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bay. This implies that the latter was at that time a place of great 

 commercial notoriety. In the year lb'OO this wise monarch granted 

 the first charter to the East India Company, by which they became 

 the exclusive traders to the East Indies, with a capital of seventy- 

 two thousand pounds. 



A very few years after Queen Elizabeth's embassy, Caesar Ere- 

 dericke, a merchant of Venice, visited this country, and in his 

 travels, which were printed in London in 1598, this entertaining 

 writer thus describes the trade of Cambay: " No great ships can 

 go thither by reason of the shallowness of the water, but they carry 

 on the trade in smail barks, which can sail in all parts of the gulph. 

 The principal city in Cambaia is called Amadaur, or Ahmadabad; 

 it is a very great city, and very populous ; and for a city of the 

 gentiles it is very well made, and builded with fair houses, and 

 large streets. Cambay is also a very fair city, and if I had not 

 seen it I could not have believed that there should have been such 

 a trade as there is; for in the time of every new and full moon the 

 small barks come in and go out, laden with all sorts of spices, with 

 silk of China, with sandal, with elephants' teeth, velvets of Vercini, 

 great quantity of pannina, which cometh from Mecca, with chicki- 

 nos, which be pieces of gold worth seven shillings, with money, 

 and with divers sorts of other merchandize. Also these barks lade 

 out an infinite quantity of cloth stamped and painted, with a great 

 deal of indigo, dried ginger, and conserved myrabolans dry and 

 candied, boraso in paste, great store of sugar, great quantity of 

 cotton, abundance of opium, asafcetida, puchio, and many other 

 sorts of drugs; turbants made in Diu, great stones like to corne- 

 lians, granites, agates, diaspry, calcedony, hematist, and some other 



