Muara, indeed, signifying in Malay a river's mouth. The Revd. J. E. Tennison-Wood, well known in Australia as an authority on geological questions, thus describes the Muara coalfields:—"About twenty miles to the South-west of Labuan is the mouth of the Brunai river. Here the rocks are of quite a different character, and much older. There are sandstones, shales, and grits, with ferruginous joints. The beds are inclined at angles of 25 to 45 degrees. They are often altered into a kind of chert. At Muara there is an outcrop of coal seams twenty, twenty-five and twenty-six feet thick. The coal is of excellent quality, quite bitumenised, and not brittle. The beds are being worked by private enterprise. I saw no fossils, but the beds and the coal reminded me much of the older Australian coals along the Hunter river. The mines are of great value. They are rented for a few thousand dollars by two enterprising Scotchmen, from the Sultan of Brunai. The same sovereign would part with the place altogether for little or nothing. Why not have our coaling station there? Or what if Germany, France or Russia should purchase the same from the independent Sultan of Brunai?" As if to give point to the concluding remarks, a Russian man-of-war visited Muara and Brunai early in 1887, and shewed considerable interest in the coal mines.[1]
CHAPTER III.
The fairest way, perhaps, of giving my readers an idea of what Brunai was and what it is, will be by quoting first from the description of the Italian Pigafetta, who was there in 1521, and then from that of my friend the late Mr. Stair Elphinstone Dalrymple, who visited the city with me in 1884. Pigafetta's description I extract from Crawford's Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands.
"When," says he, "we reached the city, we had to wait two hours in the prahu (boat or barge) until there had arrived two elephants, caparisoned in silk-cloth, and twelve men, each
- ↑ The British Protectorate has obviated the danger.
