[Illustration: THE “SERINGAPATAM,” EAST INDIAMAN, 1,000 TONS.]
The squadron duly arrived in Swally Roads on the 18th of September. Sir Thomas Roe performed his mission to the Great Mogul, and eventually reached England again. So also Edward Terry, after having been for some time in the East India Company’s service, was made rector of Great Greenford, Middlesex, and in the year 1649 we find him one day in September preaching a “sermon of thanksgiving” in the Church of St Andrew’s, Undershaft, before the Committee of these East India Company merchants. The occasion was the return of seven of the Company’s ships which had arrived from the Orient together—“a great and an unexpected mercy” after a “long, and tedious, and hazardous voyage.” Terry’s discourse is typical of the pompous, obsequious period. We can almost see these worthy East India merchants strolling into the church and taking their places by no means unconscious of their self-importance, yet not ashamed to do their duty and give thanks for the safe arrival of ships and their rich cargoes. Many of them, if not all, had never been out of England. Terry had been to India and back: he was therefore no ordinary rector, and he rose to the occasion. He hurls tags of Latin quotations at his hearers and then, after referring to the great riches which they were obtaining from the East, reminds these merchants that there are richer places to be found than both the East Indies and the West, better ports than Surat or even Bantam, and so went on to speak of the land where “nor rust, nor moth, nor fire, nor time can consume,” where the pavement is gold and the walls are of precious stones. And then, after this simple, direct homily, the Committee came out from their pews and went back to their daily pursuits.
If these seventeenth-century men were crude and had lost some of the religious zeal of the pre-Reformation sailors, they still retained as a relic of the Puritan influence a narrow but sincere personal piety. And this comes out in the following prayer which was wont to be used aboard the East Indiaman ships of the late seventeenth century. It is called “A prayer for the Honourable English Company trading to the East Indies, to be used on board their ships,” and bears the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, who append their signatures to the statement that “we do conceive that this prayer may be very proper to be used, for the purpose express’d in the tittle of it.” It has none of the beautiful English of the Middle Ages, for liturgical ability, like stained-glass window painting, was at this time a lost art. But for its simple sincerity, its suggestive deep realisation of the terrors of the sea, its true pathos and its plain religious confidence, it is characteristic of the period and the minds of the men who joined in this prayer:—