OF THE MALAY PEJs'TXSrLA. 169 



Ismail, though he had urged to be excused acceptiug the 

 Sultanship, now that he was elected determined to maintain his 

 position, but living a most retired life far away in the interior of 

 Perak, never seemed to trouble himself with the affairs of State, 

 or take any measures to prevent the ruin and desolation of Larut, 

 or the disgrace which had been put on one of his highest officers, 

 the Mentri. 



Larut, from a populous and thriving country with some 20 to 

 -30,000 inhabitants and a revenue of about §200,000 per annum, 

 with hundreds of good houses and acres of cultivated lands, had 

 been reduced to a wilderness, inhabited, with the exception of 

 Captain Speedy and his men, by pirates, robbers and murderers. 



It is useless to go into a detail of the atrocities committed on 

 all sides in Larut, but at the beginning of this disturbance 3,000 

 men are said to have been killed in a day, every house in the 

 country, except those at Bukit Gantang and the Mentri' s house 

 at Matang, had been burnt down, and Larut was filled with nothing 

 but stockades, whose occupants, at least those of the Si Kuan 

 faction, eked out a precarious livelihood by a system of wholesale 

 piracy and murder, not only in Larut and Perak waters, but on 

 the high seas, goins; so far as to make more than one attack on 

 our Settlement of Pengkor, and finally severely wounding two 

 officers of H. M.'s Navy in an attack on a boat of H. M. S. 

 " Midget 



After this last act Captain Woollcomee, e.x., Senior ^"aval 

 Officer in these waters, destroyed the two principal stockades of 

 these pirates on the Larut river, and the Mentri was thus able to 

 gain possession of the mouth of his river, a result he would pro- 

 bably never have accomplished alone. 



Previous to this a steamer flying the English flag had been 

 fired on, and there had been a considerable naval engagement, 

 in which a large number of Chinese junks took part, between the 

 vessels of the rival factions off Larut. where the Go Kuan party 

 had been completely defeated and two of their vessels sunk. 



To such an extent had party feeling risen, that having expelled 

 the Mentri from Larut. a desperate attempt was made to murder 



