Page 314 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

314> EARLY ENGLISH ADVENTURERS IN THE EAST

satisfied until they had been taken oil and handed up to
her for her inspection.
Until towards the end of the century no Englishwomen
were permitted by the Company to share the exile of its
servants. At the time of Roe’s embassy much trouble
arose through a sudden irruption of Englishwomen—
Steele’s wife and another—upon the factories at Surat and
Ahmedabad. In his irritation at the disturbance of his
peace, for which the ladies were responsible, the ambassador,
strongly urged the directors to prohibit their servants
from having their wives in India with them. This un­
gallant advice was followed, with the consequence that
until the door was practically forced by the establishment
and growth of permanent settlements the single roof of
the factory covered the entire English community. The
distant wives, however, were not forgotten. Mandelslo,
the Italian traveller who visited Surat about the year 1638,
notes that at the English factory it was the custom of the
leading functionaries at dinner to drink to their wives in
England.
It is not remarkable that in the absence of the refining
and restraining influence of women social customs in these
early settlements should have degenerated largely into
drinking customs. “ There is a general complaint that
we drink a damnable deal of wine this year,” wrote Thomas
Pitt at the close of the seventeenth century. He was
doubtless well within the mark as excess is written large
over all the records of the Company of this period. But
it was not the wine which worked the mischief so much
as the poisonous decoction known as arrack punch,
manufactured from the raw native spirit. The deadly
effects of this compound upon the early English com-

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