The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c23.s3.104

v4.c23.s3.104

The reigns of Narawara (1672-73), Minrekyawdin (1673-98), Sane (1698-1714), and Taninganwe (1714-33), were uneventful save for the usual rebellions and frontier raids. When the Āva palace was rebuilt in 1676, human victims were buried as a foundation sacrifice.⁵ In 1721 two Italian priests came to Āva and founded the Catholic Mission;¹ hitherto the only clergy in the country had been the Goanese chaplains of the feringhi villages (p. 495), whose character may be inferred from the fact that it was largely at their instigation that two devoted priests of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris were martyred in 1693. The Jatapon, a collection of royal horoscopes, was compiled about 1680; it is of high chronological value as its dates are more reliable than those of the chronicles. In 1724 Nga Kala compiled the Yazawwingyi chronicle; it is an important work, based on earlier sources, and similarly large portions of its text are incorporated in the Hmannan chronicle. European trade centred in Siam and Malaya at places such as Tenasserim² (p. 488) which, save under Bayinnaung (1551–81), was in Siamese hands till 1760. The Portuguese ceased to count after 1641, when they were expelled from Malacca by the Dutch, but there is still a colony of their descendants, with high-sounding names they cannot pronounce, round the Catholic church at Mergui. The merchants of Golconda carried the India trade thither; the king of Siam and his minister, Phaulkon, a Greek, wishing to oust them and get the carrying trade for their own ships, employed English interlopers. Thus Burneby figures as governor of Mergui among the seven commissioners appointed by the king of Siam in 1686 to administer the port and province, and Samuel White, another of the commissioners, was port officer 1683–87. But the East India Company depended for its security on the king of Golconda, and persuaded its principal shareholder, James II, to claim Mergui in 1687. White outwardly professed compliance while secretly preparing to resist, but he had betrayed his Siamese employers as well as the East India Company, and the townsfolk now rose against him as well as against James II's frigate, drove them both out and massacred sixty other English who were ashore. James II was also actuated by a desire to forestall Louis XIV. Four companies of French infantry built a fort and garrisoned Mergui during 1688 by arrangement with the king of Siam, who played off the European nations against each other. The name French Bay, on the eastern side of King Island, the largest island in the Mergui group, commemorates the fact that it was for a few years about this time the rendezvous of French warships. With the death of the Siamese king and the murder of Phaulkon in 1688, the Siamese ceased to favour the French, and in any case the French before long had no energy to spare for the farther east.³