Abstract: Early museum collections of Iban textiles from Borneo generally date from the late 1880s. This paper presents seven Iban ikat skirt cloths (kain kebat) with accession dates in the mid-nineteenth century: six cloths donated by James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the 1850s, and a slightly earlier specimen at the Ethnological Museum, Berlin, collected between 1846 and 1848 by Oscar von Kessel in Kalimantan. This paper follows the convoluted accession paths of the James Brooke donation and reviews the events, institutions, and personages involved in the context of early Victorian England; it catalogues the dispersal of Kessel’s extensive collection of over a thousand objects to various European institutions; and finally, the paper considers the implications of these seven early specimens for our understanding of Iban weaving history.