The Honourable Company
John Keay
A history of the English East India company.During 200 years the East India Company grew from a loose association of Elizabethan tradesmen into "the grandest society of merchants in the universe". As a commercial enterprise it came to control half the world's trade and as a political entity it administered an embryonic empire. Without it there would have been no British India and no British Empire. In a tapestry ranging from Southern Africa to north-west America, and from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of Victoria, bizarre locations and roguish personality abound. From Bombay to Singapore and Hong Kong the political geography of today is, in some respects, the result of the Company. This book looks at the history of the East India Company.
The Honourable Company
John Keay
Copyright (#ulink_723d99ad-0d4e-56f7-b535-06409553f473)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1991
Copyright © John Keay 1991
John Keay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006380726
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007395545
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Praise (#ulink_131c8129-4f8f-5ee0-bd64-06efa0d08691)
From the reviews of The Honourable Company:
‘What a marvellous story is that of the East India Company!…And John Keay tells it well, humanely and spicily, as well as all we need about organisation, background, etc…Mr Keay gives us the spectrum, the trade with China and Japan, the Arabian Gulf, the East Indies, India, the lot.’
A. L. ROWSE, Contemporary Review
‘Splendid, tumultuous narrative history…The sotry is so colourful, at least in its early stages, that it can be read as a bumper book of Indian adventure.’
ANTHONY QUINTON, The Times
‘A tale worth retelling in detail, when it is done with as much as flair and imagination as this.’
GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE, Guardian
‘A gem of a book on a vast and complex adventure of British trading, maritime and colonial history…highly recommended not only for scholars but to all those interested in an important segment of British and human history.’
Catholic Herald
‘Full of delicious anecdotes…fascinating reading.’
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, The Spectator
For Alexander and Anna
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ua6068831-2ad3-5b1d-afc8-d832e7e6ddcb)
Title Page (#ud07cc376-9a5a-5126-b5a9-c2b37403f21a)
Copyright (#uba9d3289-edfd-536e-8c49-42862e4c62cb)
Praise (#ud2d11f85-87ff-5b5c-bb9b-f8f691603daf)
Preface (#uef73d4bd-c30d-5c04-9d1c-828cd9abe3ea)
PART ONE A QUIET TRADE 1600-1640 (#ud1bb4ffb-31a7-5f49-9b34-5f55271266be)
CHAPTER ONE Islands of Spicerie (#u7985554e-208d-55b7-bc5f-f624638a00fc)
CHAPTER TWO This Frothy Nation (#ue2d7f98d-5e5f-57ca-abe1-1f32b1e7fe31)
CHAPTER THREE Pleasant and Fruitfull Lands (#uff9421df-8b4f-59d3-8d8b-cd85046c4f8e)
CHAPTER FOUR Jarres and Brabbles (#ua50320fe-341c-5267-9d40-ca8bef1bde6e)
CHAPTER FIVE The Keye of All India (#u8e718591-0e24-5c5b-94d0-9594c535da4b)
PART TWO FLUCTUATING FORTUNES 1640-1710 (#u3583ac04-8bb5-5378-9cfc-bf947f9b3208)
CHAPTER SIX These Frowning Times (#u62735f33-b9a5-521c-b23b-70717cb79d02)
CHAPTER SEVEN A Seat of Power and Trade (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT Fierce Engageings (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE Renegades and Rivals (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN Eastern Approaches (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE A TERRITORIAL POWER 1710-1760 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Dark Age (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE Outposts of Effrontery (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN One Man’s Pirate (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Germ of an Army (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Famous Two Hundred Days (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR A PARTING OF THE WAYS 1760-1820 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Looking Eastward to the Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Transfer of Power (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Too Loyal, Too Faithful (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN Tea Trade Versus Free Trade (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgement and Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_c5e27b3d-f5b5-5fbb-b45d-236c97d5553c)
A hundred years ago the high-minded rulers of British India regarded merchants as a lesser breed in the hierarchy of imperial pedigree. To ‘gentlemen in trade’, as to servants, ladies, natives, dogs, the brass-studded doors of Bombay’s and Calcutta’s more exclusive clubs were closed. Like social climbers raising the ladder behind them, the paragons of the Raj preferred to forget that but for the ‘gentlemen in trade’ of the East India Company there would have been no British India.
The Honourable Company was remembered, if at all, only as an anomalous administrative service; and that was indeed what it had become in the early nineteenth century. But before that, for all of 200 years, its endeavours were seen as having been primarily commercial, often inglorious, and almost never ‘honourable’. Venal and disreputable, its servants were believed to have betrayed their race by begetting a half-caste tribe of Anglo-Indians, and their nation by corrupt government and extortionate trade.
From those 200 years just a few carefully selected incidents and personalities sufficed by way of introduction to the subsequent 150 years of glorious British dominion. Occasionally greater attention might be paid to the Company’s last decades as an all-conquering force in Indian politics, but still the perspective remained the same: the Company was seen purely as the forerunner to the Raj.
Closer acquaintance reveals a different story. The career of ‘the Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’ spans as much geography as it does history. To follow its multifarious activities involves imposing a chronology extending from the reign of Elizabeth to that of Victoria upon a map extending from southern Africa to north-west America. Heavy are the demands this makes on both writer and reader. (And hence perhaps the dearth of narrative histories of the Company in this post-imperial age.) But the conclusion is inescapable. The East India Company was as much about the East as about India. Its Pacific legacies would be as lasting as those in the Indian Ocean; its most successful commercial venture was in China, not India.
