64 BRITISH BORNEO. 
the East coast, being rarely met with on the West coast, I 
have seen a private letter from an officer in command ofa 
British man-of-war who had some samples of it on board which 
came in very usefully when certain bearings of the screw shaft 
were giving out ona long voyage, and were found to last 
three times as long as lignum vite. 
In process of time, as the country is opened up by roads 
and railways, doubtless many other valuable kinds of timber 
trees will be brought to light in the interior. 
A notice of Borneo Forests would be incomplete without 
a reference to the mangroves, which are such a prominent 
feature of the country as one approaches it by sea, lining 
much of the coast and forming, for mile after mile, the actual 
banks of most of the rivers. Its thick, dark-green, never 
changing foliage helps to give the new comer that general 
impression of dull monotony in tropical scenery, which, per- — 
haps, no one, except the professed botanist, whose trained 
and practical eye never misses the smallest detail, ever quite 
shakes off. 
The wood of the mangrove forms most excellent firewood, 
and is often used by small steamers as an economical fuel in 
lieu of coal, and is exported to China in the timber ships. 
The bark is also aseparate article of export, being used as a dye 
and for tanning, and is said to contain nearly 42% of tannin. 
The value of the general exports from the territory is increas- 
ing every year, having been $145,444 in 1881 and $525,879 in 
1888. With the exception of tobacco and pepper, the list is 
almost entirely made up of the natural raw products of the land 
and sea—such as bees-wax, camphor, damar, gutta percha, the 
sap of a large forest tree destroyed i in the process of collection 
of gutta, India rubber, from a creeper likewise destroyed by 
the collectors, rattans, well known to every school boy, sago, 
timber, edible birds’-nests, seed-pearls, Mother-o’-pearl shells 
in small quantities, dried fish and dried sharks’-fins, trepang 
(sea-slug or béche de mer), aga, or edible sea-weed, tobacco 
(both Native and European grown), pepper, and occasionally 
elephants’ tusks—a list which shews the country to be a rich 
store house of natural productions, and one which will be 
added to, as the land is brought under cultivation with coffee, 
