462 Political Events in the Camatic, from 1564 to 1687. [No. 150. 



while their reputation among the other European settlers suffered, as 

 a commercial establishment, by proceedings stigmatized as little short 

 of piratical. The respectable Protestant missionary establishment had 

 not yet been established, nor the labors of the Apostolic Zinganbalg 

 and his successors begun. The French after the loss of St. Thome 

 had not yet retrieved their military reputation among the Hindoos, 

 and the establishment at Pullicherry was yet in its infancy. Of the 

 Swedes nothing was heard, and the once vast power of the Portuguese 

 on the coasts of India was now restricted to Goa. With the Spaniards 

 of Manilla, some intercourse of commerce by annual ships appears to 

 have been maintained from Madras, by which a certain quantity of 

 silver was annually imported ; but by far the greater quantity of that 

 metal, which appears to have been but recently introduced into India, 

 was imported directly from Europe, together with a certain proportion 

 of gold, a species of commerce that has now entirely ceased. 



87- Notwithstanding the competition and rivalry incidentally arising 

 from the pursuit of the same commercial views among the European 

 factories at this period, an amicable spirit and mutual civilities pre- 

 vailed in their intercourse in this distant part of the world; nor is 

 it less honorable to the memory of the founders of this colony, to ob- 

 serve the early English discouraging and forbidding the traffic in 

 slaves, of which the nation has at last signified its marked disappro- 

 bation. By a proclamation so early as 1686, the government of Ma- 

 dras forbad in the most positive terms the exercise of this commerce 

 within their limits, and of which the long continued war and a des- 

 tructive famine of two years, (1686 and 1687,) had increased the 

 usual bounds, and this discouragement of a traffic that even met the 

 sanction of national treaties* in the West, has in the East been con- 

 tinued to be viewed with disgust to our own times. f 



88. Such was the general state of the country of Carnatic, coropre- 

 A. D. 1687. hending the upper provinces, or Balla Ghaut as now called, 

 and the lower tracts on the Eastern coast, then called in European 



* The Assiento Contract by which the nation sanctioned the supply of the Foreign Colonies of 

 Spanish America with slaves from Africa is alluded to here, and the several transactions connected 

 with it. 



+ On reducing the Dutch Colonies in Ceylon in 1795-6, the British commanders early fosbad, by 

 proclamation, the trade of slaves from the coast, whence numbers it appeared had been fraudulently 

 kidnapped and conveyed away. 



