Their extraordinary audacity and the success with which they murdered their victims is recorded in the memorandum prepared in March, 1836, by an officer, Captain Lowis, who did much to bring them to justice. He speaks of repeated instances in which ten or a dozen persons were put to death by boats’ crews, hardly more numerous than their victims. In one case seven men were murdered at one and the same time by a crew of nine Thugs. The victims were often men from the west country, notoriously stronger and braver than the natives of Bengal. Strange to say, the deadly business was often completed in small boats, in which there seemed too little room to move or plan the fell purpose unperceived. Frequently the Thug boatmen made friends with their victims, as in the case of a boat laden with tobacco and hemp, when the captain and crew persuaded their passengers to land on a sand bank to cook and eat their dinner together. After the meal, the Thug leader invited his friends to join in a song of praise to the Hindu divinity, and while it was being sung the Thugs adroitly got behind their victims and strangled them. A shocking story was revealed in the trial of three Bengalis who were arraigned at Berhampore on suspicion of having committed Thuggee. It appeared that one of them, Madhub by name, had arrived at the Serai with a large sum of money in the hollow of a joint of bamboo; two others, Gunga Hurree Mitter and Kunhaye, quickly came upon the scene in pursuit of the first whom they accused of having stolen the money from their boat. Madhub retorted that they were Thugs and wanted to murder him. This squabble excited suspicion and ended in the arrest of all three. Within a few days two Bengali boats, full of suspicious characters and laden with much money and property, were seized between Monghyr and Patna and news came that four travelling merchants had recently disappeared. It was strongly suspected that these merchants had been murdered and great efforts were made to obtain a clue to the guilty parties. Gunga Hurree Mitter, above mentioned, seemed willing to turn approver, and although stoutly denying that he was concerned in this particular crime he at length confessed to complicity in many frightful murders as a river Thug and admitted as many as fifty murders between Moorshedabad and Barr, where the boats had been seized. About this time another very notorious Thug was arrested in the Burdwan district who volunteered valuable information in exchange for his life and confessed to being an accomplice in the murder of the merchants.