Page 166 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

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166 EARLY ENGLISH ADVENTURERS IN THE EAST

indifferently well, went off to the Court of the King of the
Deccan, where having abjured his faith and undergone
circumcision, he was given “great honours,” which he
enjoyed until the inevitable day of reckoning came, when
he fell out of favour. A more honourable type of the
II humble adventurer was William Hemsell, the English
coachman of Jehangir, who found such favour in his im­
perial master’s sight that he was given a handsome in­
! come and a position of considerable honour at Court. In
the end, the Rev. Edward Terry says, he might have risen
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“ to very great estate, had not death prevented it and that
immediately after he was settled in that great service.”
Belonging to yet another category was Richard Steele, the
young ^official of the Company who took the famous
pearls from Surat to Mandu, as related in an earlier part
of the narrative.
Steele was a man of ideas, who had been induced to
enter upon an Indian career by the expectation that he
would find a lucrative market for them in the Mogul’s
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dominions. One of his enterprises was a scheme for the
construction of waterworks at Agra. The success of a pro­
ject undertaken in the City of London at the close of the
sixteenth century, by which the Thames’ water was
conveyed to houses by means of pipes, suggested to Steele’s i
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fertile mind that a similar undertaking in the Mogul capital
would be profitable. He accordingly elaborated proposals
by which the waters of the Jumna would be intercepted
and passed through lead pipes to the different parts of the
City, to the great saving of labour. It was quite a feasible
scheme, as history has proved, but unhappily for Steele,
he was born two or three centuries too soon.
Roe, when he heard of the project, dismissed it as im-

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