18 BRITISH BORNEO. 
which he in time purged of its two plague spots —head-hunt- 
ing on shore, and piracy and slave-dealing afloat—and left to 
his heir, w ho has worthily taken up and carried on his 
work, the unique inheritance of a settled Eastern Kingdom, 
inhabited by the once dreaded head-hunting Dyaks and 
piratical Mahomedan Malays, the government ‘of whom now 
rests absolutely in the hands of its one paternally despotic 
white ruler, or Raja. Sarawak, although not yet formally 
proclaimed a British Protectorate,” * may “thus be deemed the 
first permanent British possession in Borneo. Sir JAMES 
BROOKE was also employed by the British Government to 
conclude, on 27th May, 1847, a treaty with the Sultan of 
Brunai, whereby the cession to us of the small island of Labuan, 
which had been occupied asa British Colony in December, 
1846, was confirmed, and the Sultan engaged that no territo- 
rial cession of any portion of his country should ever be made 
to any Foreign Power without the sanction of Great Britain. 
These proceedings naturally excited some little feeling of 
jealousy in our Colonial neighbours—the Dutch—who ineffec- 
tually protested against a British subject becoming the ruler 
of Sarawak, as a breach of the tenor of the treaty of London 
of 1824, and they took steps to define more accurately the 
boundaries of their own dependencies in such other parts of 
Borneo as were still open to them. What we now call 
British North Borneo, they appear at that time to have regard- 
ed as outside the share of their influence, recognising the 
Spanish claim to it through their suzerainty, already alluded 
to, over the Sulu Sultan. 
With this exception, and that of the Brunai Sultanate, 
already secured by the British Treaty, and Sarawak; now 
the property of the BROOKE family, the Dutch have acquired 
a nominal suzerainty over the whole of the rest of Borneo, by 
treaties with the independent rulers—an area comprising 
about two-thirds of the whole island, probably not a tenth part 
of which is under their actual direct administrative control. 
* A British Protectorate was established over North Borneo on the 12th 
May, over Sarawak on the 14th June, and over Brunai on the 17th September, 
1888. Vide Appendix. 
