William Cowie
William Cowie ran guns to the Sultan of Sulu through the Spanish blockade, brokered the lease of North Borneo that the company he later ran was built on, and as its managing director made the treaty with Mat Salleh that his own officers would not keep. He was a Scot, born in 1849, a marine engineer who by the mid-1870s was operating a steamer out of Labuan into the Sulu archipelago, where Spain was trying to close the sultan's ports and the sultan paid well for powder and rifles landed at night. Sultan Jamal ul-Azam trusted him, and when Baron von Overbeck and Alfred Dent wanted the sultan's signature on a grant of the north of Borneo in January 1878, it was Cowie who took them in, translated, and got the document signed on the deck of a ship at Jolo. The word in it that may mean lease or may mean cession is the basis of the Philippine claim to Sabah today, and the North Borneo page says so. He had a share in the concession, lost it, and spent the 1880s trading. In 1894 he came back as managing director of the British North Borneo Chartered Company in London, with a plan to make the territory pay by railway and tobacco and Chinese labour, and with the conviction that the resident officers on the spot were the problem. Mat Salleh had by then burned the company's station at Pulau Gaya, and in April 1898 Cowie went out and met him in person. They agreed that he could hold the Tambunan valley under his own authority in return for peace. The governor and the district officers thought it a surrender to a rebel and let it collapse within the year, and Salleh died in his fort in 1900. Cowie's railway from Jesselton to Tenom was built between 1896 and 1905 and lost money for a generation. He kept the company solvent by cutting everything else and was still its managing director when he died in 1910.
- Lived: 1849 CE – 1910 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: merchant, colonial_administrator
