1688-1783 
approved by the Bishop of London, was in 1700 sent 
out by the directors of the new (the English) Company 
for service at the factory of Hoogly in Bengal, and who 
ran off as soon as he got on shore. ‘We understand,’ 
wrote the authorities at Hoogly, © he is a very lewd 
drunken swearing person, drenched in all manner of 
debaucheries.” tHe must have been an exceptionally 
bad specimen, but there were also cases of respectable 
men who were nevertheless quite unsuitable : such, it 
would seem, were a chaplain and schoolmaster sent 
out to Bombay in 1669, the year in which the island 
passed into the Company’s possession, and of whom 
an account is given in a letter from Surat of January 
1671-2. But, in spite of misfits, the fact remains that 
the directors of the East India Companies considered 
qualified clergy to be an integral part of their establish- 
ment; and through the eighteenth century they 
looked also somewhat beyond their establishment and 
showed themselves markedly well disposed to the 
missionary efforts of the S.P.C.K. in India. 
The directors of the old Company, in 1691, sug- 
gested to their Board at Fort St. George, Madras, that 
a church should be built there for Protestant black 
people and Portuguese and slaves; and in the following 
year they wrote that they were sending out for this 
church two ministers who had studied Portuguese. 
At a much earlier date, during the Protectorate, in 
February 1658, the old Company had addressed a 
63 
t See The Diary of William Hedges, etc. edited for the Hakluyt 
Society by Col. Yule (2 vols., 1778-9), vol. ii, ccx. 
2 Ipid., vol. ii, ccexvii. What follows in the text below is either 
supplied from or corroborated by these volumes, which are full of 
: formation but badly in need of a new edition.