Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/257

 FAMINE AND PESTILENCE AT SURAT 207 In 1631 a Dutch merchant reported that only eleven of the 260 families at Suwali survived. He found the road thence to Surat covered with bodies decaying " on the highway where they died, [there] being no one to bury them." In Surat, that great and crowded city, he " could hardly see any living persons; " but the corpses " at the corner of the streets lie twenty to- gether, nobody burying them." Thirty thousand had perished in the town alone. Pestilence followed famine. The president and ten or eleven of the English factors fell victims, with " divers inferiors now taken into Abraham's bosom "—three-fourths of the whole settle- ment. " No man can go in the streets without giving great alms or being in danger of being murdered, for the poor people cry aloud, ' Give us sustenance, or kill us.' " " This, that was in a manner the garden of the world, is turned into a wilderness." The Dutchman estimated that it would take three years before the trade could revive at Surat. Indeed, one striking contrast between native and British rule was the slowness of recovery from famine in the Mo- ghul Empire. But the English at Surat clung to the wreck of their settlement, and their new jurisdiction over our other factories in India placed at their com- mand the whole of the Company's ships in the Indian seas. A strong naval force thus came under the cen- tralized control of Surat. The Company had from twenty to twenty-five vessels employed in the East Indies, chiefly in port to port trade. In 1629, it declared that during the past twelve years it had " sent out