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Updated: September 16, 2025
The insolence of the Sooloo men has at various times drawn down on them the wrath of the Spanish authorities, who, in 1848, and also shortly after I left Manilla, towards the end of 1850, were making arrangements for punishing them, as they afterwards did, with some severity, about the beginning of this year.
Wyndham, of the Velocipede schooner, who, being a perfect master of the tongue, had acted as an interpreter on this occasion. Great Sooloo is about fifty miles in length, and twenty-five in breadth, being the largest of a group of islands known as the Sooloo Archipelago.
Besides the trade with Sooloo, a ship is absent nearly every year to Ternate, and other places of the Moluccas, where they usually manage to get their goods ashore, without paying the heavy duties which the Dutch have imposed upon them.
Had she been captured by pirates, I should have looked for my friends in their haunts in the Sooloo Archipelago, and on the coast of Borneo; now I should have to search from Java, among all the islands to the east, up to Luzon, in the north.
"As a commercial depôt, Labuan would have considerable advantages by position; the native trade of the vicinity would of course resort to it, and so would that of the north coast of Borneo, of the Sooloo Islands, and of a considerable portion of the Spice Islands.
It was useless to show them the thrust and parry movements, or to prove the well-tempered steel by bending the blade till the hilt and point were almost meeting. A sharp iron hoop in their ideas was preferable to all the best English workmanship. The Sooloo knives are larger than they usually are in the Archipelago, and of superior manufacture.
All that they knew about it was that it must be one of the Sooloo Archipelago, and that most of those islands were inhabited by a savage race addicted to piracy. These might, however, treat them kindly, though it was more possible that they would keep them in slavery. As they were running before the breeze the wind assisted but little to temper the rays of the sun which beat down on their heads.
Having completed wood and water, we sailed for Sooloo, where we arrived on the Sunday. We were surprised to find a French squadron anchored in the bay. It consisted of the Cleopatra, 50-gun frigate, Rear Admiral Cecile, with an ambassador on board, the Victorieuse, 22, and the Alchimede war steamer.
The vessels engaged in the trade, being brigs or schooners, commonly start from Manilla in March or April for Antique, Yloylo, or other places, where they can complete a Sooloo cargo, after doing which they steer for Zamboanga, to report their cargoes and provide themselves with passports at the custom-house there, should they not have done so at Manilla.
The French, aware of this, and wishing to establish a colony in the East, offered the sultan 20,000 dollars if he would make over the island to them; but this was not acceded to, the chiefs being divided on the question. The people of Sooloo have a great dislike to all Europeans, but particularly to the French.
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