ded as
compensation the sum of $22,000, basing his calculations on the amount
which some time previously the British Government had exacted in the
case of some British subjects who had been murdered in another river.

This demand the bankrupt Government of Brunai was equally incompetent to
comply with, and, thereupon, the matter was settled by the transfer of
the river to Raja BROOKE in consideration of the large annual payment of
$4,500, two years' rental--$9,000, being paid in advance, and Sarawak
thus acquired, as much by good luck as through good management, a _pied
a terre_ in the very centre of the Brunai Sultanate and practically
blocked the advance of their northern rivals--the Company--on the
capital. This river was the _kouripan_ (see _ante_, page 26) of the
present Sultan, and a feeling of pique which he then entertained against
the Government of British North Borneo, on account of their refusing him
a monetary loan to which he conceived he had a claim, caused him to make
this cession with a better grace and more readily than might otherwise
have been the case, for he was well aware that the British North Borneo
Company viewed with some jealousy the extension of Sarawak territory in
this direction, having, more than probably, themselves an ambition to
carry their own southern boundary as near to Brunai as circumstances
would admit. The same feeling on the part of the Tumonggong induced him
to listen to Mr. MAXWELL'S proposals for the cession to Sarawak of a
still more important river--the Limbang--one on which the existence of
Brunai itself as an independent State may be said to depend. But the
then reigning Sultan and the other Ministers of State refused their
sanction, and the Tumonggong, since his accession to the throne, has
also very decidedly changed his point of view, and is now in accord with
the large majority of his Brunai subjects to whom such a cession would
be most distasteful. It should be explained that the Limbang is an
important sago-producing river, close to the capital and forming an
actual portion of the Brunai river itself, with the waters of which it
mingles; indeed, the Brunai river is probably the former mouth of the
Limbang, and is itself but a salt-water inlet, producing nothing but
fish and prawns. As the Brunais themselves put it, the Limbang is their
_priuk nasi_, their rice pot, an expression which gains the greater
force when it is remembered that rice is the chief food with this