264 CapL Veniberton's Mission to Boolan, 1837-3& |_ Aphid, 



where good examples alone should be led, bad examples alone are 

 followed. 



To the higher orders I cannot attribute the possession of a single 

 good quality. They are utter strangers to truth, they are greedy 

 beggars, they are wholly familiar with rapacity and craftiness, and the 

 will of working evil. This censure applies only to those with whom 

 we had personal intercourse ; it would be perhaps unfair to include 

 the Soobahs, whom we only saw once, in such a flattering picture, 

 but it certainly would not be unreasonable ; and I must make one 

 exception in favour of Bullumboo, the Soobah of Dewangiri, and he 

 was the only man of any rank that we had reason to be friendly 

 towards and to respect. In morale they appeared to me to be inferior 

 to all ordinary Hill tribes, on whom a Bootea would look with in- 

 effable contempt ; and although their houses are generally better, and 

 although they actually have castles and places called palaces, and 

 although the elders of the land dress in fine cloths and gaudy silks, 

 and possess money, ponies, mules, and slaves, I am disposed to consi- 

 der them as inferior even to the naked Naga. 



They are not even courageous. I am inclined to rank courage among 

 physical rather than moral qualities, yet it could not so be classified 

 in the consideration of a Bootea, in whom other physical qualities are 

 well developed. I therefore consider it among those other qualities 

 which, as I have said, are absent in Bootan. A Bootea is a great 

 boaster, but a small performer. All the accounts I heard of their re- 

 puted courage were ludicrous. Turner mentions seriously that one 

 desperate revolution superinduced the death of one man in battle; 

 and we were told that in the late protracted one, the only sufferers 

 were two sick people who were unable to escape from a burning house. 

 In a military point of view they could only make up for their deficiency 

 in numbers by an excess of courage and of perseverance under diffi- 

 culties. They are not even well versed in the use of their national 

 weapons. The Gourkha Soubahdar who accompanied the Mission 

 looked on them with the utmost contempt, and this knowledge he had 

 gained by long experience. In Mr. Scott's time a handful of Assamese 

 sebundies would take stronghold after stronghold, and lead off all the 

 tenants, excepting the defenders who had run away, as captives ; and 

 very lately 700 Booteas, with every advantage of ground, were totally 

 routed by seventy of the same sebundies. Their courage may there- 

 fore be written down as entirely imaginary. 



Their ideas of religion appear to be very confused ; religion with 

 them consisting, as indeed it may do among other more civilised 

 people, of certain external forms, such as counting beads, and mutter- 



