situated in the plain between the Surma river and the hills. Along this
frontier, the Khasis, though not averse from trade, and in possession
of the quarries which furnished the chief supply of lime to deltaic
Bengal, were also known as troublesome marauders, whose raids were
a terror to the inhabitants of the plains. Captain R.B. Pemberton,
in his Report on the Eastern Frontier (1835), mentions [2] an attack
on Jaintia by a force under Major Henniker in 1774, supposed to have
been made in retaliation for aggression by the Raja in Sylhet; and
Robert Lindsay, who was Resident and Collector of Sylhet about 1778,
has an interesting account of the hill tribes and the Raja of Jaintia
in the lively narrative embodied in the "Lives of the Lindsays." [3]
Lindsay, who made a large fortune by working the lime quarries and thus
converting into cash the millions of cowries in which the land-revenue
of Sylhet was paid, appears to have imagined that the Khasis, whom
he calls "a tribe of independent Tartars," were in direct relations
with China, and imported thence the silk cloths [4] which they brought
down for sale in the Sylhet markets. A line of forts was established
along the foot of the hills to hold the mountaineers in check, and
a Regulation, No. 1 of 1799, was passed declaring freedom of trade
between them and Sylhet, but prohibiting the supply to them of arms
and ammunition, and forbidding any one to pass the Company's frontier
towards the hills with arms in his hands.

The outbreak of the first Burma War, in 1824, brought us into closer
relations with the Raja of Jaintia, and in April of that year Mr. David
Scott, the Governor-General's Agent on the frontier, marched through
his territory from Sylhet to Assam, emerging at Raha on the Kalang
river, in what is now the Nowgong district. This was the first occasion
on which Europeans had entered the hill territory of the Khasi tribes,
and the account of the march, quoted in Pemberton's Report, [5] is the