tended to carry to the mind of the Portuguese the conviction that the English had better be left alone.
On their part, the English continued to keep their eyes open to the possibility of being able to do something at Bombay. In the early part of 1628 we find Captain John Hall writing from "aboard the Mary at Swally" to his employers in England to say that he had sounded "the Bay of Bumbaye." "In my opinion," he wrote, "it is a wonderful fit place for our shipping to harbour in, and may be made so strong that all the Portugals in India (we) being once situated (there) are not able to do us wrong."
An opinion so decided must have carried weight with the Court of Directors who at the time were groping their way to a new policy in which fortified posts would take the place of the old unprotected factories. But the times for the Company were decidedly out of joint. Dutch rivalry in India had taken the aggravated form of the sale of goods at rates below cost price. The Company was in too strong a position to be driven out by these tactics, but for the time being its finances were reduced to a very low ebb. To make matters worse, a formidable new English competitor appeared on the scene in an association of traders headed by Sir Wm. Courten, who in flagrant contempt of the East India Company's monopoly, had been granted a right to send ships to India for commercial purposes. One of Courten's ships, which visited India in 1639, distinguished itself by a series of acts of piracy in the Indian Ocean with the consequence that the Mogul became greatly incensed against the English and threatened reprisals on the Company.
Under the accumulating weight of its misfortunes, the Company in 1640 seriously contemplated the abandonment
