Marudu or Marudo or Malloodoo

 

A couple of years ago, a friend and I made a brief visit to the Kudat area. It is definitely a sleepy area far from the hustle and bustle of Kota Kinabalu or Sandakan. Beneath it all, it was the location of a very interesting part of the fabric of the early history of North Borneo which I shall elaborate later. Stamps first!

This negative picture clearly shows that the spelling used was Marudo on this particular fiscal cancellation but it was thought to be "Marudu".

Green cancellation

Violet cancellation

I prefer colour inked fiscal cancellation because they look so much better. There was no post office at Marudu in the early days of chartered rule. A district office was present to deal with fiscal and legal matters as there were large plantations in the area. The nearest town was Kudat which is about 80km to the north and Jesselton was 120km to the south west. The earliest post office located here was called Bandau and started in the early 1960s. Around the early 1970s, the name was changed to Kota Marudu. There is a gap between between the dates of the post office postmarks between 1971 and 1976 which implies that there was no functioning post office between these dates. You can see my Bandau postmarks on this blog by clicking : https://mynorthborneostamps.blogspot.com/2014/06/bandau-cancellation-and-sembulan-cover.html

The history of this area dates back at least to the 15th century as it was present on maps of that period. The most famous personality of this area was Sharif Usman or Syarif Osman. Short writeup here:           https://thesabahsociety.com/event/the-fall-of-marudu-history-of-syarif-osman/                                         There is also a book for readers who are more interested.

Essentially, it is now believed that he was not a pirate at all but painted as such to further the imperialist designs of Rajah Brooke and his friends at the Colonial Office. The settlement which he presided would have been the largest in North Borneo at the time. He ruled over a large area in this northern part of Borneo and was autonomous enough to be considered the rightful ruler of an area separate from the sultanates of both Brunei and Sulu. 

A very intriguing German Brotzen postmark on the North Borneo 1889 1/2c stamp

An interesting facet of philately is that it often involves mystery and detective work. Some years ago, I acquire the following item which has a foreign postmark on a genuine 1889 1/2 postage & revenue stamp. As we should know, there are at least 4 types of forgeries of this stamp by Fournier, Carame etc

It took me quite some time to work out this cancel. It is not straight forward as the postmark had been applied twice with the second one rotated clockwise about 30 degrees. Logically, I thought the cancel was from neighbouring Dutch East Indies/Indonesia. But I was unable to identify it from the list that I have. Recently, I decided to reconstruct the postmark. And then I realised that the postmark is similar to that on some of my late 18th and early 19th century German stamps.

The Germany & Colonies Philatelic Society has been very helpful in confirming that the village of Brotzen was part of Prussia and there was a small postal agency but no information on any postmarks. What are the caveats here? Firstly, the date of 4 7 1911 is quite late for this stamp but from the information that I have, this issue of stamps were valid till 1935. Secondly, how did this stamp end up so far from its place of origin? However, there were thousands of such stamps available in Britain just across the English Channel. And Paris, Brussels, Berlin etc would have this for sale in their stamp shops as well. And also prior to WWW1, there were quite a few Germans working in North Borneo on plantations, ships and so on.

Brotzen in Prussia is now Broczyno in north western Poland and was part of Prussia prior to 1945 (wikipedia). I found a Brotzen registration label on Ebay and this would be some evidence that this office did exist. This is possibly one of the most uncommon postmarks from prewar Germany.

Ebay
 

It has been suggested that this stamp was possibly used to uprate a returning reply postal stationary card from North Borneo. As mentioned above, there were Germans working in North Borneo and one of them might have corresponded with friends or relatives at Brotzen.