The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c15.48

c15.48

The nationality of the three captured ships was a highly controversial question. The owners of the ships were not English, but the cargo belonged to English subjects, and Kanhoji contended that they were not entitled to exemption from the ordinary rules of passports. He wrote to Captain Cornwall ‘that the ships belonging to Bombay, Bengall or Madras shall not be molested by him but that if the English will freight on countrey shipping they must expect that he will make prise of them.’³ This he reiterated in his letter to Boone. ‘The English’, he wrote, ‘freight the ships of foreign merchants and lade them with their goods, and receive no molestation they having English colours. This is gain to the owners of the ship; yet how can they carry on their trade without a pass. To-day you freight the ship Sacry; to-morrow Your Excellency will say that you have a mind to freight fifty or a hundred ships of the Surat merchants. If so what occasion have they to take a pass they always took of mee, and if Your Excellency intends to carry on the trade alone under your colours, why did the Bombay merchant who hired the ship of the Duan of Chaul write to mee and take my pass for her?’ To this Boone retorted: ‘Let the bottom be whose it will, the money lent on it is worth more than the ship, and the goods are English you well know, or else you would not have attempted so barbarously to beat the Captain and other Englishmen into a confession of what made for your purpose.’