The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c14.17

c14.17

This is the earliest reference to Shivaji’s fleet as yet available to us. It is quite natural that his first ships should have been built at Kalyan and Panvel near Bassein, for Kalyan was in those days a shipbuilding centre of some importance. The neighbouring forests offered an abundance of excellent timber, and expert shipwrights could be lured away from the Portuguese port of Bassein and the English island of Bombay. But Shivaji must have achieved a certain importance on the sea before his ship-building activity caused so much anxiety to his Portuguese neighbours. The degree of their anxiety is hardly indicated in the few sentences quoted above, which announced a new menace to their naval supremacy. We learn from a petition, submitted to the King’s council on April 1662 by Joao de Salazar de Vasconcellos, that such was the fright caused by the construction of this fleet by Shivaji that the Captain of Bassein, Antonio de Mello e Castro, was ordered to impede its exit to the sea at any cost and the Governor promised favour and pardon to all offenders who might help him in this difficult task.² In any case 1659 is an important date in the military and naval history of the Marathas, for it witnessed both the discomfiture of Afzal Khan’s expedition and the beginnings of the Maratha navy.