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The Malay Archipelago, the land of the orang-utan and the bird of paradise; a narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature — Volume 1 by Alfred Russel Wallace
page 49 of 370 (13%)
hardly anything has been written in the English language.

CHAPTER IV.

BORNEO--THE ORANGUTAN.

I ARRIVED at Sarawak on November 1st, 1854, and left it on
January 25th, 1856. In the interval I resided at many different
localities, and saw a good deal of the Dyak tribes as well as of
the Bornean Malays. I was hospitably entertained by Sir James
Brooke, and lived in his house whenever I was at the town of
Sarawak in the intervals of my journeys. But so many books have
been written about this part of Borneo since I was there, that I
shall avoid going into details of what I saw and heard and
thought of Sarawak and its ruler, confining myself chiefly to my
experiences as a naturalist in search of shells, insects, birds
and the Orangutan, and to an account of a journey through a part
of the interior seldom visited by Europeans.

The first four months of my visit were spent in various parts of
the Sarawak River, from Santubong at its mouth up to the
picturesque limestone mountains and Chinese gold-fields of Bow
and Bede. This part of the country has been so frequently
described that I shall pass it over, especially as, owing to its
being the height of the wet season, my collections were
comparatively poor and insignificant.

In March 1865 I determined to go to the coalworks which were
being opened near the Simunjon River, a small branch of the
Sadong, a river east of Sarawak and between it and the Batang-
DigitalOcean Referral Badge