The scene before me in the vessel soon diverted me from the contemplation of all other subjects. I could have brooded over the fate of my dear little ones the whole night; but the din and tumult of more than two hundred soldiers, with their friends from shore, all rioting in the cup of inebriety, tumbling over each other, blaspheming, fighting, singing, fifing, and fiddling, and all huddled together in a confined space, with their beds, bedding, parrots, minors, and other birds, roused me to a lively sense of the scene before me.
On the following morning we bade farewell to Fort William, under whose proud battlements we had been lying. The wind was serene and fair, and the wave had scarcely a ripple on its silvery surface. Would that my bosom had been equally composed and tranquil; but my heart sickened within me when I felt the beautiful ship smoothly gliding down the rapid stream, and bearing me from that country and that service in which I had spent the prime of my life, and, I may say, the happiest of my days. The rapid Ganges soon bore me from the sight of the English flag, and I dropped a tear to the recollection of the many happy days I had spent at Fort William.
I soon found that I had a queer set to deal with, without the means of checking any indiscretion that drunkenness might drive them to commit. The captain commanding the detachment was in a dying state, and indeed did die on his passage home; consequently, all the trouble, anxiety, and care, fell upon me. I can venture to assert that, with the exception of about twenty men, a more disorderly and mutinous set than the fellows I had now under my charge, never disgraced the garb of soldiers.
An Eastern voyage, either home or out, is dull and monotonous enough, even with an agreeable party. Passengers we had none, save one lady and her little girl, her sick husband, the captain of the detachment, then lingering on the brink of the grave, and a young officer of the Company's Bengal Artillery, who survived but a few days the tossing of the ship, and was committed to a watery grave, ere the bloom of boyhood had left his cheek. We had one doctor on board, and a young officer of the Company's service, in charge of the Company's troops. Of the misery of the passage the reader may have some idea, when he is informed that we had upwards of two hundred men on board, some without legs, others without arms, and twenty of whom had been removed from hospital only a week or ten days before we sailed. Every man had a box or trunk, bed and bedding, with parrots, minors, and cockatoos, and all these poor creatures, with four women and four children, were huddled on one small deck, every one that could move endeavouring to seize the more secure spot, and tumbling over and treading on those who were unable, either from sickness or drunkenness, to move or assist themselves. The smell and heat below were beyond description. Added to all this, the men were, during the whole voyage, in a state of continual drunkenness, having means of procuring liquor privately, by some device which I never could discover. All my exertions were insufficient to check them in this practice, or indeed to keep them in any kind of order, from want of the usual means of enforcing obedience, there being neither a place of confinement, nor handcuffs, nor any other means of securing the ringleaders, in the ship. Nothing but the greatest personal risk on my part, and that of the Company's officer, Lieutenant Rock, prevented open mutiny among the troops; and I consider it a mercy that we were not both thrown overboard, which was more than once threatened.