rated from the Mahrattas, who had aided them powerfully. One retreat after another was broken up; and lastly Cheetoo’s. He sprang on his horse and made off; but he had only two hundred men left, and they were perpetually urging him to surrender to the English. The reason why he did not was his dread of the sea. Every Hindoo dreads a voyage more than death; and Cheetoo fancied that he should be sent beyond sea if once a prisoner. His followers at length left him, and made their own terms; and they told the English that in Cheetoo’s snatches of sleep, disturbed by horrors, he was often heard fearfully muttering, “The dark sea! O! the dark sea!” This was in 1818; and for a few months more he flitted about the dominions of the Company and the neighbouring potentates, now sounding some Nabob about mediating for him, and now slipping from under the very grasp of his hunters and waylayers. The horses of his attendants were rarely unsaddled, and the men slept with the bridles in their hands. In February, 1819, he appealed for admittance to a fortress into which a late ally had escaped. He had rendered services to this Apa Sahib; and he carried in a pocket of his saddle letters from Apa Sahib, full of fine promises for the future: so he came to the gates in certain expectation of a shelter. He was turned away; and alone he entered the jungle, for a bivouac. He did not renew his application the next morning; on the next and the next he troubled nobody,—to the surprise of his treacherous ally. A few days afterwards, his horse, saddled and bridled, was seen grazing on the verge of the forest. The money and the letters and the chief’s signet ring were safe in the saddle: but where was Cheetoo?
The first trace was some bloody clothing; then some human bones; then Cheetoo’s head, entire. A tiger had sprung on him. The chief of tribes which had lately afforded him an army of 20,000 men had been left alone, to be torn to pieces by a wild beast.
Cheetoo, the last of the Pindarrees, has impressed the imagination, and aroused the pity of thousands of our elderly generation: but he was not enough of a hero for sympathy. He had no country, and therefore no patriotism; and he could win no admiration on the ground of devotedness. Who comes next?
I am sorry to have to name him: but I must. In the sort of review that we are making, we must look beyond our own notions and feelings, because such stories belong to the world; and there are not only multitudes of people in India, but a great many in Ireland, France, America, and elsewhere, who imagine Nana Sahib to be a vindicator of some country or race,—a champion and patriot in his own way, and therefore to be sympathised with, and watched with interest in his extinction. It is as well that the error should be pointed out, and the true position of the man understood, that his actual treachery may be duly apparent.
His admirers in Europe and America suppose Nana Sahib to have been the son by adoption of an Indian prince, entering into the ambition and pride of princes, and having feelings of nationality and patriotism which make him hate the conquerors of India. This is a mistake of ignorance. The subjects of the princes of India had no country, in the patriotic sense. They had a religion and a method of society; and these they enjoy with more completeness and security under English rule than they ever did before. There was nothing in the way of laws, dynasty, rights, and liberties that this man, or any other native, could even allege as a subject of struggle. Nor could it be for religion that he contended; for he accepted the aid of the Mohammedans,—themselves the conquerors of the Hindoos. He was ambitious and revengeful; and no higher ground than this can be asserted for his rebellion. He was no native prince, invested with traditional greatness, and living in subjection to usurpers. He was a wealthy native gentleman, of no mark or merit, and therefore incapable of a lofty object, and living entirely out of the sphere of patriotic objects.
This would be enough; but there is the positive presence of such unheroic qualities as should have saved all Europeans and Americans from the disgrace of believing in Nana Sahib for a moment . He obtained gratification for his vanity by courting the English up to the moment of the mutiny. He went out shooting with British officers: and made splendid fêtes at Bithoor for their reception. He sent his confidential friend and agent to England to enjoy London society, and listened to the accounts his friend brought back of English gullibility, of the readiness of ladies of rank to fall in love with him, and so forth. Next, he accepted the charge of refugees from the regions of the mutiny, and had them slaughtered like cattle; and his way of revelling in blood from that time forward needs no description; for the story of Cawnpore is burnt in upon every British heart and brain. He issued a proclamation, worthy of the fellow who had been adjudged the forger of a will in his own favour. The setting aside of that will, and consequent division of property between three which he had intended to take for himself, was sufficient to account for any degree of revenge in such a man as he: and the proclamation exhibits an audacity and ingenuity of falsehood which must consign the man beyond appeal to the order of mere rogues. Enough of the real standpoint of the forger, traitor, and butcher, of whom some would make a hero! He was never invaded, never attacked, never conquered, in his own person or that of his tribe. He tried to explode by treachery, and swamp in bloodshed a state of society far more tolerable than any other the country had ever known: and when he failed, he sank utterly, as he deserved to sink. When be believed the British authority overthrown, he turned against it: and when his fellow-subjects believed his authority overthrown, they forsook him. When no longer feared, it appeared how he was hated. His fate so far is generally known. We cannot say that the end is known; for, while he lives, there is no saying what he may try to do. But what we do know is that he was driven back and back till he could live nowhere hut in the malarious region in Nepaul, where life is & curse, from disease and discomfort. There,