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HISTORY OF THE INDIAN NAVY. 81
condition that the Emperor would defray the charges, and give
a promise for exclusive trade to the Company. We find that
this offer to convoy the pilgrim ships, was accepted by the
Mogul, for, on the 20th of March, 1698, three of their armed
ships sailed from Surat to Mocha and Jiddah, and convoyed
the IVIogul fleet in safety back to Surat. During this cruise
Captain Kidd, the famous pirate, passed close to them, but
escaped to Rajahpore, off which port he plundered a vessel
belonging to Bombay ; thence, after careening at the Laccadive
Islands, he proceeded to Calicut, where he took a vessel, and
again made his escape on the appearance of a Company's ship. At
Cochin he captured three valuable Dutch prizes, and then retired
to St. Mary's, an island off the east coast of Madagascar, where,
and at TuUea Harbour, near St. Augustine's Bay, on the west
coast of the same island, the pirates had fortified stations,* at
which they received stores, supplied from New York and the
West Indies. Other pirate craft had taken a Portuguese China
ship, and had plundered and sunk the ' Diamond,' an English
merchantman, while the 'Mocha' and ' Josiah,' late Company's
ships, had taken, or sunk seven or eight sail belonging to Surat.f
In the season of 1697, the Company suffered a considerable
pecuniary loss in the capture by the French of the 'Dorothea'
and ' Bedford,' outward-bound Indiamen, having on board a
captain and eighty soldiers for Bombay. But the treaty, signed
at Ryswick, on the 20th September in this year, relieved them
of any further anxiety, on the score of losses by capture at sea,
though affairs at Surat and Bombay continued in the same
precarious state, owing to the probability of civil war on the
approaching demise of Aurungzebe, and the oppressions of the
native governors.
In 1698 the pirates, grown bold by a long period of prosperity,
and the inability of the Company's ships, from their numerical
weakness, effectually to extirpate them, had regularly constituted
themselves into two scpiadrons, which swept the Malabar and
Coromandel coasts. The Company's ship 'Dorrell' had an inde-
cisive engagement ofl" Malacca with the ' Mocha,' which carried
thirty guns, and was manned with a crew of two hundred
desperate men. There was also the ' Adventure,' of the same
force, commanded by the redoubtable Kidd,t and a third, a prize,
* The pirates first established themselves on the small island of Perim at the
entrance of the Straits of Babelmandcb, which has a more convenient harbour,
but having dug through fifteen fathoms of rock without finding water, they aban-
doned the island for St. Mary's.
t Bruce's " Annals," vol. iii., p. 287.
I This noted freebooter, and several others were eventually cniiturcd and liinigcd
in chains at Tilbury. Captain Kidd hud been sent out in conuuand of the Ad-
'
venturer,' of tiiirty guns and two hundred men, to attack the pirates in Madagas-
car, but himself turned rover. Anotlicr noted robber was styled by the Deputy-
Governor of Bombay, "that grand villain Sivers, commonly called Chivers." He
was captured by a Company's ship and taken to Bombay.
VOL. I. G