Page:The Story of India (1897).djvu/53



LTHOUGH the attention of the English was thus diverted from the Archipelago and concentrated as it were on India, it is proper to repeat that their only thought during the whole of the seventeenth century and for the first forty years of the eighteenth was to obtain trading facilities and factories by the favour of the great Mogul. The annals of the nascent East India Company are made up of the recorded establishment of their stations round the western and eastern coasts of the peninsula, and the fact that is most striking about their operations is that at one time or other they occupied and tested the merits of every possible port from Cambay on the one side to the Ganges on the other,—with of course the exception of Goa, then and still firmly held by the Portuguese as their metropolis in India. These factories were established as coigns of vantage not for purposes of conquest—no thought was more foreign or repugnant to the Company, which eventually became the most