influence, but spread a knowledge of our character and intentions, which has increased respect and confidence; and they have in almost all cases succeeded, by the arbitration of differences, and the settlement of local disputes, in preserving the peace of the country without troops.[1]
On the retirement of the Marquis of Hastings in 1822, he was succeeded as Governor-General by Lord Amherst, who also, like his predecessor, found himself the inheritor of some old disputes, one of which produced an almost immediate war with the Burmese. The sovereign of this country, a rich and extensive peninsula to the eastward of the Bay of Bengal, and adjoining our eastern frontier – immersed, like all Oriental despots, in the grossest ignorance and self-sufficiency – had, on different occasions, treated the Bengal Government with a degree of haughty insolence that was suffered to pass unrebuked, under the pacific system which then prevailed. Emboldened by a degree of forbearance which they mistook for another motive, the Burmese, to the number of one thousand, invaded the Island of Shapooree, a possession of ours on the coast of Arracan; expelled its garrison, consisting of thirteen Sepoys; and, justly proud of so unheard-of an exploit, the Rajah of Arracan reported it himself to the British Government, intimating at the same time some intention of taking by force of arms the cities of Dacca and Moorshedabad from the Honourable Company Bahauder.
This casus belli not being sufficient to rouse the British lion, it was succeeded by several acts of aggression on the part of the Burmese, that brought on a series of petty hostilities between the two Powers, which our limits preclude the possibility of detailing. They ended, however, by a declaration of war on both sides; that of the Burmese stating the pleasure of "the fortunate King of the White Elephants, Lord of the Seas and Earth," to be that, as the governors on the Burmese frontier had full
- ↑ Malcolm's "Memoir of Central India;" Macfarlane's "British India."
