We propose in these pages to write the history of that vast empire which is bounded by the snowy Himalayas, the Indus, and the sea; which contains a population of more than 150,000,000 souls, and covers a mighty tract-estimated at 1,500,000 square miles-extending from the cyclopean gates and sombre passes which shut in Hindostan on the north, to the sandy Cape of Comorin on the south-1,880 miles distant-the wondrous acquisition of an originally small company of merchants, founded by Queen Elizabeth, and who went forth to seek it, as has been felicitously said, with the sword in one hand and a ledger in the other. From the origin of that infant corporation, we purpose to trace the story of our gradual acquisitions and conquests, down through the time when Madras became a presidency, in the reign of Charles II., to the days when Clive, the first and greatest of our warriors in the East, laid the solid foundations of our present supremacy there, and rent, by his sword, the power of France; thence to the days when, under Warren Hastings, Sir Eyre Coote defeated Hyder; when Cornwallis swept Mysore and dictated terms to the ferocious Tippoo in his own proud stronghold of Seringapatam; when Wellesley won Assaye; and to the wars and stones, be more fully developed, and European enterprise rewarded. In these pages we also propose to refer occasionally, in their place, to the past historical events of India, without wearying the reader by much of barbarous dynastic record; and also to the treaties of more recent years, when, in succession, Hardinge, Dalhousie, and Canning annexed and consolidated under our sway four extensive kingdoms-the Punjaub and Pegu, Oude and Nagpore, with all their cities and fortresses; and down to the horrors of the Mutiny, when the pious and heroic Havelock, Neill, Campbell, and Outram-wonderful vegetable productions of that teeming "the Bayard of India," as he was named by the lion-hearted conqueror of Scinde-so terribly avenged the destruction of our people, and when, eventually, the title of the Queen of the British Isles, as Empress of India, was proclaimed in the Palace of Delhi by the heroic Wilson and his soldiers, after the two last descendants of the Great Mogul had perished under Hodson's hand in the Tomb of Hoomaion. Nor shall we forget, in the course of our history, those other brave men, who in remote and perilous times have traversed Hindostan, and whose "kingdom was not of the sword"-the courageous missionaries of many lands and creeds; for there St. Thomas the Apostle, who is said to have perished at Meliapore, and St. Francis Xavier, "the Apostle of the Indies," led the van of those preachers who, in later years, came from Britain, Holland, and Denmark, facing peril and toil, and in many instances cruel martyrdom. Apart from the political progress of the East India Company, the moral and material advancement of India (so signally shown when Lord Dalhousie introduced cheap postage, railways, and the telegraph) shall all be traced, together with that commerce which every year assumes vaster proportions, and is capable of almost indefinite extension; for now the rich natural productions of Hindostan are being more fully developed, under the appliances of Western civilisation; and thus, while wool comes from Afghanistan, and 24,000,000 acres of land are already under cotton cultivation, and 1,000,000 acres under indigo, the silver blossoms and tender leaves of the tea-plant are beginning to cover the slopes of the Himalayas and the hill-districts of the North-Western Provinces; rice is being grown in the south, and thousands of logs of teak are now furnished yearly by the forests of Tenasserim, of Martaban, and Malabar. All the vast means there for accumulating wealth are being more and more developed by the introduction of those railways, some of the bridges and viaducts of which are the most magnificent in the world; and when the ten great contemplated lines are finally complete, we shall have a grand total of 5,859 miles. Then, indeed, will the mineral wealth of India, its mines of coal, copper, and iron, plumbago and lead, gold, silver, and precious land, and the marvels of its native architecture, the remains of its mosques and tombs, and rock-hewn temples, from the vast fabries of the Patans, who, as Bishop Heber says, built like giants but finished their work like jewellers, to the more elegant and luxurious red-and-white marble palaces of the Moguls, and other princes. Our vital interests in India are great beyond all doubt, as it affords-and for ages, let us hope, may continue to do so-the most ample arena for that exertion, honest enterprise, and hardy valour, which, when combined, make a character so essentially British. We do not, as yet, possess the whole of India, as two other nations still retain some places of but small value-the French at Pondicherry and Carical on the east coast, at Mahé on the southwest, and at Chandernagore on the Hooghley, above Calcutta; the Portuguese at Goa, on the west coast, and at Diu, on the north, between the Gulfs of Cambay and Cutch; while the Looshais, and the Bhotanese on the southern slopes of the Himalaya range, are fast coming under our sway. A subject so attractive and of such importance as India, has caused the production of several works, by distinguished soldiers and statesmen, many of whom bore important parts in the events they describe. Yet, with all this interest in our Indian possessions, which in extent are equal to all Europe without Russia, we have much to learn yet, by a general and comprehensive history. 