The pagan tribes of Borneo - Get a Free Blog Here

24 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap.
year, however, Balambangan was surprised and
captured by the Sulus. It was reoccupied for a
few months in 1803, ^^^ then finally forsaken.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the
Malays of Bruni, Sulu, and Mindanao, with native
followers and allies, inspired we may suppose by
the example of their European visitors, took to
piracy—not that they had not engaged in such
business before, but that they now prosecuted an
old trade with renewed vigour. English traders
still tried to pay occasional visits, but after the loss
of the May in 1788, the Susanna in 1803, and the
Commerce in 1806, with the murder of the crews,
the Admiralty warned merchants that it was certain
destruction to go up river to Bruni. For forty
years this intimation was left on British charts, and
British seamen followed the humiliating counsel.
Not until the early forties was peace restored, after
an event of the most romantic and improbable kind,
the accession of an English gentleman to the throne
of Sarawak.
Of this incident, so fateful for the future of the
western side of Borneo, it must suffice to say here
that James Brooke, a young Englishman, having
resigned his commission in the army of the British
East India Company, invested his fortune in a
yacht of 140 tons, with which he set sail in 1838
for the eastern Archipelago. His bold but vague
design was to establish peace, prosperity, and just
government in some part of that troubled area,
whose beauties he had admired and whose misfortunes
he had deplored on the occasion of an
earlier voyage to the China seas. When at
Singapore, he heard that the Malays of Sarawak,
a district forming the southern extremity of the
Sultanate of Bruni, had rebelled against the Bruni
nobles, and had in vain appealed to the Dutch
Governor-general at Batavia for deliverance from