| 1. | Since most of the Flashman Papers were written between 1900 and 1905, it seems likely that Flashman is here referring to the Test Match series of 1901–2, which Australia won by four matches to one, and possibly also to the series of summer 1902, when the Australians retained the Ashes, 2–1. It was in this year that an attempt to amend the ever-controversial leg-before-wicket rule failed. |
| 2. | Flashman’s behaviour on the football field is memorably described in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, where Thomas Hughes refers to his late arrival at scrimmages “with shouts and great action”. |
| 3. | Flashman’s memory is playing him false here, but only slightly. The so-called Rebecca Riots did not begin until some months later, in 1843, when a peculiar secret society known as “Rebecca and her Daughters” began a terrorist campaign against high toll charges in South Wales. They went armed, masked, and disguised as women, and would descend by night on toll-houses and toll-gates, which they wrecked. They apparently took their name from an allusion in Genesis xxiv, 60: “And they blessed Rebekah … and said … let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.” (See Halevy’s History of the English People, vol. iv, and Punch, vol. v, introduction, 1843.) |
| 4. | This is the earliest mention in any sporting or literary record of the “hat trick”, signifying the feat by a bowler of taking three wickets with successive balls, which traditionally entitles him to a new hat. The phrase has now, of course, a wider application outside cricket, covering three successive triumphs of any kind – a hat-trick of goals or election victories, for example. It is interesting to speculate, not only that the phrase had its origin in Mynn’s impulsive gesture to Flashman, but also that it was first used ironically. |
| 5. | Lords Haddington and Stanley were respectively First Lord of the Admiralty and Colonial Secretary; Lord Aberdeen was Foreign Secretary. Flashman is being malicious in coupling Deaf Burke and Lord Brougham as rascals – one was a famous prize-fighter and the other a prominent Whig politican. |
| 6. | Alice Lowe, mistress of Lord Frankfort, figured in a notorious court case over gifts he had given her, and which he claimed she had stolen. Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, then nearing completion, was something of a laughing-stock – Punch noted gleefully that the statue of the great sailor closely resembled Napoleon. The Royal Hunt Cup was first run at Ascot in 1843 and “The Bohemian Girl” opened at Drury Lane in November of that year. |
| 7. | Various government reports appeared in the early 1840s on conditions in mines and factories; they were horrifying. The atrocities referred to in Morrison’s conversation with Solomon may be traced in those reports and in others from the preceding decade. As a result, Lord Ashley (later Earl of Shaftesbury) got a Bill through the Commons in 1842 prohibiting the employment of women or childen below thirteen in the mines, although the Lords subsequently lowered the age to ten; in 1843 the publication of the report of the Children’s Employment Commission (“Home’s report”) led to further legislation, including a reduction in factory working hours for children and adolescents. (See Report of the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) 1842; the second report of the CEC, 1843; and other papers quoted in Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution, by E. Royston Pike.) |
| 8. | Lola Montez was Flashman’s mistress for a brief period in the autumn of 1842, until they quarrelled; he took revenge by engineering a hostile reception for her when she made her début as a dancer on the London stage in June, 1843. Following this incident, she left England and began that astonishing career as a courtesan which led to her becoming virtual ruler of Bavaria – an episode in which Flashman and Otto von Bismarck were closely involved. (See biographies of Lola Montez, and Flashman’s own memoir on the subject, published as Royal Flash.) |
| 9. | From Flashman’s description of the “bluff-looking chap in clerical duds” with the crippled arm, it seems certain that he was Richard Harris Barham (1788–1845), author of The Ingoldsby Legends, of which one of the most famous relates how Lord Tomnoddy, accompanied by “… M’Fuze, and Lieutenant Tregooze, and … Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues”, attended a Newgate execution, and revelled the previous night at the Magpie and Stump, overlooking the street where the scaffold was erected. However, Barham’s inspiration did not come from the execution which Flashman describes; he wrote his famous piece of gallows humour some years earlier, but may well have attended later executions out of interest. Thackeray’s presence is interesting, since it suggests that he had got over the revulsion he felt at Courvoisier’s hanging three years earlier, when he could not bear to watch the final moment. (See Barham; The Times, 7 July 1840, and 27 May 1868, reporting the Courvoisier and Barret executions; Thackeray’s “Going to See a Man Hanged”, Fraser’s Magazine, July 1840; Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge and “A Visit to Newgate”, from Sketches by Boz; and Arthur Griffiths’ Chronicles of Newgate (1884) and Criminal Prisons of London (1862).) |
