BRITISH BORNEO. 113 
These are some, and not inconsiderable ones, of the achieve- 
ments of the British North Borneo Company, which, in its 
humble way, affords another example of the fact that the 
“expansion of Britain” has been in the main due not to the 
exertions of its Government so much as tojthe energy and 
enterprise of individual citizens, and Sir ALFRED DENT, the 
the founder, and Sir RUTHERFORD ALCOCK, the guide and 
supporter of the British North Borneo Company, cannot but 
feel a proud satisfaction in the reflection that their energy 
and patient perseverance have resulted in conferring upon so 
considerable a portion of the island of Borneo the benefits 
above enumerated and in adding another Colony to the long 
list of the Dependencies of the British Crown. 
In the matter of geographical exploration, too, the Com- 
pany and its officers have not been idle, as the map brought 
out by the Company sufficiently shews, for previous maps of 
North Borneo will be found very barren and uninteresting, 
the interior being almost a complete blank, though possessing 
one natural feature which is conspicuous by its absence in 
the more recent and trustworthy one, and that is the large 
lake of Kinabalu, which the explorations of the late Mr. F. K. 
Witt! have proved to be non-existent. Two explanations 
are given of the origin of the myth of the Kinabalu Lake—one 
is that in the district, where it was supposed to exist, exten- 
sive floods do take place in very wet seasons, giving it the 
appearance of a lake, and, | believe there are many similar 
instances in Dutch Borneo, where a tract of country liable to 
be heavily flooded has been dignified with the name of Danau, 
which is Malay for Zake, so that the mistake of the European 
cartographers is a pardonable one. The other explanation 
is that the district in question is known to the aboriginal in- 
habitants as Danau, a word which, in their language, has no 
particular meaning, but which, as above stated, signifies, in 
Malay, a lake. ‘The first European visitors would have gained 
all their information from the Malay coast tribes, and the rea- 
son for their mistaken supposition of the existence of a large 
lake can be readily understood. The two principal pioneer 
explorers of British North Borneo were WiTTI and FRANK 
HATTON, both of whom met with violent deaths. WittTi’s 
