BORNEO: Sunset on the Sulu Sea

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Its very name still carried echoes of pirates' cries and winds of empire roaring in blowzy sails. It was the last of the big chartered governing companies which carried the City of London to India, and the Crown to the Cape, which spanned -oceans and jungles for the greater glory of Queen and Commerce. The British North Borneo Company—a private corporation whose stock fetched 15s. 6d. on the open market —was still the sole ruler over a quarter of a million natives inhabiting a territory roughly the size of Ireland. But last week the Borneo Company's rule was ending.

The Wind Rises. The Company began in 1872 when a Scots engineer named William Clarke Cowie (who looked like a bartender in one of the very best hotels) ran a Spanish blockade to deliver his cargo of arms to the Sultan of Sulu, ruler of North Borneo. The grateful Sultan granted him shipping rights in his domain; later, at a resplendent dinner, he let Cowie persuade him to cede sovereignty over North Borneo to a British syndicate (in an expansive mood, the Sultan threw in the mother-of-pearl dessert plates on the table, along with his realm). Cowie, as one of the directors of the new British North Borneo Company, moved into a mud hut and kept a sharp eye on the natives. The Company set up its own Governor, cabinet and judges, to carry civilization into the island's steep, wild mountains. Largely because of a maiden's grisly caprice, civilizing Borneo proved a tremendous task.

Once upon a time (so the legend went), a beautiful girl of the proud Dyak tribe persistently scorned a young warrior; desperate as a procrastinating shopper on Christmas Eve, he finally hit on the idea of bringing her a human head. His beloved tenderly declared that this was indeed a gift worthy of a Dyak maiden's heart, and consented to be his bride. Ever since then, the men of Borneo have been passionate headhunters.

The horrified Britons watched freshly severed heads—garnished with all manner of delicacies, sometimes with a lighted cigar stuck between their teeth, swing gently through the air at native ceremonies. The Company, deciding that British stockholders could not be expected to underwrite that sort of thing, nearly managed to stamp out the custom.

The Company's handful of agents settled down to a lusty, hard-drinking life (according to one observer they could not sign their names before 10 in the morning or remember them after 6 in the evening), and conducted brisk export in rubber, timber, tobacco, birds' nests, camphor, and turtle eggs. They introduced certain sublimations of the head-hunting urge—tariffs, taxes, railroads, the telegraph and the telephone.