nominal sovereigns of the whole of India, and the real masters and tyrants of a good part of it, were the Mohammedanised Mogul Tartars, a people widely different in origin, manners, laws, and religion from the Hindoos, the aboriginal, or ancient inhabitants of the country."

At the solicitation of the Company, yet in its infancy, King James sent as ambassador to Delhi Sir Thomas Roe, in 1615. Landing at Surat with eighty English men-at-arms in their full panoply of steel, with trumpeters, banners, and considerable pomp, he marched across the country to Ajmere, where, on the 23rd of December, the Mogul emperor received him with unwonted ceremony; but though he remained as ambassador in the interests

eighteen defenceless Englishmen. These were invited, in a most friendly manner, one evening in 1622, to visit the governor of a Dutch castle which was garrisoned by 200 soldiers. He suddenly closed the gates, accused them of a design to surprise his petty fortress, put them to the most dreadful tortures, and finally cut off the heads of ten.

A Portuguese and nine Japanese were decapitated as accomplices of the English, and this massacre was, according to the Abbé Raynal, neither resented nor punished until the time of Cromwell; so our trade in the Spice Isles was abandoned, and the affairs of the Company began to decline, though in 1623, on the 4th of February,

another royal grant was made to them at Westminster.*

At this crisis, through the favour in which a Dr. Boughton stood with the Shah Jehan, they were authorised to make a new settlement on the Hooghley, and the ground on which Fort St. George and Madras now stand was obtained from a native prince. Thereon Mr. Francis Day instantly erected the fortress, and soon around it there sprang the town, to which the natives always resorted as the best place for trading; and therein they placed the money they acquired, to protect it from their native lords and princes.

During the great Civil War and the suspension of all trade, the East India Company sank into comparative obscurity; but in 1652, Cromwell reconfirmed its privileges, and to their peculiarity must be ascribed the growth of its political power in Hindostan. Upon payment of a very inconsiderable sum, they obtained from the native government of Bengal an unlimited right of trading throughout that province, without the payment of any duty.

On the 3rd of April, 1661, they obtained a new charter from Charles II., giving them authority to make peace or war with any prince or people "not being Christians;" and seven years subsequently, the isle of Bombay, which had been ceded by Portugal, as part of the marriage portion of the

Princess Katharine, was granted to the Company "in free and common soccage, as of the manor of East Greenwich, at an annual rent of £10 in gold on the 30th of September in each year.” Soon after, the king granted the Company the isle of St. Helena, as a resting-place. In 1687, the Company, lured by the defensible nature of Bombay, transferred (says Bruce in his "Annals of the East India Company") the presidency over all their settlements thence, from Surat; and from that time the city, with its magnificent port, began to spread and increase steadily.

The Company did not get possession of the "island of Bombaim," as Mr. Pepys calls it, without some trouble, as the Portuguese, according to Dr. Fryar, refused to surrender it, until five English ships of war, under James Ley, Earl of Marlborough (who was killed in battle with the Dutch in 1665), appeared before it, and "landed 500 stout men, commanded by Sir Abraham Shipman, who was appointed generalissimo for the King of England on the Indian coast."

Our Indian trade was liable to frequent interruptions by the fierce wars among the natives, fermented in many instances by the Dutch and Portuguese; and these insane strifes, by weakening the Mogul empire, encouraged the English to relinquish the merely standing on their defence, and to become aggressive.

In this spirit, in the year 1686, a Captain Nicholson, with ten armed vessels of from twelve to seventy guns each, having on board only six companies of infantry, 1,000 strong, proceeded up the Ganges, with orders to levy war against the Mogul emperor, the descendant of the mighty Tamerlane, the Nabob of Bengal !

This force was ridiculously small to be employed for either warlike or political purposes; but the totally undisciplined state of the Bengalese was fully considered. Nicholson's orders were to seize upon Chittagong, which had been the great emporium in the time of Ackbar, and was now held by the Rajah of Arracan. The interior is mountainous and still covered with jungle; but between the ranges are well-cultivated valleys, covered with olive, mango, orange and plantain trees. • Rymer's "Fœdera.”

On being joined by the Company's fleet, Nicholson found himself at the head of nineteen sail; but he managed matters so badly that he was beaten off by the cannon of Chittagong; on which the nabob, inflamed with fury, destroyed the English factories at Patna and Cossimbazar. Upon this, the Company sent out a large ship called the Defence, with a frigate, under Captain Heath, who had no better success than his predecessor. He arrived in Bengal in October, 1688, and came to anchor in Balasore Roads. The members of our factory there had been seized and imprisoned. Captain Heath opened a negociation for their release with the native governor, but was too impatient to await the result of it. He landed at the head of 160 soldiers, captured a thirty-gun battery, and plundered the town; but the result of these proceedings was, that the English prisoners were carried

From Balasore, Heath now sailed to Chittagong, and after some fruitless negociations there, he went to Arracan, and finally arrived at Madras in March, 1689, with fifteen ships, on board of which was all that now remained to the Company of their once flourishing factories in Bengal. The irritated nabob vowed to expel the English everywhere from his dominions. Our factory at Surat was seized; the island of Bombay was environed by an Indian fleet; the factories at Masulipatam and Vizagapatam were captured, and in the latter many of the Company's servants were put to cruel and lingering deaths; but, according to the histories of Mill and others, the treasury of the nabob began to sink low, and he and his ministers believing that, from their recent failures, the Company could never become sufficiently strong to be formidable, became open to friendly negociations.

