154 MR. BROOKE'S NATIVE ORATORY. [1844. 



In the morning Seriff Jaffer was summoned to a con- 

 ference. " To this," says Keppel, " he was obliged to 

 attend, as the natives had learnt that we were not to be 

 trifled with, and would have forced him on board rather 

 than have permitted their village to have been destroyed. 

 With Pangeran Budrudeen, as the representative of the 

 Sultan, Seriff Jaffer was obliged to resign all pretensions 

 to the government of the province, over which he had 

 hitherto held sway; since it was considered from his being 

 a Malay, and from his relationship to Seriff Sahib, that 

 he was an unsafe person to be entrusted with so impor- 

 tant a post. A second conference took place on shore, 

 at which the chiefs of all the surrounding country at- 

 tended, when the above sentence was confirmed. On 

 this occasion I had the satisfaction of witnessing what 

 must have been from the effect I observed it to have 

 produced on the hearers a splendid piece of oratory 

 delivered by Mr. Brooke, in the native tongue, with a 

 degree of fluency I had never witnessed before, even in 

 a Malay. The purport of it, as I understood, was, to 

 point out emphatically the horrors of piracy on the one 

 hand, which it was the determination of the British 

 Government to suppress, and on the other hand, the bles- 

 sings arising from peace and trade, which it was equally 

 our wish to cultivate ; and it concluded by fully explain- 

 ing, that the measures lately adopted by us against piracy, 

 were for the protection of all the peaceful communities 

 along the coast; so great was the attention bestowed 

 during the delivery of this speech, that the dropping of a 

 pin might be heard. From these people many assurances 

 were received of their anxiety and willingness to co-ope- 



