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 estimated the aborigines at 2000 to 2500, and gives a very unflattering description of them. They then used rafts of bamboo in addition to canoes.[96] 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.[97] 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 _Runnymede_ 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.[98] 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 animals were rats; but the bays abounded with fish and turtle, and water was obtained by sinking wells in the beach. In the middle of July, the _Flying Fish_--the ship that had landed the first settlers--brought a second batch from Moulmein, and the population then consisted of four men, two women, and four children, with a small number of Burmese and a few Lascars.