66 Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and strangled Atahualpa," says Macaulay, in his Essay on Lord Clive; "but we doubt whether one in ten, even among English gentlemen of highly-cultivated minds, can tell who won the battle of Buxar, who perpetrated the massacre of Patna, whether Surajah Dowlah ruled in Oude of in Travancore, or whether Holkar was a Hindoo or a Mussulman. The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards vanquished, and were at the same time quite as highly civilised as the Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the Cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz; viceroys A BRIEF GLANCE AT ANCIENT INDIA AND THE FORMATION OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY. and propose that they should resume their march towards that quarter where wealth, dominion, and fame awaited them." LONG before the invasion of India by Alexander | should have prompted him to assemble his soldiers, the Great, the Greeks had travelled there in search of knowledge; for there, more than two thousand four hundred years ago, says Voltaire, "the celebrated Pilpay wrote his Moral Fables, that have since been translated into almost all languages. All subjects whatever have been treated by way of fable or allegory by the Orientals, and particularly the Indians." Hence it is that Pythagoras, who studied among them, and Pachimerus, a Greek of the thirteenth century, expressed themselves in the spirit of Indian parables. India, on this side of the Ganges, had long been subject to the Persians, and Alexander, the avenger of Greece and the conqueror of Darius, led his army into that part of India which had been tributary to his enemy. Though his soldiers were averse to penetrate into a region so remote and unknown, Alexander had read in the ancient fables of Macedonia that Bacchus and Hercules, each a son of Jupiter, as he believed himself to be, had marched as far, so he determined not to be outdone by them, and thus the year B.C. 327 saw his legions entering India by what is now called the Candahar route, the common track of the ancient caravans from Northern India to Agra and Ispahan. Encountering incredible difficulties, and surmounting innumerable dangers, he marched across "the Land of the Five Waters," now named the Punjaub, to the banks of the Hydaspes (a tributary of the Indus) and the Hyphasis. "No country," says Robertson in his "Historical Disquisitions," "he had hitherto visited, was so populous and well cultivated, or abounded in so many valuable productions of nature and of art, as that part of India through which he led his army; but when he was informed in every place, and probably with exaggerated description, how much the Indus was inferior to the Ganges, and how far all that he had hitherto beheld, was surpassed in the happy regions through which that great river flows, it is not wonderful that his eagerness to view and take possession of them But after the erection of twelve stupendous altars on the bank of the river, he found himself by the pressure of circumstances compelled to issue orders for retiring back to Persia. Collecting a numerous fleet of galleys, built of pines, firs, and cedars, he descended to the mouth of the Indus, where his army and fleet parted company. marched with the troops by land, while Nearchus, who wrote an account of the voyage, sailed with the galleys through an ocean till then unknown. He went by the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates, while Alexander was traversing the deserts of Gedrosia, now called Beloochistan. He By this expedition of the adventurous Greeks, a sudden light was thrown upon the vast nations of the East, though the accounts given by Nearchus of all he saw-the serpents, the banian-tree, the birds that spoke like men (unless he meant the parrots)-were greatly exaggerated. Alexander left behind some of his hardiest Macedonians to keep possession of the conquered country on the banks of the Indus, but his death, which happened shortly after his retreat, hastened the downfall of the Persian power in Hindostan, though it was not quite annihilated. Seleucus, the holder of Upper Asia, on the death of his warlike master, marched into those countries which had been subdued, partly to establish his own authority and partly to curb the King of Maghada, with whom eventually he concluded an amicable treaty by giving him his daughter in marriage on receiving fifty elephants; and from this time till nearly two hundred years after, we hear no more of Indian affairs. With all the exaggerations of early writers, if, says Elphinstone in his history, "we discard the fables derived from Grecian mythology, and those that are contrary