The settlement of Singapore, the present capital of the Straits Settlements, by Sir STAMFORD RAFFLES, under the orders of the East India Company in 1819, again drew attention to Borneo, for that judiciously selected and free port soon attracted to itself the trade of the Celebes, Borneo and the surrounding countries, which was brought to it by numerous fleets of small native boats. These fleets were constantly harassed and attacked and their crews carried off into slavery by the Balinini, Illanun, and Dyak pirates infesting the Borneo and Celebes coasts, and the interference of the British Cruisers was urgently called for and at length granted, and was followed, in the natural course of events, by political intervention, resulting in the brilliant and exciting episode whereby the modern successor of the olden heroes--Sir James Brooke--obtained for his family, in 1840, the kingdom of Sarawak, on the west coast of the island, which he in time purged of its two plague spots--head-hunting on shore, and piracy and slave-dealing afloat--and left to his heir, who has worthily taken up and carried on his work, the unique inheritance of a settled Eastern Kingdom, inhabited by the once dreaded head-hunting Dyaks and piratical Mahomedan Malays, the government of whom now rests absolutely in the hands of its one paternally despotic white ruler, or Raja. Sarawak, although not yet formally proclaimed a British Protectorate,[2] may thus be deemed the first permanent British possession in Borneo. Sir JAMES BROOKE was also employed by the British Government to conclude, on 27th May, 1847, a treaty with the Sultan of Brunai, whereby the cession to us of the small island of Labuan, which had been occupied as a British Colony in December, 1846, was confirmed, and the Sultan engaged that no territorial cession of any portion of his country should ever be made to any Foreign Power without the sanction of Great Britain. These proceedings naturally excited some little feeling of jealousy in our Colonial neighbours--the Dutch--who ineffectually protested against a British subject becoming the ruler of Sarawak, as a breach of the tenor of the treaty of London of 1824, and they took steps to define more accurately the boundaries of their own dependencies in such other parts of Borneo as were still open to them. What we now call British North Borneo, they appear at that time to have regarded as outside the sphere of their influence, recognising the Spanish claim to it through their suzerainty, already alluded to, over the Sulu Sultan. With this exception, and that of the Brunai Sultanate, already secured by the British Treaty, and Sarawak, now the property of the BROOKE family, the Dutch have acquired a nominal suzerainty over the whole of the rest of Borneo, by treaties with the independent rulers--an area comprising about two-thirds of the whole island, probably not a tenth part of which is under their actual direct administrative control.