Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/288

 236 FIEST SETTLEMENTS ON THE BENGAL COAST Lucklip the Rogger [i. e. Lakshmi the raja] rescued them with two hundred men." Ralph Cartwright, the chief merchant, leaving the boat in the joint protection of its crew and the friendly port-officer, proceeded with a small deputation inland to the Moslem Governor of Orissa at Cuttack, at the delta-head of the Mahanadi, or Great River. Their mission was to " the Nabob of Bengal," but our simple explorers looked on one native ruler as much the same as another, and they thought that the governor of Orissa would serve their purposes equally well. The kindness which they met with on their few days' jour- ney up the delta— kindness which Hindu hospitality showed to any stranger from a distant land who came in peace— impressed them deeply. The imposing eti- quette of the court at Cuttack quickly brought them back to a sense of their position. The Moslem Governor of Orissa was Agha Muham- mad Zaman, who was born in Tahran, the capital of Persia. This distinguished soldier and able admin- istrator was merely a deputy of the Moghul Viceroy of Bengal, but he was a polite Persian and knew how to combine courtesy with state, displaying a cer- tain simplicity, half-military, half-religious. By day the lord of a magnificent palace, at night he slept like a soldier in his tent, " with his most trusty servants and guards about him," as we are told in Captain Bruton's " Newes from the East Indies " (published in 1638), from which this quotation and those in the next two paragraphs are taken. The gracious governor re-