The causes of this war, the second which the Burmese had forced upon us in the course of thirty years, were almost identical with those which had brought about the conflict with China, described in the preceding chapter. Persistent disregard of treaties and systematic oppression of European traders had culminated in maltreatment of British subjects so flagrant that our Government was compelled to seek redress by arms; and in each theatre of war the prestige of Britain was re-established by the combined efforts of both branches of the Service. The dissensions between England and the King of Ava, as the ruler of Burma was officially described, were brought to a climax by the misconduct of one of his lieutenants, the governor of Rangoon, who wantonly imprisoned the master of a British ship, and exposed him in the stocks to the gibes and insults of an Eastern rabble. When a squadron demanded reparation for this outrage the Burmese temporised, but soon so clearly showed they did not mean to mend their ways that the commodore seized a Burmese ship-of-war and blockaded the port of Rangoon. The truculent governor retaliated by confiscating the property of all British subjects within his reach; and the sailors thereupon towed their prize to sea under a heavy fire from the stockades on the banks of the Rangoon river. When this news reached Calcutta the Indian Government at once ordered a combined naval and military expedition[147] to rendezvous at the mouth of the branch of the Irrawaddy on which Rangoon stands, and on January 19, 1852, Lieutenant-Colonel Reignolds with the headquarters and right wing of the regiment (444 all told) embarked at Calcutta, followed in a few weeks by Lieutenant-Colonel C. J. Coote with the left wing, 518 strong.[148] This was not the first time that the sails of a great British expedition had whitened Burmese waters. In 1824, the King of Ava had invaded the territories of the East India Company, an act of unprovoked aggression punished by the capture of Rangoon, and followed by a long series of operations, in which a very large number of the British troops perished of disease before the Burmese sued for peace, and ceded to us the provinces of Aracan and Tenasserim, long narrow strips of territory washed respectively by the waters of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Rangoon was restored to the King of Ava, and with it two hundred miles of coast-line that lay like a wedge between our new dominions.[149]