‘The first voyagers from the west,’ says Rajah Brooke, ‘found the natives rich and powerful, with strong established governments, a flourishing literature, and a thriving trade with all parts of the eastern world. The rapacious European has reduced them to their present abject condition. Their governments have been broken up; the old states decomposed by treachery, by bribery, and intrigue; their possessions wrested from them under flimsy pretences, their trade restricted, their vices encouraged, and their virtues repressed.’ ‘Among the Malays of the present day,’ says Newbold, ‘we look in vain for that desire of knowledge which excited their ancestors to transplant the flowers of Arabian literature among their own forests. Works of science are now no longer translated from the Arabic, and creations of the imagination have almost ceased to appear. The few children educated among them learn nothing but to mumble in an unknown tongue a few passages from the Koran, entirely neglecting arithmetic and the acquirement of any useful manual art or employment. Painting, sculpture, architecture, mechanics, geography, are totally unknown to the Malays. Their literature declined with the fall of their empire in the Archipelago, nor could it well be expected to flourish under the Upas trees of Portuguese intolerance, Dutch oppression, and British apathy.’ Essentially maritime in their tastes, the Malays have been named the Phœnicians of the East; but not satisfied with the peaceful pursuits of the fisherman or the merchant, many of them infest the Indian Ocean as merciless pirates. Encouraged by the weakness and distraction of the old-established Malay governments, the facilities offered by natural situation, and the total absence of all restraint from European nations, except now and then the destruction of some mud fort or bamboo-village, which is soon rebuilt, the Illanuns, the Balagnini, and other sea-robbing tribes, issue forth like beasts of prey, enslave or murder the inhabitants on the coasts or at the entrance of rivers, and attack ill-armed or stranded European vessels. The Illanuns of Mindanao are particularly noted for their daring and long-protracted piratical excursions, which they undertake in large junks with sails, netting, and heavy guns. On one occasion the ‘Rajah Brooke’ met eighteen Illanun boats on neutral ground, and learned from their two chiefs that they had been two years absent from home; and from the Papuan slaves on board it was evident that their cruise had extended from the most eastern islands of the Archipelago to the north-western coast of Borneo.