“A few days ago I was up a high mountain and looked over the country.  It is a prospect which I have rarely seen equalled; and sitting there, lazily smoking a cigar, I called into existence the coffee plantations, the sugar plantations, the nutmeg plantations, and pretty white villages and tiny steeples, and dreamed that I heard the buzz of life and the clang of industry amid the jungles, and that the China Colins whistled as they went, for want of thought, as they homeward bent.”

The first duty which claimed attention was the relief of the native Dyaks.  A shrewd Dyak once defined the Malay government as “a plantain in the mouth and a thorn in the back.”  A plantain giving to their poor subjects a little to keep life in them; a thorn stripping them to the skin and piercing them to the bone.  The description is pithy, and it is true.  The exactions of the Malay chiefs were almost beyond belief.  Seizing and monopolizing some article of prime necessity,—­salt perhaps,—­they would force the natives to buy at the rate of fifty dollars’ worth of rice for a teacup of salt; until the wretched cultivator, who had raised a plentiful crop, was brought to the verge of starvation.  They reserved to themselves the right of purchasing the articles which the Dyaks had to sell, and then affixed to those articles an arbitrary price, perhaps less than a five-hundredth of their real value.  They would send a bar of iron two or three feet long, and having an intrinsic worth of a few cents, to the head mart of a tribe, demanding that his village should give for it a sum equal to five, ten, or twenty dollars.  Another was sent in the same way, and another, and another, until the rapacity of the chiefs was satisfied, or the wretched natives had no more to give.  Often, when the latter had been robbed of everything, the Malays would seize and sell their wives and children.  It is recorded of one tribe, that there was not so much as one woman or child to be found in it.  All had been swept off by these remorseless slave-hunters.  Nor did their wrongs end here.  If a Dyak killed a Malay “under any circumstances of aggression,” he was put to death, often with every possible addition of torture.  If he accidentally injured one of the ruling caste, he was fortunate to escape with the loss of half or two thirds of his little savings.  On the other hand, a Malay might kill as many Dyaks as he pleased, and if perchance justice were a little sterner than usual, he might be fined a few cents or a few dollars.  Volumes are contained in this one statement, that in the ten years from 1830 to 1840, the Dyaks in the province of Sarawak dwindled from 14,000 to 6,000 souls.