Page:A brief history of the Hughli district.djvu/13

Rh rice, cloth of bombast of divers sorts, lacca, great abundance of sugar, paper, oil of zerzeline, and other sorts of merchandise."

Buttor is the modern Sibpur: the name Bhatore is still given to a locality between the Botanical Gardens and the Engineering College, slightly north of these places and back from the river. It must have taken very good rowing to go from Buttor to Satgaon on one tide; the distance up the Hughli is fully 35 miles, besides some four miles down the Saraswati to Satgaon. Mr. Long also quotes from Di Barros:—"Satgaw is a great and noble city, though less frequented than Chittagong, on account of the port not being so convenient for the entrance and departure of ships;" and from Purchas, who calls it "a fair citie for a citie of the Moores, and very plentiful, but sometimes subject to Patnaw."

After the capture of the Portuguese fort of Hughli in 1632, Hughli became the royal port, and all public offices were transferred to that place from Satgaon, which gradually fell into decay. But Warwick, a Dutch Admiral, quoted by Long, states that in 1667 Satgaon was still a great place of trade for the Portuguese.

The river Saraswati was once the boundary between the kingdom of Orissa and that of Bengal, but this was almost in pre-historic times. In 1589 Raja Man Sinh, Governor of Bengal under Akbar, in an expedition against the Afghans, who then held the kingdom of Orissa, halted for the rainy season at Jahanabad. And in 1592 the Afghans from Orissa plundered Satgaon. The boundary of the kingdom of Orissa was then somewhere about Midnapur. In Akbar's time Satgaon was known as Balghak-Khana, the "house of revolt."

Pandua also appears in more or less legendary history, when it was captured by Shah Safi, from the Hindu Raja who formerly held sway there. The date is by no means certain, but it would appear to be about the middle of the fourteenth century that the Hughli district passed from Hindu to Musalman dominion. More about both Satgaon and Pandua will be found in the description of these places in Chapter VII of the Hughli Medical Gazetteer.

2. The Portuguese and Bandel.—The Portuguese, as is well known, were the first European nation to visit and settle in India. On 8th January 1454 Pope Nicholas V granted to Affonso V of Portugal an exclusive right to all countries which might be discovered in Africa and eastwards, including India. Bartholomeo Diaz doubled the Cape for the first time early in 1487. The first explorer to reach India was Vasco da Gama, who arrived at Calicut on 26th August 1498. Pedro Alvarez Cabral discovered Brazil on 21st April 1500, having been driven far out of his course, to the west, when on the way to India, viâ the Cape. Much about the same time the Spaniards began to push their discoveries westwards. Columbus sailed on his voyage of discovery on 3rd August 1492, and discovered Hispaniola, now Haiti, before