f the accounts and the tribe who was found
to be on the debtor side paying, not human heads, but compensation in
goods at a fixed rate per head due. Another custom which the Company
found it impossible to recognize was that of _summungap_, which was, in
reality, nothing but a form of human sacrifice, the victim being a slave
bought for the purpose, and the object being to send a message to a
deceased relative. With this object in view, the slave used to be bound
and wrapped in cloth, when the relatives would dance round him and each
thrust a spear a short way into his body, repeating, as he did so, the
message which he wished conveyed. This operation was performed till the
slave succumbed.

The Muhammadan practice of cutting off the hair of a woman convicted of
adultery, or of men flogging her with a rattan, and that of cutting off
the hand of a thief, have also not received the recognition of the
Company's Government.

It has been shewn that the native population of North Borneo is very
small, only about five to the square mile, and as the country is fertile
and well-watered and possesses, for the tropics, a healthy climate,
there must be some exceptional cause for the scantiness of the
population. This is to be found chiefly in the absence, already referred
to, of any strong central Government in former days, and to the
consequent presence of all forms of lawlessness, piracy, slave-trading,
kidnapping and head-hunting.

In more recent years, too, cholera and small-pox have made frightful
ravages amongst the natives, almost annihilating some of the tribes, for
the people knew of no remedies and, on the approach of the scourge,
deserted their homes and their sick and fled to the jungle, where
exposure and privation rendered them more than ever liable to the
disease. Since the Company's advent, efforts are being successfully made
to introduce vaccination, in which most of the people now have
confidence.

This fact of a scanty native population has, in some ways, rendered the
introduction of the Company's Government a less arduous undertaking than
it might otherwise have proved, and has been a fortunate circumstance
for the shareholders, who have the more unowned and virgin land to
dispose of. In British North Borneo, luckily for the Company, there is
not, as there is in Sarawak, any one large, powerful tribe, whose
presence might have been a source of trouble, or even of danger to the
young Government, but the abori