| 10. | Mr Tighe’s bet was that Flashman would “carry his bat” (i.e. would not lose his wicket, and be “not out” at the end of the innings). A curious wager, perhaps, but not extraordinary in an age when sportsmen were prepared to bet on virtually anything. |
| 11. | The Regency practice among noblemen of patronizing prize-fighters, and using them (usually when they had retired) as bodyguards and musclemen, had not quite died out in Flashman’s youth, so his fears of the Duke’s vengeance were probably well-founded – especially in view of the names mentioned by Judy. Ben Caunt, popularly known as “Big Ben” (the bell in the Westminster clock tower is said to have been named after him) was a notoriously rough heavyweight champion of the 1840s, and the other fighter referred to can only have been Tom Cannon, “the Great Gun of Windsor”, who had held the title in the 1820s. |
| 12. | The first sale of Australian horses, imported into Singapore by Boyd and Company, did not in fact take place until 20 August 1844. These were the first of the famous cavalry “walers” (so called after New South Wales) of the Indian Army. |
| 13. | Not quite so ancient and shrivelled nowadays, perhaps. Flashman, writing in the Pax Britannica of the Edwardian years, could not foresee a time when the tribes of North Borneo would resume the practice of head-hunting which British rule discouraged. The Editor has seen rows of comparatively recent heads in a “head-house” up the Rajang River; the locals admitted that most of them were “orang Japon”, taken from the Japanese invaders of the Second World War, but some of them looked new enough to have belonged to the Indonesian tribesmen who at that time (1966) were fighting the British-Malay forces in the Communist rebellion. |
| 14. | Frank Marryat, son of the novelist Captain Marryat, served as a naval officer in Far Eastern waters in the 1840s, and confirmed Flashman’s opinion of the dullness and prudishness of Singapore society. “Little hospitality, less gaiety … everyone waiting to see what his position in society is going to be.” His description of the city, its people, customs, and institutions, tallies closely with Flashman’s. (See Borneo and the Indian Archipelago (1848), by F. S. Marryat, and for a wealth of detail, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, by C. B. Buckley.) |
| 15. | Catchick Moses the Armenian and Whampoa the Chinese were two of the great characters of early Singapore. Catchick was famous not only as a merchant, but as a billiards player, and for his eccentric habit of shaving left-handed without a glass as he walked about his verandah. He was about 32 when Flashman knew him; when he made his will, at the age of 73, seven years before his death, he followed the unusual procedure of submitting it to his children, so that any disputes could be settled amicably during his lifetime. |
| | Whampoa was the richest of the Chinese community, renowned for the lavishness of his parties, and for his luxurious country home with its gold-framed oval doors. His appearance was as Flashman describes it, down to his black silk robe, pigtail, and sherry glass. (See Buckley, Marryat.) |
| 16. | As Flashman later admits, the name of James Brooke, White Raja of Sarawak and adventurer extraordinary, meant nothing to him on first hearing, which is not surprising since the fame of this remarkable Victorian had not yet reached its peak. But Flashman was plainly impressed, despite himself, by his rescuer’s personality and appearance, and his description tallies exactly with Brooke’s famous portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, which catches all his resolution and restless energy, as well as that romantic air which made him the beau ideal of the early Victorian hero. The painting could serve as the frontispiece for any boys’ adventure story of the nineteenth century – and sometimes did. All that is missing is the face-wound which Flashman mentions; Brooke had received it in a fight with Sumatran pirates at Murdu on 12 February 1844, so it would still be incompletely healed when they met. |
| 17. | If it seems unlikely that even an emotional Victorian can have spoken such purple prose, we can be certain that Brooke at least wrote it, almost word for word. In his journal, about this time, he recorded his emotions on hearing that a European lady was held prisoner by Borneo pirates who were demanding ransom: “A captive damsel! Does it not conjure up images of blue eyes and auburn hair of hyacinthine flow! And after all, a fat old Dutch frau may be the reality! Poor creature, even though she be old, and fat, and unamiable, and ugly, it is shocking to think of such a fate as a life passed among savages!” Obviously, he cannot have had Mrs Flashman in mind. |
