not finish flaying their innocent young captive until dawn, and, since she still lived, his concubines sat her on the stake in the ground, as they had Beatrix Van Loon and several of their sisters in agony. There, with the fire between her crossed legs, this newest victim eventually found surcease from her tortures.

Perhaps Smuts might have lived out his bestial life and died an old and rheumy derelict had he not turned away from the native concubines because of his addiction to torture. But to refuse the advances of a Suluk woman was considered the worst offense a man can commit. Once spurned, the dusky beauties would never forget.

Smuts had believed that the Suluk's addiction to torture, which rivaled his own, was sufficient to retain their loyalty. True, they reveled just as much as he in the sights and sounds of a naked white woman thrashing and screaming in mortal agony. But, unbeknownst by him, their passion began to take a different path because of his neglect. As they watched the slow torture and dismemberment of the colonists' daughters and wives, their emotions reached a fever pitch. The time had come for Smuts to replace his victims in the waiting chains.

On the night of October 21, 1763, the concubines struck. Smuts awoke from a drunken stupor to find himself hanging, head-down, in the cave, and he clawed at the empty air below him. His howls of rage turned to screams of pain as the lash exploded across his naked back. The whip wielding concubines stood in a tight circle around him, taunting him with their obscene gestures, and demonstrating the skill which he had taught them. Long after every inch of skin had been flayed from his back, he dangled suspended, twitching and mewling in his death song. Thus died one of history's most depraved fiends.