Excerpt from Lives and Exploits of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Robbers and Murderers, of All Nations The Pindarries whose modes of life and atrocities I have endeavoured to sketch, might have been thought of themselves a curse sufficient for any country, however vast, seeing, as we have done, with what rapidity and to what immense distances they were accustomed to extend their incursions. But besides these hordes, Central India was devastated by other associations of wretches, who for the most part subsisted entirely on plunder. Some of them seem to have struck their baneful roots in the country long ago, others to have arisen under the Mahratta system, and the times of revolution and trouble, which would naturally tend to give strength to the old and birth to the new - and facilities to the execrable operations of all. Sir John Malcolm has described, in a striking manner, the desolation which ensued from letting loose a population composed of such iniquitous materials. Only those who resided in walled towns were safe from the ravages and massacres of the banditti. The state of the unprotected parts of the country near the Vindyha mountains and the river Nerbudda, where hundreds of villages were seen deserted and roofless, is described by Captain Ambrose, one of Sir John Malcolm's officers: in the year 1818, he ascertained the names, and the names of the villages they belonged to, of eighty-four individuals who had been killed by tigers; these ferocious animals having literally usurped the country and fought with the returning inhabitants for their fields. Authentic documents also testify that in the state of Holkar, in 1817, sixteen hundred and sixty-three villages were deserted, or, as the natives emphatically term it - "without a lamp," a phrase that denotes the extreme of desolation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.