to give a repetition during the ensuing
week."

My reminiscence of battle closes with a
grand pyrotechnic display.

SARÁWAK.

THE son of a certain civil officer in the
East India Company's service, having
obtained a cadetship, and commenced his career
in India as a soldier, was shot in the chest
during the storming of a stockade in the
Burmese war. The wound was serious, and
made a furlough necessary. The young
officer returned to England, recruited his
health with a short European tour, and, in
due time, set sail again for India. But the
wreck of the ship in which he sailed, delayed
his return to his post until after the furlough
had expired. His appointment thus
forfeited, could be recovered only by a tedious
and formal process. It was abandoned, therefore.
No longer a servant of the East India
Company, Mr. James Brooke, twenty-seven
years of age, sailed at once from Calcutta for
China, and, on the way, saw for the first
time—eight-and-twenty years ago—the
beautiful islands of the spice and the bread-fruit
swelling in rich verdure from the tropical
seas. Their luxuriance of wealth—for us
neglected wealth—the many strange tribes
and unknown regions in that Indian
Archipelago, the pirate fleets, the glimmerings of
trade shedding a faint light of civilisation
here and there, gave double force to an
adventurous young man's reflection on the
value to Great Britain of this border of the
highway between India and China.

We have lost Java to the Dutch, thought
Mr. Brooke, and carelessly have left those
traders in almost exclusive possession of a
region that will become of the highest
importance to us whenever the resources of
China shall be thoroughly laid open. Then, we
shall find some of these island coasts yielding
much more than landmarks on the path of a
grand route of trade, and it will be well for
Britain if a stranger or a rival do not hold
them all. The wayfarer was impressed by
what he saw; he talked with travellers, and
was impressed by what he heard; he read
books also until he discovered for himself, in
Borneo, a field of enterprise that excited his
ambition. He dwelt on an attractive thought
till it acquired perhaps undue importance in
his eyes, and then he planned out for himself
what might be a life's work of useful and
glorious Adventure. He sought, in England,
to make converts to his opinion, and when,
by the death of his father, he became the
owner of a little fortune—about fifty thousand
pounds—he began to spend it upon the
fulfilment of his dreams. He bought a yacht of
a hundred and forty-two tons burthen (the
Royalist), belonging to the Royal Yacht
Squadron, and proposed to make in her a
private expedition, of which he described the
object in a paper written at that time. An
abstract of it appeared in the Journal of the
Geographical Society. It dwelt on the field
offered in the Eastern Archipelago for the
extension of Christianity and commerce; it
discussed the commercial position of the
Dutch, whose trade was beset with restrictions,
and their weak hold on the good-will
of the natives. What Britain had lost by
the cession of Java was, he said, half
recovered by the misrule of the Dutch; we
had only to regain some little footing, and, by
a policy the reverse of that which the Dutch
were pursuing, win the good-will of the
natives, and secure slowly and surely the
simultaneous increase in those seas of our
territorial possessions and of our prosperity
in trade. In Malludu Bay, at the northern
point of the great island of Borneo—
excluding Australia, that is the largest island
in the world—in Malludu Bay we had already
a possession favourably placed relative to
China, and perhaps available for native trade.
It had good climate, a river supposed to
communicate with the lake and the high
mountain of Keeny Balloo, and (it was reported)
docile natives. "A strong government," said
Mr. Brooke, "established in this bay, a
British territory, capable of extension and
possessing internal resources, having sufficient
authority to cultivate a good understanding
with the native governments, and spread
inferior ports over the Archipelago, as
opportunities offered, would, without
infringing upon the claims of any foreign state,
ensure a commercial footing on a scale never
yet developed in this portion of the world."
Timor, he thought, might be had on the
easiest terms from Portugal, and Leuconia as
a set-off against debt from Spain. He thought
that one result of the next general war would
be our possession of the Archipelago, and in
the meantime was resolved by individual
exertion to put an end, if he could, to the
apathy with which England regarded this
field for her energies, and lead the way to an
increased knowledge of the Indian
Archipelago.

The purpose with which Mr. Brooke first
set out in the Royalist was to explore,
where exploration might prove practically
valuable, to collect information of all kinds,
and to bring together in friendship, wherever
they met, Englishmen and natives. With
such objects Mr. Brooke sailed eastward in
his yacht at the close of the year eighteen
hundred and thirty-eight. "I cast myself,"
he had said, "on the waters, like Southey's
little book; but whether the world will know
me after many days, is a question which,
hoping the best, I cannot answer." The
pioneer has set out

            accomplished for a task
    Which his own nature hath enjoined;

and to the nature of a pioneer there belong
qualities defined so sharply that they are apt