24 BRITISH BORNEO. 
the building of a house or of a vessel. Chop dibas, literally 
a free seal; this was a permission granted by the Sultan to 
some noble and needy favourite to levy a contribution for 
his own use anywhere he thought he could most easily en- 
force it. The method of inventing imaginary crimes and 
delinquencies and punishing them with heavy fines has been 
already mentioned. Then there are import and export duties 
as to which no reasonable complaint can be made, but a real 
grievance and hindrance to legitimate trade was the effort 
which the Malays, supported by their rulers, made to prevent 
the interior tribes trading direct with the Chinese and other 
foreign traders—acting themselves as middlemen, so that but a 
very small share of profit fell tothe aborigines. The lords, too, 
had the right of appointing as many orang kayas, or head- 
men, from among the natives as they chose, a present being 
expected on their elevation to that position and another on 
their death. In many rivers there was also an annual poll- 
tax, but this does not appear to have been collected in the 
Limbang.. Sir SPENCER ST.JOHN, writing in 1856, gives, in 
his “Life in the Forests of the Far East,’’ several instances of 
the grievous oppression practiced on the Limbang people. 
Amongst others he mentions how a native, in a fit of despera- 
tion, had killed an extortionate tax-gatherer. Instead of hav- 
ing the offender arrested and punished, the Sultan ordered his 
village to be attacked, when fifty persons were killed and an 
equal number of women and children were made prison- 
ers and kept as slaves by His Highness. The immediate 
cause of the rebellion to which I am now referring was 
the extraordinary extortion practised by one of the principal 
Ministers of State. The revenues of his office were prin- 
cipally derived from the Limbang River and, as the Sultan was 
very old, he determined to make the best possible use of the 
short time remaining to him to extract all he could from his 
wretched feudatories. To aid him in his design, he obtained, 
with the assistance of the British North Borneo Company, a 
steam launch, and the Limbang people subsequently pointed 
out to me this launch and complained bitterly that it was with 
the money forced out of them that this means of oppres- 
sing them had been purchased. He then employed the 
