haps the most remarkable. He resided for some years in Bengal, where he followed what was then regarded as the hazardous occupation of producing raw silk in competition with the Commercial Resident of the East India Company. That was in the days when the arbitrary power which that Government possessed was intrusted to its servants, who, as is well known, sometimes used it in the most unscrupulous manner to crush the spirit of private enterprise, and to retain in their hands the virtual monopoly of a branch of industry which, by an act of the British legislature in 1813, had been declared open to all its subjects under certain restrictions.
While in Bengal, Henry Gouger was attacked by an illness which baffled medical skill, and he was advised, as a last resource, to try a change of climate as affording the only means of recovery. On the suggestion of a friend, he determined to make a voyage to Rangoon, the chief seaport of the Burmese Dominions, and thence by the Irrawaddi to Amerapoorah, then the capital of the Empire. His idea was, that in addition to finding health, he might find that a highly lucrative commerce could be established with Amerapoorah and the regions beyond, especially in the introduction of British cotton manufactures, which were at that time beginning to supplant the native fabrics in most of the markets of the East.
Unhappily these dreams did not come true. The Burmese Empire was then (1822) a terra
