The guns on their stockades and war-boats are equally defective from bad powder, and the hammered iron bullets. It is difficult to know where they could have collected such a curious assemblage. Sometimes you will fall in with a small brass piece of exquisite Spanish manufacture, at others you will find them of the strangest forms that can be conceived. I rather think they were purchased, or taken as a part of the duties on vessels trading to Rangoon. I recollect once at the first taking of a stockade, we knocked off the trunnions of an old iron gun, and left it there as useless. The Burmahs reoccupied the stockade, and we had to take it a second time, when we found that they had most ingeniously supplied the want of trunnions with iron hoops and rivets, and the gun was fired at us before we entered. At another time, we entered a stockade which had kept up a brisk fire for a few minutes, and to our surprise found that they had made _wooden_ guns, very well bound and braced with iron hoops. Of course these guns would not fire more than two or three shots each, as the touch-holes became inflamed, and were soon so large as to render the guns unserviceable; but I mention these points, to prove the perseverance of these people, and the efforts they made in their own defence. After the first campaign it is true that they deserted, and the levies were made by force; but the reason of this, for I inquired into it, was not that they had any objection to fight, but that, fighting without pay, they wanted to go home and put the seed into the ground, as otherwise their wives and families would starve. The Burmah war-boats are very splendid craft, pulling from eighty to one hundred oars; the Burmahs manage them very dexterously, and will pull them from seven to eight miles an hour. They have a war-boat dedicated to the Deity, which brought intelligence that saved the nation at the time of the war with the empire of Pegu, in a space of time so short, as almost to appear incredible.