“To all this the Chairman made answer that the Governor-General and people of India had nothing to do with the India House; and if I did not go back and join _their_ pilot service, to which I belonged, I should receive such a communication from that House as would be by no means agreeable to me! “On the instant I penned my resignation, and placing it in his hands, then gave utterance to the sentiment which actuated me from that moment till the moment I realised my aspiration—that I would establish the Overland Route, in spite of the India House.” How little must the public of the present day be prepared to find such a condition of affairs, or anything in the shape of antagonism in such a quarter, now that the Overland Route has become not only a practical thing for the “mail” but for ordinary travellers and tourists, and a matter of panorama and pantomime, of dioramic effects and burlesque songs—the sublime, and the ridiculous! But how did it fare with our enterprising sailor, after penning his resignation, and handing it in with such a declaration and defiance? “This avowal,” says Lieutenant Waghorn, “most impolitic on my part as regarded my individual interests, is perhaps the key to much of the otherwise inexplicable opposition I subsequently met with from those upon whose most energetic co-operation I had every apparent reason to rely. I proceeded to Egypt, not only without official recommendation, but with a sort of official stigma on my sanity! “The Government nautical authorities reported that the Red Sea was not navigable; and the East India Company’s naval officers declared, that, if it _were_ navigable, the North-Westers peculiar to those waters, and the South-West monsoons of the Indian Ocean, would swallow all steamers up! And, as if there were not enough to crush me in the eyes of foreigners and my own countrymen, documents were actually laid before Parliament, showing that coals had cost the East India Company twenty pounds per ton, at Suez, and had taken _fifteen months_ to get there.”