Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/603

 12 s. vii. DEC. is, 1920.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

499

AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED. (12 S. vii. 450.)

3. Call us not weeds, we are flow'rs of the sea ' The short poem called ' Flowers of the Ocean',

and beginning with the above line, has already been printed at 11 S, viii, 316. It is there said to occur in a volume by L. E. Aveline, ' The Mother's Fables,' published in 1861. The third line, however, is given as. Our blush is as deep as the rose of thy bowers.

4. This couplet in the form

Search the universe from Pole to Pole, You'll find self-interest rules the whole. Appeared at 10 S. ix 29, where a correspondent asking for the source of these and two other lines observed that " these passages are not apparently in Pope, Swift, Churchill, or Johnson's translations of Juvenal." There has been no answer.

EDWARD BENSLT.

William Bolts : a Dutch Adventurer under John Company. By N. L. Hallward. (Cambridge University Press, 15s. net.)

THE personage with whose career we are occupied was born in Holland in 1735, came to England as a boy, spent some time in Lisbon (where he witnessed the earthquake of 1755) and, in November, 1759, was appointed a factor by the East India Company. He entered into a partner- ship with two members of Council, and so energetic, unscrupulous and successful was he that within a few years he had amassed a fortune of 90,0007. Ere long, however, he became obnoxious to the authorities not only by reason of oppressions and frauds upon the natives, and consequent complaints against him by the native rulers, but also on account of misdoings against the Company itself. He proved extremely hard to deal with, defying the President and Council, resisting with long-continued success their deci- sion to send him back to Europe, and signalizing himself at last by a bold overt attempt to stir up sedition in Calcutta. He affixed to the door of the Council House, as if he had been a sovereign, a proclamation inviting any who would to repair to his house, and there peruse, or make copies of, certain manuscripts throwing light on his rela- tions with the Company, which, owing to the want of a printing-press in Calcutta, he had no means of circulating. He was, finally, expelled by force and then entered upon a long and bitter struggle with the Company in the course of which he published his book entitled ' Considerations on Indian Affairs, &c.,' This made a great stir and was translated into French. Answered by Verelst himself in ' A View of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the English Government in Bengal ' it was continued by a rejoinder form- ing vol. ii. of the ' Considerations.'

The books were surrounded and followed by a turmoil of litigation, which broke the health and fortune of Verelst and reduced Bolts himself to bankruptcy, a situation in which he lost nothing either of his cunning or his spirit of enterprise.

Reverting to his character of a Dutchman he proceeded to Vienna, gained the goodwill of Maria Theresa and got himself made a Lieut. - Colonel in the Imperial Army his business being to command an expedition attempting to get a footing in the East India Trade to the prejudice of the Company. He arrived at Surat, and soon entered into intrigues with a French adventurer at Poona. In these the French Consul at Surat soon became implicated, and an intercepted packet of the Consul's, directed to the Minister- of Marine in Paris, furnishes much the most interesting matter contained in this volume. The packet includes letters dated from June to December, 1777, by various hands, and reveals clearly enough the French dealings with the- Mahrattas, as also the part played by Mr. Bolts. As Director of the Imperial Company of Trieste Bolts succeeded in establishing three factories on the Malabar Coast, one on the Nicobar Islands and one at Delagoa. On his return to Europe his schemes were widely extended, with plentiful support from the Netherlands and Austria. They miscarried, however, through the intrigues of the Antwerp Directors against Mm. This brings the history of William Bolts to the year 1784. He lived till 1808 but of the last twenty- four years of his life virtually nothing is known.

This brief outline will show that the author of this book has good reason to say, as he does in his Preface, that the material with which he is dealing throws light on questions interesting to the general reader such as the causes of the Patna Massacre and tte unpopularity of " Nabobs," while it undoubtedly has considerable importance for the student of Anglo-Indian history in general and the East India Company in particular. His handling of the documents raises the question of the use of " sources." We have in William Bolts an individual of whom almost nothing is known except what is dis- creditable, and whose activities move for the most part in a sufficiently depressing sphere. His best exploits, if they have a touch of the romantic, also have a touch of sordid quality : many of them, are sordid altogether. It is only his relations with India and Efcrope through India, only his function as illustrating an important and curious stage in the connexion of East and West, that can justify spending any time on him. But to bring out these connexions Mr. Hallward relies very largely on actual quota- tion from a somewhat narrowly restricted series of documents : so much so that some of his chapters are little more than chunks from this material scantily framed in a few explanatory sentences. This may be a tolerable method where the material itself is interesting, and the original wording vigorous, or at any rate pleasant to read, or, again, where the ipsissma verba of documents count for something. But it is not a tolerable method when the " sources " consist of masses [of the worst, and most lumbering of eighteenth-century English verbiage. We begin to think that, in biographical monographs, as in other historical writing, the choice lies between two plans.. Either the historian should digest his material and arrange it and so give us a clear straight- forward narrative having some pretence to style, and something of a ndse-en-sc&ne and an atmo- sphere (often overdone, but not, for that reason to be entirely omitted); or, if he holds a text