Charles Elliot spent most of his early adult life in India, first with his father and later as a sub-lieutenant serving the Royal Navy, stationed in Calcutta. That would explain the presence of a company of sepoys on board the HMS Sulphur, one of the British squadrons sent by Elliot—who was by then the British plenipotentiary in charge of trade with China—to hoist the British flag at what is now known as Possession Point on Hong Kong island more than 150 years ago in January 1841. Elliot, says Nigel Cameron in his Illustrated History of Hong Kong, had especially requested warships from India to accompany him when he arrived in China in 1835, six years before the British seized Hong Kong in 1841.