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PREFACE. ix
possess, and I here tender to them all,—from the
senior officer, Captain Boyce,* a name honoured in
as the following annals will show,—
the Service, my
hearty thanks for their co-operation.
But the difficulties that stand in the way of com-
piling a reliable and connected History of the Indian
Navy, are of no common order, and this chiefly through
an act of Vandalism more worthy of the days when the
Alexandrian library was committed to the flames, than
of the present century,—though, perhaps, we do the
ancients scant justice when we instance this memor-
able deed as peculiarly typical of that age, for there are
men still living who can recall the destruction by fire
of the Public Library at Washington, when our troops
entered that city in 1814. The act of Vandalism, men-
tioned above, was the destruction of the public records
of the Indian Navy, and is thus referred to by Mr.
Markham : — " Before the Indian Navy had become a
thing of the past, there was a destruction of the
materials for its history. Previous to 1860 there were
many and most valuable records of that Service in the
India Office, but in that year nearly all were reduced
—
to pulp." Again he writes : " The official records of
the Bombay Marine and Indian Navy have been
almost entirely destroyed. Its history can now only
be traced in fragmentary memoirs, papers, and
reports."
:—
Horace has said " Vixere fortes ante Agamem'
nona multi ;" but, as the bard adds, these heroes have
gone down to oblivion, " carent quia vate sacro.'^ It
is to rescue the names, " unhonoured and unsung," of
* This gallant veteran, who entered the Service so for back as the
year 1802, and lost his legs in the memorable action fought on the 30th
of June, 1816, between his brig, the 'Nautilus,' and the United States
ship ' Peacock,' still survives, and wrote to me in excellent health and
spirits on the 9th of April, 1877.