DISASTERS OF THE ORISSA COLONIES 241 mat-huts which formed their sole shelter on shore. Even a third of a century later, when they had learned in some measure to accommodate their dress and man- ner of living to the climate, two large English ships, after one year of the climate of Balasor, were unable to put out to sea " because most of their men were lost." With their goods unsalable and factors and seamen dying around them, the survivors clung through the rainy season of 1633 to the footholds they had won on the Orissa coast. But two new scourges were added to their miseries. The Portuguese pirates from the Arakan and Chittagong seaboard, on the other side of the Bay of Bengal, swooped down on the river mouths; a Dutch fleet from the Madras coast and the Eastern Archipelago blockaded the roadsteads with pinnaces of ten to sixteen guns, strengthened by an occasional ship. Cartwright had to give up the idea of planting agencies at Pippli and Puri, the northern and southern extremi- ties of Orissa; his central factory midway down the delta fell into decay, due in part to the silting up of the river; and soon all that remained to the English in Orissa was the unhealthy settlement at Balasor. The parent factory at Masulipatam had enough to do to keep its head above the all-engulfing wars between the inland king of Golconda and his half-subdued coast- rajas. The Company at home, in the grip of court cabals, looked on the Orissa settlements as a new and unprofitable burden which had been thrust upon it. In the words of Wilson's " Early Annals of Bengal," " No
