The Calcutta Review/Series 1/Number 1/Article 1
THE
CALCUTTA REVIEW.
Art. I.—1. Anglo-India, Social, Moral, and Political; being a collection of papers from the Asiatic Journal. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1838.
2. Society in India, by an Indian Officer. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1841.
3. The Stranger in India, or Three Years in Calcutta, by G. W. Johnson, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1843.
4. The Bengallee, or Sketches of Society in the East—a new Edition, 2 vols. 8vo. Calcutta. 1843.
Not very many years have passed away, since even well-informed people in England knew little more about an Anglo-Indian, than that he was very rich—very yellow—and very ill-tempered; that he dwelt in a country where fevers and liver complaints were abundant, where tigers and mosquitoes preyed on the human race, where hookahs were smoked and widows burned, and curry eaten and wealth acquired; that he left England young, healthy and poor, and came back old, decrepit, and rich; that he spent a life of luxurious solitude and wretchedness, and brought home his ill-gotten wealth, to bestow it after a few years of isolation and discontent, upon some distant relative, or compliant friend, who had invested his patience in a profitable market, and borne with the old man’s humors to the last. These liver-decayed old Indians were principally useful in bad novels and worse comedies. They appeared, in the third volume or the fourth act, to make a virtuous maiden happy for life, or to disconcert the schemes of some unprincipled nephew (for it will be observed that in novels and comedies old Indians are always uncles) to the consummation of poetical justice and the advancement of public morals. Of India itself little more was known, than that Calcutta and Madras were, somehow or other, two of its principal components; that the climate was very hot and very unhealthy; and that the Great Mogul, the hero of the playing cards, was one of its most magnificent potentates. Whether Madras was in Calcutta, or Calcutta in Madras; or whether they were contiguous cities, like London and Westminster; whether Tippoo Sahib was the Great Mogul, or whether the Great Mogul was one of the Princesses of Oude: all these were questions, which only the very knowing were competent satisfactorily to solve. We have now before us a novel written just a quarter of a century ago—one, too, which enjoyed some popularity in its day—wherein the heroine is said to have proceeded to Madras up the River Hooghly; and another party is described as spending his time between Calcutta and Madras, as though they were as close as London and Hampstead. We quote this as no solitary instance of the amount of knowledge possessed even by book-writers, when we were some few years younger than we are now. It is not to be forgotten that a certain reverend poet, novelist and dramatist, conspicuous less for his talents in either of these capacities, than for his intense admiration of a profligate monarch, commenced his greatest poetical work with the notable line—
Bengal being about as famous for its mountains, as the PaysBas; but not more so. We need not multiply examples. Whilst writers, undertaking to instruct the public, manifested this amount of ignorance, it is not surprising that more ordinary people, in the intercourse of daily life, fell into the most egregious blunders;—confounding the three presidencies; conceiving India to be one small integral principality, traversed in a few days; entrusting to a Bengal cadet or writer, letters or parcels for parties at Bombay, with strict injunctions to deliver them in person; enquiring from a returned Bengallee after some denizen of Madras, whom of course he “must know”—all these things, we say, were not to be wondered at, even although there were few respectable families in the country, not connected, through some of their members, with our glorious dependencies in the east.
