The garrison at Vellore consisted of about four hundred Europeans and fifteen hundred sepoys. At midnight, without warning, the sepoys rose in mutiny. One body fired on the European barracks until half the soldiers were killed or wounded. Another body fired on the houses of the British officers, and shot them down as they rushed out to know the cause of the uproar. All this while provisions were distributed amongst the sepoys by the Mysore princes, and the flag of Mysore was hoisted over the fortress. [Sidenote: Suppression of mutiny; recall of Bentinck.] Fortunately the news was carried to Arcot, where Colonel Gillespie commanded a British garrison. Gillespie at once galloped to Vellore with a troop of British dragoons and two field guns. The gates of Vellore were blown open; the soldiers rushed in; four hundred mutineers were cut down, and the outbreak was over. The Home authorities wanted a scapegoat; and Lord William Bentinck, the governor of Madras, and Sir John Craddock, the commander-in-chief of the Madras army, were recalled. Fifty years afterwards, when the Bengal army broke out in mutiny on the score of greased cartridges, many an old officer wished that a Gillespie, with the independent authority of a Gillespie, had been in command at Barrackpore. [Sidenote: Lord Minto, 1807-13: lawless condition of Bundelkund.] §8. In 1807 Lord Minto succeeded Barlow as Governor-General. He broke the spell of non-intervention. South of the river Jumna, between the frontiers of Bengal and those of Sindia and Holkar, are the hills and jungles of Bundelkund. For centuries the chiefs of Bundelkund had never been more than half conquered. They never paid tribute to Mogul or Mahratta unless compelled by force of arms; and they kept the country in constant anarchy by their lawless acts and endless feuds. [Sidenote: British conquest.] When the Peishwa accepted the British alliance, he ceded Bundelkund for the maintenance of the Poona Subsidiary Force. Of course the cession was a sham. The Peishwa ceded territory which only nominally belonged to him, and the British were too happy in concluding a subsidiary alliance to inquire too nicely into his sovereign rights over Bundelkund. The result was that the chiefs of Bundelkund defied the British as they defied the Peishwa, and Sir George Barlow sacrificed revenue and ignored brigandage rather than interfere with his western neighbours. Lord Minto found that there were a hundred and fifty leaders of banditti in Bundelkund, who held as many fortresses, settled all disputes by the sword, and offered an asylum to all the bandits and burglars that escaped from British territory. Lord Minto organised an expedition which established for a while something like peace and order in Bundelkund, and secured the collection of tribute with a regularity which had been unknown for centuries. [Sidenote: Dangers in the Punjab.]