It brought back to my mind some four-and-twenty years ago, when I first came up in the _Dido_ with Sir James Brooke on board, and gave the first and nearly the only help he had in securing his position, thereby enabling him to carry out his philanthropic views for the benefit of a strange race. If he had not succeeded to the full extent of his then sanguine hopes, still there is no man living, or to come, who, single-handed, will have benefited his fellow-creatures to the extent Brooke has. In 1842, piracy, slavery, and head-hunting were the order of the day. The sail of a peaceful trader was nowhere to be seen, not even a fisherman, but along the length of this beautiful coast, far into the interior, the Malays and Dayaks warred on one another. Now how different! Huts and fishing stakes are to be seen all along the coast, the town of Kuching, which on the visit of the _Dido_, had scarcely 800 inhabitants, now has a population of 20,000. The aborigines, who called themselves warriors, are now peaceful traders and cultivators of rice. The jungle is fast being cleared to make way for farms. Head-hunting, the third aim which Rajah Brooke held before his eyes, was an ingrained custom of the race which could not be eradicated at once. The utmost that he could effect at first was to prevent the taking of heads of any of the subjects under his rule. All the tribes that were in his raj were to be regarded as friends, and were therefore not to be molested. Any breach of the peace, every murder was severely punished. In a short time head-hunting and intertribal feuds amongst the Sarawak Dayaks were extirpated, and the raj ceased to be a hunting-field for the Sekrang and Saribas Dayaks; but they continued to haunt the coast together with the Lanun and Balenini pirates, and the suppression of piracy was the most serious undertaking of the three, and took many years to accomplish.