Until within the last ten years, the communication between England and India has been both slow and irregular. The establishment of a line of steam-vessels, reducing the distance by two-thirds, and conveying not only mails but passengers, from India to England in little more than a month—this, following close upon the renewal of the Charter, under which the country was thrown open to adventurers of every class—has increased, in an enormous degree, the amount of passengers and letters, despatched to and from India; and by giving a proportionate impetus to the local press, still further multiplied the sources of information thus thrown open to the mother country. The number of letters, despatched every month, by the Bombay steamers, exceeds thirty thousand; the number of printed papers ten thousand. Many of these letters and papers are delivered in London five weeks after they are despatched; and in little more than two months an answer to a letter sent from Bombay may be received at that place. This rapidity of communication, coupled with its certainty,[1] is an extreme provocative to frequent correspondence, not only between parties engaged in business, but between private individuals. In former years a letter was four, five, six, perhaps, seven months on its way. “We are now,” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, in 1805, “within five days of six months from the date of our last London papers;” and again in 1811, “seven months from the date of the last London News.” If an answer were received within the year, the letter-writer thought himself fortunate. This was disheartening and repelling. Correspondence, even between intimate friends and dear relatives, soon flagged; fell off by degrees; and ere long ceased altogether. Parties in England, or in the interior of India, had no knowledge of the date of a vessel’s departure. Hence further delays. A letter was, perhaps, several weeks, lying idle at the General Post-office, or in the duftur-khana of a Calcutta agent. After this long rest, it was probably despatched by a vessel, bound for several intermediate ports, and did not reach its destination, until other letters of a more recent date had been received. All this was vexatious, in the highest degree, and as regular correspondence was out of the question, people soon began to meditate on the expediency of abandoning that, which was fraught with so much inconvenience and annoyance. The establishment of a regular Steam Communication between the two countries has remedied all this, and made every Englishman and English-woman, in the three presidencies, a periodical letter-writer.
The rapidity and regularity of the communication between the two countries induced, at the same time, a greater desire after Indian News. The number of local journals despatched to England was soon multiplied. A class of publications, unknown before, sprang up, and in a short time acquired a strenuous vitality. Papers were prepared, expressly for the Overland Mail, containing a summary of the month’s news, and issued on the morning of Post-day. These were despatched, in large numbers, by Indian residents to their friends at home. The British press soon began to perceive the importance of obtaining the earliest and most correct Indian intelligence. The leading morning journals secured the services of clever and experienced correspondents at Calcutta and Bombay. These writers despatched their letters, containing an abstract of the month’s news, and the most interesting extracts, afforded by the Indian journals, to the care of an agent at Paris, whose business it was to forward the despatches to the coast by a special courier. Thus the French mail was often anticipated by several hours. Second editions were published; and the Indian news, for the time, was even more talked of than the last partisan debate in Parliament, or the state of the poll at a pending election.
It must be admitted, however, that much of the interest, which has lately been attached to the news from India, owes its birth to the important and exciting character of the events, which have been enacted in the romantic countries beyond the Sutlej and the Indus. The history of the English in India, during the last six years, is one of extraordinary interest. The chronicles of the whole world do not furnish a series of more vivid and exciting scenes of picturesque warfare. Contemplating the whole, it is difficult to believe, that we are not poring over some highly wrought narrative of fictitious adventure. “Truth is strange; stranger than fiction.” The siege of Herat—Herat, wrested from the grasp of the Persian by the wondrous energy of a young British officer,[2] who chance-guided to the “gate of India,” threw himself into the beleaguered city to revive the failing energies of the besieged, and sustain them unvanquished, until diplomacy had done the rest; the assemblage of the “Army of the Indus;” the magnificent gathering at Ferozepore; the march of the Bengal and Bombay columns of the grand force, through an unknown and dangerous country; the triumphant entry of Shah Soojah into Candahar; the capture of the stronghold of Ghuznee; the preparations made for our reception at Urghundee, where Dost Mahomed, having drawn up his guns in position, was basely deserted by his followers; the flight of the Dost; the pursuit of the chivalrous Outram; the progress to Caubul; the mummeries enacted there; the march to Bameean; the passage of the Hindoo Khoosh; the return of the Bombay Troops; the capture of Khelat; and the death of Mehrab Khan; the lull, the deceitful calm, and then the re-appearance of the Dost, the assemblage of the Oosbegs, and the rising of the Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/16 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/17 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/18 tunately, however, we do not rely merely upon the adventitious aid of an exciting period, in India, or the adjacent countries, to render our glorious dependency familiar to the home-staying circle. The opening of the Trade and the liberation of the press had accomplished much, before Central Asia became the vast theatre of war; and these influences will exist, in increasing force, when the Peace which Lord Ellenborough restored to Asia, in a proclamation, and inscribed on a medal, has really begun to spread its branches over the land. Since the annihilation of the Company’s monopoly, the annual amount of shipping in the River Hooghly has encreased more than 100 per cent. The number of vessels which arrived at Calcutta, in 1832, was 246; in 1839, it was 516; and it has since gone on gradually increasing. Of the increase of passengers brought by these vessels we do not know the extent. We have no statistics to enable us to record an accurate opinion, and we have no leisure to prepare any. The amount of the British population in India has, however, greatly increased; and in the present day a propensity to visit England, much greater than that which existed in the old times, exists among all classes of the community. Occasionally, we meet an old Indian, who has never set his foot on British soil since he first arrived in India, as a writer or a cadet; but this class of men is becoming rapidly extinct.
