This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ... The Lost Casket shivaji and his followers, after their raid on Surat, had retired loaded with plunder to their fastnesses in the south. We of the English factory had successfully defended our lives and our property, thanks especially to the valour and discretion of our president, Sir George Oxenden, ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ... The Lost Casket shivaji and his followers, after their raid on Surat, had retired loaded with plunder to their fastnesses in the south. We of the English factory had successfully defended our lives and our property, thanks especially to the valour and discretion of our president, Sir George Oxenden, and to the guns and sailors he summoned to help us from the ships at Swally. But my uncle was terribly distressed. He had lost what he valued almost more than his life, a small casket containing a beautiful miniature of his dead wife set in rubies and diamonds, and also the Agnus Dei which the Martyr King had presented to him twenty years before for his devoted loyalty in the great rebellion. The casket containing these and other precious relics had been forgotten and left behind in my uncle's villa when we hurriedly retired from it to take refuge in the factory. The villa had been thoroughly ransacked by the Mahratta spoilers. On our return we found little remaining but the bare walls, and the casket was nowhere to be seen. No doubt it had gone with the rest of the plunder of Surat to Shivaji's new capital on Raighur, and there was little hope of its ever being recovered to gladden once more my uncle's eyes and heart. My uncle as a stubborn Malignant (such was the cant term the Roundheads applied to anyone conspicuous for loyalty to Church and King) had been deprived of his landed estates in England by the rebel government. With a little money saved from the wreck of his fortune he started life again as an India merchant in Holland, and had thriven so well that he was now extremely rich. In the last of several voyages that he made to India he took with him me, his nephew, the penniless orphan of his brother, who had fallen on the fatal field...
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