Surat was restored with all that had been taken; but during our contests with the natives, our powerful enemies, the French, had won a footing in India, and established themselves at Pondicherry, on the Coromandel coast, where they obtained a slip of land, five miles in length, from the King of Bejapore, and at once proceeded to fortify it, while sedulously cultivating the friendship of such native princes as were inimical to the English, who now saw the stern necessity for obtaining, by gold or steel, an extension of territory to render them independent of all native princes.

"The truth is," says Sir John Malcolm, "that from the day on which the Company's troops marched one mile from their factories, the increase of their territories and their armies became a principle of self-preservation; and at the end of every one of those numerous contests in which they were involved by the jealousy, avarice, or ambition of their neighbours, or the rapacity or ambition of their servants, they were forced to adopt measures for improving their strength, which soon appeared to be the only mode by which they could avert the occurrence of similar danger."

While Pondicherry was growing in strength, so far were the Company from being able to attempt its destruction, that they were unable to hold the sea against a French squadron of four ships, armed with twenty, forty, sixty, and sixty-six guns respectively, which hovered on the western coast of India, and captured one of their large ships within forty miles of Bombay. About this time Tegnapatam, a town and port not far from Pondicherry, was acquired by purchase from a native prince, and thereon the Company built a stronghold called Fort

About nine years later, more important acquisitions were made by the Company. Aurungzebe, the Mogul emperor, had made his son Assim Ooshaun, Viceroy of Bengal, and as the latter aspired to dethrone his father, as Aurungzebe had dethroned his, money was requisite for the scheme. Thus, for a good round sum he sold to the East India Company the zemindarships of Govindpore, Chutanutty, and Calcutta. The word zemindar, according to Grant's "Inquiry into the Nature of Zemindary Tenures" (1791), signifies a possessor or holder of land, without ascertaining the particular mode of tenure, or the interest in the lands holden. But in 1707, nine years after these territories were acquired, Fort William (so called in honour of the late reigning king) was finished, a town rose under its protection-the future "City of Palaces"-and the Company made Calcutta its presidency, and it rapidly rose to the dignity of being capital of British India.

The actual founder of our settlement at Calcutta was Mr. Job Charnock, one of the first Englishmen who made a conspicuous figure in the political theatre of India, and who, it may literally be said, laid the first stone of the mighty fabric of our Eastern Empire; and his tombstone was long visible in the old cemetery of Calcutta. The Company had now a footing in Bengal, similar to that it already possessed at Madras and Bombay.

In 1693, King William had granted a new charter to the Company, under which it was required to augment its capital stock, then amounting to £756,000, to £1,500,000, and to export in every year British produce to the value of £100,000. But the power of the Crown to grant such a monopoly was questioned by the Commons, who passed a resolution declaring, "that it is the right of all Englishmen to trade to the East Indies, or to any part of the world, unless prohibited by Act of Parliament." In this situation the affairs of the Company remained until 1698, when, to obtain a charter conferring an exclusive right of trading to India, £2,000,000, at eight per cent., were offered to Government by a number of subscribers unconnected with the old Company, which, to maintain its privileges, had previously offered £700,000 at four per cent.

Thus were two East India Companies erected in the same kingdom, which could not but be very prejudicial to each other. A few private traders now began to speculate on their own risk, thus establishing a kind of third company. In 1702, these corporations were in a measure united by an indenture tripartite, to which the queen was the third party, and six years later saw them perfectly consolidated by Act of the first British Parliament, by their later name of the "United Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies."

From this period, the Company has occupied a station of vast importance in the commercial

infuriated mob, on a gibbet within the high-water mark. Before the Consolidating Bill had passed the Commons, the Great Mogul, Aurungzebe, a man whose heart never felt a generous sentiment or inspired that feeling in the heart of anotherdied, and fierce wars followed his death.

His son Azim, or Assim, was proclaimed emperor in Hindostan; his son Bahadur Shah seized the remote throne of Cabul, and marching down to Agra, at the head of the hardy Afghans, the ferocious Kyberees, and other tribes, defeated his rival in a severe battle, in which Azim and his two grown-up sons were slain, and his youngest, an infant, was captured.

interests of this country; and an account of the various legislative provisions which have been made for its support and regulation may be found incorporated in most of the histories of England. At this period English and Scottish ships seem at times to have fought each other in Indian waters, as some of those sent from Edinburgh by the Darien Company were, after the ruin of that colony by the artifices of William III., attacked, and their crews treated as pirates. For acting thus, an English captain named Green, was seized in 1705, when in command of the Worcester, East Indiaman, in Burntisland harbour, together with thirteen of his crew, who were alleged to have been concerned in the murder of an entire Scottish crew in the Indian Seas. For this, after a due rial, Green and two of his crew were conducted to Leith, and there hanged, amid the execrations of an

Scarcely was the sword sheathed, when a prince named Cambakah unfurled the standard of revolt in that spacious district named the Deccan, or "the South," a term applied by Hindoo writers to all that portion of Hindostan which lies to the south of the Nerbudda river; but in advancing, he was defeated and slain near Hyderabad.

Every event subsequent to this, by weakening the Mogul, tended to strengthen the Company's prospects of territorial aggrandisement; for though thus victorious, he was compelled to make a truce that was humbling and dishonourable with the plundering Mahrattas, and to stoop to a compromise with the Rajpoots. These were barely accomplished, when the fierce and fanatic Sikhs burst into his territories and ravaged them as far as Lahore on the one side, and the gates of Delhi on the other. Burton's "Trials."