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under pretence of religious pilgrimage, have been accustomed to traverse the chief part of Bengal begging, stealing and plundering wherever they go, and as it best suits their convenience to practice." In the years subsequent to the famine, their ranks were swollen by a crowd of starving peasants who had neither seed nor implements to recommence cultivation with, and the cold weather of 1772 hrought them down upon the harvest fields of Lower Bengal, burning, plundering, ravaging in bodies of fifty thousand men." The Collector called out the military; but after a temporary success our Sepoys" were at length totally defeated, a Captain Thomas (their leader) with almost the whole party cut off." It was not till the close of the winter, that the Council could report to the Court of Directors that a battalion, under an experienced Commander, had acted successfully against them, and a month later we find that even this tardy intimation had been premature. On the 31st March 1773, Warren Hastings finally acknowledges that the commander who had succeeded Captain Thomas "unhappily underwent the same fate, that four battalions of the army were then actively engaged against the banditti, but that, in spite of the militia levies called from the land-holders, their combined operations had been fruitless. The Revenue could not be collected, the inhabitants made common cause with the marauders, and the whole rural administration was unhinged. Such excursions were annual episodes in what some have been pleased to represent the still life of Bengal.—Hunter's annals of Rural Bengal, pp. 70–72.