to the course of nature, we shall find more reason to admire the accuracy of these early writers, than to wonder at the mistakes into which they | exploration of the Molucca Isles, where he had fell, in a country so new and different from their been kindly treated by the natives, who assured own, and where they had everything to learn by him that they were quite as willing to trade with the means of interpreters, generally through the medium English as with the Portuguese. He and others of more languages than one." applied for a small squadron for India, but the English Government did not think the subject deserving of consideration. The first genuine English expedition to India Strabo and others refer to the Indian sects of philosophers, and the peculiar lives led by the Brahmins, together with the feats of those halfcrazed ascetics called "fakirs;" of the self-immola-partook more of the warlike and piratical than the tion named the "suttee," and those magnificent and commercial element, and was rather a species of wonderful fairs, festivals, and gatherings for religious cruise against the Portuguese. purposes, which successive foreign conquests, and the mingling of foreign blood, have all left to-day unchanged, as when the trumpets of the Macedonians proclaimed the fall of Porus. During those dark ages that followed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Oriental trade with Europe, small though it was, became greatly diminished, but some of the productions of the East had become necessary for, and consecrated to, the services of the Church. "Even in our remote island of Great Britain, and in the poor semi-barbarous Saxon period, the venerable Bede had collected in his bleak northern monastery at Jarrow some of the spices and scented woods of the East. At the dawn of our civilisation under Alfred the Great, English missionaries are said to have found their way to the coast of Malabar." There, in the sixth century, a merchant of Syria settled with his family and left his religion, which was Nestorian, and as these Eastern sectaries multiplied, they called themselves Christians of St. Thomas. Vasco de Gama's discovery of the way to India by the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, where, according to Camoëns, he saw the Spirit of the Mountain and the Storm, led to a great commercial revolution; the Eastern trade, which hitherto had its emporiums at Constantinople, Venice, and Amalfi, and whither goods were conveyed from India, Persia, and Asia Minor, or by the way of the Red Sea, was turned into the Deccan and a new channel. Hence the most valuable part of that important trade was placed in the hands of the Portuguese merchants and conquerors, who, by holding the Straits of Malacca, secured the commerce of the Indian Archipelago, and monopolised it for all Europe during the sixteenth century, till on the English, Dutch, and French beginning to find their way round the dreaded "Cape of Storms," and to appear on the shores of India, the Portuguese lost their influence as rapidly as they won it. In 1588, the year of the Armada, one of the bravest navigators of the Elizabethan age, Captain Thomas Cavendish, returned after a two years' It was fitted out in 1591, under Captains George Raymond and James Lancaster, and consisted of three large ships, the Penelope, Merchant-Royal, and Edward-Bonaventure, which sailed from Plymouth on the 10th of April.* Storms and tempests, shipwreck and other disasters, attended this expedition, which never saw India, and after more than three years of perilous wandering in unknown seas, Lancaster, almost the sole survivor, landed at Rye on the 20th of May, 1694, a ruined man. As another example of the danger and uncertainty of voyaging by unexplored seas and shores in those days, when navigation was in its infancy, and superstition invested unknown lands with more than material perils, we may mention the expedition of Captain Wood, who sailed from London for the East Indies in 1591 with three vessels, the Bear, Bear's-whelp, and Benjamin. He was bearer of a letter from Queen Elizabeth vaguely addressed to the Emperor of China. Every species of disaster attended his little squadron, which, instead of finding the East Indies, was driven to the West, where the last survivor was heard of at Puerto Rico, in 1601. It was not until the great Sir Francis Drake captured five large Portuguese caravels, laden with the rich products of India, belonging to certain merchants of Turkey and the Levant, and brought from Bengal, Agra, Lahore, Pegu and Malacca-and undoubted intelligence of the wealth of the country had begun to flow in through other channels— that any anxiety was manifested by the English to participate in the riches of the East; and on the departure of the first Dutch expedition in 1595, under Cornelius Hootman, their national pride and rivalry were thoroughly roused. In one of those five caravels taken at the Azores, named the St. Philip, there were found many papers and documents, from which the English fully learned the vast value of Indian merchandise, and also the method of trading in the Eastern world. + Accordingly