'History of the Indian Navy. (1613-1863).' [‎450] (469/622)

450
HISTORY OF THE INDIAN NAVY.
poisoned stakes, so that the elephants carrying the ammunition
and mountain-guns were lamed. Lieutenant Davies was
wounded in the shoulder, arm, and breast, the latter a very-
severe wound, from which he has continued to suffer ever since,
the bone coming away many years afterwards. On receiving
this last wound, Lieutenant Davies pushed the muzzle of his
revolver through the interstices of the stockade and shot his
assailant dead.
Lieutenant Lewis gives some interesting details of the Expe
dition in a private letter. Writing on the 11th of March, he
says:— 44 We returned to Dibrooghur from Pashee Ghat on
Monday last, the 6th of March, having been away just three
weeks, and I was very glad to get back, as it was terrible rough
work about those hills marching in the rain, and encamping on
sand-banks in small paul tents, leaking when it rained, and
sand blowing in when it did not. The day after the fight no
end of Abors came in; they were not the villagers we had been
fighting with, but other villagers, supposed to be friendly; they
told us that there were all the fighting men of twenty-two
villages assembled in the stockades that we took, making at the
very lowest computation thirteen hundred men we had against
ns. If there is going to be much more fighting like the last up
here, they certainly must have European troops of some kind
always here : the Assam Light Infantry are of no use against
such enemies as the Abors, provided they always fight the
same. It is the first time the Government have ever had any
collision with these tribes, and I am rather inclined to think
they will not give quite so much trouble the next affair. I do
not think the Assam Light Infantry would ever have taken the
stockades if we had not been there; they would have come to
great grief, as they are just like so many sheep under fire,
yelling and firing in the air, and sitting down in the pathway.
I had a very narrow escape at the last stockade, where Davies
and Mayo were wounded. While I w^as trying to break in the
door, an arrow was shot through a chink which went into my
cap pouch; fortunately, it was one of the 6 Punjaub's ? Bombay
ones, the leather of which is like a board. The arrow went
through two parts, and nearly through a third, and brought up
against the leather waist-belt; if it had been one of the new-
pattern pouches, I should have been dead in less than five
minutes, as it was right over the spleen. Davies is going on
pretty well. Mayo all right; one man w r ounded, I am sorry to
say, died to-day, I hope we are not going to lose any more,
there are four more that cannot be considered out of danger.
It certainly requires good men for the work, as, if you got
repulsed at a stockade, you would suffer tremendously in the
retreat if there was a muster of tribes like the last; besides, it
would most likely have the effect of raising the whole of the