02 BRITISH BORNEO. 
tion of the accounts and the tribe who was found to be on the 
debtor side paying, not human heads, but compensation in 
goods at a fixed rate per head due. Another custom which 
the Company found it impossible to recognize was that of 
summungap, which was, in reality, nothing but a form of 
human sacrifice, the victim being a slave bought for the pur- 
pose, and the object being to send a message to a deceased 
relative. With this object in view, the slave used to be bound 
and wrapped in cloth, when the relatives would dance round 
him and each thrust a spear a short way into his body, repeat- 
ing, as he did so, the message which he wished conveyed. 
This operation was performed till the slave succumbed, 
The Muhammadan practice of cutting off the hair of a woman 
convicted of adultery, or of men flogging her with a rattan, 
and that of cutting off the head of a thief, have also not re- 
ceived the recognition of the Company’s Government. 
It has been shewn that the native population of North 
Borneo is very small, only about five to the square mile, and 
as the country is fertile and well-watered and possesses, for 
the tropics, a healthy climate, there must be some exceptional 
cause for the scantiness of the population. This is to be 
found chiefly in the absence, already referred to, of any strong 
central Government in fermer days, and to the consequent 
presence of all forms of lawlessness, piracy, slave-trading, 
kidnapping and head-hunting. 
In more recent years, too, cholera and small-pox have 
made frightful ravages amongst the natives, almost annihilat- 
ing some of the tribes, for the people knew of no remedies 
and, on the approach of the scourge, deserted their homes and 
their sick and fled to the jungle, where exposure and priva- 
tion rendered them more than ever liable to the disease. 
Since the Company’s advent, efforts are being successfully 
made to introduce vaccination, in which most of the people 
now have confidence. 
This fact of a scanty native population has, in some ways, 
rendered the introduction of the Company’s Government a 
less arduous undertaking than it might otherwise have proved, 
and has been a fortunate circumstance for the shareholders, 
who have the more unowned and virgin land to dispose of. 
