The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c14.63.4

c14.63.4

The only concession that he managed to obtain was included in a treaty of 1670, whereby small boats carrying provisions and foodstuffs were permitted to ply between Karanja and Goa without a Portuguese pass.¹ This concession was persistently refused to the *Gallivats* and big coasting vessels. Shivaji's fleet was numerically superior to the fleets of European nations in Indian waters; but in artillery and in the art of navigation it was vastly inferior. Shivaji himself cannot be blamed for these deficiencies. In twenty years he could hardly expect to create a navy and bring it to perfection. He had made a beginning and a good beginning; it was for his successors to build upon the foundation he had laid. In Sambhaji and Rajaram's days the Maratha fleet continued to compel alien traders to buy its permits and its power was felt at sea even after the Mughals had conquered practically the whole of Maharashtra. But nothing more was done. In its organisation, in the type of its men-of-war, in its policy of selling *cartaz* and making prizes of merchantmen that did not possess it, and in the art and science of maritime warfare the Maratha navy remained where Shivaji had left it, until in the beginning of the next century its control definitely passed from the Chhatrapati to a family of hereditary naval chiefs.