the annals of Indian Missions, I
felt as a young Greek would feel on being taken to Marathon and
Thermopylae. I felt I was entering on a war, where there had been heroes
before me, which demanded courage and endurance of a far higher order
than had ever been enlisted in the cause of patriotism.

CHAPTER II.

VOYAGE TO BENARES.

_March, 1839._

I left myself in the hands of friends in Calcutta as to the best mode of
proceeding to my destination. There were at that time three modes of
travelling to the North-Western Provinces. One was being carried in a
palanquin on men's shoulders, arrangements being made to have fresh
bearers every few miles. For a long journey of more than four hundred
miles to Benares this was at once a very tedious and fatiguing mode of
travelling. To one who knew not a word of the language of the people in
whose hands one was to be for days it was additionally trying. Yet not a
few persons newly arrived, some of them delicate ladies, did travel in
that mode to far more distant places than Benares, and very seldom any
mishap befell them. In this mode little more could be taken in the way
of luggage than necessary clothing.

Another mode was by the river in a native boat, with a crew engaged to
take the party to their destination. Not a few travelled in this way,
even to Delhi. Weeks, often months, were spent on the voyage; great
inconveniences were endured, and not infrequently great perils
encountered from the sudden storms to which voyagers on the Ganges are
exposed, from the strong and eddying currents in some parts of the
river, and perhaps most of all from the treacherous character of the
boatmen. In 1841 and 1842 a severe storm fell on a large fleet of boats
taking a European regiment to the north-west. Many of the boats were
wrecked, and, if I remember rightly, about three hundred men lost their
lives.

There was a third mode of proceeding to the north-west. A few years
previously a River Steam Company had been formed for the transmission of
passengers and goods. Passengers were accommodated in flats drawn by
steamers. As the Ganges enters Bengal it breaks into a number of
streams, by which it makes its way to the ocean. The Hoogly, on which
Calcutta stands, is one of these streams. Some of them are so shallow at
certain seasons that native boats of considerable size cannot find
sufficient water, and they are at that time impassable for steamers,
though so constructed as to hav