When the strangers had dried themselves, Diggle inquired of Hybati how he came to be in his present predicament. The Maratha explained that he had been in command of Angria's fortress of Suwarndrug, which was so strong that he had believed it able to withstand any attacks. But one day a number of vessels of the East India Company's fleet had appeared between the mainland and the island on which the fortress was situated, and had begun a bombardment which soon reduced the parapets to ruins. The chief damage had been done by an English ship. Hybati and his men had made the best defense they could, but the gunners were shot down by musket fire from the round tops of the enemy, and when a shell set fire to a thatched house within the fort, the garrison were too much alarmed to attempt to extinguish the flames; the blaze spread, a powder magazine blew up, and the inhabitants, with the greater part of the soldiers, fled to the shore, and tried to make their escape in eight large boats. Hybati had kept up the fight for some time longer, hoping to receive succor; but under cover of the fire of the ships the English commodore landed half his seamen, who rushed up to the gate, and cutting down the sally port with their axes forced their way in.
Seeing that the game was up, Hybati fled with thirty of his men, and was lucky in pushing off in the grab, unobserved by the enemy. The winds, however, proving contrary, the vessel had been blown northward along the coast and then driven far out to sea. With the breaking of the monsoon a violent squall had dismasted the grab and shattered her bulkhead; she was continually shipping water, and, as the sahib saw, was at the point of sinking when the English ship came up.
Such was the Maratha's story, as by and by it became common property on board the Good Intent. Of all the crew Desmond was perhaps the most interested. To the others there was nothing novel in the sight of the Indians; but to him they stood for romance, the embodiment of all the tales he had heard and all the dreams he had dreamed of this wonderful country in the East. He was now assured that he was actually within reach of his desired haven; and he hoped shortly to see an end of the disappointments and hardships, the toils and distresses, of the past seven months.
He was eager to learn more of these Marathas, and their fortress, and the circumstances of the recent fight. Bulger was willing to tell all he knew; but his information was not very exact, and Desmond did not hear the full story till long after.
The Malabar coast had long been the haunt of Maratha pirates, who interfered greatly with the native trade between India and Arabia and Persia. In defense of the interests of his Mohammedan subjects the Mogul emperor at length, in the early part of the eighteenth century, fitted out a fleet, under the command of an admiral known as the Sidi. But there happened to be among the Marathas at that time a warrior of great daring and resource, one Kunaji Angria. This man first defeated the Sidi, then, in the insolence of victory, revolted against his own sovereign, and set up as an independent ruler.
By means of a well-equipped fleet of grabs and gallivats he made himself master of place after place along the coast, including the Maratha fortress at Suwarndrug and the Portuguese fort of Gheria. His successors, who adopted in turn the dynastic name of Angria, followed up Kunaji's conquest, until by the year 1750 the ruling Angria was in possession of a strip of territory on the mainland a hundred and eighty miles long and about forty broad, together with many small adjacent islands.
For the defense of this little piratical state Angria's Marathas constructed a number of forts, choosing admirable positions and displaying no small measure of engineering skill. From these strongholds they made depredations by sea and land, not only upon their native neighbors, but also upon the European traders, English, Dutch, and Portuguese; swooping down on unprotected merchant vessels and even presuming to attack warships. Several expeditions had been directed against them, but always in vain; and when in 1754 the chief of that date, Tulaji Angria, known to Europeans as the Pirate, burnt two large Dutch vessels of fifty and thirty-six guns respectively, and captured a smaller one of eighteen guns, he boasted in his elation that he would soon be master of the Indian seas.
But a term was about to be put to his insolence and his depredations. On March twenty-second, 1755, Commodore William James, commander of the East India Company's marine force, set sail from Bombay in the Protector of forty-four guns, with the Swallow of sixteen guns, and two bomb vessels. With the assistance of a Maratha fleet he had attacked the island fortress of Suwarndrug, and captured it, as Hybati had related. A few days afterwards another of the Pirate's fortresses, the island of Bancoote, six miles north of Suwarndrug, surrendered. The Maratha rajah, Ramaji Punt, delighted with these successes against fortified places which had for nearly fifty years been deemed impregnable, offered the English commodore an immense sum of money to proceed against others of Angria's forts; but the monsoon approaching, the commodore was recalled to Bombay.
The spot at which the Good Intent had fallen in with the sinking grab was about eighty miles from the Indian coast, and Captain Barker expected to sight land next day. No one was more delighted at the prospect than Desmond. Leaving out of account the miseries of the long voyage, he felt that now he was within reach of the goal of his hopes. The future was all uncertain; he was no longer inclined to trust his fortunes to Diggle, for though he could not believe that the man had deliberately practised against his life, he had with good reason lost confidence in him, and what he had learned from Bulger threw a new light on his past career.
One thing puzzled him. If the Pirate was such a terror to unprotected ships, and strong enough to attack several armed vessels at once, why was Captain Barker running into the very jaws of the enemy? In her palmy days as an East Indiaman the Good Intent had carried a dozen nine-pounders on her upper deck and six on the quarterdeck; and Bulger had said that under a stout captain she had once beaten off near Surat half a dozen three-masted grabs and a score of gallivats from the pirate stronghold at Gheria. But now she had only half a dozen guns all told, and even had she possessed the full armament there were not men enough to work them, for her complement of forty men was only half what it had been when she sailed under the Company's flag.