Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/286

 234 FIRST SETTLEMENTS ON THE BENGAL COAST rulers were so remote from the Imperial control that they could oppress on their own account; yet at the same time could call in the whole force of the empire to crush resistance to their oppression. This semi- independence of the Ganges viceroys dominated our position in Bengal. It was a personal element which the Imperial Court kept under strict subjection in its nearer province of Gujarat. But it influenced our whole history on the Bengal seaboard, from our first gracious reception in Orissa, to the caprices of the half- mad youth infamous for the Black Hole of Calcutta. The popular story of our settlement in Bengal is a pretty one. A patriotic ship-surgeon, Mr. Gabriel Boughton, having cured an imperial princess of a severe burn in 1636, would take no fee for himself, but secured for his countrymen the right to trade free of duties in Bengal. It is true that Mr. Boughton obtained an influ- ence at the Moghul Court, but he did not go there until 1645, and meanwhile the English had fixed themselves on the Bengal seaboard by no romance of Imperial favour, but by sufferings and endurance of a deeper pathos. The draft-treaty proposed by Sir Thomas Roe in 1616 had mentioned the ports of Bengal as places free to the English, and visions of trade with that distant province flitted before the Company's servants of Surat. Bengal was to be opened to them, however, not by any plunge of the Surat Council into the Eastern terra incognita, but by the gradual advance of the English up the Madras coast. The " Golden Phirmaund " (far-