[1] The account of this transaction is taken from the private log of one of the officers who was present in the barge during the whole time. I was not there myself. In his narrative it will be observed that he makes no mention of the natives who came down upon them having thrown spears at them, although in the extract from the "Times" it is so stated. It would appear also that there was some mistake as to the number of men on board of the prahus and the number killed. A war prahu generally contains from fifty to eighty men. Some are smaller, and occasionally they are larger, but not often. Capt. Keppell states fifty men to be the usual number in his work; and, in his conflict with the pirates, estimates the force accordingly. Now the first day there was one war prahu, which ran up a creek; and, on being fired at, the crew deserted her. On the second day there were five prahus, all captured. On the third day the five prahus engaged were not captured, the boat returning to the ship after the captain was wounded; so that in all it appears that there were nine prahus; and, allowing eighty men to each, the force would only amount to 720 men, or about one half of the number stated, viz. 1330. How the killed, amounting to 350, or about half the number, were arrived at and estimated, it is impossible to say; but in the narrative of the officer, which I have given, the major portion of the crews deserted the prahus and got on shore.
[2] These rascally nurses have all been discharged. When enlisted as nurses in England, they signed for three years' service. When their time was expired, they applied to Admiral Cochrane for their discharge. After some demur their request was complied with; but their conduct had been so disgraceful, that, as it was not in the agreement, they were refused a passage home in a man-of-war. I met some of them ashore at Hong Kong, looking in vain for employment, and at a distance of 20,000 miles from their own country. The retribution was just.
[3] These sepoys were raised and paid by Mr. Brooke.
THE END.
London:
Spottiswoode and Shaw,
New-street-Square.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
The author's original (and inconsistent) spelling of place and person names has been preserved, although in some cases, the modern equivalents are substantially different.
In the original text, most illustration captions had terminating punctuation but a few did not. In this transcription, terminating punctuation has been added to those captions which did not have them in order to remain consistent with the style most commonly seen in the text.
Lithographs facing pages 85, 142, 199 and 201 were missing a line specifying the publisher "Longman & Co" which is present in the other lithographs. It is possible that the pages used for this transcription had been physically truncated. The original appearance of the physical page has been preserved and the publisher line, if missing, has not been added.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation of words preserved. (orang outang, orang-outang; blowpipe, blow-pipe; bow-man, bowman; daylight, day-light; flagstaff, flag-staff; goodwill, good-will; gunshot, gun-shot; lighthouse, light-house; parang, pa-rang; pineapples, pine-apples; tomtoms, tom-toms; whitewashed, white-washed; pic nic, pic-nic; Nepa palm, nepa-palms)