Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/251

 ENGLISH TRADE IN GUJABAT 201 Keeling was a sailor of taste with a wide outlook into the possibilities of his times. On a previous voyage, while detained at Sierra Leone, in September, 1607, he and his crew had played " Hamlet " and " Richard II " by way of private theatricals. He believed in India as a career, and wanted to carry his wife with him— but gave up his request on compensation of £200 from the Company. He now, in 1616, sailed boldly to Mala- bar, and tried to turn the flank of the southern Portu- guese base at Goa, by a treaty with Calicut further down the coast. The allies were to drive out the Portu- guese from Cochin, which was then to be made over to the English. This project failed, but a halcyon period opened to the English at Surat. The crop-fields of Gujarat, with their miracle of two harvests a year, seemed a paradise to the storm-tossed mariners, as they rowed up the smooth channels of the Tapti. " Often of two adjoin- ing fields," they wrote, " one was as green as a fine meadow, and the other waving yellow like gold and ready to be cut down." They might regret that spices did not grow so far north, but they found substitutes in the fine cotton fabrics and dyes of upper India. Small English agencies, which were thrown out into the interior (in Gujarat, Ahmadabad, Kathiawar— espe- cially the Kathiawar coast of the Gulf of Cambay— and Sind), collected the muslins of the neighbouring provinces, and the indigo of Agra, for shipment at Surat. The titular viceroyalty of the heir apparent to the