The nucleus of the Regiment was two companies of Malays recruited from among prisoners at St Helena. In 1795 there were some 300 prisoners there taken from vessels of the Dutch East India Company. Some 70 or 80 Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes joined the British East India Company. The Malays apparently were glad to serve under British command as they found the treatment they received much better than that to which the Dutch had subjected them. The men of the two companies were trained as artillerymen. After about two years, the companies were transferred to Bencoolen, and later from there to Ceylon.[1]
In all, five independent companies of Malays were transferred from Dutch to HEIC service. Since then the regiment under different names fought for the British in the Kandyan War and the Uva Rebellion of 1818.
The Ceylon Rifle Regiment saw action in the Matale Rebellion in 1848. Since it served no practical application it was disbanded in 1873.
Trivia
The regiment's officers' mess is now known as Visumpaya.
Brooke, Thomas Henry (1824) A History of the Island of St. Helena, from its discovery by the Portuguese to the year 1806. (Kingsbury, Padbury & Allen).
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The island of Saint Helena, currently part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, maintained a military reserve force at various times between the 17th and 20th centuries. The first force, a feudal militia, was established in 1673 by the East India Company, who had first settled the island, in response to a Dutch invasion and short-lived occupation. The East India Company divided the island into tenancies with each required to provide a certain number of men for the militia. This fell into disuse as the defences of the island were improved. Saint Helena was taken over by the British Crown in 1833 and, keen to reduce the regular garrison, the militia was reinvigorated. An ordinance was passed drafting every able-bodied man into the Local Militia, though this was soon reduced to a core of around 360 men. This militia must have fallen into disuse by the later part of the 19th century as a new force, the St Helena Volunteer Sharpshooters, was established in 1897. Numbering around 100 men sources conflict on whether it was maintained beyond the withdrawal of the regular British garrison in 1907. It had certainly been disbanded by 1998.
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