Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/76

 fascinating chapters in historical romance. But these men were pirates or bandits, renegade priests from Goa, or deserters from Malacca. Like others of their nation, they showed a marvellous capacity for adapting themselves to native ways and surpassed Asiatics in the favourite forms of Asiatic crime. Their descendants remain to this day by thousands in the East, and are hardly distinguishable in morals or physique from the indigenous natives. Pirate ships from the Portuguese headquarters in the Sundarbans swept the seas; one clever miscreant set up a kingdom for himself at Syriam near Rangoon, and kept up gorgeous Oriental state. But practically the struggles for mastery in Burma were amongst the natives whose only relations with Western arts and civilization arose from the occasional employment of mercenary Portuguese captains. We need not dwell upon the monotonous and sanguinary record, or chronicle the ups and downs of fortune by which the kings of Burma conquered the kings of Martaban or of Pegu, or these States in turn obtained control over the northern kingdom or each other. It is however worth while to note that Siam entered constantly into the competitions and complications just as in our own day a definite understanding with the Court of Bangkok was regarded as a necessary factor for the success of administration at Mandalay. It suffices to go back to 1750, when Alompra the Hunter, a man of humble birth but commanding