Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/255

 ENGLISH SUPPORT OF THE MOGHUL EMPIRE 205 settled on that coast, so it looked to the English at Surat to keep open the ocean path of pilgrimages to the holy cities of the Red Sea. The Moghul supremacy was essentially of land origin. It had started from Central Asia, spread from the mountain passes across the Panjab, forced its way through the Aravalli deserts to Gujarat, and followed the courses of two mighty rivers, the Indus and the Ganges, to the opposite shores of India. From the vast hinterland of Hindustan the Moghul emperors were constrained to find an outlet to the ocean. But the great distance of their capitals in Northwestern India from the coast rendered it impos- sible, when they had found an outlet, to exercise an effective sea-control. On the east, Portuguese buccaneers and Arakanese pirates swept the Bay of Bengal, and the Moghul vice- roy had, by a special tax, to maintain an armed flotilla to keep open the mouths of the Ganges. On the west, the royal galleons and frigates of Portugal blocked the approaches to the Indus and the Gulf of Cambay. What the river fleet of the Bengal viceroy did for the Gangetic delta, the Indian emperors resolved that the English at Surat should do for the Arabian Ocean. Our squadrons formed, in fact, the naval complement to the land-conquest of Gujarat by the Moghul Empire. The anarchy which had ended just as we arrived gave place to a period of prosperity unexampled in the history of the province. Caravans came and went to all the inland capitals of India— Golkonda, Agra, Delhi, La- hore; the products of Asia, from the Straits of Malacca