which excited our admiration. They are peculiarly a
warlike nation; indeed, they are fond of war. Every man is a soldier,
and when ordered out to join the ranks, obeys without receiving any pay,
providing his own arms. This fact, at once, establishes that they are
inclined to war. Their aims generally consist of a double-handed sword,
a weapon of great force, and very large spears; but every one will
possess a musket if he can, and if it has not a lock, he will fire it
with a match. It is in this point that the Burmahs are so deficient in
aims: we used to consider it a very courageous act to venture to fire
off a Burmese musket, they were in such a wretched condition: and to
crown all, every man _makes his own gunpowder_. Now it may be easily
imagined what stuff this must be; as, previous to an expected combat,
each Burmah sits down and composes the article to the best of his
knowledge and belief. The consequences are, that when these muskets do
go off (and it is ten to one they do not), it is again ten to one that
the bullet falls short, from the inefficacy of the powder. There is
another singular fact, and one which proves that they have been used to
muskets but a short time: it is, that they have no bullet-moulds or
leaden bullets. All their bullets are of iron, hammered as round as
they can hammer them at the forge; of course the windage produced by
this imperfect shape, occasions it to deviate much from its intended
direction.

The guns on their stockades and war-boats are equally defective from bad
powder, and the hammered iron bullets. It is difficult to know where
they could have collected such a curious assemblage. Sometimes you will
fall in with a small brass piece of exquisite Spanish manufacture, at
others you will find them of the strangest forms that can be conceived.
I rather think they were purchased, or taken as a part of the duties on
vessels trading to Rangoon. I recollect once at the first taking of a
stockade, we knocked off the trunnions of an old iron gun, and left it
there as useless. The Burmahs reoccupied the stockade, and we had to
take it a second time, when we found that they had most ingeniously
supplied the want of trunnions with iron hoops and rivets, and the gun
was fired at us before we entered. At another time, we entered a
stockade which had kept up a brisk fire for a few minutes, and to our
surprise found that they had made _wooden_ guns, very well bound and
braced with