Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/50

 intrinsic value of the gifts. They included "a bason of silver with a fountain in the midst of it weighing 205 ounces, a great standing cup of silver, a rich looking-glass and headpiece with a plume of feathers, a case of very fine daggers, a rich wrought embroidered belt to hang a sword on, and a fan of feathers." The King immediately pounced upon the fan, "and caused one of his women to fan him therewithall, as a thing that most pleased him of all the rest." Later the visitors were entertained at a banquet, where they ate off plates of precious metal and were entertained with dancing damsels, "richly attired and adorned with bracelets and jewels." Finally, Lancaster and his chief lieutenants were invested with robes of honour and equipped each with a kris, the Malay dagger, which is a symbol of authority. In this honorific fashion they were dismissed to their ships.

The Elizabethen letter, which with so much ceremony had been conveyed to the Acheen prince, was a highly characteristic effusion embodying the royal sentiments as to the establishment of a trade connexion with the English Company. She promised the King that he should be very well served and better contented than he had previously been with the Portugals and Spaniards, the enemies of England, who "only and none else of these regions," the Queen went on to say, "have frequented those your, and the other kingdoms of the East: not suffering that the other nations should doe it, pretending themselves to be monarchs and absolute lords of all these kingdoms and provinces as their own conquest and inheritance as appeareth by their lofty title in their writings." Then came the pith of the document—an application for a site for a factory and for protection for those who might be left to manage it.