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BORNEO: Sunset on the Sulu Sea

4 minute read
TIME

Its very name still carried echoes of pirates’ cries and winds of empire roaring in blowzy sails. It was the last of the big chartered governing companies which carried the City of London to India, and the Crown to the Cape, which spanned -oceans and jungles for the greater glory of Queen and Commerce. The British North Borneo Company—a private corporation whose stock fetched 15s. 6d. on the open market —was still the sole ruler over a quarter of a million natives inhabiting a territory roughly the size of Ireland. But last week the Borneo Company’s rule was ending.

The Wind Rises. The Company began in 1872 when a Scots engineer named William Clarke Cowie (who looked like a bartender in one of the very best hotels) ran a Spanish blockade to deliver his cargo of arms to the Sultan of Sulu, ruler of North Borneo. The grateful Sultan granted him shipping rights in his domain; later, at a resplendent dinner, he let Cowie persuade him to cede sovereignty over North Borneo to a British syndicate (in an expansive mood, the Sultan threw in the mother-of-pearl dessert plates on the table, along with his realm). Cowie, as one of the directors of the new British North Borneo Company, moved into a mud hut and kept a sharp eye on the natives. The Company set up its own Governor, cabinet and judges, to carry civilization into the island’s steep, wild mountains. Largely because of a maiden’s grisly caprice, civilizing Borneo proved a tremendous task.

Once upon a time (so the legend went), a beautiful girl of the proud Dyak tribe persistently scorned a young warrior; desperate as a procrastinating shopper on Christmas Eve, he finally hit on the idea of bringing her a human head. His beloved tenderly declared that this was indeed a gift worthy of a Dyak maiden’s heart, and consented to be his bride. Ever since then, the men of Borneo have been passionate headhunters.

The horrified Britons watched freshly severed heads—garnished with all manner of delicacies, sometimes with a lighted cigar stuck between their teeth, swing gently through the air at native ceremonies. The Company, deciding that British stockholders could not be expected to underwrite that sort of thing, nearly managed to stamp out the custom.

The Company’s handful of agents settled down to a lusty, hard-drinking life (according to one observer they could not sign their names before 10 in the morning or remember them after 6 in the evening), and conducted brisk export in rubber, timber, tobacco, birds’ nests, camphor, and turtle eggs. They introduced certain sublimations of the head-hunting urge—tariffs, taxes, railroads, the telegraph and the telephone.

When the Japs occupied North Borneo during the war, the natives remained fiercely loyal to the British, who had brought them these blessings. Some of the Company’s officers were interned in a leper colony by the Japs. One day, a group of loyalist lepers came up to the Company’s Governor to ask if they could bump off some other lepers (who had collaborated with the Japs) when & if the Company’s rule was restored after the war. Asked the Governor: “Why don’t you do it now?” Replied one of the lepers: “The Japs would kill us; but if you try us, you will find us guilty and then say, ‘Oh well, they are only lepers, so I will recommend clemency.’ ”

The Wind Falls. The Company’s vigor, as that of all companies must, in time abated. Last week, the Company was up for sale to Britain’s Labor Government. The price was not yet fixed (the Company had rejected a Government offer of £2,100,000), and assorted descendants of the original Sultan of Sulu were raising claims to the island. But there was no doubt that the grandly anachronistic rule of the last corporate Raj was doomed. Said the president of the court of directors, white-haired, parchment-skinned, 76-year-old Major General (retired) Sir Neill Malcolm: “[The Company] is not quite in accord with modern ideas.”

Old-Soldier-of-the-Queen Malcolm was now reduced to collecting chinaware, hobbling to his club (Travellers’) on two canes, and frowning on decadent modern Englishmen who no longer dress for dinner even among headhunters.

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