Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/47

PORTUGUESE ENMITY TOWARD THE ENGLISH 25 memorates the first Englishman who lived and died in Japan. Wherever the English had gone they had encountered the hostility of the Portuguese. It was not alone in the Moluccas and Philippines, where Portugal had rights based on actual possession of certain of the islands. But in the great empires of India and Japan also, where all Europeans were but humble strangers, the Portuguese determined that for the English there should be no thoroughfare. In Japan they would have had Adams executed; they plotted with the native governors against our settling on the Indian coast; they procured the revocation of the grant to Hawkins at the court of the Great Moghul. The treaty of 1604 tied the hands of our captains, and if James I had one eye to his subjects' interests, he had the other to a family alliance with Spain. Fortunately the Portuguese themselves brought about a collision. Their fleet had prevented our ships from landing at Surat in 1611, and had compelled them to do what business they could by exchanging cargoes at sea. In 1612 Captain Thomas Best, with the Bed Dragon and a smaller vessel, the Hosiander, arrived off Suwali, at the mouth of the Surat or Tapti River, with orders from the Company to conciliate the good- will of the Indian emperor for trade on that coast. On November 29th four Portuguese ships, mounting over 120 guns, attended by twenty-six or thirty " frig- ates,' ' or rowed galleys for boarding, appeared off Suwali, with the intent to capture the two English ves-