CHAPTER XVIII
BOMBAY, AND CENTRAL INDIA

THE prompt action taken by Lord Elphinstone,
the Governor of the Bombay Presidency, on
receipt of the Meerut news was recorded in the
opening chapter of this narrative. He had been a
successful Governor of Madras twenty years earlier, and
when travelling in India ten years before the Mutiny
he had made an adventurous and pioneer journey,
from the Gilgit Valley in Kashmir, over the intervening
mountains, to the Indus Valley by a pass until then
unknown to Europeans. He had been Governor of
the Presidency of Bombay since 185*3, controlling 20
millions of natives in that long, narrow strip of country,
and the Native States subordinate to it.

Lord Elphinstone's wide experience and delightfully
polished manners had, amongst the Europeans, added
to the reputation with which he came to Bombay.
His knowledge of the Native races was great; his
courage in dealing with them even greater. Early
in May 1857, ^^ order to suppress an outbreak in
Bharoch unconnected with the Sipahi mutiny, he sent
150 Europeans 200 miles away, leaving the city of
Bombay and its population of 500,000 with a garrison
of only 350 white soldiers. In the Presidency there
were only 5000, and they were scattered, by small
detachments in different stations,  over  700 miles of

country from north to   south.

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