Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/318

 satisfied until they had been taken off and handed up to her for her inspection.

Until towards the end of the century no Englishwomen were permitted by the Company to share the exile of its servants. At the time of Roe's embassy much trouble arose through a sudden irruption of Englishwomen—Steele's wife and another—upon the factories at Surat and Ahmedabad. In his irritation at the disturbance of his peace, for which the ladies were responsible, the ambassador, strongly urged the directors to prohibit their servants from having their wives in India with them. This ungallant advice was followed, with the consequence that until the door was practically forced by the establishment and growth of permanent settlements the single roof of the factory covered the entire English community. The distant wives, however, were not forgotten. Mandelslo, the Italian traveller who visited Surat about the year 1638, notes that at the English factory it was the custom of the leading functionaries at dinner to drink to their wives in England.

It is not remarkable that in the absence of the refining and restraining influence of women social customs in these early settlements should have degenerated largely into drinking customs. "There is a general complaint that we drink a damnable deal of wine this year," wrote Thomas Pitt at the close of the seventeenth century. He was doubtless well within the mark as excess is written large over all the records of the Company of this period. But it was not the wine which worked the mischief so much as the poisonous decoction known as arrack punch, manufactured from the raw native spirit. The deadly effects of this compound upon the early English