hat of the Brunai Sultanate, already secured
by the British Treaty, and Sarawak, now the property of the BROOKE
family, the Dutch have acquired a nominal suzerainty over the whole of
the rest of Borneo, by treaties with the independent rulers--an area
comprising about two-thirds of the whole island, probably not a tenth
part of which is under their actual direct administrative control.

They appear to have been so pre-occupied with the affairs of their
important Colony of Java and its dependencies, and the prolonged,
exhausting and ruinously expensive war with the Achinese in Sumatra,
that beyond posting Government Residents at some of the more important
points, they have hitherto done nothing to attract European capital and
enterprise to Borneo, but it would now seem that the example set by the
British Company in the North is having its effect, and I hear of a
Tobacco Planting Company and of a Coal Company being formed to operate
on the East Coast of Dutch Borneo.

The Spanish claim to North Borneo was a purely theoretical one, and not
only their claim, but that also of the Sulus through whom they claimed,
was vigorously disputed by the Sultans of Brunai, who denied that, as
asserted by the Sulus, any portion of Borneo had been ceded to them by a
former Sultan of Brunai, who had by their help defeated rival claimants
and been seated on the throne. The Sulus, on their side, would own no
allegiance to the Spaniards, with whom they had been more or less at war
for almost three centuries, and their actual hold over any portion of
North Borneo was of the slightest. Matters were in this position when
Mr. ALFRED DENT, now Sir ALFRED DENT, K.C.M.G., fitted out an
expedition, and in December, 1877, and January, 1878, obtained from the
Sultans of Brunai and Sulu, in the manner hereafter detailed, the
sovereign control over the North portion of Borneo, from the Kimanis
river on the West to the Siboku river on the East, concessions which
were confirmed by Her Majesty's Royal Charter in November, 1881.

I have now traced, in brief outline, the political history of Borneo
from the time when the country first became generally known to
Europeans--in 1518--down to its final division between Great Britain and
the Netherlands in 1881.

If we can accept the statements of the earlier writers, Borneo was in
its most prosperous stage before it became subjected to European
influences, after which, owing to the mistaken and monopolising pol