Chap. II.] CONTINUED DIFFICULTIES. 265
of the king against their own servants. The plan originally adopted of giving a.d. lesi. an interest in each voyage to all the persons employed in it had never been abandoned, and accordingly even common soldiers and sailors had been per- mitted to trade on their own account in certain specified articles. The quantity of space allowed to each for this private trade was a chest 4 feet long, 1 ^ foot wide, and H foot deep. Under the cover of this permission, it appears that smuggling was carried on to such an extent as both to defraud the public revenue and diminish the Company's legitimate profits. The proclamation specially directed against this smuggling, " whereby the said Company's general affaii's are of late much declined and decayed, and the adventm-ers therein much discouraged," intimates that in future greater vigilance will be exercised, and calls upon all officers to exert themselves to the utmost against those who, not satisfied with the specified amount of licensed traffic, and " the extraordinary great wages which they (the Company) are accustomed to pay in their employ- Apparent ments," were ungratefully and ungenerously imdermining their employers by oftiio " driving a secret underhand trade." The abuse thus denounced was surely ""'^'""^ one with which the Company themselves ought to have been fully prepared to deal, and it is almost piteous to see them vii-tually confessing their incom- petency by calling in extraneous aid to assist them in their internal manage- ment. Even without the aid of government, it could not have been difficult to strike at the root of the evil by withdi'awing the license which made its detection almost impossible, and declaring that in future all the servants of tlie Company would be paid by fixed salaries and wages. The very opposite course was adopted ; and the proclamation, while denouncing the evil, proceeds very preposterously to increase it, by announcing that the license to carry on l)rivate trade, instead of being prohibited, would remain as before in the case of the lower classes of servants, and in the case of the higher classes would be extended, so as to give many of them double the quantity of private tonnage which had previously been allowed.
It would have been strange if the Company, while proclaiming their own Continued incompetency and sanctioning gi*oss mismanagement, could have prospered even under favourable circumstances ; and unfortunately at this very time a series of events took place which placed their affiiirs in great jeopardy. The Dutch had made good their footing at Surat, and gi-eatly reduced the profits of the trade by a formidable competition. In the Persian Gulf, where, in addition to the ordi- nary profits of trade, the Company had obtained a permanent grant of half the customs levied at the port of Gomberoon, their position was endangered not only by a new succession to the throne, but by an attempt of the Portuguese to recapture Ormuz. In the Eastern Ai'chipelago the spice trade had been almost extinguished, and the factory of Bantam, which, as it was the earliest, had long held precedence of all the other stations of the Company, became so unim- • portant as to be reduced to an agency dependent on Surat, which alone was Vol. I. 34
