em fair game for
plunder and oppression whenever opportunity occurred, and using all
their endeavours to prevent Chinese and other foreign traders from
reaching them, acting themselves as middlemen, buying (bartering) at
very cheap rates from the aborigines and selling for the best price they
could obtain to the foreigner.

I believe I am right in saying that the idea of forming a Company,
something after the manner of the East India Company, to take over and
govern North Borneo, originated in the following manner. In 1865 Mr.
MOSES, the unpaid Consul for the United Sates in Brunai, to whom
reference has been made before, acquired with his friends from the
Sultan of Brunai some concessions of territory with the right to govern
and collect revenues, their idea being to introduce Chinese and
establish a Colony. This they attempted to carry out on a small scale in
the Kimanis River, on the West Coast, but not having sufficient capital
the scheme collapsed, but the concession was retained. Mr. MOSES
subsequently lost his life at sea, and a Colonel TORREY became the chief
representative of the American syndicate. He was engaged in business in
China, where he met Baron VON OVERBECK, a merchant of Hongkong and
Austrian Consul-General, and interested him in the scheme. In 1875 the
Baron visited Borneo in company with the Colonel, interviewed the Sultan
of Brunai, and made enquiries as to the validity of the concessions,
with apparently satisfactory results, Mr. ALFRED DENT[16] was also a
China merchant well known in Shanghai, and he in turn was interested in
the idea by Baron OVERBECK. Thinking there might be something in the
scheme, he provided the required capital, chartered a steamer, the
_America_, and authorised Baron OVERBECK to proceed to Brunai to
endeavour, with Colonel TORREY'S assistance, to induce the Sultan and
his Ministers to transfer the American cessions to himself and the
Baron, or rather to cancel the previous ones and make out new ones in
their favour and that of their heirs, associates, successors and assigns
for so long as they should choose or desire to hold them. Baron VON
OVERBECK was accompanied by Colonel TORREY and a staff of three
Europeans, and, on settling some arrears due by the American Company,
succeeded in accomplishing the objects of his mission, after protracted
and tedious negotiations, and obtained a "chop" from the Sultan
nominating and appointing him supreme ruler, "with the title of Mah