by English officers. Several battalions of regular Sepoys had to be employed in hunting them out of Bengal, and troops were afterwards posted along the frontier to prevent all future raids[1].
At the same time, other troops were waging a harder fight against the Bhutia invaders of Kúch-Behar, whose young Rájá in 1772 had appealed to Hastings for help in driving them back to their own hills. In return for such help, he offered to acknowledge the Company's over-lordship, and to assign half his revenues to the Government of Bengal. His prayer was granted, and a small Sepoy force hastened to his aid. The men of Bhután fought stubbornly, but Sepoy discipline under British leading bore them back into their own mountains; and in 1774 their leader, the Deb Rájá, was glad to make peace on terms which restored to him his captured strongholds and gave Bhutia merchants the right of trading with Rangpur.
Out of this campaign sprang Hastings' project of sending a British mission into Tibet. The Teshu Láma, one of the two rival Buddhist Popes who reigned in that far corner of the Chinese Empire, had written to Hastings pleading for the merciful treatment of his unruly vassal, the Deb Rájá. His request was answered by the treaty of 1774, which Hastings followed up by sending George Bogle, a young civil officer of fine promise, on a friendly mission to the Láma himself. This measure, he fondly hoped, might prove the preface to a new and profitable trade between
- ↑ Gleig.
