The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c17.37

c17.37

The Maratha captains did not in general act differently from their brethren in the Portuguese, English and Dutch navies. They seized trading ships only when these had failed to purchase their passes, and in those days such an omission, as the Carwar letter already quoted shows, could be very well construed as a deliberate defiance. The merchantmen were generally well-armed, the few passengers that they took also provided themselves with muskets and blunderbusses and not infrequently put up a fight before the ship surrendered to a man-of-war. The capture of such armed ships could hardly be regarded as an act of cowardice as the torpedoing of an unarmed trading vessel by a submarine today. In any case the merchant ship was fully aware of the risk she was running, and the contest was not very unequal.