Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo: A Record of Intimate Association with the Natives of the Bornean JunglesGomes, Edwin Herbert
History
Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo: A Record of Intimate Association with the Natives of the Bornean Jungles
Gomes, Edwin Herbert
Iban (Bornean people); Sarawak (Malaysia) -- Description and travel
After his strenuous life in Sarawak, Sir James Brooke had a great desire
to visit England. Besides other reasons, the wish to see his relatives
and friends, he felt he could effect more for the inhabitants of Borneo
by a personal interview with Government Ministers in England than by
correspondence. He left Sarawak, and reached England early in October,
1847. There honours awaited him. He was presented with the freedom of
the City of London; Oxford University conferred upon him the degree of
LL.D.; he was graciously received at Windsor by the Queen and the Prince
Consort. The British Government recognized the work he had done, and
appointed him Governor of Labuan and Commissioner and Consul-General in
Borneo, and made him a K.C.B. The warrant of investiture was issued by
Her Majesty on May 22, 1848.
The extirpation of piracy was the first step towards introducing into the
country the blessings of a settled government, with all its civilizing
influences. But he was not satisfied with this, and soon began to take
measures for the establishment of a Christian Mission in Sarawak. When
Sir James Brooke visited England in 1847, he appealed to the Church,
and especially to the two Universities, to come to his aid. Neither of
the two great missionary societies was able at the time to undertake
this new enterprise through lack of funds, and a new organization, the
“Borneo Church Mission,” was founded, which laboured in the island for a
few years. Then, in 1854, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in Foreign Parts was able to take up the work, and has ever since been
responsible for it. The original organization had, however, done well in
the choice of the missionaries it sent out, the first of whom was the
Rev. F. T. McDougall, who was consecrated Bishop of Labuan and Sarawak
in 1855.
My father, the Rev. W. H. Gomes, B.D., worked under Bishop McDougall as
a missionary among the Dyaks of Lundu from 1852 to 1867, and I myself
have worked, under Bishop Hose, as a missionary in Sarawak, for seventeen
years, and have thus gained an intimate knowledge of the people and of
their lives, now so rapidly changing under Western influence.
Sir James Brooke was a man of the highest personal character. That a
young English officer, with a fortune of his own, should have been
willing to devote his whole life to improving the condition of the Dyaks
was a grand thing. That he should have been able, by perfectly legitimate
means, to do this in the teeth of much official and other opposition;
that he should have been able to put down piracy and head-hunting, with
their unspeakable accompaniments of misery and cruelty, and to do it all
with the hearty good-will of the people under his rule,—this was indeed
an achievement which might have seemed hardly possible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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