Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/347

 THE NEW COMPANY AND THE OLD 287 for its £20,000 the Old Company's factories at Surat, with dependencies on the Bombay coast; at Fort St. George, with dependencies on the Madras coast and in the Bay of Bengal; at Bantam, with dependencies at Jambi, Macassar, and Pularoon; and at Gombroon on the Persian Gulf. The small price paid for these acquisitions is ex- plained by the circumstances of the times. On the Persian Gulf the agents of the Old Company had strug- gled on amid oppressions and exactions, not because they hoped to do any trade, but merely on the chance of reasserting, at some future day, the English right to half the customs of Gombroon under the treaty of 1622. Bantam seemed again to be passing under the power of the Dutch, English ships were intercepted in the narrow seas, and the port was about to suffer a regular blockade. Nor did the political state of India itself warrant any large price for English possessions on that continent. The military convulsions, amid which Aurangzib seized the throne, rudely interrupted the order that the Moghul Empire had during a century imposed. Surat castle was seized and the town pillaged on behalf of one of the claimants; and the distracted president complained " that it was equally dangerous to solicit, or to accept of, protection, it being impossible to fore- see who might ultimately be the Moghul." In Southern India, the first great act of Maratha hostility to the Moghuls took place in May, 1657. On the east coast, the Madras Council in despair resolved for the second