| 18. | Henry Keppel (1809–1904) was one of the foremost fighting seamen of the Victorian period. An expert in the specialized craft of river warfare, he was known to the Dyaks as “the red-haired devil”, and served with Brooke in numerous raids against the pirates of the South China Sea. (See his books, Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido, 1846, and A Visit to the Indian Archipelago in HMS Maeander, 1853.) He later became Admiral of the Fleet. |
| 19. | Stuart’s enthusiastic description of Brooke and his adventures is perfectly accurate, so far as it goes (see The Raja of Sarawak by Gertrude L. Jacob, 1876, The Life of Sir James Brooke, by Spenser St John, 1879, Brooke’s own letters and journal, and other Borneo sources quoted elsewhere in these footnotes. Also Appendix B). The only error at this point is a minor one of Flashman’s, for “Stuart’s” name was in fact George Steward; obviously Flashman has again made a mistake of which he is occasionally guilty in his memoirs, of trusting his ears and not troubling to check the spelling of proper names. |
| 20. | Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), “the richest heiress in all England, enjoyed a fame … second only to Queen Victoria.” She spent her life and the vast fortune inherited from her grandfather, Thomas Coutts the banker, on countless charities and good causes, endowing schools, housing schemes, and hospitals, and providing funds for such diverse projects as Irish famine relief, university scholarships, drinking troughs, and colonial exploration; Livingstone, Stanley, and Brooke were among the pioneers she assisted. She was the first woman to be raised to the peerage for public service, and numbered among her friends Wellington, Faraday, Disraeli, Gladstone, Daniel Webster, and Dickens, who dedicated “Martin Chuzzlewit” to her. |
| | The combination of her good looks, charm, and immense wealth attracted innumerable suitors, but she seems to have felt no inclination to matrimony until she met Brooke and “fell madly in love with him”. There is a tradition that she proposed to him and was politely rejected (see following note), but they remained close friends, and she is said to have been instrumental in obtaining official recognition for Sarawak. She eventually married, in her sixties, the American-born William Ashmead-Bartlett. She is buried in Westminster Abbey. (See Raja Brooke and Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Letters, edited by Owen Rutter, and the Dictionary of National Biography.) Flashman’s memory has again betrayed him on one small point; he may have known Miss Coutts, but not “at Stratton Street”; she did not take up residence there until the late 1840s. |
| 21. | The truth about Brooke’s Burmese wound is far from clear; all that can be said with certainty is that he received it during his service in the Bengal Army in the Assam campaign (1823–5) when he commanded a native cavalry unit and was shot while charging a stockade. Both his principal biographers, Gertrude Jacob and Spenser St John, say that he was hit in the lung; according to Miss Jacob the bullet was not extracted until more than a year later, when it was kept in a glass case by Brooke’s mother. On the other hand, Owen Rutter cites John Dill Ross, whose father knew Brooke well, as the authority for the story that the wound was in the genitals. If this is true it is certainly consistent with Brooke’s reputed refusal of Miss Burdett-Coutts, and with the fact that he never married. |
| | It is possible, of course, that Jacob and St John were unaware of the true nature of Brooke’s injury (although this seems unlikely in the case of St John, who was Brooke’s close friend and secretary at Sarawak), or that they were simply being tactful. Remarks occur in their biographies which are capable of varying interpretations: St John, for example, says that in convalescing from the wound Brooke was “absorbed in melancholy thoughts, and often longed to be at rest”, but that is not necessarily significant – any young man with a wound that had put paid to his military career might well be gloomy. Again, both Jacob and St John refer to Brooke being in love, and briefly engaged (to the daughter of a Bath clergyman) after he had been wounded, and St John adds that “he from that time seems to have withdrawn from female blandishments”. It would be dangerous to draw conclusions from such conflicting evidence, or from what is known of Brooke’s character and behaviour; Flashman, naturally, would be ready to believe the worst. |
