General Sir Josiah Champagné, G.C.H., died in the beginning of this year; and was succeeded in the colonelcy of the regiment by General Sir Frederick Augustus Wetherall, G.C.H., from the sixty-second regiment.
The regiment embarked from Bombay in April, for Panwell, from whence it proceeded to Poona, leaving a detail on duty at Bombay.
1841
On the 2nd of June, 1841, the regiment left Poona, and arrived at Bombay in ten days. On the 22nd of September the head-quarters and four companies embarked from Bombay for Arabia Felix, and on the 2nd of October arrived at Aden, the capital of a pleasant and fertile district near the mouth of the Red Sea, where a detachment of the regiment arrived from Bombay in October, and another in November.
On the evening of the 5th of October, 1841, a detachment, amounting to about six hundred men, selected from the troops at Aden, proceeded, under the command of Lieut.-Colonel Pennycuick, to attack an Arab force, which had caused much inconvenience by preventing supplies being received from the country. After a severe skirmish of two hours' duration, in the hottest part of the following day, the troops destroyed the Arab post of Sheik Othman, and returned to Aden on the evening of the 6th, having traversed upwards of forty miles of ground in about twenty-two hours.
1842
The head-quarters of the regiment remained at Aden, in Arabia Felix, during the year 1842. In February a detachment proceeded from Bombay to Poona, and in November a detachment marched from Poona to Ahmednuggur: in December four officers and thirty-four rank and file arrived at Aden from Poona.
1843
On the 18th of December, 1842, the venerable General Sir Frederick Augustus Wetherall, G.C.H., after a service of sixty-seven years, and attaining the age of eighty-eight years, died, and Her Majesty Queen Victoria was pleased to confer the colonelcy of the regiment on Lieut.-General Sir Peregrine Maitland, K.C.B., from the seventy-sixth regiment, on the 2nd of January, 1843.
1844