British Borneo

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Excerpt from British Borneo: Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo Not only this, but the example has been followed by Prince Bismarck, and German Companies, on similar lines, have been incorporated by their Government on both coasts of Africa and in the Pacific, and another British Company, to operate on the Niger River Districts, came into existence by Royal Charter in July, 1886. It used to be by no means an unusual thing to find an educated person ignorant not only of Borneo's position on the map, but almost of the very existence of the island which, regarding Australia as a continent, and yielding to the claims recently set up by New Guinea, is the second largest island in the world, within whose limits could be comfortably packed England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with a sea of dense jungle around them, as Wallace has pointed out. Every school-board child now, however, knows better than this. Though Friar Odoric is said to have visited it about 1322, and Ludovico Berthema of Bologna, between 1503 and 1507, the existence of this great island, variously estimated to be from 263, 000 to 300, 000 square miles in extent, did not become generally known to Europeans until, in 1518, the Portuguese Lorenzo De Gomez touched at the city of Brunai. He was followed in 1521 by the Spanish expedition, which under the leadership of the celebrated Portuguese circumnavigator MAGELLAN, had discovered the Philippines, where, on the island of Mactan, their leader was killed in April, 1520. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.