Reporting History

We are enabled, through the courtesy of Mr. Waghorn, to present our readers with a detail of his route from India to England; and as the subject involves considerations of vast importance to this country as well as to Europe generally, we have selected it for illustration in our present number. This gentleman has now long been known to the world as the indefatigable and persevering author of the overland route to India. Brought up from an early age in the pilot service of the East India Company, and having distinguished himself in the Arracan expedition, he was in the year 1827 recommended by Lord Combermere to the Court of Directors, as a proper person to open steam intercourse between this country and India. To this he devoted himself; and in 1829 his views had attracted so much public attention, that he was selected by the Company to take out despatches, and report upon the route by the Red Sea. For his successful accomplishment of this duty, he received, on his arrival at Bombay, the thanks of the Governor General in council; and the circumstance of his having proceeded down the Red Sea in an open boat, when disappointed of his steamer, the Enterprise, at Suez, was particularly adverted to, as indicating the zeal with which he had applied himself to the service of the public. Since the year 1831, the endeavours of this gentleman to accomplish his object, by the formation of establishments in Egypt, for the passage of mails and passengers, have been unceasing, and are at length crowned with perfect success. Upon one occasion, in the year 1836, it is recollected that he succeeded in getting a mail from Bombay to London within 60 days, and the rapidity of his method so impressed the public, the Government, and the Board of Directors, with the advantages to be derived from his line of route, that steamers were forthwith placed at his disposal for facilitating his plans; and so successfully had he availed himself of the resources opened to him, as well by the patronage of the Government at home, as by his personal intimacy with Mehemet Ali, that the Indian mail of July 1841 passed from the post-office of London to the post-office of Bombay in 30 days and 10 hours. There can be no question that this gentleman is eminently entitled to the gratitude of his country, or, we may justly say, of all Europe, for the genius, zeal, and self-devotion by which he has so materially shortened the distance between two points of the globe, so important and so essential to the welfare of each other.