The East India Company was far more seriously challenged by rivals than was the Hudson’s Bay Company, even in the devastating days of the latter’s struggle with the Northwestern Fur Company. Not only England but Holland and numerous other commercial nations of the continent hungered for the loot of India, and between the traders representing all these conflicting greeds an almost continuous state of warfare prevailed, which more than once drew in the governments themselves. Not only foreign competitors harassed the English East India Company, for among its annoyances was what was called the “interloper,” the English trader who poached in their preserves, in defiance of law, to such an extent that not a few considerable fortunes were thus established. But the company did not always pursue these trespassers with the severity which they might lawfully have used; local conditions on the coast made another English ship, even an interloper, not unwelcome, and at such times these gentry were tolerated and even welcomed with a surprising friendliness. In addition to the continentals and the interlopers, the Scotch African-Indian company had, as we have seen, following the wreck of the Darien colony, begun to send its ships out for a share of the Indian spoils, two of which ships, through the unwitting kindness of Captain John Bowen, had just been prevented rather forcibly from troubling the sleep of the English company. The status of the _Worcester_, then, was that of an interloper, but in one of the more genial humors of the monopolizing company, and Captain Thomas Green, her commander, had reason to believe that it would not seriously molest him as he sought to pick up a couple of hundred tons of more or less profitable cargo. An old, slow, lead-sheathed craft was the _Worcester_, formerly in the whaling business. She was about a hundred feet in length and twenty-two or so feet in breadth, and carried a crew of thirty-five men. Tom Green, her master, was an honest old sea dog, thoroughly loyal to his owners and to his vessel; the admirable sort of man who does Britannia’s drudgery at sea, happy if at last he can step off his quarterdeck with all the limbs he had when he first went up the gangway as a ’prentice, and content to sink into a permanent armchair on the sunny side of a cottage close to tidewater and the lanes of sea trafficking. And but for John Bowen, it is reasonable to suppose that Tom Green would at length have achieved his modest, commendable ambition.