Passages to Europe are cheaper than they were, and more rapidly performed. The passenger vessels, too, as regards comfort and accommodation, are of a greatly superior description.—They are, indeed, floating hotels, or boarding houses, where a man must be somewhat enjoyment-proof, if he cannot contrive to enjoy himself. It is true that fruit and fresh-laid eggs and green-peas are denied to him; but he has good meat, excellent poultry, wines of every description, from Champaigne to Sherry; and the best of sauces, a sharp appetite. He cannot play at billiards, it is true, but he can enjoy his rubber of whist and an enjoyable thing it is, in a snug cuddy, with a glass of mulled wine within reach, on a cold evening, rounding the Cape. What if the floor does form an angle of 45° with the horizon? Such little inconveniences as these soon become a source of amusement. One can put up with a good many discomforts in a place, where there are no bills. The immunity from all the cares of business and house-keeping, which the passenger enjoys, is truly delightful. He pays his passage money, before he ascends the side of the vessel; and is kept like a prince for three or four months, without one disturbing thought of the morrow. No wonder that, aided by the fresh bracing air, he soon runs to flesh. Among the amusements of a voyage, weighing is not one of the least considerable. It is pleasant, especially in a homeward-bound, to watch the gradual advance of the passengers in obesity. Like Voltaire’s trees, they grow, because they have nothing else to do. But people rarely know when they are happy, and, except when strong attachments are formed on board—and such attachments are rarely otherwise than deep-rooted and permanent—every body is glad to escape from the vessel. This is not unnatural, though the ship be the finest in the world, and the captain the best fellow possible. Indeed, now-a-days, both ships and captains are unexceptionable. The magnificent passenger-vessels, built by Messrs. Green and Messrs. Wigram, officered as they almost invariably are by gentlemen, leave one nothing to desire. These splendid locomotive boarding-houses are great inducements to the voyage to England. The comfort, the rapidity, and the cheapness of the passage tempt many to undertake it, who, when a ship was five or six months on its way, and an indifferent cabin cost five hundred pounds,[3] would have prolonged their residence in India, till wealth enabled, or death compelled, the worn-out old Indian to retire finally from the scene of his labors.
The establishment of a regular line of Government Steamers from Bombay, and of the Oriental and Peninsular Company’s noble steam-ships, from Calcutta, has encreased still more the home-going tendency; and we not seldom find a hundred passengers embarking, in a single month, on board the Hindostan or Bentinck. There are other powerful influences to which this tendency may be traced. Not the least of these are the greater liberality of the retiring regulations, now in force in the Company’s services; the establishment of sundry retiring and other funds; and the increase of marriages in India, strengthening as it naturally does, through the medium of family connexions, the hold of his country upon the heart of the exile. In former days, when wives were few and native mistresses many, the greater number of residents were tied to India, and had little inducement to quit it. Now, however, wives are many, mistresses few: and whilst the number of illegitimate children is diminishing every year, the lawful offspring of British residents in India is progressively on the increase. The books of that noble institution, the Military Orphan Asylum, show, that whereas in 1810, the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate children subsisting on the charity of the Fund, was as ten to eight; in 1840 there were forty legitimate wards to every eleven of the other class. In the present day, there is no scarcity of brides; and Merchants’ clerks and Ensigns are eligibles. A married man has many inducements to visit his home; his wife’s health may require it; his children, perhaps, are sufficiently advanced in years to render it necessary that they should be removed to England for the sake both of physical health and mental culture. The voyage has now no terrors for delicate women or young children. The latter thrive luxuriantly on board-ship; they are the happiest of the happy. They scamper about the deck; pull the ropes; and are great favorites with the sailors. They never slip through the port-holes, and seldom tumble down the hatchways. The sweet little cherub, who sits up aloft, and keeps watch for poor Jack, seems to have one eye at least to watch over these infant passengers. Times have greatly changed, since that excellent man, Mr. Shore (afterwards Lord Teignmouth) was twice under the necessity of tearing himself from a wife, to whom he was fondly attached, rather than that she should brave the horrors of the deep, and the dangers of so savage a country as India, by accompanying him to the scene of his labors.
