425
in British India. The facts are familiar to
88 I
drafted the original working memorandum. The Portoguese
Colony of Goa, in Western India, lies about 30 miles inland. Provided with the sanction of
an Indian railway of its own, the Portuguese Government
raised a London loan of some £2,000,000 at 6% interest
guaranteed by Lisbon. The frontier station on the slope
of the Western Ghauts, where no gradients could be located
and the Portuguese rails, trains had to run over the
British line for a few miles to the nearest station
Castle Rock,
Despite the fact that the Railway did not pay and,
moreover that the interest on capital invested exceeded
the whole of the revenues of Portuguese Colony, the
Goa Government for several years, ostensibly on various
own as well as on a royal naval undertaking, promised doubt
that I would be unwise to minimise
so foreign interference or estrangement.
The insistence on
with tariff rates and the friction thereby arising from
dual interests resulted in such a divergence of traffic
that the Portuguese line was starved and after several
years of annual deficit, when the gross receipts did not
cover