Obviously I wasn't connected with the East India Company in 1831, so I don't know if they had any strange conventions, but it looks to me a bit like a quirk of the scribe - if it's the same one, I think you said before that he wasn't a native English speaker.
One possible explanation might be that he was once told that a particular instance of 'several' should be written like that, and assumed that this applied always and everywhere. Other similar quirks in this larger extract appear to be upper-case 'M' in 'Minutes', and possibly upper-case 'K' in 'Killed'. He also seems to have omitted the 's' at the start of 'streams'.