Then an old Indian was a rarity; a young one a greater rarity, in England. Now they are plenty as blackberries. You can scarcely walk into a dining house (provided it be a good one) in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, at seven o'clock, without finding yourself in company with a batch of them. Indian Officers on Furlough—private affairs or sick certificate—swarm about this locality; young men, too, the greater number of them. The race of genuine old Indians is nearly extinct. Few men now pass thirty or forty years in the country without a visit, to Great Britain. There may be a few of the ancient flock still to be found looking into the Oriental Club; or sauntering along the streets of Cheltenham. But, ere long, a regular, liver-diseased, parchment-faced, shivering, querulous, rich old Indian, who feels himself when at home as in a foreign land, so strange and distasteful to him are its manners and customs, will have become as rare as a mummy. The complaint of the singularities of old Indians is now dying away. An Indian Officer or Civilian returning to England is very much like the rest of the world. He has brushed up all his old English habits and feelings, once at least before his ultimate retirement. Moreover, thanks to steam communication, and the progress of the public press, if he be an attentive reader of the Indian Journals, he will find himself only a few months behind the London world in his knowledge of public events—important or unimportant—a new tariff or a new dancer. Men from India are no longer necessarily old; necessarily yellow; or necessarily rich. If they differ much from other members of society, it is in being a good deal less stiff and somewhat more liberal. A returned Indian once complained pathetically to us that the English were “magnificently selfish.” He had been a quarter of a century in the East without once returning to his native land; had he taken a furlough in the interim nothing would have seemed strange to him. Few men neglect this now-a-days. The number of applications for furlough—unless any new war renders it necessary that no leave should be granted to Military Officers—is increasing every year.
We have thus briefly explained the principal circumstances, which whilst they have rendered people in England more familiar with Indian affairs, have extinguished the tribe of genuine old Nabobs; as Gun-powder, the Brandy-bottle, and the Small-pox, have extinguished another more interesting race of Indians. Old Indians are not in these days so much unlike the rest of the world. Neither do they turn up unexpectedly, with mines of wealth, to lavish upon unsuspecting relatives. There is an Indian Army List or Directory in almost every principal street of London; and the Indian Journals are filed in so many, that any one anxious to gain information relative to a brother, an uncle, or a cousin, may ascertain to a nicety all his movements—when he was promoted to this or that rank, when he received this or that appointment, when he obtained six month’s leave of absence—or, if he happened not to be in “the Services,” when he went through the Insolvent Court. Indeed, by the payment of a guinea a year, for one of the Overland Summaries of the Indian Newspapers, he may have all this interesting intelligence laid on his breakfast-table once a month. An expectant heir, by the aid of a Directory and a monthly Newspaper, may keep himself cognizant of the movements of an antiquated relative, with very little trouble to himself. But, in good truth, antiquated relatives in India are not very much worth looking after. Fortunes are not easily made; and if they are, they are easily spent. Men do not, now-a-days, hoard up wealth for unknown nephews and nieces. Whether they ever did, we think extremely doubtful, in spite of the comedies and the novels of the early part of the present century.
