Note 04 — Chapter X · IN WHICH THE FLOOD BEGINS TO RISE.

My Amelia will have learnt from my letters so much of the character of the wise and valiant persons who are our governors that she won’t need to be told what was the immediate impulse of their hearts on reading this alarming news. But for the sake, I suppose, of setting themselves right in their own eyes, what do Mr President and his friends, Mess. Manningham and Frankland, do? They call together the five captains of the Company’s forces here (Captain Colquhoun, of course, being one) and ask them very seriously whether they believe it possible, with a hundred men from the Calcutta garrison, to attempt the relief of Cossimbuzar against the Nabob’s army of 12,000 trained soldiers, supported by a train of artillery! You won’t wonder that the poor men declared the notion to be an extravagant one, but they added that the force at Cossimbuzar was sufficient, and the factory strong enough, to beat off the enemy if wisely handled. But the humane gentlemen to whom our destinies in this country are committed did not offer to repeat this hard saying to Mr Watts. In their care for the lives of our people at Cossimbuzar, they sent for presentation to the Nabob an arasdass,[04] or humble petition, couched in the most submissive terms imaginable, and yielding all he might choose to ask, while they promised prodigious rewards to the cossids[05] or messengers if it should reach Muxadavad in thirty-six hours. At the same time they gave orders for the destruction of poor Mr Kelsall’s pavilion and of the draw-bridge and outworks at Perrins Redoubt, and this is going on as I write. O’ my conscience, Amelia, if my pen were the sword I spoke of just now, and in a manly hand, it would not be against the Nabob I would turn it, but upon his honour the President and his two like-minded advisers.