3o6 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap. 



culture, especially the cultivation of pepper and sago 

 and rubber, and the growing capacity and facilities 

 for the purchase of imported goods by the people 

 even of the remotest parts, enable the government 

 to raise a considerable revenue by indirect taxation 

 in the form of customs duties. 



The minerals, worked in the main by the Borneo 

 Company,^ principally gold, antimony, and mercury, 

 have also been an important source of revenue. 

 The recent discovery of supplies of petroleum 

 promises to result in an important addition to the 

 wealth of the country.^ But these various commercial 

 and industrial developments affect hardly at all 

 the lives of the pagan tribes. So far as they are 

 concerned, the work of the government may be 

 summed up by saying that it has suppressed the 

 chronic warfare which kept them all in a state of 

 armed hostility and uneasy distrust of one another ; 

 that it has suppressed head-hunting and crimes of 



^ This Company has enjoyed, for more than half a century, the right to work 

 minerals in Sarawak, paying royalty to the government ; it has been and is 

 the principal channel through which the natural products of the country have 

 been brought into the world's markets. It has always worked in harmony 

 with the government, and to the judicious conduct of its affairs the present 

 material prosperity of the country is largely due. An important development 

 of the Company's activity in recent years has been the planting of large areas 

 with the Para rubber-plant. 



2 The beneficent and active interest taken by the Rajah in the prosperity of 

 the natives, and the paternal character of his government, are well illustrated 

 by a recently issued order. It is within the memory of all that in the years 

 1910 and 191 1 occurred the great rubber "boom " in the markets of Europe. 

 With the hope of vast profits, speculators hurried to every region where rubber 

 was known to grow. The seeds of the Para rubber-plant had been introduced 

 to Sarawak many years before ; the suitability of the soil and climate for the 

 production of the best quaUty of Para rubber had been abundantly demonstrated ; 

 and the natives had been encouraged to plant for their own profit the seeds and 

 young plants which were distributed to them from the government stations, 

 so that when the boom came many of them possessed small plantations of 

 the trees that " lay the golden eggs." The speculators were everywhere 

 seeking to buy these plantations at prices which, though they seemed handsome 

 to the natives, were low enough to provide a very large profit to the buyers. 

 The Rajah caused warnings to be published and brought to the notice of the 

 natives, and informed them that they were at full liberty to appropriate jungle- 

 land for the formation of rubber plantations, and that their tenure of such lands 

 would be secured to them so long as they cared for the trees and worked the 

 rubber properly. He further ordered that no sales of rubber plantations should 

 be effected without the knowledge and approval of the government. 



