After a month or so of the old life, he returned to Acheen with a quantity of quicksilver, which, he said, abounded in some of the Andamans; and thereafter he made several other voyages, always returning with a similar cargo. "Some Mohammedan faquirs would have accompanied him, but he would not suffer them, because, he said, he could not engage for their safety among his countrymen. When I saw him he was in company of a seid, whom I carried as a passenger to Surat, and from whom I had this account of his adventures."
Trustworthy history of the islands now begins; for, at the close of the eighteenth century, the Honourable East India Company sent small expeditions, under Colonel Colebrooke and Captain Blair, to report on the possibilities of the group. Their accounts were so satisfactory, that, in 1789, the latter was sent to establish a penal settlement in what was then called Port Cornwallis--now Port Blair.
All went well with Blair and his colony until 1792, when orders were received from Calcutta to transfer the whole establishment to the harbour in North Andaman, which, in turn, was to be known as Port Cornwallis. The first place of that name was henceforth for a time dubbed Old Harbour.
Colonel Syme, who was sent on a mission to Ava in 1795, visited the establishment on his voyage out, and found there a population of 700, including a company of sepoys. He estimated the aborigines at 2000 to 2500, and gives a very unflattering description of them. They then used rafts of bamboo in addition to canoes.[96]
The new settlement proved so unhealthy, that, after an existence of four years, its abandonment was decided on: the prisoners were transferred to Penang, and the troops returned to Bengal.[97]
For many years now, the group remained untenanted by a foreign element, and its isolation was broken only by the rendezvous at Port Cornwallis, in 1824, of the fleet carrying the army of Sir Archibald Campbell to Rangoon for the first Burmese war; by the murder, while ascertaining the mineral possibilities of the islands, of Dr Heifer, a Russian scientist employed by the H.E.I.C.; and by the simultaneous wrecks in 1844, on Sir John Lawrence Island, of the troopships _Runnymede_ and _Briton_, which, in a hurricane one inky night, were flung, unknown to each other until morning dawned, right over the reef in among the trees of the jungle. Hardly a life was lost.