Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/81

 king. But so little did he succeed in mollifying the angry feelings of the Court, that it was only by address and determination that he escaped being detained as a hostage. This was the last attempt to communicate with the government of Ava by a pacific British mission.

The nationalist drama, in which King-bering was the leading actor, had an ill ending. A Burmese army came and swept him and his followers back to Chittagong, from which harbour of refuge they resumed patriotic incursions. So, till 1815, the triangular warfare was maintained, poor King-bering and his men being hunted with equal zest by the Company's Sepoys and the levies of the Viceroy of Arakan. Then the freebooter died, and his haunt amid the forests knew him no more. But the ill-feeling, of which his forays were the occasion, did not die with him. It would be too much to say that King Bodau Phra brooded over his wrongs; but the inattention of John Company to his representations struck him as a piece of outer barbarism, of which the government of Ava was obliged to take serious note. It was intimated in 1817 that if the vagabond Mugs were not sent back to receive the penalty of their contempt, the Lord of the Seas and Earth would be obliged to re-assert his authority over such places as Dacca and Murshidábád—undoubted appanages of the crown of Arakan. Such was the warning, given in a pompous letter from the Governor