| 22. | Whatever Flashman’s opinion of Brooke, he has been an honest reporter of the White Raja’s background and conversation. The picture of The Grove – the furnishings and routine, the formal dinners, the reception of petitioners, even his interest in gardening, his pleasure in comfortable armchairs and home newspapers, and his eccentric habit of playing leap-frog – is confirmed by other sources. Much more important, virtually all the opinions which he expressed in Flashman’s presence, throughout this narrative, are to be found elsewhere in Brooke’s own writings. His views on native peoples, piracy, Borneo’s future, missionaries, colonial development, religion and ethics, honours and decorations, personal ambitions and private tastes – all the philosophy of this remarkable man, in fact, is contained at length in his journals and letters, and his conversation as reported by Flashman reflects it accurately, often in identical words. Even the style of his talk seems to have been like his writing, brisk, assertive, eager, and highly opinionated. (See Brooke’s papers, as quoted in St John, Jacob, et al.) |
| 23. | Brooke had written these very words in his journal only a few days before. |
| 24. | Charles Johnson (1829–1917) was Brooke’s nephew, and became the second White Raja on his uncle’s death in 1868. He took the name Brooke as his surname, reigned for almost 50 years, extended Sarawak’s boundaries, and earned a high reputation as a fighting man and just ruler. Despite his background, he was an unusually clear-sighted colonialist who predicted at the beginning of this century the end of empire and the ascendancy of new Eastern Powers in the shape of China and Russia. |
| 25. | W. E. Gladstone was one of several liberal politicians who pressed for charges to be brought against Brooke on the ground that his actions against the Borneo pirates were cruel, illegal, and excessive. St John comments bluntly: “James Brooke’s sympathies were with the victims, Gladstone’s with the pirates.” (See Gladstone’s article on “Piracy in Borneo, and the Operations of 1849”.) |
| 26. | An excellent description of a sea-going pirate prau. These vessels, up to 70 feet long, heavily armed with cannon and carrying hundreds of fighting men, were the scourge of the East Indies until well into the nineteenth century. Cruising sometimes in fleets of hundreds from the great pirate nests of the Philippines and North Borneo, they preyed on shipping and coast towns alike in search of slaves and plunder, and set the small naval forces of Britain and Holland at defiance. |
| | While piracy was universal in the Islands, the principal fraternities were the Balagnini, subsidized by the Borneo princes in return for slaves and treasure; the wandering Maluku from Halmahera in the Moluccas; the Sea Dyaks of the Seribas and Skrang rivers who specialized in head-taking; and most feared of all, the Lanun or Illanun rovers, “the pirates of the lagoon”, from Mindanao, whose praus could cruise for three years at a time and who operated the great slave market on Sulu Island. Although most of the pirate leaders were Islanders, some of them, like Flashman’s friend, Sahib Suleiman Usman, were Arab half-breeds – Usman was held to be especially detestable because he did not scruple to sell fellow-Arabs into slavery, but he was extremely powerful as head of a strong confederacy of North Borneo pirates, and also through his marriage to the Sultan of Sulu’s daughter. (See Brooke, Marryat, Keppel, Mundy, and F. J. Morehead, History of Malaya, vol. ii.) |
| 27. | “Jersey” can surely only refer to “New Jersey”, where the .40 five-shot muzzle-loading revolver known as the Colt Paterson was produced between 1836 and 1842. Some of these pistols had barrels a foot long. |
| 28. | Flashman is definitely mistaken. If any pirates were executed at Linga – and there is no supporting evidence, although the methods of execution which Flashman describes here were common among the Dyaks – Makota could not have been among them, since he was with the pirates at Patusan on the following day. |
| 29. | The storming of Patusan, where five pirate forts were burned, took place on 7 August. If Flashman’s account does not give prominence to the part played by Wade and Keppel, or to the outstanding bravery of the loyal Dyaks and Malays, it is understandable; river-fighting was more confused than most, and he was obviously fully occupied by his own share of it. On some details he is exact – Seaman Ellis was killed in the Jolly Bachelor while loading the bow gun, for example – and other accounts also refer to the plundering of Sharif Sahib’s headquarters (where his “curious and extensive wardrobe” was discovered) and to the fact that his harem escaped unscathed from the battle. Plainly the other reporters did not consult Flashman on this last point, or if they did, he was prudently reticent. |
| 30. | The fort of Sharif Muller (or Mullah) was taken on 14 August, and a great force of pirate praus destroyed. The death of Lt Wade, and Muller’s escape, took place as Flashman describes |
