of us suffered in the least, and I shall ever look back with pleasure
to my trip as being my first introduction to mountain scenery in the
Eastern tropics.
The meagreness and brevity of the sketch I have here given of my visit
to Singapore and the Malay Peninsula is due to my having trusted chiefly
to some private letters and a notebook, which were lost; and to a paper
on Malacca and Mount Ophir which was sent to the Royal Geographical
Society, but which was neither read nor printed owing to press of matter
at the end of a session, and the MSS. of which cannot now be found. I
the less regret this, however, as so many works have been written on
these parts; and I always intended to pass lightly over my travels in
the western and better known portions of the Archipelago, in order to
devote more space to the remoter districts, about which hardly anything
has been written in the English language.
CHAPTER IV. BORNEO--THE ORANGUTAN.
I ARRIVED at Sarawak on November 1st, 1854, and left it on January 25th,
1856. In the interval I resided at many different localities, and saw
a good deal of the Dyak tribes as well as of the Bornean Malays. I
was hospitably entertained by Sir James Brooke, and lived in his house
whenever I was at the town of Sarawak in the intervals of my journeys.
But so many books have been written about this part of Borneo since I
was there, that I shall avoid going into details of what I saw and heard
and thought of Sarawak and its ruler, confining myself chiefly to my
experiences as a naturalist in search of shells, insects, birds and the
Orangutan, and to an account of a journey through a part of the interior
seldom visited by Europeans.
The first four months of my visit were spent in various parts of
the Sarawak River, from Santubong at its mouth up to the picturesque
limestone mountains and Chinese gold-fields of Bow and Bede. This part
of the country has been so frequently described that I shall pass it
over, especially as, owing to its being the height of the wet season, my
collections were comparatively poor and insignificant.
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