And yet, within the last fifty years, society in India has undergone so many other changes, that perhaps it may have changed in this respect too. It will not be altogether uninteresting to trace a few of the more important changes—to shew what Anglo-Indians were and what they are, when dwelling in their adopted Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/23 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/24 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/25 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/26 European furniture; the walls are hung with paintings; the floors are covered with warm carpets; the doors, perhaps the windows, are curtained. Hence an increase perhaps of warmth, and an unquestionable accession of mosquitoes; but there is a more cheerful look about our rooms; the eye is pleased; the spirits are raised; there is a greater feeling of home. The mistake of overcramming one’s rooms with furniture, as though they were upholsterers’ ware-houses, is too common not to be readily admitted: but for these errors of taste the system itself is not accountable. Every good thing will find people only too ready to over-do it; and the extravagances of its more tasteless votaries are no proof of the viciousness of any fashion. It is undeniable, that within the last few years, the internal aspect of our houses has brightened up greatly; and in no part of the ménage is this more strikingly apparent—in no one social improvement is the operation of an extended Trade more discernible—than in the furniture of the dinner-table. The quantity of fine Plate, fine Glass, and fine Porcelain to be seen at the tables of men of moderate income, would astonish an old Qui-hye of the last century; and he would look with little less surprise at the display of ornamental ware in all our drawing-rooms; the bronze, the papier maché, the porcelain, the alabaster, and, more than all, the beautiful glass lamps and lustres of every conceivable device, superseding the tasteless wall-shades, which stood out, of old, in all their ugliness, from the unvaried surface of whitewash plastered over the sides of our rooms.
But still more remarkable than the change in the aspect of the principal European abiding places are the changes in the aspect of European Society. We shall not attempt to give anything, which can aspire to be regarded as a complete picture of these changes; but content ourselves with noticing a few of its most prominent features. Old Indians, as we have already had occasion to observe, have been generally conceived to be distinguished for excessive wealth, diseased livers, a repulsive querulousness of manner, and a luxurious way of life. Who has not heard of the enormous fortunes and the Sardanapalian luxuriousness of the “Nabobs” of the old time? How far the general opinion may have been correct, we pretend not oracularly to decide, but it may be permitted to us, in all modesty to suggest a doubt. That large fortunes were made sometimes, and that the extreme of Oriental luxury was indulged in by some European residents, and hence imported, in a modified form, into the West, is a fact sufficiently well-established for us most willingly to concede; but we question whether these Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/28 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/29 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/30 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/31 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/32 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/33 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/34 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/35 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/36 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/37 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/38 one is likely to prefer the latter. Palanquins are principally employed in Calcutta, as hackney-coaches and cabs are in London; their best patrons being sailors and cadets. A few Mofussil residents may keep these portable ovens; but at the Presidency the use of them is almost entirely confined to strangers; for even the poorer classes—the clerks and others—travel to their offices in some sort of a wheeled carriage, which, if drawn by a single pony, as many of these vehicles are, is a cheaper thing to keep than a palanquin. As an article of luxury, it may have held a high place in those days, when only the governor and senior member of council sported wheel-carriages; for a ride in a palanquin is a degree or two better than a walk in the sun; but now it is regarded as a sort of refuge for the destitute, into which a man ventures, on extraordinary occasions, such as the breaking-down of his carriage in the streets, or any other untoward accident befalling him. Such things may happen once or twice to a Calcutta resident, in a period of half-a-dozen years. There are many who have not even within that space of time deposited themselves inside a palanquin—and we cannot but acknowledge, that the less frequently a man indulges in this species of Oriental luxury, the better for his bodily comfort.
