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210 HISTORY OF THE INDIAN NAVY.
guns were worked witli such effect by raw lads and natives,
who are perilous stuff to fight naval actions with, speaks more
for the skill, seamanship and courage of the officers of the ship
than coukl any words of eulogy on our part. Not less honour
and credit are due to the gallant boys of the Marine Society,
Avhich, for nearly three-quarters of acentury, supplied the Service
with a never-failing supply of smart young lads, possessed of
all the pluck and seamanlike qualities characteristic of the
Anglo-Saxon race.
And yet we hear nothing of any rewards or honours being
meted out to the officers, whose devotion was displayed by the cir-
cumstance that they were all wounded, while their painstaking
care in training into good gunners such unpromising material,
was evinced by the successful resistance they made to a vessel
of such superior force; so little, indeed, was thought, or,
perhaps, known, of this deed of valour on the part of the small
and uninfluential Bombay Marine, that James, in his exhaustive
and complete record of the services of our sailors during the
Great War, makes no mention of this brilliant defence of their
ship by the officers and men of the ' Intrepid.' Sad to relate,
the sea soon after swallowed up both the cruiser and the
survivors of the action of the 22nd of November.
Soon after her return to Bombay, the ' Intrepid,' under the
command of Captain George Roper, the successor to her late
commander, Hall, was despatched, in company with another
cruiser, the ' Comet,' Lieutenant William Henry, to the China
seas, to learn the fate of the Company's ship ' Talbot,' which
was supposed to have been wrecked, but the same darkness
that shrouded the fate of the ship in quest of which they were
sent, has settled over the fate of these two cruisers. From the
day they sailed out of Bombay Harbour they were never heard
of again.
" And though no stone may teU
Their name, theii' work, their glory,
Tliey rest in hearts that loved them well,
They grace Britannia's story."
—
Among the officers lost in these ships were ' Intrepid,'
(.'aptain G. Roper, Lieutenants Stephen Best, William Nicholson,
and William Henry Taylor. ' Comet,' Lieutenant W.
Henry and Acting-Lieutenants Charles Baker and Isaac
Richardson.
In 1801 the Indian Government despatched the ' Swift,'
twenty guns, commanded by Captain Hayes, and the ' Star,'
brig, under Lieutenant Scott, to co-operate in the attack on the
Dutch possessions in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands. Admiral
Rainier left these two vessels to blockade the island of Ternate,*
* Ternate, the northernmost of a chain of islands adjoining tlie west coast of
G illolo, was formerly the seat of sovereignty over all the adjacent Molucca Islands,