With these pirates were associated the Bajaus or sea-gipsies, a roving people, who lived entirely in their prahus, with their women and children. The vessels employed by Lanuns on marauding expeditions were sometimes of 60 tons burden, built very sharp in the prow and wide in beam, and over 90 feet in length. A double tier of oars was worked by slaves to the number of 100, and the fighting men would be from 30 to 40; the prahus of the smallest size carried from 50 to 80 in all. The bows of the vessels were solidly built, and fortified with hard wooden baulks capable of resisting a 6-pounder shot; often they were shod with iron. Here a narrow embrasure admitted a gun for a 6 to a 24-pound shot. In addition to this, the armaments consisted of several guns, usually of brass, of smaller calibre. Sometimes the piratical fleets comprised as many as 200 prahus, though the Lanuns usually cruised in small fleets of 20 to 30 sail. They would descend on a coast and attack any village, sack and burn it, kill the defenders, carry away men, women, and children as slaves, slaughter the cattle, and ravage the plantations. A cargo of slaves captured on the east coast of Borneo would be sold on the west coast, and those taken in the south would find a ready market in the north, in Sulu[110] and the Lanun country. Their cruising grounds were extensive—around the coasts of the Philippine islands, Borneo, and Celebes to Sumatra, Java, and the Malay peninsula, through the Moluccas to New Guinea, and even up the Bay of Bengal as far as Rangoon. In 1834, a fleet of these Lanuns swept round the coast of a small island in the Straits of Rhio, opposite Singapore, and killed or carried away all the inhabitants.[111] In addition to their original home in the bay of Lanun, they had settlements in Marudu Bay in the north of Borneo, and towns along the west coast almost as far south as Ambong, and on the east coast to Tungku, and on to Koti. In Marudu their chief was Sherip Usman, who was married to a sister of the Sultan Muda of Sulu, and who was in league with Pangiran Usup, uncle to the Sultan of Bruni, and his principal adviser. Usman supplied the pirates with powder, shot, and guns, and they, on returning from a piratical expedition, paid him at the rate of four captives for every 100 rupees worth of goods with which he had furnished them. Such captives as had been taken in the vicinity of Bruni he would sell to Pangiran Usup for 100 rupees each, who would then demand of their friends and relations Rs. 200 for each. "Thus this vile Sherip, not reckoning the enormous price he charged for his goods in the first instance, gained 500 per cent for every slave, and the Pangiran Usup cleared 100 per cent by the flesh of his own countrymen."