d with two boats, and paid me several visits. He
assured me he wanted to enter into an agreement, to the effect that
neither should injure the other. To this treaty I was obliged to
add the stipulation, that he was neither to pirate by sea nor by
land, and not to go, under any pretence, into the interior of the
country. His shrewdness and cunning were remarkably displayed. He
began by inquiring, if a tribe, either Sakarran or Sarebus, pirated on
my territory, what I intended to do. My answer was, 'To enter their
country and lay it waste.' But he asked me again, 'You will give me,
your friend, leave to steal a few heads occasionally?' 'No,' I replied,
'you cannot take a single head; you cannot enter the country: and
if you or your countrymen do, I will have a hundred Sakarran heads
for every one you take here.' He recurred to this request several
times: 'just to steal one or two!' as a schoolboy would ask for
apples. There is no doubt that the two tribes of Sakarran and Sarebus
are greatly addicted to head-hunting, and consider the possession as
indispensable. The more a man has, the greater his honor and rank; nor
is there anything without to check or ameliorate this barbarous habit;
for the Malays of all classes, on this coast, take the same pride in
heads as the Dyaks themselves, with the exception that they do not
place them in their houses, or attach any superstitious ideas to them.

"I asked Matari what was the solemn form of agreement among his tribes;
and he assured me the most solemn was drinking each other's blood,
in which case it was considered they were brothers; but pledging the
blood of fowls was another and less solemn form.

"On the 26th of January the Royalist's boat, with Captain Hart and
Mr. Penfold, second mate, of the Viscount Melbourne, arrived here. The
reason, it appears, of the Royalist coming was, to seek the missing
crew of the Viscount Melbourne, a large ship wrecked on the Luconia
shoal. The captain in the launch, with some Coolies; the first and
third mates, with Colonel Campbell of the 37th, M.N.I., in a cutter;
the second mate, Mr. Penfold, and the surgeon, in the second cutter;
a fourth boat with twenty-five Lascars, and the jolly-boat, making
in all five boats, left the vessel well provisioned, and steered in
company for the coast, which they made somewhere between Borneo and
Tanjong Barram. The fourth boat was missed the night they made the
land; and being all at anchor, and the weath