tories, in which no machinery is used. All the traders are
only agents of Singapore firms and are in a small way of business. There
is no European firm, or shop, in the island. Coal of good quality for
raising steam is plentiful, especially at the North end of the island,
and very sanguine expectations of the successful working of these coal
measures were for a long time entertained, but have hitherto not been
realised. The Eastern Archipelago Company, with an ambitious title but
too modest an exchequer, first attempted to open the mines soon after
the British occupation, but failed, and has been succeeded by three
others, all I believe Scotch, the last one stopping operations in 1878.
The cause of failure seems to have been the same in each
case--insufficient capital, local mismanagement, difficulty in obtaining
labour. In a country with a rainfall of perhaps over 120 inches a year,
water was naturally another difficulty in the deep workings, but this
might have been very easily overcome had the Companies been in a
position to purchase sufficiently powerful pumping engines.

There were three workable seams of coal, one of them, I think, twelve
feet in thickness; the quality of the coal, though inferior to Welsh,
was superior to Australian, and well reported on by the engineers of
many steamers which had tried it; the vessels of the China squadron and
the numerous steamers engaged in the Far East offered a ready market for
the coal.

In their effort to make a "show," successive managers have pretty nearly
exhausted the surface workings and so honeycombed the seams with their
different systems of developing their resources, that it would be,
perhaps, a difficult and expensive undertaking for even a substantial
company to make much of them now.[14]

It is needless to add that the failure to develop this one internal
resource of Labuan was a great blow to the Colony, and on the cessation
of the last company's operations the revenue immediately declined, a
large number of workmen--European, Chinese and Natives--being thrown out
of employment, necessitating the closing of the shops in which they
spent their wages. It was found that both Chinese and the Natives of
Borneo proved capital miners under European supervision. Notwithstanding
the ill-luck that has attended it, the little Colony has not been a
burden on the British tax-payer since the year 1860, but has managed to
collect a revenue--chiefly from opium, tobacco, spi