Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/84

80 almost fiendish malignity he could display to those who had had the misfortune to give him offence even unwittingly. He was essentially a man of moods. In the evening he might be a genial and even interesting companion, delighting in badinage and conversational small talk. The morning would probably reveal him as the personification of gloom, his brow clouded with a black frown, his eye fierce and menacing and his voice like thunder. Woe to the man then on whom that terrible eye might light. These strange transitions from one state of mind to exactly the opposite are susceptible of a simple explanation. Jehangir was an inveterate drinker. A carousal was a feature of the day's routine, and probably during the greater part of his reign he never went to bed sober. Alcoholic excess produced its natural and inevitable result in destroying the balance of the mind and rendering the Emperor capricious, irritable and cruel. It is doubtful whether in some of his fits of passion he was really sane. Such was the man who gave the concession which was the foundation of English trade in India, and of the influence which led directly to the building up of the mighty fabric of the British Indian Empire.

When the English merchant envoy with his escort of wild horsemen rode on that hot April day in 1609 along the dusty road leading into Agra from the West they must have excited more than ordinary attention; for Hawkins was not the man to hide his light under a bushel and in any event a European mission was a sufficient novelty to make a considerable stir in the imperial city. Jehangir, who had probably been kept informed of the progress of the mission after its departure from Surat, appears to have had the very earliest intimation of its