Of These Peoples No Less Than 600,000 Live In A Comparatively Small Area Of The Southeast, The Districts Of Oeloe Soengei And Bandjermasin.

These are nearly all Malays, only 4,000 or 5,000 being Dayaks, who probably do not form the majority of the 217,000 that make up the remainder of the native population of the Division.

On account of the small white population and insufficient means of communication, which is nearly all by river, the natural resources of Dutch Borneo are still in the infancy of development. The petroleum industry has reached important proportions, but development of the mineral wealth has hardly begun. In 1917 a government commission, having the location of iron and gold especially in view, was sent to explore the mineral possibilities of the Schwaner Mountains. In the alluvial country along the rivers are vast future possibilities for rational agriculture, by clearing the jungle where at present the Malays and Dayaks pursue their primitive operations of planting rice in holes made with a pointed stick.

The early history of Borneo is obscure. Nothing in that regard can be learned from its present barbarous natives who have no written records, and few of whom have any conception of the island as a geographical unit. Although the Chinese had early knowledge of, and dealings with, Borneo, there seems little doubt that the country was first colonised by Hindu Javanese from Modjopahit, the most important of the several kingdoms which Hindus began to found in the early centuries after Christ. Modjopahit enclosed the region round the present Soerabaia in East Java, and it was easy to reach Borneo from there, to-day distant only twenty-seven hours by steamer. These first settlers in Borneo professed Hinduism and to some extent Buddhism. They founded several small kingdoms, among them Bandjermasin, Pasir, and Kutei, also Brunei on the north coast. But another race came, the Malays, who with their roving disposition extended their influence in the coast countries and began to form states. Then Islamism appeared in the Orient and changed conditions. Arabs, sword in hand, converted Java, and as far as they could, destroyed temples, monuments, and statues. The Malays, too, became Mohammedans and the sway of Islam spread more or less over the whole Malay Archipelago. With the fall of Modjopahit in 1478 the last vestige of Hindu Javanese influence in Borneo disappeared.

The Malays established sultanates with the same kind of government that is habitual with Mohammedans, based on oppression of the natives by the levying of tribute with the complement of strife, intrigue, and non-progress. In the course of time the Malays have not only absorbed the Hindu Javanese, but also largely the Bugis, who had founded a state on the west coast, and in our time they are gradually pushing back the Dayaks and slowly but surely absorbing them. The Chinese have also played a prominent part in the colonisation of Borneo, having early developed gold and diamond mines and established trade, and though at times they have been unruly, they are today an element much appreciated by the Dutch in the development of the country.

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