In this situation, a young prince, confiding more in the appearances than examining into the reality of things, undertook (from motives which the House of Commons, with all their industry to discover the circumstances, have found it difficult to make out) to attack a little miserable trading fort that we had erected at Calcutta.

He succeeded in that attempt only because success in that attempt was easy.

A close imprisonment of the whole settlement followed,--not owing, I believe, to the direct will of the prince, but, what will always happen when the will of the prince is but too much the law, to a gross abuse of his power by his lowest servants,--by which one hundred and twenty or more of our countrymen perished miserably in a dungeon, by a fate too tragical for me to be desirous to relate, and too well known to stand in need of it.
At the time that this event happened, there was at the same time a concurrence of other events, which, from this partial and momentary weakness, displayed the strength of Great Britain in Asia.

For some years before, the French and English troops began, on the coast of Coromandel, to exhibit the power, force, and efficacy of European discipline.

As we daily looked for a war with France, our settlements on that coast were in some degree armed.