The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c7.s8.102

c7.s8.102

The exports of Chaul were indigo, opium, cotton, silk of every sort, with great store of iron and corn; and the imports came from Mecca and China as well as from Europe.⁷ Ships laden with fine stuffs used to come to Goa from Sindh.⁸ But with the seventeenth century the European rivals of the Portuguese began to trouble them as well as the Malabár and Arab pirates. In 1615 the chief points in the treaty made between the Emperor Jahángir and the Portuguese expressed their mutual enmity to the English and Dutch and the necessity of destroying the Malabár pirates.⁹ The entry of other Europeans into the Indian seas was looked on as so much of a calamity that De la Valle¹ calls it one of the signs of the decay of the Portuguese that English and Dutch ships frequent the ports of Dábhol Chaul and Bassein without hindrance and without acknowledging the Portuguese supremacy, though the latter still prevented native vessels from sailing in these seas without their permission.² So late as 1624 no one could go to Europe by way of Persia and Turkey without obtaining leave from the authorities of Goa.¹