The coasts of Borneo have long been occupied by a Mohammedan population
of Malay culture; this population is partly descended from Malay
and Arab immigrants, and partly from indigenous individuals and
communities that have adopted the Malay faith and culture in recent
centuries. When Europeans first visited the island, this population,
dwelling for the most part, as it still does, in villages and small
towns upon the coast and in or near the mouths of the rivers, owed
allegiance to several Malay sultans and a number of subordinate rulers,
the local rajahs and pangirans. The principal sultans had as their
capitals, from which they took their titles, Bruni on the north-west,
Sambas in the west, Pontianak at the mouth of the Kapuas river,
Banjermasin in the south at the mouth of the river of the same name,
Pasir at the south-east corner, Kotei and Balungan on the east at the
mouths of the rivers of those names; while the Sultan of Jolo, the
capital of the Sulu islands, which lie off the north coast, claimed
sovereignty over the northern end of Borneo. But these Malay sultans
were not the first representatives in the island of culture and of
civilised or semi-civilised rule; for history preserves some faint
records of still earlier times, of which some slight confirmation is
afforded by surviving traces of the culture then introduced.

In spite of all the work done on the history of the East Indies,
most of what occurred before and much that followed the arrival of
Europeans remains obscure. There are several Asiatic nations whose
records might be expected to contain valuable information, but all
are disappointing. The Klings, still the principal Hindu traders
in the Far East, visited the Malay Archipelago in the first or at
any rate the second century after Christ,[4] and introduced their
writing[5] and chronology. But their early histories are meagre