BRITISH BORNEO. 19 
They appear to have been so pre-occupied with the affairs of 
their important Colony of Java and its dependencies, and the 
prolonged, exhausting and ruinously expensive war with the 
Achinese in Sumatra, that beyond posting Government Resi- 
dents at some of the more important points, they have hitherto 
done nothing to attract European capital and enterprise to 
Borneo, but it would now seem that the example set by the 
British Company in the North is having its effect, and I hear 
of a Tobacco Planting Company and of a Coal Company 
being formed to operate on the East Coast of Dutch Borneo. 
The Spanish claim to North Borneo was a purely theore- 
tical one, and not only their claim, but that also of the 
Sulus through whom they claimed, was vigorously disputed 
by the Sultans of Brunai, who denied that, as asserted by the 
Sulus, any portion of Borneo had been ceded to them by a 
former Sultan of Brunai, who had by their help defeated rival 
claimants and been seated on the throne. The Sulus, on 
their side, would own no allegiance to the Spaniards, with 
whom they had been more or less at war for almost three 
centuries, and their actual hold over any portion of North Bor- 
neo was of the slightest. Matters were in this position when 
Mr. ALFRED DENT, now Sir ALFRED DENT, K.C.M.G., fitted 
out an expedition, and in I)ecember, 1877, and January, 1878, 
obtained from the Sultans of Brunai and Sulu, in the manner 
hereafter detailed, the sovereign control over the North por- 
tion of Borneo, from the Kimanis river on the West to the 
Siboku river on the East, concessions which were confirmed 
by Her Majesty’s Royal Charter in November, 1881. 
Ihave now traced, in brief outline, the political history 
of Borneo from the time when the country first became gene- 
rally known to Europeans—in 1518—down to its final division 
between Great Britain and the Netherlands in 188r. 
If we can accept the statements of the earlier writers, Bor- 
neo was in its most prosperous stage before it became sub- 
jected to European influences, after which, owing to the mis- 
taken and monopolising policy of the Commercial Companies 
then holding sway in the East, the trade and agriculture of 
this and other islands of the Malay Archipelago received a 
