'History of the Indian Navy. (1613-1863).' [‎573] (592/622)

HISTORY OF THE INDIAN NAYT.
573
per-
Frushard, with some natural emotion, addressed a few words
to the officers and men, bidding each and all farewell, and
warmly shaking hands with the officers, and some of the petty
officers and seamen, who, in return greeted him with three hearty
cheers. On landing from the flagship, he was received with a
personal salute of eleven guns, and thus passed away the last
vestige of power belonging to a Service, which had exercised
undisputed sovereignty over the seas from the Cape of Good
Hope to the Straits of Singapore.
For a period of exactly two centuries and a half, counting
from the year 1612, when Captain Best defeated the Portu
guese fleet off the bar of Surat, the Naval Service of the East
India Company had done its duty faithfully and well, though
oftentimes with insufficient means: and the surviving officers,
a fast-decreasing band, have the satisfaction of knowing that
when, as Keats says, 64 the daisies are growing over them,"
their countrymen will admit that they performed their devoirs
their day and generation. Raised at a time when the
m
" Company of Adventurers trading to the East" were an
uninfluential knot of merchants, first as the Bombay Marine The navy of the East India Company. ,
and then as the Indian Navy, it fulfilled its share in the
great task of building up that structure of empire which
has excited the wonder and envy of other nations, and of
which the first stone was laid on that day in April, 1609,
when Captain Hawkins, of the Company's ship 'Hector/
presented himself before Jehangire, in his palace at Agra, the
first representative of his nation to stand in the presence of the
Great Mogul. The ceremony of hauling down the old flag of
the Indian Navy in Bombay harbour was not imposing, but to
the thoughtful, or to those conversant with its glorious history
during the two and a half centuries of its existence, the scene
was eminently suggestive. Such witnesses, as they recalled to
mind the names of the long line of gallant seamen, whose
services we have sought, however imperfectly, to chronicle in
these pages, men who bore triumphantly through the battle and
the breeze, the flag now slowly descending for the last time
from the masthead, must have murmured to themselves the
well-worn apophthegm—old, yet ever new in its application
—" Sic transit gloria mundir
If official recognition was meagre and its expression cold, the
same cannot be said of the testimony borne by those best
qualified to judge of the merits and conduct of the Indian Navy,
and whose goodwill was, therefore, the more valued. ^ The
Bombay Press, as representing the community, published
valedictory articles, in many cases giving a sketch of the
history of the Service, that in the 44 Deccan Herald being an
admirable summary, while all were equally warm in Jheir
eulogiums, and hearty in the farewells addressed to the officers
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