reoccupied for a few months in 1803, and then finally forsaken.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Malays of Bruni,
Sulu, and Mindanao, with native followers and allies, inspired
we may suppose by the example of their European visitors, took to
piracy -- not that they had not engaged in such business before, but
that they now prosecuted an old trade with renewed vigour. English
traders still tried to pay occasional visits, but after the loss
of the MAY in 1788, the SUSANNA in 1803, and the COMMERCE in 1806,
with the murder of the crews, the Admiralty warned merchants that it
was CERTAIN DESTRUCTION to go up river to Bruni. For forty years this
intimation was left on British charts, and British seamen followed the
humiliating counsel. Not until the early forties was peace restored,
after an event of the most romantic and improbable kind, the accession
of an English gentleman to the throne of Sarawak.

Of this incident, so fateful for the future of the western side
of Borneo, it must suffice to say here that James Brooke, a young
Englishman, having resigned his commission in the army of the British
East India Company, invested his fortune in a yacht of 140 tons,
with which he set sail in 1838 for the eastern Archipelago. His
bold but vague design was to establish peace, prosperity, and just
government in some part of that troubled area, whose beauties he had
admired and whose misfortunes he had deplored on the occasion of an
earlier voyage to the China seas. When at Singapore, he heard that
the Malays of Sarawak, a district forming the southern extremity
of the Sultanate of Bruni, had rebelled against the Bruni nobles,
and had in vain appealed to the Dutch Governor-general at Batavia for
deliverance from their oppressors. Under the nominal authority of the
Sultan, these Bruni nobles, many of whom were of Arab descent, had