24 PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO chap. 



year, however, Balambangan was surprised and 

 captured by the Sulus. It was reoccupied for a 

 few months in 1803, ^^^ then finally forsaken. 



Towards the end of the eighteenth century the 

 Malays of Bruni, Sulu, and Mindanao, with native 

 followers and allies, inspired we may suppose by 

 the example of their European visitors, took to 

 piracy — not that they had not engaged in such 

 business before, but that they now prosecuted an 

 old trade with renewed vigour. English traders 

 still tried to pay occasional visits, but after the loss 

 of the May in 1788, the Susanna in 1803, and the 

 Commerce in 1806, with the murder of the crews, 

 the Admiralty warned merchants that it was certain 

 destruction to go up river to Bruni. For forty 

 years this intimation was left on British charts, and 

 British seamen followed the humiliating counsel. 

 Not until the early forties was peace restored, after 

 an event of the most romantic and improbable kind, 

 the accession of an English gentleman to the throne 

 of Sarawak. 



Of this incident, so fateful for the future of the 

 western side of Borneo, it must suffice to say here 

 that James Brooke, a young Englishman, having 

 resigned his commission in the army of the British 

 East India Company, invested his fortune in a 

 yacht of 140 tons, with which he set sail in 1838 

 for the eastern Archipelago. His bold but vague 

 design was to establish peace, prosperity, and just 

 government in some part of that troubled area, 

 whose beauties he had admired and whose mis- 

 fortunes he had deplored on the occasion of an 

 earlier voyage to the China seas. When at 

 Singapore, he heard that the Malays of Sarawak, 

 a district forming the southern extremity of the 

 Sultanate of Bruni, had rebelled against the Bruni 

 nobles, and had in vain appealed to the Dutch 

 Governor-general at Batavia for deliverance from 



