Running along the whole northern coast of Borneo, eight hundred miles, and inland perhaps two hundred, is found Borneo Proper, one of the three great Mohammedan kingdoms into which the island was divided as early as the sixteenth century.  This state is governed, or rather misgoverned, by a sultan, and, under him, by rajahs and pangerans,—­officials who give to the commands of their nominal superior but a scanty obedience.  For two centuries Borneo Proper has been steadily settling into anarchy and barbarism.  With a government both feeble and despotic, it was torn by intestine wars, crushed within by oppression and ravaged without by piracy, until commerce and agriculture, the twin pillars of the state, were equally threatened, and not one element of ruin seemed to be wanting.  What evidence of decay could be more striking than the simple fact that Bruni, its capital, which in the sixteenth century was crowded with a population of more than two hundred thousand souls, had in 1840 scarcely fourteen thousand inhabitants?

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To one corner of this wasting empire came, twenty-five years ago, a young Englishman.  Simply a gentleman, he had no governmental alliances to help him, and no advantages of any sort for founding empire, except such as sprang from the possession of a sagacious mind, an undaunted temper, and a heart thoroughly in sympathy with the oppressed.  Alone he has built up a flourishing state, introducing commercial activity and the habits of civilized life where only oppression and misery were, and has achieved an enterprise which seems to belong rather to the days of chivalry than to a plodding, utilitarian age,—­an enterprise which, in romance and success, but not in carnage, calls to mind the deeds of the great Spanish captains in the New World.

James Brooke, the second and only surviving son of Thomas Brooke, a gentleman who had acquired a fortune in the service of the East India Company, was born in India, April 29, 1803.  At an early age he entered the employ of the same company to whose interests his father had given his best days.  In 1826, as a cadet, he accompanied the British army to the Burmese war, was dangerously wounded, received a furlough, and came to England.  To restore his health and gratify his curiosity he spent the year 1827 in travelling on the Continent.  His furlough having nearly expired, he embarked for India, but was wrecked on the voyage, and could not report for duty in proper season.  This was one of those apparently fortuitous circumstances which so often change the whole aspect of a man’s life.  At any rate, it was the turning-point in Mr. Brooke’s career.  Finding that his misfortune had cost him his position, and that he could not recover it without tedious formalities, he left the service.  Uncontrolled master of himself, and endowed with sagacity and courage of no ordinary stamp, he was ready for any undertaking which his adventurous spirit or his love of research might dictate.