"KUDAT," cables Reuter, "was raided early on powder April 28 by 200 natives who captured the powder magazine and a Maxim, killing two policemen, and wounding six others." Fifteen Chinese were also killed. Later on the Sikh police recaptured the magazine and the Maxim, shot the rebel Chief, Mat Sator, and some score more of the raiders, and took divers prisoners. The Governor, Mr. Hugh Clifford, having arrived from Sandakan with reinforcements, is in pursuit, with the Commandant. "The Europeans were unharmed."
The above little episode present various gratifying and characteristic contrasts with another "bush-whacking" war which is being carried on by the Americans near Kudat - just across the way, so to speak - in the Philippines.
I spent some time in North Borneo last year, and saw the efficiency of the Sikh soldiery, or "police" against whose emigration to Borneo the Government of India is reported to entertain a natural prejudice.
The Company's "army" consists of some two hundred of these men; with about an equal number of Dyaks (the force represented at the Jubilee), short, sturdy fellows, presenting a contrast in every way to the Sikhs, but useful in the special work of bush-whacking," which is not the Sikhs game.
With this armed strength, supplemented by a heterogeneous, but efficient, full band (which was recruited, with its instruments, from the wreckage of the Spanish-Phillippino bands after the fall of Manila – it is an ill wind that blows nobody's trombone!), the Company administers its territories, besides carrying on, without undue nervousness or publicity, this interesting little war with the insurgents of the interior.
Mat Salleh, of whom Mat Sator appears to have been a brother, has been killed since I left.
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In my time he was looked on by the older officials of the Company (several of whom had held palavers with him on various occasions) as an amiable, but chronically turbulent, upstart, of unknown parentage (a common case in Borneo); a sort of dusky Rob Roy, who pretended to scruples about the payment of taxes, but in reality made a good thing out of his profession of rebel.
My own opinion, which I concealed from my host, the Company's Commissioner of Lands, was that the Company's original concession from the Sultan of Sulu (a pirate king, who had developed a customary right to raid the country) having covered, of course, no more than a transfer of his Majesty's own rights, which we construed as equivalent to a prerogative of taxation, the excellent Mat Salleh really intended to take his stand as a Nationalist, on the constitutional point that the most (Orientally) perfect right to raid could not, even when commuted for a poll-tax, convey, as by the introduction of our land-tenure it has been assumed to do, the right to the fee simple of a territory.
However, the constitutionalist (if he was one) is now dead; though he perished not before he succeeded in annoying my official friends, by robbing a Government Treasury, protected though it was, as I remember, by a most intricate fence of barbed wire. And, in any case, the weak point of his argument must have been that there was no nation, or indeed, much population, behind him to possess any rights, or to help him to rebel; the aborigines of the northward part of the island, once wealthy and prosperous, having been, apparently, exterminated by small-pox and piracy after the introduction of Portuguese civilisation to those parts, and having been succeeded by a shocking amalgam of Chinaman, Malay, Dyak, Sulu, Sea-Gypsy, and every rapscallion tribe which can confuse the ethnologist who knows his Eastern Seas, I met some hereditary, though retired, pirates in my pilgrimage; one of whom, who presented his son and grandson to the administrator travelling with me, had been in full practice when the Company's first officials arrived.
Our journey from Sandakan to Kudat amounted to a triumph. Captain Pfort the captain of those seas who annexed Palahwan a while ago till a gunboat scuttled down from Hong Kong and took the Flag away - Pfort brought as round in his steam launch chartered by the Government to make a naval demonstration – and to go to Kudat races.
And the band (which filled three parts of the launch's deck, and was sick) performed mightily whenever we shoved our nose in alongside any crazy pier to ship rattans.
The retired pirates, and others, if there were any others, marvelled at the power of the Government.
But of the glories of that voyage - the oysters gathered and the pigeons shot at sunset on thick clustering coral isles; of the hospitalities of Kudat; the wrath of its Sub-Commandant when he heard that precedent had been outrage by more than ten pounds having been given for a racing and polo pony; of the races themselves, and the review of Sikhs on the race course, whereat medals were presented for the last bedevilment of Mat Salleh; above all, of the ice-machine which had been produced, after a night's crank-turning of a mystified "boy" a glass of tepid water to cool my fever - of these things this is not the place to tell.
Only I will say that, though coffee is "down" now, yet tobacco is by no means down, while rubber, also, and gutta are to come, and that if this part, also of our heritage be goodly, yet so much the more does it need keeping.
Several of the best and most prosperous among the very tall and kindly-riotous good tobacco-planters of Kudat are Germans, and they are welcome there.
But that the late Blue-Funnel fleet, the Government mail line, the only means (beyond Chinese-owned tramp steamers) of communication between this British colony and the alleged British port of Singapore, should have passed in block, like the fleets plying between Singapore and Bangkok, and between Bangkok and Hong Kong, into the hands of the North German Lloyd - this is not good.
The Kaiser has bought the Carolines; German intrigue was hot, a year ago, in the Sulu Islands, and has been revived again in the last few weeks; Germany stretches from China, in the north-west, far down to the south-eastward of Kudat and counts herself, besides, heir to Java (which, even as Delagoa Bay, is ours in reversion, by treaty) and to all the Dutch Indies.
These things, I say, are not good. But then, neither is it good that Singapore itself is for the rich and enterprising.
Chinaman, or the pushing Teuton while our excellent but feckless young English clerks spend their afternoons at cricket, or their dwindling dollar-paid salaries at the Club. – Pall Mall Gazette
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