242 FIRST SETTLEMENTS ON THE BENGAL COAST one cared about them; they were distant, unhealthy, dangerous.' ' In 1641 the ship Dyamond was ordered thither to pay off their debts and bring away the fac- tors. But in the summer of 1642, after nine years' despair- ing struggle for existence, the tide began to turn. Francis Day, who had just founded Madras, visited Balasor and protested that it " is not to be totally left." After all, it lay within the Moghul Empire, whose settled order contrasted with the wild dynastic confusion further down the coast. The Madras Council shrank, however, from the risk, and referred the ques- tion home. Meanwhile the Company in London was exchanging the makeshift rule of Charles for the con- trol of Parliament. In 1650 it resolved to follow the example of the Dutch and to found a settlement in Bengal itself. Yet the perils of the Hugli River, then unsurveyed and without lights or buoys, rendered it unsafe for large vessels. The Madras Council resolved therefore to make Balasor a port of trans-shipment, whence cargoes should be carried in native boats round to the Ganges delta, and so up its southwestern chan- nel, the Hugli, to Hugli town, about a hundred miles from the sea. There, on the bank of a deep pool formed by the current whirling round a bend of the river, the Portu- guese had built a factory more than a century before. But having incurred, apparently, the displeasure of the Emperor Shah Jahan, while he was Prince Imperial, that sovereign soon after his accession resolved to root
