his passage home; consequently, all the trouble, anxiety, and
care, fell upon me. I can venture to assert that, with the exception of
about twenty men, a more disorderly and mutinous set than the fellows I
had now under my charge, never disgraced the garb of soldiers.

An Eastern voyage, either home or out, is dull and monotonous enough,
even with an agreeable party. Passengers we had none, save one lady and
her little girl, her sick husband, the captain of the detachment, then
lingering on the brink of the grave, and a young officer of the
Company's Bengal Artillery, who survived but a few days the tossing of
the ship, and was committed to a watery grave, ere the bloom of boyhood
had left his cheek. We had one doctor on board, and a young officer of
the Company's service, in charge of the Company's troops. Of the misery
of the passage the reader may have some idea, when he is informed that
we had upwards of two hundred men on board, some without legs, others
without arms, and twenty of whom had been removed from hospital only a
week or ten days before we sailed. Every man had a box or trunk, bed and
bedding, with parrots, minors, and cockatoos, and all these poor
creatures, with four women and four children, were huddled on one small
deck, every one that could move endeavouring to seize the more secure
spot, and tumbling over and treading on those who were unable, either
from sickness or drunkenness, to move or assist themselves. The smell
and heat below were beyond description. Added to all this, the men were,
during the whole voyage, in a state of continual drunkenness, having
means of procuring liquor privately, by some device which I never could
discover. All my exertions were insufficient to check them in this
practice, or indeed to keep them in any kind of order, from want of the
usual means of enforcing obedience, there being neither a place of
confinement, nor handcuffs, nor any other means of securing the
ringleaders, in the ship. Nothing but the greatest personal risk on my
part, and that of the Company's officer, Lieutenant Rock, prevented open
mutiny among the troops; and I consider it a mercy that we were not both
thrown overboard, which was more than once threatened.

Some of the more refractory among the soldiers soon discovered that my
means to enforce obedience were limited; in consequence of which
three-fourths of them set my orders at defiance, refusing in the most
peremptory manner to obey me, even