ד

cross-bow glanced away from the well rivetted plates, and the stroke of the sword rang harmlessly upon the helmet, the brassarts and the cuisses of proof. While infantry were powerless and des titute of physical solidity, and armies were numbered only by their array of cuirassiers, battles which were to decide the fate of nat tions scarcely differed from tournaments à l'outrance, or with sharp lances. The prostrate warrior yielded himself before the upraised dagger of his foe, his ransom was regulated by his rank, and while the miserable footmen were slaughtered without mercy in the pur suit, whenever they were dragged into the field by their feudal lords, the vanquished knight was spared by the avarice if not by the humanity of his conqueror. Thus may the bearing of Antient Pistol to his prisoner be received as a touch of the times.

6

Boy, He prays you to save his life; he is a gentleman of good house, and for his ransome he will give you two hundred crowns.

Pistol. Tell him-my fury shall abate, and I

The crowns will take.

As I suck blood, I will some mercy shew.'

Still, however, with all the security against wounds which platearmour afforded, it was attended with many disadvantages. Its enormous weight crippled the limbs and exhausted the strength; the rays of the sun, in warm climates especially, rendered its heat unsupportable; and under some circumstances, as in the passage of a river or morass, the danger of death was increased by its unwieldiness. The slightest intrenchment or difficulty of ground was sufficient to stop the advance of an army; and so impossible was it to oblige an enemy to fight, that (particularly in the frequent Italian wars) it was necessary to level the ground, like the lists of a tournament, on which it was intended by mutual consent to engage. In the French wars of Henry V. which continued in his son's reign, we find the chivalry dismounting to engage on foot with the lance; but this courageous expedient for coming to close quarters, which had been long an English practice, must have been extremely embarrassing with the ponderous equipment of the fifteenth century.

The indissoluble firmness of the forests of pikes which the Swiss infantry opposed in the middle of that century to the proud array of Charles of Burgundy, gave the first check to the hitherto overwhelming force of the old chivalry, and it is from this epoch, that we date the commencement of the last period of armorial history. But one hundred and fifty years were yet to pass before the mixture of musketeers with pikemen gave a decided superiority to infantry. This is not the place to mark the course of invention and improvement by which fire-arms reached their mur

derous

the

derous completion; but experience had scarcely convinced the military world of the inefficacy of steel harness to resist the deathshot of the arquebuss and musket, when our James I. wittily, expressed his pacific admiration of armour': 'He could not,' he said, but greatly praise armour, as it not only protected the wearer, but also prevented him from injuring any other person. The warriors of his times, however, began to discover that it lacked the best part of these qualities. They first laid aside the jambes or steel boots; the shield was abandoned, and next the covering for the arms. When the cavalry disused the lance, the cuisses were no longer worn to guard against its thrust, and the stout leathern or buffcoat hung down from beneath the body-armour to the knees, and supplied the place of the discarded steel. The helmet was later deprived of its useless vizor, but before the middle of the seventeenth century nothing remained of the ancient harness but the open cap and the breasts and backs of steel, which the heavy cavalry of the continent have more or less worn to our times. In our service these have been but lately revived for the equipment of the finest cavalry in Europe, the British Life-guards, who, unaided by such defences, tore the laurels of Waterloo from the cuirassiers of France.

ART. III.—History of a Voyage to the China Sea. By John White, Lieutenant in the United States Navy. Boston. Svo.

1823.

WE have two reasons for noticing this little volume; the first is, that we know the author to be a respectable man, and worthy of credit; and the second, that it affords us a peep into one of those corners of the globe, of which we possess little or no information; because the barbarous but conceited inhabitants, in imitation of their somewhat more civilized and more conceited neighbours, affect to consider all the world, besides themselves, at best as one-eyed barbarians, and seek neither the means of intercourse nor improvement. The country to which we allude is the southern extremity of that long neck of land which lies between the two gulphs of Siam and Tonquin, and which, on our on our charts, is called Cambodia, an evident corruption of the Chinese name Kan-phou-chi. This rump, as it may be termed, of the Chinese empire, has for some time past been governed by the king of Cochin-china, the person whom the French bishop D'Ădran, during a rebellion, assisted very materially in the recovery of his kingdom, and whose son, then a boy, he carried to France and presented to Louis XVI. He, with his father, is since dead; and, as is usual with the unsettled governments of the

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East,

East, a competition for the throne is likely to produce another rebellion and its invariable concomitant—a famine.

The French Jesuits, who have written largely on Siam and Laos, both situated at the back of Cambodia, do not seem to have passed the mountains, or to have had any intercourse with the latter country; and a Portugueze of that fraternity, of the name of Santa Cruz, who ventured among them, was held in so little respect by the natives, that he quitted the mission in disgust, and abandoned them to their fate." The only account, therefore, of this country, at least that we are acquainted with, is to be found in the narrative of a Chinese, who was sent thither in an official capacity by the Court of Pekin, in the latter part of the thirteenth century. It is slightly noticed by Père Amyot, in the Mémoires Chinois,' and has recently been translated by M. Abel Remusat.* It is a vague and meagre composition; but may so far be cou sidered curious, as showing how very little change or improve ment time is able to effect among the people of the East. dirom

The Americans, being in the enjoyment of an unrestricted range for their commercial speculations in every part of the East, on finding that the French had been favourably received in the northern parts of Cochin-china, and boasted of the benefits which were likely to result from it, resolved to try what might be done at the other extremity of this kingdom; and with this view, dispatched two or three of their traders (one of which, the Franklin, was commanded by the author of this volume) to make their way up the Donai River, which falls into a bay close to Cape St. Jacques, and is probably a branch of the great river Cambodia. The latitude of this cape is 10° 32′ N.; longitude 160° 40′ E... At the distance of sixty miles from the mouth of the Donai, following the windings of the river, stands the city of Saigon; the intermediate country is a dead flat of alluvial soil, thickly covered to the water's edge with mangroves and other trees, and resembling, in all respects, the sunderbunds of the Ganges.