| 31. | The Battle of the Pyramids, fought on 21 July 1798, was one of Napoleon’s most complete victories. He beat and captured an Egyptian-Turkish army more than 20,000 strong under the Circassian, Murad Bey. St John tells us that one of Brooke’s people had taken part in the battle, on the Turkish side, but refers to him merely as “an old Malay”; Flashman is the only source for the suggestion that this anonymous veteran was Paitingi Ali; it is possible, assuming that Paitingi was in his 60s at the time Flashman knew him. |
| 32. | Like Flashman, other participants in the battle on Skrang river thought it the most hectic and bloody of all the encounters fought by Brooke’s force in their passage up the Batang Lupar. Six hundred pirates in six praus attacked Paitingi’s spy-boat, overwhelming its crew of seventeen; Keppel’s account, quoted by Flashman, testifies to the viciousness of the fighting in the waterway choked by a mass of foundering craft and bodies which broke in two as it floated downstream, enabling Brooke and Keppel to drive their gig through the gap, followed by a rocket-firing boat. In addition to Paitingi’s crew, the expedition lost 29 other dead, with 56 wounded in the battle. |
| | Although Flashman was in no position to appreciate it, this action marked the end of the Batang Lupar operation. With the stream too heavy against them, Brooke’s fleet returned to Patusan, having effectively destroyed or dispersed the pirates along the river in the fortnight’s campaign. Much of the credit for this undoubtedly belonged to Keppel, whose role in the leadership Flashman tends to underrate; otherwise, his account of the expedition is on the whole accurate and fair, although it is as usual a highly individual view, and while he is reliable on dates, names of people, places, and vessels, and the broad conduct of operations, there is no way of verifying his more personal recollections. He seems to have magnified the action at Fort Linga (in which by his own account he played no part), but there is no reason to suppose that the gruesome picture which he paints of Borneo river-fighting, or of conditions along the pirate coast, is in any way exaggerated. (See Keppel, Jacob, St John, Marryat, and Sir George Mundy’s Narrative of Events in Borneo and Celebes, 1848.) |
| 33. | So hostile to foreigners was Madagascar that comparatively few written authorities exist for the first half of the last century, and those named by Flashman are the principal ones in English; they bear out virtually every detail which he gives about that astonishing island and its appalling ruler, Ranavalona I. James Hastie (1786–1826) was a soldier, not a missionary; he was tutor to two Malagassy princes and British agent on the island at a time when Europeans were still tolerated there. His journal is in the Public Record Office. W. Ellis’s Three Visits to Madagascar, 1858, Madagascar Revisited, 1867, and The Martyr Church of Madagascar, 1870, are invaluable sources for Queen Ranavalona’s reign, and the island background and people, as is S. P. Oliver’s Madagascar, 1886. See also H. W. Little’s Madagascar, 1884, J. Sibree’s The Great African Island, 1880, and L. McLeod’s Madagascar and its People, 1865. But none compares with the indomitable and entertaining Ida Pfeiffer, that great tourist whose Last Travels contains a wealth of informative detail recorded at first hand. |
| 34. | Curiously enough, this barbarous custom was abolished by Queen Ranavalona. It was said to be her only humane act. |
| 35. | Flashman’s is possibly the only eye-witness account of the fearful cruelties and varied means of execution practised in Madagascar at this time, but the other authorities quote evidence in detail to support him, and there can be no doubt that such atrocities as he describes took place, and were part of the Queen’s policy. Ida Pfeiffer, having confirmed Flashman’s figures of tens of thousands dying annually from execution, massacre, and forced labour, sums up: “If this woman’s rule lasts much longer, Madagascar will be depopulated … Blood – and always blood – is the maxim of Queen Ranavalona, and every day seems lost to this wicked woman on which she cannot sign at least half a dozen death-warrants.” |
| 36. | Flashman’s estimate of Laborde was sound; the Frenchman was a tough and resourceful soldier of fortune who in his time had been a cavalry trooper, steam engineer in Bombay, and (according to some sources) a slave-trader. He was shipwrecked in Madagascar in 1831, enslaved, bought by the Queen and became a favourite. Subsequently he was liberated and married a Malagassy girl, but he was still kept in Madagascar where he served the Queen as engineer and cannon-maker. He became an influential figure at court, and was active in promoting French interest. |