a company was suggested for that Camden and Hakluyt. + Camden. purpose, in September, 1599, the petitioners being Sir John Hart, Sir John Spencer, knights of London; Sir Edward Mitchellson, William Candish, Esq., Paul Banning, Robert Lee, Leonard Holiday, John Watts, John More, Edward Holmden, Robert Hampson, Thomas Smith, and Thomas Cambell, citizens and aldermen of London; and upwards of two hundred more, being those " of suche persons as have written with there owne handes, to venter in the pretended voiage to the Easte Indias (the whiche it maie please the Lorde to prosper), and the somes they will adventure: xxij Septumber, 1599." Such was the origin of that wonderful commercial body of merchants, who in time to come were to carry the British colours to the slopes of the Himalayas, to Burmah, Ava, Java, and through the gates of Pekin. The sum subscribed amounted to £30,133 6s. 8d., and a committee of fifteen was deputed to manage it. They were formed into "a body corporate and politic" by the title of "the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, trading into the East Indies." On the 16th of October, the queen having signified her approbation of their views, the committee began to exert themselves to procure armed vessels for the expedition, when suddenly-Spain having become desirous of peace-the whole affair was nearly crushed by the queen's approval being withdrawn, as she feared the voyage might give umbrage to Spain. Eventually, on the 31st of December, a Royal Charter of Privileges was given to the company of merchant adventurers, but conditionally for fifteen years only.* Thomas Smith, alderman of the city of London, was named the first governor, with twenty-four members as a committee; and the space over which they were empowered to trade was of mighty extent, as it included Asia, Africa, and even America, with all cities and ports therein, and beyond the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan. The spring of 1601 saw the expedition in readiness at Woolwich, under the command of Captain James Lancaster, the unfortunate survivor of that squadron which left Plymouth in 1591. It consisted of only four vessels; the Red Dragon, of 600 tons; the Hector, of 300 tons; the Swan, of the same tonnage; and the Guest, a victualling ship of 130 tons. They had on board in all 550 men, well furnished with arms, ammunition, and food, and had with them money and goods to the value of £20,000 as a trading stock. The Woolwich of that day was little more than a It is given at great length by Purchas at page 139, vol. i. 5 hamlet with a church, having a square tower and double aisles, on a bare green eminence, northward of which lay an old dock built by Henry VIII., and its inhabitants were chiefly fishermen; but we may easily imagine the excitement with which the gathered crowds on shore, and in craft on the river, must have watched the departure of Lancaster and his shipmates, when, on that eventful 15th of May, 1601, these four little vessels dropped down the Thames on their voyage to that distant land of which the people had scarcely the least idea, but which they regarded with something of awe and mystery. "It is curious," says Macaulay, "to consider how little the two countries, destined to be one day so closely connected, were then known to each other. The most enlightened Englishmen looked on India with ignorant admiration. The most enlightened natives of India were scarcely aware that England existed. Our ancestors had a dim notion of endless bazaars, swarming with buyers and sellers, and blazing with cloth of gold, with variegated silks, and with precious stones; of treasuries where diamonds were piled in heaps, and sequins in mountains, of palaces compared with which Whitehall and Hampton Court were hovels, and of armies ten times as numerous as that which they had seen assembled at Tilbury to repel the Armada." With such visions in their mind, and full of high hopes and aspirations, after a brief detention at Torbay, Lancaster's crews saw the white cliffs fade into the sea, and the 20th of June found them two degrees north of the line. The first place they visited was the island of Sumatra, where they met a welcome reception. In the Malacca Straits, Lancaster captured a large Portuguese vessel having on board calico and spices sufficient to load all his ships, and on being thus suddenly enriched, he bore away for Bantam, in Java, where he left some agents-the first founders of the Company's factories, and sailing from thence for England, came safely to anchor in the Downs in September, 1603. James of Scotland had been crowned King of Great Britain three months before. As three generations passed away before events seemed to indicate that the East India Company would ever become a great military and commercial power in Asia, a brief glance at its history will bring us to the reign of Charles II. In 1609, the Company obtained a renewal of its charter for an undefined period, subject to its dissolution by government on a three years' notice; but before 1612, when a firman of the Mogul emperor confirmed the Company in certain privileges |