At that time the influence of England over India was small to insignificance--a scrap of Bengal, the island and town of Bombay, Madras, and a fort or two. The average Englishman's knowledge of India was small even to non-existence. The few Englishmen who ever looked with eyes of intelligent information upon that great tract of territory, leaf-shaped, and labelled India on the maps, knew that the English possessions therein were few and paltry. Three quite distinct sections, called presidencies, each independent of the two others, and all governed by a supreme authority whose offices were in Leadenhall Street in London, represented the meagre nucleus of what was yet to be the vast Anglo-Indian Empire. The first of these three presidencies was the Bombay presidency, where the Indian Ocean washes the Malabar coast. The second was in the Carnatic, on the eastern side of the leaf, where the waters of the Bay of Bengal wash the Coromandel coast, where the forts of St. George and St. David protected Madras and a smaller settlement. The third presidency was up towards the north, where the sacred Ganges, rushing through its many mouths to the sea, floods the Hoogly. Here the town of Calcutta was growing up around Fort William. {254} These three little presidencies, plying their poor trade, and depending for defence upon their ill-disciplined native soldiers, the Sepahis, whom we have come to call Sepoys, were all that had grown out of the nearly two centuries of relations with the leaf-shaped Indian land since first, in 1591, Captain Lancaster sailed the seas; since first the East India Company sprang into existence. It was not an agreeable two centuries for Englishmen who ever thought of India to read about. Two centuries of squabblings and strugglings with Dutch settlers and with Portuguese settlers, of desperate truckling to native princes. In 1664 the English East India Company found a rival more formidable than the Dutch or the Portuguese in the French East India Company, which the astuteness of Colbert set up at Pondicherry, and which throve with a rapidity that quite eclipsed the poor progress of the English traders. Even when, in 1708, the old East India Company united its fortunes with the new Indian Company that had been formed, and thus converted one rival into an ally, the superiority of the French remained uncontested, and daily waxed greater and greater, until it began to seem as if, in the words of Antony to Cleopatra, all the East should call her mistress. [Sidenote: 1725-1743--The Clives of Market-Drayton]