The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, October 1879Various
History
The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, October 1879
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
After another seventy years the Bombay Marine became in name what, as
the only local armed fleet, it had long been in fact--the Indian Navy.
Wherever round the basin of the Indian Ocean there had been fighting in
those years, the vessels of the Bombay Marine had borne the British flag
with honour, though the services of officers and crews, both afloat and
ashore, had been too sparingly recognised. And in those years was
commenced the series of surveys which are still the chief authorities
for the navigation of the Eastern seas, and have given the names of
Rennie, Moresby, Haines, and Taylor a permanent place in history. But
men who entered the Bombay Marine were still serving efficiently when
the Indian Navy was abolished, in the belief that ships of the Royal
Navy would carry on the police of the seas as efficiently, but at less
annual cost, and that other arrangements might be made for the business
of inland navigation and transport; the necessity for recurrent shore
surveys seems not to have been foreseen, though already a special
department has been created and placed under a retired officer of the
Indian Navy. It is impossible not to admit that, through its want of
influential friends, the Service was treated unjustly. The guarantee of
"Colonel Sykes's clause" has, through repeated agitation, been made so
effectual for officers of the Indian Army that men of forty have retired
as full colonels, because all their regimental seniors had joined the
Staff Corps, while the officers of the Indian Navy were forced to retire
without appeal on something like the pension of their rank. But they
must have felt a grim satisfaction in knowing that they had outlived the
piracy which had been the scourge of Western India and the first cause
of the creation of the force; their last serious service was in
administering a final pounding to their old enemies the Waghers, the
last survivors of the flourishing pirate communities of Kattyawar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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