ATTEMPT AT COLOxNISATION 181 



Colonel Syme, who was sent on a mission to Ava in 1795, 

 visited the establishment on his voyage out, and found there 

 a population of 700, including a company of sepoys. He esti- 

 mated the aborigines at 2000 to 2500, and gives a very unflattering 

 description of them. They then used rafts of bamboo in addition 

 to canoes.* 



The new settlement proved so unhealthy, that, after an 

 existence of four years, its abandonment was decided on : the 

 prisoners were transferred to Penang, and the troops returned 

 to Bengal.f 



For many years now, the group remained untenanted by a 

 foreign element, and its isolation was broken only by the 

 rendezvous at Port Cornwallis, in 1824, of the fleet carrying the 

 army of Sir Archibald Campbell to Rangoon for the first 

 Burmese war ; by the murder, while ascertaining the mineral 

 possibilities of the islands, of Dr Heifer, a Russian scientist 

 employed by the H.E.I.C. ; and by the simultaneous wrecks in 

 1844, on Sir John Lawrence Island, of the troopships Runnyviede 

 and Briton^ which, in a hurricane one inky night, were flung, 

 unknown to each other until morning dawned, right over the 

 reef in among the trees of the jungle. Hardly a life was 

 lost. 



Before the Andamans again became the field of Government 

 activity, the Cocos group, which lie 20 miles to the north of Great 

 Andaman, were the scene of an unofficial attempt at colonisation. \ 

 The first settlers were two men on their way to Australia, who, 

 struck with the beauty of the Great Coco, with its shore covered 

 with innumerable coco palms and other trees, gave up their 

 original plan, and were left there in the early part of 1849. There 

 were no inhabitants ; but the islands were frequented during the 

 north-east monsoon by people from Tenasserim and Arakan, who 

 came for the coconuts that were so plentiful. The only 



* A Mission to Ava, by Col. Michael Syme, 3 vols. 



t The Indian Antiquary, monthly numbers, April 1900- June 1901, con- 

 tains articles by Lieut. -Col. R. C. Temple on Blair's reports of his survey and 

 settlement in the Andamans. 



X Vide "Our Monthly," June and July 1883. Rangoon. 



