27.1 - toddy deleted, and 'rack' inserted. (OED: 'rack' is a variant of 'arrack' - in eastern countries, a local fermented beverage)
I was misled by the slight dot, which made it out for me to look like raik. There my block started
Rack or raks(h)i! Of course! Toddy is made from sugar cane and raksi from anything, in this case of course rice. Maybe that was the reason to replace the word.
Thanks again for your input. It really helps me to get better in this. Now I am at the brink of doing 10 pages per day. The whole diary is ( a rough guess) 200 to 250. And more and more often I understand whole pages on my own. That is amazing!
And I learned already an immense amount of new context to understand the early relations between the British and the locals.
One more thing: the place names are not that important, since I already have a rough idea about the route, and local memory will tell the rest. So in most cases it is more important to understand the simple spelling (most often after what he heard or was given by more or less able translators – there was not much change in this regard since – I fight the same wars all the time). There I have limits. Thsis is also to train my eyes on written source of the 19th century. I have a huge amount of material here, all handwritten and in good parts of even worse legibility.
Jan
Attached is an overview of the area where all this took place: North-western Manipur on the border to todays Nagaland. They started south of the picture and used first the right hand valley just till after the point, where it splits. Then they went left up and over to the parallel valley and further up North to cross over the river and left the picture in the left upper corner.
