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Other miscellaneous products of the East were in great demand for various purposes: camphor and cubebs from Sumatra and Borneo; musk from China; cane-sugar from Arabia and Persia; indigo, sandal-wood, and aloes-wood from India; and alum from Asia Minor.
Having driven away the two principal instigators and abettors of all the piracies committed along the coast of Borneo and elsewhere, and destroyed their strongholds, it now remained for us to punish the pirates themselves as far as lay in our power.
The Company's officials then proceeded to the island of Labuan, now a British Crown Colony, and established a factory, which was maintained but for a short time, at Brunai itself. In 1803 Balambangan was again occupied, but as no commercial advantage accrued, it was abandoned in the following year, and so ended all attempts on the part of the East India Company to establish a Colony in Borneo.
The obliging kapala, in order to do his bit to induce the people to dance, offered to present one pig if I would give rice and salt. The dancing, which was performed around a blanga on a mat spread on the ground, was similar in character to what may be seen elsewhere in Borneo. Four men and four women performed one dance.
To return for a moment to the matter of fault-finding, it would be ridiculous to maintain that no mistakes have been made in launching British North Borneo on its career as a British Dependency, but then I do not suppose that any single Colony of the Crown has been, or will be inaugurated without similar mistakes occurring, such, for instance, as the withholding money where money was needed and could have been profitably expended, and a too lavish expenditure in other and less important directions.
That consummation is not immeasurably distant. Even now, from considerations connected with China, with New Zealand, Borneo, Australia, we may say, that already the fields are white for harvest.
The British Government did not, however, fall in with this view, and in the early part of 1879, being then Acting Consul-General in Borneo, I was despatched to Sulu and to different points in North Borneo to publish, on behalf of our Government, a protest against the claim of Spain to any portion of the country.
Especially in regard to their presence at the lake of Sembulo, at the kampong of the same name, the consensus of opinion is strong. That place is the classical ground for the rumour of tailed men, and I thought it worth while, before leaving Borneo, to make another attempt later to reach Sembulo and investigate the reasons for the prevalent belief in tailed humans in that locality.
"I thought all this was over and done for," said Shaw, busying himself with the cover, "since Sir Thomas Cochrane swept along the Borneo coast with his squadron some years ago. He did a rare lot of fighting didn't he? We heard about it from the chaps of the sloop Diana that was refitting in Calcutta when I was there in the Warwick Castle. They took some king's town up a river hereabouts.
"Taking the parallel of Rhodes," says Donaldson, "he calculated the longitudes from the Fortunate Islands to Cattigara or the west coast of Borneo at 180 degrees, conceiving this to be one-half the circumference of the globe.
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