l outgrew this house
we built another for the boys, their master, and the matron, close by;
but I always kept the girls with us until Julia married, when they were
sent to the Quop, in charge of the missionary's wife there.

Long before we left the court-house, Mr. and Mrs. Wright decided to give
up the Sarawak mission, and went to Singapore, where Mr. Wright became
master to the Raffles Institution for the education of boys. We were
therefore quite alone until February, 1851, when the Bishop of Calcutta
paid us a visit to consecrate the church, and brought with him Mr. Fox
from Bishop's College, to be catechist, with a view to his future
ordination. Very soon after him came the Rev. Walter Chambers from
England, and about the same time Mr. Nicholls also arrived from Bishop's
College; but, as he only wished to stay for two years in the country, he
had scarcely time to learn the language before he returned to Calcutta.

CHAPTER IV.

PIRATES.

When we first lived at Sarawak, the coasts and the seas from Singapore
to China were infested with pirates. "It is in the Malay's nature," says
a Dutch writer, "to rove the seas in his prahu, as it is in the Arab to
wander with his steed on the sands of the desert." Before the English
and Dutch Governments exerted themselves to put down piracy in the
Eastern seas, there were communities of these Malays settled in various
parts of the coast of Borneo, who made it the business of their lives to
rob and destroy all the vessels they could meet with, either killing the
crews or reducing them to slavery. For this purpose they went out in
fleets of from ten to thirty war-boats or prahus. These boats were about
ninety feet long; they carried a large gun in the bow and three or four
lelahs, small brass guns, in each broadside, besides twenty or thirty
muskets. Each prahu was rowed by sixty or eighty oars in two tiers, and
carried from eighty to a hundred men. Over the rowers, and extending
the whole length of the vessel, was a light flat roof, made of split
bamboo, and covered with mats. This protected the ammunition and
provisions from rain, and served as a platform on which they mounted to
fight, from which they fired their muskets and hurled their spears.
These formidable boats skulked about in the sheltered bays of the coast,
at the season of the year when they knew that merchant-vessels would be
passing with rich cargoes for the ports of Singapore, Penang, or to and
from Chi