Upon the 8th of March he gave notice that he should again call the attention of the House to the subject. He had hoped that those papers would have been prepared before Parliament met, and he was not at present aware of the causes which had delayed them. Upon the 4th of March he complained of the delay of the papers promised by the noble Lord, and upon the same day the noble Lord said. At the same time, he was not aware that the Government were in possession of any information beyond the reports of officers of Her Majesty's Navy. That the Government were ready to lay upon the table any information they possessed on the subject to which the hon. Whether he would lay upon the table of the House the reports furnished by the commanding officers, whether of Her Majesty's or the East India Company's navy, engaged in operations for the alleged suppression of piracy against the natives of Borneo, on the rivers Moratatias, Sarebas, Sakarran, and other places during 1849 together with the correspondence between Sir James Brooke and Her Majesty's Government on the same subject? He asked the question, because very great anxiety existed in the public mind on the subject. On the 4th of February, 1850, he asked the noble Lord at the head of the Government. Hume) came down to the House and asked the First Lord of the Admiralty whether he had received any despatch from the Nemesis and the answer was that none had been received, although there was a naval regulation, by which every officer commanding a fleet was bound to despatch to the Admiralty by the first opportunity an account of every pro-Ĭeeding of such a nature. In order to show that he was not actuated by any private or personal feelings in the matter, he might state that it was first brought under his attention by an extract from a Singapore paper which appeared in the Daily News of the 25th of June, 1849, and which stated that in March and April the naval force of the Nemesis, belonging to the East India Company, and in the pay of the British Government, had joined a collection of prahus with Sir James Brooke, and had proceeded to attack certain portions of the Dyaks of the Sarebas and Sakarran rivers, in the island of Borneo but the paragraph which most attracted his attention was the one in which it was asked whether it was creditable to our naval forces to aid or take part in cruel butcheries, and brutal murders of the helpless and the defenceless? After reading this account, he (Mr. He was not the only one who thought so, for he learnt that a great public association in this metropolis had had the matter under their consideration. He was not the tool of any man, and he had taken up this question upon his own conviction of the necessity and justice of doing so as a public man. Hume) had been urged on by an individual who was hostile to Sir James Brooke but he denied that such was the fact. He could not for a moment acquiesce in any such opinion, and he was anxious to remind the House that he had endeavoured from a very early period to bring the question before their consideration but he must say he never knew a question which was kept in so much doubt and secrecy, or in which he had encountered so much difficulty in obtaining from the Government those official documents and papers which ought to have been on the table long ago. He had been asked that very day why he brought forward this question at a period so long subsequent to the transactions to which it referred, and when it was impossible to remedy the evil. He deprecated that course at the time, and he still deprecated it, for he wished it toīe considered as a public question of great importance, affecting the character of this country. Gentleman had diverted the attention of the House from that which was a public question, to a question of certain squabbles between private individuals. He was sorry that, upon the last occasion when this subject was introduced, some hon. He said, that at last an opportunity was afforded him of calling the attention of the House to transactions which had long been before the public, and to which he had given great attention. Rose to propose the Motion of which he had given notice.
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