My dear Minny, —... There are so many interesting subjects to write about that I feel quite an embarras des richesses. India ^^ is the first, but you will be informed in England weeks earlier than we shall be here of all that goes on there, and much more accurately than we are. I will only tell you, therefore, that Lord Elgin ^^ arrived here the 28th of July. I had a long talk with him about the disposal of the troops from the Transit, and wanted him to send us all on bodily to Calcutta; he decided, however, upon sending the 300 men of the 90th and the 120 men of the 59th only to Calcutta, leaving the 200 men of the Medical Staff Corps and myself to go on to Hong Kong. He had brought vAt\x him in the Shannon 50, and the Pearl 30, about 350 marines, so that independently of the moral effect of his presence at Calcutta, with two heavily armed men-ofwar, he will bring the welcome reinforcement of about 800 bayonets. Lord Elgin expects to be back at Singapore about the end of this month, and has ordered in the meantime all troops coming from England to China to be stopped here and sent off to Calcutta instead, so that there is, I am afraid, no chance whatever of any operations commencing in China this year, and am rather in hopes that General Ashburnham ^^ and all the staff may be sent on to India. Sir M. Seymour 1* has sent the
Inflexible here to bring the remnant of my diminished forces on to Hong Kong. She arrived here three days ago and then went on to Banca to pick up Chambers and the crew of the Transit, who are still on the island looking after the wreck and its contents. We expect the Inflexible back to-morrow, and then we shall all go on together to China. The only troops now there are the 5 9th, so reduced from sickness as to be almost unfit for service, and about 500 native Indian troops. I have passed a most interesting time since we parted, and if I were talking instead of writing to you, could amuse you very much with an account of our adventures. Now that the beastly old Transit is gone, I can tell you that it is a mercy we did not all go to the bottom in her weeks previous to her striking. It was a daily source of anxiety to us the state she was in. At one time an engineer goes down as usual to the stokehold, and to his horror finds himself up to his armpits in water (that was off Sandown); at another time our assistant steward descends into the hold underneath our dining saloon, and he gets a cold bath, the water is up to his waist. This occurred in the middle of the Atlantic; the leak could not be repaired, for they could not get at it — it was somewhere between the hull and the lining of the ship; the donkey engine was set going in consequence and never left off till we wrecked. Then off the islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam, daring a tremendous gale, we sprung a leak, forward this time, which I believe was more than 20 feet long; if we had met with another gale after this I don't think anything could have saved us, so we providentially ran upon a rock (not properly marked in the Admiralty chart), and our troubles came to an end. We really enjoyed ourselves thoroughly in the island of Banca, and were like a set of children playing at Robinson Crusoe.... We fixed upon the verge of the forest just above high-water mark and close to a capital stream of water for our camping ground, and before night we had rigged up some sails between the trees for tents, and though the men were
1 8s 7] LIFE ON THE ISLE OF BANCA 177