Page:A History of the Indian Medical Service, 1600-1913 Vol 1.djvu/53

 CHAPTER IV

EARLY HISTORY; THE ISLANDS; AMBOYNA

" Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone, But over the scud and the palm trees an English flag was flown."

Kipling, The English Flag.

To our generation India is a definite entity, the vast country or sub-continent which extends from the Himalayas to the sea. Our forefathers, three centuries ago, knew no such definition. What is now our Indian Empire then contained numerous more or less independent states. One indeed stood pre-eminent, the kingdom of the Great Mogul, the Badshah of Delhi, Agra, and Lahore. But much of southern or peninsular India was never included in the Delhi empire ; on the other hand, the sway of that monarchy extended over Kabul and Kandahar, which are not now considered as part of India. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, Burma was a foreign country ; not, as it now is, a province of India.

The early ventures of the East India Company were not directed specially to India, but to the East Indies; this term including Burma, the Malay Archipelago, Siam, and even countries as far east as China and Japan. For the first quarter of a century it may be said that the islands of the Malay Archipelago, rather than continental India, were the chief aim and seat of the E.I. Co., as well as of the Dutch. Their factory at Bantam was founded nearly ten years before that at Surat, their first foothold in India itself. Men had then no reason to suppose that England would develop a great empire on the mainland of India.

The Company's first voyage was to the islands, in 1601-03, under Lancaster, where he founded the factories at Achin in Sumatra, and at Bantam in Java, in 1601. Captain Hippon, in the seventh voyage, founded a factory in Siam in 1610-11! Numerous other factories were started in the islands during the