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 better than an ambassador," he urged in one of his dispatches. On another occasion he wrote home telling the Court that the Mogul officials would never let the Company's trade run on quietly until they were well beaten.

"Besides," he added, "your having suffered your servants to be treated after that most ignominous manner at Surat for many years past has encouraged them to attempt the like in all your settlements, and I hear in Bengal that they chawbuck (whip) Englishmen in their public durbars, which formerly they never presumed to do, and the Jun-kaneers all over the country are very insolent: only those within our reach I keep in pretty good order by now and then giving them a pretty good banging." Pitt knew the type of Indian official with whom the Company chiefly had to deal. If his advice had been accepted instead of being ignored the path to ultimate supremacy would have been much smoother for the British.

Though an essentially hard man, Thomas Pitt had his little weaknesses. One of his hobbies was gardening, a pursuit which he seems to have followed with all the ardour of an enthusiast. "I hear," he wrote to a friend at Calcutta in 1702, "that you are the top gardener in Bengali and I am as well as I can imitating of you here . . . and should be extremely obliged to you if you would yearly furnish me with what seeds your parts afford: Beans, Pease, etc.: they must be new and the best way to send 'em is in bottles well stopped, for no manner of seed thrives here if it be the growth of the place, for it dwindles to nothing," To a friend in London a little later he wrote: "My leisure time I generally spend in gardening and planting and making such improvements which I hope will tend to the Company's advantage, and the good of the whole