Early American adventurers in Borneo: a brief note and request for information
This brief note by G.N. Appell (Harvard University) reports a reference in the journal of James Austin Wilder to early American traders on the Baram River in Sarawak, and requests further information from readers.
Summary
Appell draws on the informal journal kept by James Austin Wilder, a Harvard graduate and descendant of the missionary-physician Gerrit Parmale Judd, who joined the Furness-Hiller Pacific expedition in 1895. The expedition reached Sarawak in 1896 and, at the invitation of Charles Hose, used Claudetown on the Baram River as a base for several months of ethnographic and biological collecting (p. 220).
During a visit to a Kayan long-house, the headman told Hose a story of two white men who had come up the Baram in a schooner in the 1830s, before the White Raja’s time, selling “heads, cloths, etc.” at enormous profit. The headman identified them as coming “from the land where the drill comes from! America!” and Wilder speculated they might have been “Bully Hayes and Captain Peese of infamous history” (pp. 220–221). Appell states he has been unable to locate further information on these individuals and invites readers to contribute any relevant details.