s and our nominal allies was thoroughly broken up. Even then it
proved a most difficult enterprise to root out the Pindaris, who were
not a race, or a tribe, or a sect, but bands of lawless men of all
faiths; for they met and vanished like birds of the air, outstripping
regular cavalry by the length and rapidity of their marches, and
carrying off their booty almost under the eyes of their pursuers. But
the resolute tactics of Hastings prevailed in the end. Amir Khan, their
most powerful leader, disbanded his troops; and hemmed in on all sides,
cut off from every place of shelter, and chased by successive
detachments of horsemen almost as fleet as his own, Chitu became a
hopeless fugitive, with a handful of faithful adherents, who shared his
desperate efforts to escape, but advised him to surrender. He could not
bring himself to do so, possessed, it is said, with an unspeakable
horror of being transported across "the black sea," and he actually
remained at large or in hiding for a year after his lair was discovered.
Nor was he ever captured, for, by a strange fate, this ruthless scourge
of the Deccan, after baffling human vengeance, found his last refuge in
a jungle and died, a tiger's prey. By this time, all the wild bands
which sprung into existence out of the Maratha war had been extirpated
or dispersed, and after the year 1818 the dreaded name of Pindari was
heard no more in history.

The suppression of civil war and anarchy in Central India, which
completed the work of Wellesley, was the greatest achievement of
Hastings. One remarkable incident of it was a portentous outbreak of
cholera in 1817, during a campaign in Gwalior conducted by Hastings in
person. There had been several minor visitations of this disease in
India. But it now first established itself as an endemic disease, and it
has ever since infested the valley of the Ganges. So virulent was its
onslaught, and so fearful the mortality in Hastings' army, that it was
only saved by shifting its quarters, and the governor-general himself
made preparations for his own secret burial, in case he should be among
the victims. As we have seen already,[140] it was propagated from this
centre through other regions of Asia, until it spread to Western Europe,
and the "Asiatic cholera" of 1831-32 may be lineally traced back to the
last Maratha war.

The position of Hastings in Indian history closely resembles that of
Wellesley. Disregarding the instructions of the board