i8 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap. 



on stone, and in various gold ornaments of Hindu 

 character. 



The faith of Islam and the arrival of Europeans 

 have profoundly affected the manners and politics 

 of the East Indies, and now it is difficult to picture 

 the state of affairs when King Hiawang revisited 

 China to pay homage to the Emperor. In 152 1, 

 within a hundred years of that event, Pigafetta, 

 the chronicler of Magellan's great exploit, was 

 calling on the '* Moorish " king of Bruni, in the 

 course of the first voyage round the world. The 

 change had come. Of the two new influences, so 

 potent for good and evil, Mohammedanism made 

 its appearance first. The struggle for religious 

 supremacy ended in the complete victory of the 

 Prophet's followers in 1478, when Majapahit was 

 utterly destroyed, thirty years before the capture 

 of Malacca by the Portuguese. 



How early the Arab doctrines were taught in 

 Bruni it is impossible to state with any precision. 

 Local tradition ascribes their introduction to the 

 renowned Alak ber Tata, afterwards known as 

 Sultan Mohammed. Like most of his subjects 

 this warrior was a Bisaya, and in early life he was 

 not a Mohammedan, not indeed a civilised potentate 

 at all, to judge by conventional standards ; for the 

 chief mark of his royal dignity was an immense 

 chawat, or loin-cloth, carried as he walked by eighty 

 men, forty in front and forty behind. He is the 

 earliest monarch of whom the present Brunis have 

 any knowledge, a fact to be accounted for partly 

 by the brilliance of his exploits, partly by the 

 introduction about that time of Arabic writing. 

 After much fighting he subdued the people of 

 Igan,^ Kalaka, Seribas, Sadong, Semarahan, and 

 Sarawak,^ and compelled them to pay tribute. He 



^ Whose descendants are the Malanaus. 



^ Cf. Low, Journal Straits Bratich Royal Asiatic Society^ voh v. p. I, 

 from whose article we have obtained much interesting material. 



