pepper, and shipping, personal matters affecting the Company's servants
are set down; treating of their quarrels, their debts, and, too often, of
their misconduct, as ordinary incidents in the general course of
administration. At times a bright light is turned on some individual, who
relapses into obscurity and is heard of no more, while the names of
others emerge again and again, like a coloured thread woven in the canvas;
showing how much romance there was in the lives of the early traders. One
such thread I have followed in the account of Mrs. Gyfford, from her
first arrival in India till her final disappearance in the Court of
Chancery, showing the vicissitudes and dangers to which an Englishwoman
in India was exposed two hundred years ago.

To Mr. William Foster, of the India Office, I am especially indebted for
aid in directing my attention to old documents that would otherwise have
escaped notice, and who has generously placed at my disposal some of the
results of his own researches into the history of the Company in the
seventeenth century, as yet unpublished.

My thanks are also due to Sir Ernest Robinson for permitting me to use
his picture of an engagement with Mahratta ships, as a frontispiece.

J.B.



CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

RISE OF EUROPEAN PIRACY IN THE EAST