Page 65 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

CHAPTER V

‘Wc’il n long brass gun amidships, like a well-conducted ship,
We had each a brace of pistols and a cutlass at the hip;
It’s a point that tells against us, and a fact to be deplored,
But we chased the goodly merchantmen and laid their ships aboard.
Then the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains.
And the paint-work all was spatter-dashed with other people’s brains.
She was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank.
And the pale survivors left us by the medium of the plank.’
A Ballad of John Silver - John Masefield

t“ T”1HE voyage up the west coast of India was uneventful.
Loch did not go ashore at many of the places where the
Eden touched, as he was suffering from ‘bilious fever and
a swelling of the ankles’, which, he says, was a common complaint
among Europeans on their first arrival in India. When the ship
anchored, natives came off in canoes and catamarans (rafts made
of logs), selling fruits, coconuts and monkeys, the last ‘which
might have been taken for the children of the men from their
manners and appearance and mode of sitting’. Although Loch
said that the men looked like monkeys, he expressed admiration
for the women who were ‘contrary to the men, having fine figures
and good faces’.
On November nth, the Eden anchored at Cochin, on the Mala­
bar coast, where the officers were entertained by an elderly couple
called Schuller. The husband was a German, and his wife was a
French woman from Mauritius, ‘a great Bonapartistc’. Schuller
ran a boat yard, and had built several small frigates for the
Admiralty. His wife traded in fruit, vegetables and poultry,
selling them to ships which visited the port. Between them, this
elderly couple had acquired a monopoly of all the trade in the
place.
Cochin was one of the first Portuguese settlements on the Indian
Coast, and was later taken by the Dutch, who were evicted by the
English in 1795. Since then, all the fortifications had been des­
troyed, though many of the original houses remained. They
reminded Loch of the tall houses in the old part of Edinburgh,
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