The End of Malay Piracy.--In these very years that Malay piracy was receiving such severe blows from the recuperating power and activity of the Spanish government on the north, it was crushed also from the south by the merciless warfare of a great Englishman, the Raja Charles Brooke of Sarawak. The sources of pirate depredation were Maguindanao, the Sulu archipelago, and the north and west coasts of the great island of Borneo. We have seen how these fleets, century after century, swept northward and wasted with fire and murder the fair islands of the Philippines. But this archipelago was not alone in suffering these ravages. The peaceful trading inhabitants of the great island groups to the south were persistently visited and despoiled. Moreover, as the Chinese trade by the Cape of Good Hope route became established in the first half of the nineteenth century, these pirates became a great menace to European shipping. They swarmed the China Sea, and luckless indeed was the ship carried too far eastward on its course. Every American schoolboy is familiar with the stories of fierce hand-to-hand struggles with Malay pirates, which have come down from those years when the American flag was seen everywhere in the ports of the Far East. About 1839 a young English officer, [90] who had been in the Indian service, Charles Brooke, having armed and equipped a yacht of about 140 tons, set sail for the coast of Borneo, with the avowed intent of destroying Malay piracy and founding an independent state. In all the romantic stories of the East there is no career of greater daring than that of this man. In 1841, having engaged in several bloody exploits, Brooke forced from the sultan of Borneo the cession of Sarawak, with the government vested in himself as an independent raja. Brooke now devoted himself with merciless severity to the destruction of the pirates in the deep bays and swampy rivers, whence they had so long made their excursions. Later he was assisted by the presence of the English man-of-war "Dido," and in 1847 the sultan of Brunei ceded to Great Britain the island of Labuan. In 1849, Brooke visited Zamboanga in the English man-of-war "Moeander," and concluded a treaty with the sultan of Sulu, which greatly alarmed the Spaniards. Brooke's private correspondence shows that he was ambitious and hopeful of acquiring for England parts of the Dutch possessions in the south and the Spanish Philippines in the north; but his plans were never followed up by England, although in 1887 North Borneo was ceded to an English company, and all the northern and eastern portions of this great island are now under English protection. [91]