| 37. | The few Europeans who met Queen Ranavalona face to face and lived to write impressions of her, confirm what Flashman says of her appearance, although most of them saw her much later in her reign than he did. Ellis, giving a description which is very close to Flashman’s, adds that “the whole head and face is small, compact and well proportioned; her expression … agreeable, although at times indicating great firmness.” Ida Pfeiffer, who apparently did not see her close to, noted that she was “of strong and sturdy build, rather dark”. Both she and Mr Ellis seem to have thought the Queen rather older than she probably was; there is no reliable evidence of her birth-date, and although the Nouvelle Biographie Générale says “about 1800”, which would make her 44 when Flashman met her, it seems more likely that she was in her early fifties. |
| 38. | Flashman’s virtuosity on the keyboard was either highly eccentric or less memorable than he imagined, for years later when Ida Pfeiffer was invited to play the palace piano, she understood Ranavalona to say that she “had never seen anyone play with their hands”. Mme Pfeiffer found the piano sadly out of tune. |
| 39. | Despite her suspicion of Europeans and their ways, the Queen did in fact employ an English-educated secretary. |
| 40. | These peculiar divination-boards were known as sikidy. According to Sibree, there were three of them, one of four squares by sixteen, a second four by four, and a third four by eight |
| 41. | An unflattering description of Prince Rakota, although not unlike his portrait, which survives. Oliver described him as being like a Greek god, with dark curls and light gold skin, but agrees with Flashman’s estimate of his character, and confirms that he was a moderating influence on his mother. |
| 42. | Flashman is the only survivor of the tanguin, or tangena, ordeal to have written of the experience. His account varies from other descriptions only on minor points – it was customary, when time was available, to starve the patient for 24 hours before the scraped stone of the tanguin fruit was administered, and some historians say that in order to pass the test the pieces of chicken skin had to be regurgitated in a particular direction. The deposit of 28 dollars (Flashman says 24) was normally put up by the accuser of the person undergoing the test – if the accused failed the test, the accuser got his money back, but if he passed, the accuser recovered only one-third of the deposit, the other thirds going to the accused and the Queen. |
| 43. | As a result of its separate evolution, the plant and animal life of Madagascar is unique, and it has been estimated that ninety per cent of its living things exist nowhere else on earth. Among its more celebrated fabulous monsters was the giant Roc bird which carried off Sinbad. The “apes” which Flashman saw were probably sifakas, a type of lemur capable of prodigious jumps. |
| 44. | It was Flashman’s good fortune to arrive at Tamitave on the very morning (15 June 1845) when three European warships, the French Berceau and Zelée and the British frigate Conway, made a concerted attack on the fort and town. The punitive expedition was in retaliation for Ranavalona’s ill-treatment of Europeans – she had recently decreed that those trading with the island were liable to Malagassy law (slavery for debt, forced labour, trial by tanguin, etc.), there had been fatal incidents between British ships and Malagassy troops, and a British shipmaster of American origin, Jacob Heppick, had been enslaved after his barque, the Marie Laure, was shipwrecked. Captain Kelly of the Conway was sent to Tamitave to demand redress early in June, and when this was not forthcoming the Anglo-French bombardment followed a few days later. (See Oliver, the “Memorial of Jacob Heppick, mariner, to the Governor of Mauritius”, and the Annual Register.) |
| 45. | The unsuccessful storming of Tamitave fort by landing parties from the Anglo-French squadron took place as Flashman says. The outer palisade was carried under a hail of grapeshot and musketry, the battery overrun and guns spiked, but the attackers failed to carry the main fort and retired after a brisk fight. The British lost four dead and 12 wounded, and the French 17 dead and 43 wounded. Both the Zelée and Berceau lost topmasts in the gun-battle with the fort |
| | The incident of the flag is true, although not all the details are clear. It appears that it was shot away from the outer wall, and caught by a Malagassy soldier who put it on a spear. It fell again, and was captured by a British midshipman and two sailors; there was a tussle for it between French and British under Malagassy fire, and the matter was only resolved when someone – the Annual Register says Lt Kennedy, but doubtless Flashman knows best – cut it in two. The French received the half bearing the legend “Ranavalona” and the British the piece inscribed “Manjaka”. Most of Tamitave town was burned during the attack. |
| 46. | After a long period of political unrest and violence in the Punjab, the Sikhs finally invaded British-controlled territory in December 1845, and the First Sikh War began. |
