While withdrawing from Afghanistan, however, Lord Ellenborough was anxious to retain our hold upon the lower Indus with the fort of Karachi, which had been occupied temporarily as our base for the late operations. Sir Charles Napier was therefore sent out to Scinde with a small force to press upon the Amirs a treaty to that effect. The Amirs very naturally resented the demand; whereupon Napier instantly struck the first blow. His campaign is one which every Englishman should know, and which none has any excuse for not knowing; for its history was written by William Napier. Charles Napier began by making a raid with five hundred and fifty men mounted on camels across many miles of desert to a stronghold of the Amirs, and blowing up the fort with gunpowder. On this march he carried not only provisions but water for the whole force, animals and men. Then returning to the Indus he marched south upon Hyderabad with twenty-eight hundred men; and on the 17th of March, 1843, attacked between twenty and thirty thousand of the enemy at Miani, in a strong position above the bed of a dry river. There followed one of the greatest and most marvellous battles ever fought by the British; and at the close of three hours the enemy was hopelessly routed with a loss of five thousand men. Again the Baluchis managed to collect twenty thousand men; and Napier, having been reinforced to a strength of five thousand men, defeated them in a second action of much the same kind at Dubba; after which he with little more trouble completed the subjection of the Amirs. Scinde was then annexed; and Napier as its first Governor showed himself not less capable as an administrator than as a general. By this time trouble had arisen in the dominions of Scindia owing to the death of the Maharaja without issue; and an armed insurrection broke out against the authority of the Regent accepted by the British Government. The matter was one which at ordinary times might have been adjusted by patience; but the attitude of the Sikhs, which I shall describe immediately, was such that there could be no trifling. The Maratha armies had been assembled, some thirty thousand strong, including between them twenty-two thousand men trained by European officers; and, with a disputed succession in train, it was impossible to say what mischief their leaders might work. Ellenborough therefore ordered a strong force to enter Scindia's dominions in two columns, and the war was ended in one day--29th of Dec. 1843--by the simultaneous victories of Sir Hugh Gough at Maharajpore, and of General Grey at Punniar. These were the last of our battles with the Marathas. They have never to this day forgiven us for depriving them of the mastery of India; and in 1843, in consequence of our defeats in Afghanistan, they had been stirring up hostility against us in every court of the East. The double defeat therefore gave them a salutary lesson.