On entering this river the Franklin was boarded by a number of people whom, from their manners and appearance, Captain White sets down as being in a state of deplorable barbarism. One of them announced himself as a military chief; he was (the Captain says) a withered, grey-headed old man, possessing, however, a great deal of vivacity, tinctured with a leaven of savage childishness, which, in spite of his affectation of great state and ceremony, would constantly break out, and afford us infinite amusement.' One of his attendants carried a huge umbrella spread over his head, without which he would not stir à

* Description du Royaume de Camboge, par un Voyageur Chinois, &c.

step;

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step another had two little bags strung over his shoulder, containing his areka nut, betel leaf, chunam, and tobacco; a third carried his fan; and the risibility of the Americans was not a little excited on seeing him strutting about the deck, peeping into the cook's coppers, embracing the sailors on the forecastle, dancing, grinning, and playing many other antic tricks, followed by the whole train of fanners, umbrella-bearers, and chunam boys, with the most grave deportment and solemn visage.A cotton shirt, which had once been white, a pair of black trowsers, a blue jacket, wooden sandals, and a hat of palm leaves rising into a cone, like that of Mother Goose, constituted the dress of the party, some of their clothing being of silk, others of cotton, but t every part of it filthy in the extreme.

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*This great personage,' Captain White says, soon began to t my favour with the most unwearied pertinacity, hugging me round the neck, attempting to thrust his dirty betel nut into my mouth from his own, and leaping upon me like a dog, by which I was nearly suffocated.' The object of this sudden and violent fit of friendship was as suddenly explained; it was to extort a present, which he concluded would be in proportion to his exertions in fawning, during which every thing that caught his eye, and was moveable, was begged for either by himself or by his attendants: on being refused, he immediately changed his conduct, became sulky, and made signs that the ship could not proceed farther up the river. In conclusion, Captain White found it necessary to propitiate him, by a very considerable present, which, together with a large case bottle of rum, that was speedily emptied by him and his attendants, put the illustrious Heo (for that was his title) into high spirits again; and the ship was permitted to ascend tol the village of Cangeo, opposite to which she came to anchor. 19ti • On our approach to the shore, our olfactory nerves were saluted with "the rankest compound of villainous smells, that ever offended nostril;" and the natives of the place, men, women, children, swine, and mangy dogs, equally filthy and miserable in appearance, lined theo muddy banks of this Stygian stream to welcome our landing. With this// escort, we proceeded immediately to the house of the chief, through a fortuitous assemblage of huts, fish-pots, old boats, pig-styes, &c. which surrounded us in every direction; and, in order that no circumstance i of ceremony should be omitted to honour their new guests, a most harmonious concert was immediately struck up, by the swarm of little filthy children, in a state of perfect nudity, (which formed part of our procession,) in which they were joined by their parents, and the swine and dogs before mentioned.'-pp. 42, 43.

On entering the hovel of the chief, which was somewhat better than the rest, and distinguished, among other things, by having

two

12

two large drums at the door, in imitation of a Chinese mandarin's dwelling, the first objects that struck them were two miserable looking wretches with the cangue, or walking pillory, round their necks. A coarse screen of split bamboo served as the door to a second apartment, not close enough, however, to hide from view the women, children, and pigs behind it, who were amicably partaking together of the contents of a huge wooden tray. The walls were decorated with rusty swords, matchlocks, gongs, 'and' , spears; and in a sort of recess stood a table on which was a little bronze deity, with a censer filled with matches. Before the table, on a raised platform about six feet square, was seated, in all the dignity of good behaviour, his head erect, his chest inflated, his arms a-kimbo, and his legs crossed like a tailor's, a venerable looking object with a thin grey beard, which he was stroking most complacently.' This august personage received the strangers with great pomp, and made a long speech, of which they understood nothing: the voice, however, appeared familiar to them; and on a nearer scrutiny, they recognized their recent merry guest, but now their dignified host, the drunken Heo! On descending from his throne, he laid aside his dignity, resumed his natural levity, and was particularly assiduous in cramming his guests with rice and boiled pork, which he tore in pieces with his fingers and thrust into their mouths, to the no little hazard of suffocating them: this was of course meant for civility; but the Americans, who appear to have understood as little of the manners as of the language of this people, warmly resented this outrage on their taste; and a quarrel must have ensued, but for the fortunate intervention of a bottle of rum, (deus ex machina,) which, as Captain White says, 'ascended into the brain,' and gave him and his countrymen an opportunity of making their escape.

After this the Franklin was several times visited by this ancient chief and his myrmidons, the main object of which was to extort as many presents as possible, not forgetting spirituous liquors, of which they appeared to be excessively fond. Captain White had, from the first, expressed an anxious desire to proceed up the river to Saigon; and several days having now passed away, during which the old man had amused him with the hope of an answer to a dispatch which he pretended to have sent thither, he naturally became impatient, and insisted on proceeding with his ship, or on sending some of his officers in a boat. This brought Heo to confess that no such dispatch had ever been sent, and that, without an order from the king, then at Hué, they could not be permitted to go to Saigon. This daring avowal of his falsehood and duplicity put the Americans out of all patience, and determined them at once to quit the river, and proceed to Turon Bay.

Here