I joined the Bandasaris, who have no fixed residence, but rove continuously between the Ganges and the Indus. They are a race like our gypsies. I believed I might organize them into an army and win back my kingdom, and liberate my beautiful Zeib Alnissa, but the blessing of God did not rest on my undertaking.

When I had got my army ready to march to Sardhana, the chief of the tribe changed his mind about letting me use his people to win back my throne, and, instead, sold me to the English company, which corporation had also offered a price for my head. Thus my unfortunate cranium became the property of the powerful East India Company, and there, if nowhere else, a man learns how to pray.

PART IX.
ON THE HIGH SEAS.

CHAPTER I.
THE PIRATES.

The English did not think me of sufficient consequence to suspend me in an iron cage over the crocodile pool. This honor was reserved for the native shahs and rajahs.

I was transported, with scant ceremony, to Bombay, from which city I was shipped to sea, together with fifty other prisoners, who, like myself, had come to India to seek their fortunes, and whose chief crime was their nationality. They were natives of France, Holland, Germany and Spain, and the East India Company believed it had a right to arrest them and ship them in a body to New Caledonia.

Now, honorable gentlemen of the court, I beg you to tell me which was the pirate?—I, in the unseaworthy cutter, bound with chains to a Spaniard, perspiring over my oars, sailing to New Zealand instead of to New Caledonia, where the captain had been ordered to take us; having nothing to eat and drink but dried fish and stale water, the captain having again disobeyed orders, for the East India Company had shipped honest biscuit, smoked meat and brandy for the prisoner's food—which of us, I ask, was the pirate? the captain, who plundered the helpless prisoners in his power and broke the maritime laws—which, I ask, was the pirate; Captain Morder or I?

"I say Captain Morder was the pirate—" and the prince emphasized his reply by thumping the floor with his cane.