Their very mention makes the feet of the
young men restless. They mark the places where the strange trails go
down. Of them all, the one that most completely captivated my boyish
imagination was Borneo. To me, as to millions of other youngsters, its
name had been made familiar by that purveyor of entertainment to
American boyhood, Phineas T. Barnum, as the reputed home of the wild
man. In its jungles, through the magic of Marryat's breathless pages, I
fought the head-hunter and pursued the boa-constrictor and the
orang-utan. It was then, a boyhood dream come true when I stood at
daybreak on the bridge of the _Negros_ and through my glasses watched
the mysterious island, which I had so often pictured in my imagination,
rise with tantalizing slowness from the sapphire sea.

We forged ahead cautiously, for our charts were none too recent or
reliable and we lacked the "Malay Archipelago" volume of _The Sailing
Directions_--the "Sailor's Bible," as the big, orange-covered book,
full of comforting detail, is known. As the morning mists dissolved
before the sun I could make out a pale ivory beach, and back of the
beach a band of green which I knew for jungle, and back of that, in
turn, a range of purple mountains which culminated in a majestic,
cloud-wreathed peak. An off-shore breeze brought to my nostrils the
strange, sweet odors of the hot lands. A Malay _vinta_ with widespread
bamboo outriggers and twin sails of orange flitted by an enormous
butterfly skimming the surface of the water. I was actually within
sight of that grim island whose name has ever been a synonym for
savagery. For never think that piracy, head-hunting, poisoned darts
shot from blow-guns are horrors extinct in Borneo today, for they are
not. Ask the mariners who sail these waters; ask the keepers of the
lonely lighthouses, the officers who command the constabulary outposts
in the bush. They know Borneo, and not favorably.

You will picture Borneo, if you please, as a vast, squat island the
third largest in the world, in fact--half again as large as France,
bordered by a sandy littoral, moated by swamps reeking with putrid
miasmata and pernicious vapors, covered with dense forests and
impenetrable jungles, ridged by mile-high mountain ranges, seamed by
mighty rivers, inhabited by the most savage beasts and the most bestial
savages known to man. Lying squarely athwart the Line, the sun beats
down upon it like the blast from an open furnace-door. The sto