The first stamp of North Borneo were issued in March 1883. It was a 2c stamp and very soon it was realised that a higher denominated stamp would be required for mail beyond North Borneo, Labuan and Brunei. 8c was the rate to the Straits Settlements, China and Japan. To save on stock, the 2c stamp was overprinted in late March or early April 1883 initially with "8 CENTS." vertically and then changed almost immediately to "EIGHT CENTS." horizontally. SG2 is therefore a rare stamp with lots of imitations and almost certainly no mint copy exist. We are very lucky with SG3 as it gives us such a plethora of various local and foreign cancellations.
Even though the stamps arrived from GB in March 1883, the cancellers did not arrive until January 1884. So the earliest cancellations were pencancels usually one or two lines across. They were either red or brown (?Sandakan) or with blue crayon (? Kudat). Used SG2 were all cancelled by blue crayon which implied that they were only used at Kudat only and for a very limited time anyway.
I have seen this blurred mess of black lines before on very early used NB stamps. It is only recently that I realised it is the B62 cancellation from Hong Kong. The inference is that this stamp was cancelled at Sandakan with a deep brown pen cancel of 2 lines on its way to China or Japan. The cover transited at HK and received the B62. One make quite clearly the "2" and a bit of the "6" with the enhanced image when compared to a clear B62 on a HK adhesive. This is plated as Transfer A stamp 15 with the Type 4 overprint. The stamps were printed in sheets of 50. This is the 5th stamp on the second row of 10. The "EIGHT CENTS." surcharge was in a row of 10 with each slightly different with respect to the positions of the letters to the ones below.
This is another example, again with 2 deep brown lines and a messy looking black cancel. It is impossible to see any of the B62 but the pattern of the black bars would fit perfectly. This plated as Tranfer A stamp 41 with the Type 5 overprint. Similar looking items from Transfer B, C and transfers D and E (1886 perf 14 ) are all fakes.
This is SG1 which is plated as transfer C stamp 23 or R3/2 with a bar type cancellation which I initially thought was another B62. Transfer C SG1 stamps have a different and lighter shade of brown in comparison to transfers B and C. They also have better perforations but more plate flaws.
Manipulation of the image reveals disappointingly a 107 bar killer type cancellation. The absence of a North Borneo cancel would suggested use in 1883 even though we would have expected some kind of pen cancel. It was quite likely the post officer missed cancelling this stamp and therefore it received an arrival cancel.
This is the GB Bradford 107 cancellation and it seems that the NB stamp was used on a postal item to Bradford ? in 1883.
