Goa, and the Blue Mountains, Or, Six Months on Sick Leave

This is a smart and lively volume, with which everyone will have faults to find, but which will afford considerable pleasure to Anglo-Indian, if not to home readers. It assumes all those jauntish airs for which ninety-nine light books of travel out of a hundred are now distinguished, and there is a rapidity of transition from caricature and badinage to sober narrative, which rather does violence to good taste; yet we can safely recommend it both for the amusement and information which it affords.
Our author left Bombay to visit, on sick certificate, the Neilgherries, which word he translates, for the benefit of English readers, and calls "the Blue Mountains." At starting he is unreasonably severe upon our harbor of Bombay. To compare with the Bay of Naples all that comes under the eye of a passenger when his ship sails down to her anchorage at Bombay would certainly be absurd; perhaps it would be absurd to compare any single view here with beautiful Parthenope, and its classic associations. But he who has been so fortunate as to enjoy the interior scenery of our harbor, and to sail up to Ghorebunder, well knows that for variety and boldness of outline, and for richness of coloring, the beauties of the view are unrivalled. The description of Goa is rather meager; we hoped to find some details of those imposing edifices about which Buchanan first excited our curiosity, but we were doomed to disappointment, and were obliged to be content, instead, with the account of a rapscallion English Officer's adventure.
And as we are thus brought to the subject, we cannot help remarking that, however unintentionally, this work represents the British Officer in anything but a favorable light. It furnishes us with narratives of two, who, with the author, have not done their best to support the national character. They are all said to have belonged to the Bombay Army; one, a Major G--, married a Seroda nautch girl, his mistress, adopted the habits and superstitions of her countrymen, and, as far as Hindus would permit the miserable creature, he embraced their religion, performing their ceremonies, and aping their grotesque mummeries. The second was a wretch who invaded the sanctity of the nunnery of Santa Monaca, and by a combination of deceit, cunning, and falsehood, endeavored to abduct one of its immured inmates. How far the story, as given in this volume, is intended to be received as a verity, we cannot say. Told as it is by a native servant, in language which is a kind of imitation of Bulwer, it has an unmistakable air of romance, but we suppose that it is intended that we should receive the main facts as literally true. We have not room for the extract, which, if we set aside all considerations of morality, may, to some at least, be amusing enough. The story in short is this: A certain Lieut., celebrated for falsehood and hypocrisy, contrived, by trumping up a lying tale, to ingratiate himself with the Prioress, and to turn the head of a young woman under her charge, and whom he would have succeeded in bearing away to pollution if his vile attempt had not been baffled through a ludicrous mistake. The narrator produced the story to account for the refusal of the portress to show his master the cloisters. He was refused admittance "because he was an Englishman."
-"The Bombay Quarterly Magazine and Review," Vol. 2 1852]