began. The _Lion
King_ sent up a rocket when she espied the pirate fleet, to apprise the
rest. Then there was a dead silence, broken only by three strokes of a
gong, which called the pirates to a council of war. A few minutes
afterwards a fearful yell gave notice of their advance, and the fleet
approached in two divisions. But when they sighted the steamer they
became aware of the odds against them, and again called a council by
beat of gong. After another pause, a second yell of defiance showed they
had decided on giving battle. Then, in the dead of the night, ensued a
fearful scene. The pirates fought bravely, but could not withstand the
superior forces of their enemies. Their boats were upset by the paddles
of the steamer; they were hemmed in on every side, and five hundred men
were killed, sword in hand; while two thousand five hundred escaped to
the jungle. The boats were broken to pieces, or deserted on the beach by
their crews; and the morning light showed a sad spectacle of ruin and
defeat. Upwards of eighty prahus and bangkongs were captured, many from
sixty to eighty feet long, with nine or ten feet beam.

The English officers on that night offered prizes to all who should
bring in captives alive: but the pirates would take no quarter; in the
water they still fought without surrender, for they could not understand
a mercy they never accorded to their enemies. Consequently the prisoners
were very few, and the darkness of the night favoured escape.

The peninsula to which they fled could easily have been so surrounded by
the Dyak and Malay forces that not one man of that pirate fleet could
have left it alive. This blockade the Malays entreated the rajah to
make; but he refused, saying that he hoped they had already received a
sufficient lesson, and would return to their homes humbled and
corrected. He therefore ordered his fleet to proceed up the river, and
the pirates went back to Sarebas and Sakarran. This severe punishment
cured the Dyaks of those rivers once and for all of piracy, and was the
greatest blessing which could have been conferred on those fine tribes.
They allowed forts to be built on their rivers, and submitted to English
residents, who ruled them with the counsel of their own chiefs. In 1857,
when the Chinese rebelled and burnt the town of Kuching, these Dyaks
sent their warriors to assist the Sarawak Government; in doing so they
joined other tribes whose hereditary enemies they had been for m