'History of the Indian Navy. (1613-1863).' [‎545] (564/622)

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HISTORY OF THE INDIAN NAVY, 545
was prevented by the rules of the House from making a reply • but
k q -' 0 xi w-n 0 L June ' ! ie c, WaS again P re8Sed for an answer
by Sir H. Willoughby and Sir M. Farquhar, he said:—- u The
position of the officers of the Indian Navy was unchanged, that
no steps had yet been taken in relation to that Service and
that nothing, in fact, had been done. He hoped, too that all
arrangements which it might be necessary to make, would be
effected without in any degree infringing on the guarantee given
to the public servants in India when the transfer of Government
was about to take place. He must, however, be permitted to
put a different interpretation on the guarantee from that which
the Hon. Member for Hertford (Sir M. Farquhar) had given
When an army or a regiment was reduced, the effect was to
diminish, to a certain extent, the prospect of the junior officers.
But if the guarantee referred to were taken to extend to all
advantages which every officer might obtain by promotion, the
Indian Army and Navy must be kept up for the next twenty
years. It would be necessary to preserve them for that length
of time, if all the advantages which their existence might confer
on the officers who had entered them perhaps only six months
ago, were to be preserved to those officers in all their integrity.
He entirely admitted that full and fair consideration should be
given to the case of those officers whose prospects would be
injured. It was his anxious desire, and that of every Member
of the Indian Council, that the claims of officers in the Indian
Service should be considered in that way; but when a regiment
was reduced in England the officers whose services were no
longer required were put on half-pay, and he could never admit
that the House had bound itself to keep up the Army and Navy
of India, so that no injury should be done to the prospects of
the youngest officer throughout his life." To this it might be
replied that there was no such thing as half-pay in the Indian
Navy, and the right to full-pay pensions was just one of the
44 privileges " that was specially guaranteed by the wording of
the Act. Also temporary half-pay was a widely different thing
from permanent loss of profession and such injury to prospects
as is involved in abolition.
On the 12th of June, 1862, Commodore Wellesley proceeded
to England to advise the Government on the scale of pensions
to be awarded to officers of the Indian Navy, and on other
regular slavers, their property destroyed, and themselves subjected to wanton
outrage, or placed in imminent peril of their lives." Such incidents, as these
the writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. in the Bombay journal not unreasonably remarks, "proclaim trumpet-
tongued the necessity for the reconstitution of an Indian Marine. In the days
of the Indian Navy, our officers in these seas generally knew what they were
about. They managed to learn Arabic enough to help them in avoiding scrapes
arising out of zeal untempered by experience, and if they ever chased the wrong
vessel, they discovered their mistake before any serious harm had been done to
innocent people."
VOL. II. N N