Page 287 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

THE ARCH INTERLOPER—THOMAS PITT 287

"better than an ambassador,” he urged in one of his dis­
patches. On another occasion he wrote home telling the
Court that the Mogul officials would never let the Com­
pany’s trade run on quietly until they were well beaten.
“ Besides,” he added, “ your having suffered your servants
to be treated after that most ignominous manner at Surat
for many years past has encouraged them to attempt the
like in all your settlements, and I hear in Bengal that they
cJiawbuck (whip) Englishmen in their public durbars,
which formerly they never presumed to do, and the Jun-
7cancers all over the country are very insolent: only those
within our reach I keep in pretty good order by now and
then giving them a pretty good banging.” Pitt knew the
type of Indian official with whom the Company chiefly
had to deal. If his advice had been accepted instead of
being ignored the path to ultimate supremacy would have
been much smoother for the British.
Though an essentially hard man, Thomas Pitt had his
little weaknesses. One of his hobbies was gardening, a
pursuit which he seems to have followed with all the ardour
of an enthusiast. “ I hear,” he wrote to a friend at Cal­
cutta in 1702, “ that you are the top gardener in Bengali
and I am as well as I can imitating of you here . . . and
should be extremely obliged to you if you would yearly
furnish me with what seeds your parts afford: Beans,
Pease, etc.: they must be new and the best way to send
’em is in bottles well stopped, for no manner of seed thrives
here if it be the growth of the place, for it dwindles to
nothing.” To a friend in London a little later he wrote:
“ My leisure time I generally spend in gardening and plant­
ing and making such improvements which I hope will tend
to the Company’s advantage, and the good of the whole

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