Page 269 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

THE ENGLISH SECURE A FOOTHOLD IN INDIA 269

1667, handed over Bombay to the East India Company as
the surest means of ridding himself of a troublesome and
somewhat expensive appanage. On September 21, in
the same year the formal transfer took place with some
little ceremony, one of the features of the programme being
the exchange of the soldiers from the King’s to the Com­
pany’s service.
Oxenden’s skilful hand is to be discovered in all the
devious negotiations which led up to this consummation ■
of the long cherished hope of founding a settlement on the .
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Western Coast of India. At Surat in the years which suc­
ceeded his arrival he had completely restored the tarnished
English prestige by a bold and judicious policy. Fortune
put in his way a happy opportunity of bringing the Eng­
lish once more into favour at the Mogul Court. In 1663
Sivaji, the renowned Mahratta leader, who was soon to
create a power which was to shake the Mogul Empire to
its foundations, conceived the idea of raiding the port of
Surat whose wealth offered a tempting bait to his adventur­
ous mind. With four thousand of his famous light horse­
men he descended like a flood on the Western India port.
The governor promptly shut himself up in his castle and
the inhabitants fled in terror to the wilds. Only a little
handful of Englishmen under Oxenden and a few Dutch­
men remained to stem the devastating torrent. So bold a :
front was presented by these sturdy defenders that Sivaji’s
men not only spared the foreign factories, but left intact
a greater part of the town—for them an extraordinary act
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of restraint. Aurungzebe, who at this time was on the
Imperial throne, regarded the action of the Englishmen ,1
with such satisfaction that he granted the East India Com­
pany new privileges, and issued an edict exempting all

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