Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/170

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166
EARLY ENGLISH ADVENTURERS IN THE EAST

indifferently well, went off to the Court of the King of the Deccan, where having abjured his faith and undergone circumcision, he was given "great honours," which he enjoyed until the inevitable day of reckoning came, when he fell out of favour. A more honourable type of the humble adventurer was Wlliam Hemsell, the English coachman of Jehangir, who found such favour in his imperial master's sight that he was given a handsome income and a position of considerable honour at Court. In the end, the Rev. Edward Terry says, he might have risen "to very great estate, had not death prevented it and that immediately after he was settled in that great service." Belonging to yet another category was Richard Steele, the young official of the Company who took the famous pearls from Surat to Mandu, as related in an earlier part of the narrative.

Steele was a man of ideas, who had been induced to enter upon an Indian career by the expectation that he would find a lucrative market for them in the Mogul's dominions. One of his enterprises was a scheme for the construction of waterworks at Agra. The success of a project undertaken in the City of London at the close of the sixteenth century, by which the Thames' water was conveyed to houses by means of pipes, suggested to Steele's fertile mind that a similar undertaking in the Mogul capital would be profitable. He accordingly elaborated proposals by which the waters of the Jumna would be intercepted and passed through lead pipes to the different parts of the City, to the great saving of labour. It was quite a feasible scheme, as history has proved, but unhappily for Steele, he was born two or three centuries too soon.

Roe, when he heard of the project, dismissed it as im-