Word: borneo
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These words were almost a century old last week, and almost a hundred times as ironic as their author, Sir James Brooke, the first swashbuckling white Raja of Sarawak in Borneo, thought they ever would be. For last week evildoers with scant respect for the English union jack descended on his Sarawak...
...obvious to the Dutch that if the Japanese had an easy time in Malaya, if they took the Philippines, then the Dutch islands of Borneo, Java, Sumatra would be next on the list of the Mikado's Lord High Executioner. And first to fall would probably be Borneo, of which the Brookes' Sarawak is a small part...
...Borneo is larger than Japan, three times as large as Great Britain. It is, in fact, the third largest island in the world.* Dutch industriousness and British imperiousness have only picked at the tasseled fringes of its wealth: its oil, rubber, hard woods, copra, coconuts, hemp, pepper, sago. In places red veins of iron ore crumble right out of the earth's surface, but they have not yet been tapped. Coal is known to lie just under the surface, but it has not yet been mined. With all Sarawak's natural wealth, some of Raja Brooke...
...Japanese landed in Sarawak, on the wild and oily island of Borneo. So far this was only a holding attack on Singapore's flank; it might eventually develop into a quest for oil, but the British reported that they had already destroyed the wells in the region threatened by the Japanese...
...mainland. In snatching Davao they were also going after a base, 1,600 miles from Singapore, that could be another link in a chain around the Philippines, through the Mandated Islands, from Tokyo to Singapore. If the Japanese could grab it, while they also set themselves up in North Borneo, they would have a fairly well-protected detour around the submarine-guarded narrows in the South China...