216 FIRST SETTLEMENTS ON THE BOMBAY COAST it to an end. The Portuguese had continued to plunder Moghul ships, subject to such reprisals as the English could inflict on them. But the English president at Surat had now made a treaty on his own account with the Goa viceroy: Why should he not also include in it the Indian government? In 1639 the Surat Council found themselves raised into negotiators between the Moghul governor and the Portuguese. The degenerate successors of Albuquerque and the half-breed corsairs of Goa for a time transferred their piracies from the Mecca route to the Bay of Bengal, and the cold shadows which had fallen on the Surat factory were again warmed into prosperity under the sunshine of the Mo- ghul court. However low the fortunes of the Company sank under king or Commonwealth in England, the Surat factory grew with a strength of its own. In 1657, on account of the prosperous condition of that factory, the Company decided that there should be but one pres- idency in India— and that Surat. I have narrated at some length the rise of the Surat factory for several reasons. It formed the first head- quarters of the English in India— a centre of English control in the East which had a vitality in itself apart from the Company in London, and which won by its Persian Gulf victory our first revenue grant— the Cus- toms of Gombroon— and profoundly influenced our later settlements on the Indian continent. It also illustrates the position which the English quickly secured in the economy of the Moghul Empire: as a sure source of revenue, a sea-police for the coast, and the patrol of
