214 COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL 
from the country now called British North Borneo, two 
separate chains of islands run to form connecting-links 
with the main group of the Philippines, the most eastern 
being known as the Sulu Archipelago. 
The coast of Borneo is very little indented with bays, 
and nowhere by deep inlets. The few bays it possesses 
are towards the north-eastern extremity, where the coast 
is somewhat higher and more abrupt. As a rule the 
island is bordered throughout by a considerable width of 
swamp and lowland, except at a few points where there 
are high promontories or a small extent of hilly country. 
Various ranges of mountains, which may be roughly de¬ 
scribed as radiating from a common centre, divide the 
island into sections, the intervening land being low, flat, 
and marshy, and it has been pointed out that a subsidence 
of 500 feet would allow the sea to fill the great valleys 
of the Kapuas, Barito, and Koti rivers almost to the 
centre of the island, greatly reducing it in size, and causing 
it to assume a star-shaped outline much resembling that 
of the neighbouring island of Celebes. 
Politically, Borneo is divided into four separate terri¬ 
tories—British North Borneo or Saba occupying the 
northern portion, and Sarawak the greater part of the 
north-western. Between them lies the small independent 
state of the Sultan of Brunei. The rest of the island be¬ 
longs to the Dutch, and is considerably larger than the 
aggregate of the other three territories. The island is, on 
the whole, very sparsely inhabited. It is impossible to 
obtain any exact data as to its population, but it is esti¬ 
mated as under 2,000,000. 
2. History. 
So far as is known, the Italian traveller Varthema 
