246 FIRST SETTLEMENTS ON THE BENGAL COAST sand rupees judiciously expended at the viceregal court. But as the document was lost three years later, by Mr. Waldegrave on a land journey to Madras, it remains doubtful whether the license confined our trade to the seaports or sanctioned it also in the interior. The Masulipatam factory rewarded Mr. Boughton with a gift " of gay apparel "— a dress of honour suitable to a high personage in attendance on the Viceregal Court —and from 1651 onward the English were established as traders alike on the seaboard and in the interior of Bengal. These trading posts were at Balasor, and per- haps at Pippli on the Orissa coast; at Hugli, Kasim- bazar near Murshidabad, and one or two out-stations in the Ganges delta; and at Patna and subordinate agencies higher up the Ganges, in Behar. It soon appeared that this advance northward ex- ceeded the still feeble powers of the Company. The Bengal factories lay beyond effective control. Their staff, in spite of all pious instructions, plunged into irregularities which ended in two of them deserting the Company's service, in the death of a third ruined by debt, and in the return of a fourth to Madras with a story that he had lost the Company's papers. The good surgeon Boughton was also dead, and his widow, who had married again, was clamouring for a reward for his services. In 1G56 - 1657 the Madras Council for the second time withdrew, or resolved to withdraw, their factories from the Bengal seaboard. But once again we were saved from the counsels of despair. In October, 1657, Cromwell reorganized
