“Of myself I trust I may be excused when I say that the highest object of my ambition has ever been an extensive usefulness; and my line of life—my turn of mind—my disposition long ago impelled me to give all my leisure, and all my opportunities of observation, to the introduction of steam-vessels, and permanently establishing them as the means of communication between India and England, including all the colonies on the route. The vast importance of three months’ earlier information to His Majesty’s Government and to the Honourable Company, whether relative to a war or a peace; to abundant or to short crops; to the sickness or convalescence of a colony or district, and oftentimes even of an individual; the advantages to the merchant, by enabling him to regulate his supplies and orders according to circumstances and demands; the anxieties of the thousands of my countrymen in India for accounts, and further accounts, of their parents, children, and friends at home; the corresponding anxieties of those relatives and friends in this country; in a word, the speediest possible transit of letters to the tens of thousands who at all times in solicitude await them, was a service to my mind,” (of the greatest general importance) “and it shall not be my fault if I do not, and for ever, establish it.” By his indefatigable efforts in India, having extensively made known his plans and methods for accomplishing these great objects, and bringing home with him the testimonial of thanks he had received from the Governor in Council of Bombay, he returned to England. Let his own words—homely, earnest, straightforward, full of sailor-like simplicity, impulsive, and fraught with important results—relate his reception. “Armed with the record of the Governor’s thanks, I commenced an active agitation in India for the establishment of steam to Europe. In prosecution of this design, I returned to England, expecting, of course, to be received with open arms—at the India House especially. Judge of my surprise on being told by the successor of Mr. Loch (Chairman of the court), that the India Company required no steam to the East at all! “I told him that the feeling in India was most ardent for it; that I had convened large public meetings at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, and, in fact, all over the Peninsula, which I had traversed by _dawk_; that the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, was enthusiastic in the same cause, and had done me the honour to predict (with what prescience need not now, in 1849, be stated), that if ever the object was accomplished, it would be by the man who had navigated the Red Sea in an open boat, under the circumstances already named.