366 GENERAL CONSIDERATION’S OX TOE ISLAND OF BORNEO, 
use, ami cannot even have any idea of a specific name appropriated 
to the whole extent of a country, of which the sea bord is even most 
often unknown to the savage and wandering tribes who are separat¬ 
ed by great distances from each other, and who are dispersed in hordes 
of small numbers over the vast extent of one of the largest islands 
in the world. These different tribes are designated amongst them¬ 
selves by the names which they give to the rivers on the borders of 
which they nave established their abodes; it is thus that all the 
Oayalis of the great river Duson (the Banjer of our maps) call them¬ 
selves Orang Duson (men of Duson) and those of the river Sam pit, 
Orcmg Sampit; the manuscript memoirs of Major G. Muller and 
of Colonel de Henrici make mention of a great number of tribes 
designated by the names of rivers which have their mouths on the 
western coast; in the north of Borneo Mr. Brooke makes mention 
of Dayak tribes under the names of Sarebus, Sakarran, Lundu, 
Sibnuw &c. established on the rivers which bear those names. 
It appears that all those tribes which at present inhabit the bor¬ 
ders of the numerous rivers which bear their abundant waters in all 
directions to the coast, as well as those which are dise ruminated through 
the elevated part of the interior from whence those immense bodies 
of water flow down, draw their origin from one common stock, and 
that this aboriginal people were spread over all parts of the island 
before the epoch of the occupation of the coasts by the Malays. 
These nomadic conquerors have, without doubt, given the name of 
Dayak to these aboriginal people, of manners soft and peaceable, 
whom they have easily succeeded in driving from the coasts which they 
have occupied at their expence, and over whom they have, since that 
time, exercised an arbitrary and tyrannical domination. After hav¬ 
ing abandoned all parts of the coast of their island to these perfidious 
adventurers, now their masters and their oppressors, the aborigines 
were constrained to seek a refuge in the least accessible parts of the 
interior; there they have since led a miserable life, full of privations, 
even depending on the caprice of the Mahomedan chiefs of the coast 
for all that appertains to their first necessities, such as salt, clothes 
and household utensils, of which the Malays can entirely deprive 
