ad made his escape by leaping overboard during the fight. The
three prahus were the same Illanun pirates we had so suddenly come
upon off Cape Datu in the Dido, and they belonged to the same fleet
that Lieut. Horton had chased off the Island of Marundum. The slave
prisoner had been seized, with a companion, in a small fishing canoe,
off Borneo Proper; his companion suffered in the general slaughter. The
sight that presented itself on our people boarding the captured boat
must indeed have been a frightful one. None of the pirates waited on
board for even the chance of receiving either quarter or mercy, but
all those capable of moving had thrown themselves into the water. In
addition to the killed, some lying across the thwarts, with their
oars in their hands, at the bottom of the prahu, in which there was
about three feet of blood and water, were seen protruding the mangled
remains of eighteen or twenty bodies. During my last expedition I
fell in with a slave belonging to a Malay chief, one of our allies,
who informed us that he likewise had been a prisoner, and pulled an
oar in one of the two prahus that attacked the Jolly Bachelor; that
none of the crew of the captured prahu reached the shore alive, with
the exception of the lad that swam off to our people; and that there
were so few who survived in the second prahu, that, having separated
from their consort during the night, the slaves, fifteen in number,
rose and put to death the remaining pirates, and then ran the vessel
into the first river they reached, which proved to be the Kaleka, where
they were seized, and became the property of the governing Datu; and
my informant was again sold to my companion, while on a visit to his
friend the Datu. Each of the attacking prahus had between fifty and
sixty men, including slaves, and the larger one between ninety and
a hundred. The result might have been very different to our gallant
but dosy Jolly Bachelors.

I have already mentioned the slaughter committed by the fire of the
pinnace, under Lieutenant Horton, into the largest Malay prahu; and
the account given of the scene which presented itself on the deck of
the defeated pirate, when taken possession of, affords a striking
proof of the character of these fierce rovers; resembling greatly
what we read of the Norsemen and Scandinavians of early ages. Among
the mortally wounded lay the young commander of the prahu, one of
the most noble forms of the human race; his countena