After destroying the batteries and securing the five hundred guns captured at Amoy, the expeditionary force put to sea, leaving as garrison of Kulangsu 361 officers and men of the XVIIIth under Major J. Cowper, part of the 26th, and a detachment of artillery--a total of 550 of all ranks. The intention was to attack the towns of Chinhai and Ningpo, and then, in order to efface the bad impression produced by our evacuation of Chusan at the beginning of the year, to re-occupy that island. Bad weather, however, scattered the ships, and, when at length they were reassembled it was decided at once to seize Tinghae, the capital of Chusan, before the Chinese had finished their preparations for its defence. Since we had abandoned it our enemy had fortified the town assiduously. On the sea wall facing the harbour a battery of eighty guns had been thrown up. On the west it ended at the base of an eminence, in our previous occupation known as Pagoda Hill, where cannon were now mounted; to the eastward it stretched almost to the foot of a line of heights, entrenched but not yet armed. Gough decided to land at the foot of these heights, and after carrying them to push some of the troops against the town, while others attacked the long battery from flank and rear. The ships were to avoid the fire of the guns on the sea front by taking up their stations on the outer flanks of Pagoda Hill and the eastern heights. The fleet came into action on October 1, 1841, and covered by their bombardment three hundred of the Royal Irish under Lieutenant-Colonel Adams, the newly arrived 55th regiment, and eight guns of the Madras Artillery disembarked under a heavy though ill-aimed fire of matchlocks and gingals. The 55th won the eastern heights, though not without difficulty, for the garrison of Tinghae were soldiers of a better stamp than the defenders of Amoy. The Royal Irish were sent off to the right, marching in quarter column and covered by the flank companies and picked marksmen, who ran into the enemy at an encampment near the long battery. Here the Chinese showed fight, and lost considerably in hand-to-hand work. Murray relates that a “white-buttoned” Mandarin,[134] after wounding one of the marksmen in the chest with a spear, “closed with him and got his forage cap off, another man came up and thrust at him with a bayonet, which he wrenched off, but was shot by a third.” While the sharpshooters were thus employed the grenadier company had made its way into the long battery, where there was a sharp skirmish at close quarters round a gun. The Chinese stood bravely, and were not dislodged until another company of the regiment came up at the double, when they fell back, leaving the ground covered with their own wounded and a few of the XVIIIth. In this little fight pistols were used with effect. A Chinaman ran at Murray, sword in hand, but as the hero of the adventure writes, “having no particular confidence