NORTH BORNEO. 
67 
meet on the high seas, if he thought no one was looking on. The old Bajow caretaker is 
an amusing man. One day he told me that Captain Witti had always said, “ Never steal, 
whenever you want anything ask the Company; for if you steal you will go to prison.” Then 
the old boy looked up and said, “ Tuhan, I have no coat, give me some white cloth! ” But I 
told him if he wanted white cloth he must go and catch me some fish; for although we are 
close to the sea and the Bajows go out fishing nearly every day, it is very seldom that 
we can buy any. 
The few Bajows that live here work in the swamps, cutting up the roots of 
mangrove and nipa, which they pile into large heaps and set fire to, extracting salt 
from the residue after it has been boiled; this they mould into large flat cakes and 
barter at the weekly tamel. This salt is the only kind used in this district, the 
natives preferring it to the imported article. By barter it finds its way far inland beyond 
Kina Balu. 
On the 9th the 4 Kimanis ’ arrived with one of the Company’s officers, the chief object 
of this visit being on my account, and partly to see about the building of a court-house on 
the Tampassuk. This officer told me that he had just returned from an attack on a 
recalcitrant Dusun chief some miles inland, where the expedition had burnt several villages 
and killed eight natives. The Dusuns of this tribe had several times raided down to 
the coast and cut off many heads : their chief was noted throughout the district for his 
bravery; the Ghinambur Dusuns told me that he was invulnerable, so his and his tribe’s chas¬ 
tisement at the hands of the Company was necessary and merited. The chief was not 
killed, and in the following year tendered his submission and became good friends with his 
former enemies. This expedition had a good effect among the mountaineers, being 
conducted against their most noted chief, and showed them that it would in future be 
useless to cope with Europeans. 
Several coast Dusuns came one day, bringing brass-ware of various sorts, which was 
accepted by the Assistant-Resident as poll-tax. I must say it seemed rather hard on these 
people that they should be allowed to surrender up their goods and chattels to swell even 
indirectly the revenue of the Company. There can be no objection to the levying of this 
tax in the more civilized parts of the territory as payment for benefits conferred by the 
Company’s rule, but in districts that are not even annually visited it seems to me to be an 
unprincipled exaction. 
At midnight on the 12th we left for Pulo Gaya. The Assistant-Resident had been 
suffering daily from severe attacks of fever, which ultimately ended in his death in Labuan 
Hospital on the 19th of the following June. After waiting four days in hot uninteresting 
Gaya we left for Labuan in one of the coasting-steamers, and thus ended my second attempt 
to reach Kina Balu—the failure of this and the former expedition being due to no fault of 
my own, but to the disturbed state of the Company’s territory. 
After a few days in Labuan, which were occupied in finding a suitable prahu and in 
fitting her out for our next expedition, we started for the Lawas River. This stream 
debouches opposite Labuan, and is one of the last strongholds of the Murut head-hunters, 
being a sort of “ no man’s land ” between the territories of the Company and those of 
Sarawak. It is, however, really a (nominal) dependency of the now rapidly decaying 
