Frank Marryat was a sailor, artist and author. The particular book I’m highlighting is Borneo and the Indian Archipelago, where Frank chronicles and illustrates the sights and scenes of his travels through Asia.
The image that first got me to look for this book is this:
This is the signing of the Treaty of Labuan where Brunei signed Labuan off to the Brits. Frank was there, and describes 7 Europeans including himself was in the audience chamber with hundreds of armed natives surrounding them. What is really interesting is that you row your way to the audience chamber. Frank also describes the city built on water with hundreds of canoes, and only a quarter of the city is built on dry land.
The important buildings, Sultan’s palace, mosque, etc are built on dry land. He also describes a large three-sided building facing the water, which I assume is this audience chamber he illustrated.
The architecture is really interesting, it is built in context of the river.
Here are some other cool illustrations:
He described Brunei as having lots of different people, Muruts, Malays, Arabs. Lots of spears and umbrellas.
A loondoo Dayak (Land Dayak? They called all the different tribes on Borneo Dayaks)
Native of Batan
Dayak War Prahu
Teeth of Dayaks
Malay Chief (Sooloo, is that Sulu?)
Procession of Sultan of Gonong Tabor (Gunung Tabur?)
View In Samboagan (Zamboanga City in Philipines)
Illanoan Pirate (Iranun people)
Illanoan Pirates
Natives of Northeast Coast Borneo
Links and downloads
+ I originally got the e book where I extracted the images from Project Gutenberg here.
+ Archive.org has a scanned version (it’s pretty) here.
+ Download just the illustrations here in a zip file here.
Text by Mun Kao. This post was originally published on November 4, 2017 on the A Thousand Thousand Islands Patreon.
