Word: islanded
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mistakes. The British had not scorched the earth as they should have. At Penang, strategic island base on Malaya's east coast, they had destroyed military establishments in the withdrawal, but had left warehouses full of rubber, several months' supplies of rice, and-incredible blunder-all utilities working like a charm. At week's end the unscorched Penang radio repeatedly broadcast: "Hello, Singapore, how do you like our bombings...
They dispatched several naval ships to Singapore. Dutch submarines harassed the Japanese supply lines for the assault on Malaya. Dutch planes attacked the Japanese attackers of Mindanao, the southernmost major Philippine Island. Dutch planes and submarines played a doomful tune on the hulls of Japanese ships heading for Raja Brooke's Sarawak...
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...
Highways embroider no more than the coast of this huge treasure island. The only lines inland are rivers, leading into a mysterious, mountainous land of superstition and legend-the land of the Dyaks, the wild men of Borneo, who used to collect heads as Westerners collect stamps; who believe that their victims' spirits enter their own bodies and add to their strength; who live, 50 families in a bunch, in communal houses up on stilts to be safe from orangutans, honey bears, rhinoceroses, elephants, snakes...
...Hong Kong Club were as refreshing as the food of the great hotels was dull. Shops bore names that circled the rim of Empire: Kelly & Walsh sold Britons their books, Whiteaway & Laidlaw sold them practically everything else. The white monolithic skyscraper of the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank dominated the island's waterfront as it dominated Britain's Pacific Empire, looking down upon the lesser establishments of Jardine, Matheson & Co., Butterfield and Swire, other British merchants and entrepreneurs...