We referred briefly elsewhere to Mr. W.B. Pryer's report to the Foreign Office for the year 1888 on the Territory of the British North Borneo Company. As the Acting Consul-General, Mr. 'A.S. Hamilton, mentions to the Marquis of Salisbury when forwarding the report, Mr. Pryer has been in the service of the Company from the time in which it was first started up to the present; he was, in fact, the first representative of Messrs. Dent and Overbeck in the territory. No one therefore knows the territory better than he does; and the fullest confidence may be placed in this report, which he makes, not as a North Borneo Company's official, but as British Consular Agent at Sandakan. Unquestionably there is no practical inconvenience in Mr. Pryer's holding both positions but it is conceivable that a British subject might have a grievance against the territorial government, and if he went to his Consul for assistance, he would be surprised to find that the Consul himself was also a territorial official.
Mr. Pryer's report comes mainly to this—and it is what he told his friends when he was last in Shanghai—that the success of the Company depends entirely on Tobacco. Workable minerals have not yet been found; the limit of the production of jungle produce seems to have been reached with a total export, including timber, of something over half a million dollars; and the only marked increases in the imports are in machinery and the supplies needed for the new tobacco estates that are being opened. In reference to imports, Mr. ryer is able to say that "year after year the importation of cloth steadily increases, denoting more settled andvivilised habits amongst the natives but when we turn to the figures, we find that the value of the cloth imported during the first half of 1888 was only $93,500, or $20,000 more than in the same peed in 1887, which is being thankul for small mercies. As regards ex+ ports, what Mr. Pryer says is decidedly weighty. After stating that, as we have already mentioned, the limit of jungle produce has been reached, he says:—"If it had not been for the recent movement in tobacco cultivation, this would have been a serious matter as the limit of exports naturally governs the limit of revenue in this country, and it is generally felt that should not be allowed to depend so the future prospects of the. country peas on this one industry, as they and that more vigorous, efforts should be made by the British North Borneo Company for the initiation and development of other cultivations for which the country is adapted."
Mr. Pryer explains that the plan the Company adopted to find out what products were best adapted to the soil and climate, and could be cultivated with profit, was to offer land at such a low rate, one dollar an acre, as would attract capitalists and planters. For a long time it was virtually a failure, or as he puts it, "the absence of any information on which intending planters could base their calculations has proved a serious deterrent up to the present time, and it has been found very difficult to attract new comers in consequence." He adds a list of one year's exports from Singapore, to shew what might be grown on the, presumably, equally fertile lands of British North Borneo; and mentions that "various cultivations are now being attempted by different people wonder, therefore, that planting operations in North Borneo are closely watched by a great many people, as it is hoped that of the various experiments now being undertaken, if but some turn out successful, North Borneo, with its enormous extent of unoccupied land and good soil, will offer a large field for the employment of British capital, and of many young men of good bringing-up, who cannot find congenial occupation in the over-crowded labour market in England." It was the discovery that the very valuable tobacco grown in Sumatra could be grown equally well in North Borneo that has come to the rescue of the territory, and Mr. Pryer gives a list of some sixteen companies
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.