A party of malcontent Saribas Dayaks had been induced by the Sherip to settle in the Serikei river, to be handy agents for the execution of his oppressive exactions, and the intrepid Penglima Seman was sent by the Rajah to drive them out. This he did very effectually, and destroyed their houses and stores. Shortly afterwards the Datu Temanggong and the Datu Imaum dispersed a flotilla of some forty Saribas bangkongs which they had met in the main river below Serikei. The unsatisfactory condition of affairs in the Muka and adjacent districts led the Rajah to pay another visit to Bruni, and thither he sailed in June, 1855, after having despatched the Tuan Muda to Muka. He went up in his little gunboat, the _Jolly Bachelor_, alone, and with no retinue, no longer holding high offices under the Crown, "the castaway of his own country." But he was most cordially received, and entertained with due honours by the Sultan, by the Rajahs of both the hostile factions, and by the people. All saw in the Rajah the possible instrument to relieve them of the dissensions with which Bruni was troubled, and which now verged upon civil war. Of the opposing factions, which had existed ever since the days of Pangiran Usop, one party, and by far the most powerful, was led by the Pangiran Anak Hasim, the late Sultan's reputed son (who became Sultan in 1885), and this party was in opposition to the Sultan, who had lost the support of nearly all his people by becoming the tool of his cunning and grasping minister, Pangiran Makota. "Trade had become a monopoly and thus been extinguished; the exactions on the coast to the northward had produced dissatisfaction and rebellion; the unfortunate people of Limbang, which country is the granary of Bruni, was reduced to extremity, cruelly plundered by Makota and his sons, and attacked by the Kayans, sometimes at the instigation of Makota, sometimes on their own account; in short, what Sarawak was formerly, Bruni was now fast becoming; and when I pulled into the city in my little gunboat of thirty-five tons, four of the Kampongs had their guns loaded and pointed against each other." Such was the unhappy condition of the country as described by the Rajah. The day after his coming the rival parties disarmed their fortifications. The Sultan and the Rajahs placed the government in his hands, with a request that he would endeavour to establish it on a proper and firm basis, and promised obedience to all his directions. Makota was absent, having been ordered by the Sultan to Muka to look into matters there, which meant that he had been sent to plunder the people of that and the neighbouring districts, but, though it angered the Rajah, it rendered his task the easier.