The stranded oil men had no choice but to retreat into the jungle. They broke up into small groups for what proved to be a desperate effort to find some route of evacuation through the jungle. It was a terrible ordeal. They made their way by foot or in proas, beset by hunger, exhaustion, malaria, dysentery, and fear, their parties growing smaller and smaller as the ill and dead dropped away. From natives they encountered, they learned that the Japanese had landed all over Borneo. Trapped in the jungle, they felt like rats in a cage. A few did finally escape from the island. Of the seventy-five
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