There are few so poor, in these days, as not to be able to keep a carriage. The keeping a carriage in England is a very magnificent thing. There is an unctuous smack in the very mention of it, redolent of no small amount of well-to-doishness; even though the carriage be nothing higher than that cockney-sounding thing—an one-horse-shay. But here the difficulty is to find a man, who does not, in some form, “keep a carriage.” It may be a very sorry affair, but still it is a carriage, with as good a right to the name, as the best appointed Britzska that ever went rolling and swinging and plunging out of a coach-maker’s yard. If any one be curious in this matter of carriages—and books have been written on the subject—let him come to Calcutta. He will here find carriages of every degree, from the highest to the lowest; of every conceivabie form and fashion; and many besides of which it has never entered into his imagination to conceive. An Englishman in India may aptly be described as a riding animal. Let the curious in such matters station himself at one of the corners of Tank-Square, between ten and eleven in the morning, and again about six o’clock in the evening: and count, not the number of carriages, but the number of varieties of carriages that pass—Britzskas, Barouches, Landaulets, Chariots, Phaetons, Buggies, Palanquins, Palki-gharries, Brown-berries, Crahanchys (some of these unknown genera to the English reader) and then let him post himself, towards sunset, on the saluting battery of Fort William, and view all these varieties en masse. If Clive, or Admiral Watson were to revisit, in this year of grace, 1844, the banks of that river, which, nearly a century before, they passed up with the few ships and small handful of fighting men which paved the way for the conquests of Hindostan, they would out-do Dominie Sampson in their hearty exclamations of “Prodigious!” Where erst were to be seen a few Bengallee fishermen or boat-men, mending their nets or cleaning their cooking-pots, on the jungly banks of the river, is now a broad and level road, covered, at evening tide, by hundreds of carriages and horse-men. No sooner does the setting sun tinge the western horizon, than all the English residents in Calcutta throw open their doors and windows, make a hasty toilet, and sally forth, in carriage or on horse-back, to enjoy the evening air. Before the sun has disappeared behind the western bank of the river, the strand is crowded with vehicles of every description—a concourse as dense as that which may be seen on the Epsom Road during the race-week, with even more entanglements and embarrasments; for there is a stream setting both ways. One marvels who all these people are that own these hundreds of carriages. The first impression made upon the mind of the stranger is, that there must be an enormous number of wealthy inhabitants in Calcutta. But the equipage is, in reality, no sort of index to the worldly possessions of the owner. It may let you, perhaps, into the secret of a man’s vanity—certainly not of his income. Some of the most pretending equipages on the course are sported by people belonging to the second class of society—uncovenanted Government servants, petty East Indian or European traders—respectable personages enough in their way, and, peradventure, not much given to show; but the wife and the daughters must have their britzska or barouche, though they do pinch a little at home to maintain it; and on the course, at least, the wife of the uncovenanted subordinate may jostle the lady of the head of the office. When we consider how much is often sacrificed to support the dignity of the carriage and pair—how much substantial comfort is thrown aside to make room for this little bit of ostentation—that the equipage is with many, the thing, from which they derive much of their importance—we soon cease to wonder at the formidable array of assuming conveyances, which throng the course every evening, at sunset, and present a scene, which, as one of daily recurrence, has not, perhaps, its parallel in the world.
A few words now on the subject of Dress. When those sumptuary regulations were sent out against gold-laced coats, Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/41 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/42 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/43 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/44 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/45 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/46 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/47 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/48 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/49 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/50 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/51 Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/52
- ↑ It is very, very rarely that an Overland Mail miscarries; the Memnon, Iron Steamer, with the Indian Mails, of July, 1843, was lost near Aden, and few of the boxes were saved; but a similar mischance had not occurred for many years.
- ↑ This had not been long written, when the sad tidings of Eldred Pottinger’s early death reached Calcutta. Strange that he should have been the first actor in the Affghan War and the last in the China War; that he should have been the prologue of the one and the epilogue of the other; that he should have defended Herat against the Persians, and that to him should have been entrusted, for conveyance to England the supplementary Chinese treaty. Sad, that he should haye escaped all the perils of the war in Affghanistan, to die from the effects of the accursed climate of one of our new Chinese Golgothas.
- ↑ Mr. Forbes, in his ''Oriental Memoirs'', says, “the Captains of the homeward-bound Indiamen demand eight thousand rupees (£1000) for the passage of a single person, and fifteen thousand for that of a gentleman and his wife.” He adds; “One gentleman distinguished for his liberality gave five thousand guineas for the accommodation of his wife and family, besides an ample supply of Madeira wine, provisions and delicacies for the table.’”’—This, however, was an extraordinary case even in those days,