decked in gaudy tinseled robes allure the victim to the grave.” Overcrowding in dilapidated accommodation was all too often a sight; slime, dirt and excrement a common experience of life in the Oriental Quarter. A small number of lascars settled down and married local British and Irish women, at least partly due to a lack of Asian women in Britain at the time, leading to small multiracial communities in port towns. Some of them converted to Christianity (at least nominally) as it was legally required to be Christian in order to marry in Britain at this time, the most famous case being Sake Dean Mahomed, who converted from Islam to Christianity in order to marry his Irish wife Jane Daly. British women cohabiting with lascars became an issue, and a magistrate of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets area in 1817 expressed "disgust" at how the local English women in the area were marrying and cohabiting with foreign Indian lascar seamen. Nevertheless, there were no legal restrictions against "mixed" marriages in Britain. Indian lascar sailors established some of England's first settled Asian-British inter-racial families in the dock areas of major port cities. This led to a small number of "mixed race" children being born in the country. Ethnic minority women in Britain were often outnumbered by "half-caste Indian" daughters born from white mothers and Indian fathers. The most famous of these mixed-race children was Albert Mahomet, born with a lascar father and English mother. He went on to write a book about his life called From Street Arab to Pastor. Lascars commonly suffered from poverty in Britain. In 1782, East India Company records describe lascars coming to their Leadenhall Street offices ‘reduced to great distress and applying to us for relief’. In 1785 a letter writer in The Public Advertiser wrote of "miserable objects, lascars, that I see shivering and starving in the streets". During the 1780s it was not uncommon to see lascars starving on the streets of London. The East India Company responded to criticism of the lascars' treatment by making available lodgings for them, but no checks were kept on the boarding houses and barracks they provided. The lascars were made to live in cramped, dreadful conditions which resulted in the deaths of many each year, with reports of lascars being locked in cupboards and whipped for misbehaviour by landlords. Their poor treatment was reported on by