Freed of its subservient function as the unworthy stock on which the mighty Raj would be grafted, the Company stands forth as a robust association of adventurers engaged in hazarding all in a series of preposterous gambles. Some paid off; many did not but are no less memorable for it. Bizarre locations, exotic produce, and recalcitrant personalities combine to induce a sense of romance which, however repugnant to the scholar, is in no way contrived. It was thanks to the incorrigible pioneering of the Company’s servants that the British Empire acquired its peculiarly diffuse character. But for the Company there would have been not only no British India but also no global British Empire.
PART ONE A QUIET TRADE 1600-1640 (#ulink_a8d0228b-d3cc-51e9-8d70-be373259bad8)
CHAPTER ONE Islands of Spicerie (#ulink_d613e086-282a-57d7-9f63-f5015ea29488)
THE VOYAGES OF JAMES LANCASTER
Every overseas empire had to begin somewhere. A flag had to be raised, territory claimed, and settlement attempted. In the dimly perceived conduct of a small band of bedraggled pioneers, stiff with scurvy and with sand in their hose, it may be difficult to determine to what extent these various criteria were met. There might, for instance, be a case for locating the genesis of the British Empire in the West Indies, Virginia, or New England. But there is a less obvious and much stronger candidate. The seed from which grew the most extensive empire the world has ever seen was sown on Pulo Run in the Banda Islands at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. As the island of Runnymede is to British constitutional history, so the island of Run is to British imperial history.
How in 1603 Run’s first English visitors ever lit upon such an absurdly remote destination is cause for wonder. To locate the island a map of no ordinary dimensions is needed. For to show Pulo Run at anything like scale and also include, say, Darwin and Jakarta means pasting together a sheet of room size – and still Run is just an elongated speck. On the ground it measures two miles by half a mile, takes an hour to walk round and a day for a really exhaustive exploration. This reveals a modest population, no buildings of note, and no source of fresh water. There are, though, a lot of trees amongst which the botanist will recognize Myristica fragrans. Dark of foliage, willow-size, and carefully tended, it is more commonly known as the nutmeg tree.
For the nutmegs (i.e. the kernels inside the stones of the tree’s peach-like fruit) and for the mace (the membrane which surrounds the stone) those first visitors in 1603 would willingly have sailed round the world several times. Nowhere else on the globe did the trees flourish and so nowhere else was their fruit so cheap. In the minuscule Banda Islands of Run, Ai, Lonthor and Neira ten pounds of nutmeg cost less than half a penny and ten pounds of mace less than five pence. Yet in Europe the same quantities could be sold for respectively £1.60 and £16, a tidy appreciation of approximately 32,000 per cent. Not without pride would James I come to be styled ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway [Pulo Ai] and Puloroon [Pulo Run]’. The last named, thought one of its visitors, could be as valuable to His Majesty as Scotland.
True, the island never quite lived up to expectations. Indeed it would become a fraught and expensive liability. But as it happened, the importance of Run for the East India Company and so for the British Empire lay not in its scented groves of nutmeg but in one particular nutmeg seedling.
A peculiarity of the Banda islands at the beginning of the seventeenth century was that thanks to their isolation they owed allegiance to no one. Moreover, the Bandanese recognized no supreme sultan of their own. Instead authority rested with village councils presided over by orang kaya or headmen. In the best tradition of south-east Asian adat (consensus), each village or island was in fact a self-governing and fairly democratic republic. They could withhold or dispose of their sovereignty as they saw fit; and whereas the inhabitants of neighbouring Neira and Lonthor had already been bullied into accepting a large measure of Dutch control, those of outlying Ai and Run had managed to preserve their independence intact.
By 1616 Run and Ai valued their contacts with the English and, when menaced by the Dutch, voted to pledge their allegiance to the men who flew the cross of St George. They did this by swearing an oath and by presenting their new suzerains with a nutmeg seedling rooted in a ball of Run’s yellowish soil. As well as the symbolism, it was an act of profound trust. Seedlings were closely guarded, and destroyed rather than surrendered. Who knew what effect the naturalization elsewhere of a misappropriated seedling might have on the Bandanese monopoly?
The recipients of this gratifying presentation were, like all the other doubleted Englishmen who had so far reached Run, employees of the East India Company. But therein lay a problem. For in this, its infancy, the Company was not empowered to hold overseas territories. Its royal charter made no mention of them, only of trading rights and maritime conduct. It was therefore on behalf of the Crown that Run’s allegiance had to be accepted. And when, after an epic blockade of the island lasting four years, the Company would eventually decide that it had had enough of Run, it was in fact the British sovereign who stood out in favour of his exotic windfall and of his Bandanese subjects.
Even Oliver Cromwell was to have a soft spot for Run, and at his instigation arrangements would be made for re-establishing a permanent colony there. Solid Presbyterian settlers were recruited; goats, hens, hoes, and psalters were piled aboard the good ship London; and it was only at the very last minute that renewed hostilities with the Dutch led to the ship being redirected to St Helena in the south Atlantic. More important, though, it was with Run in mind that the Protector issued the Company with a new charter which included the authority to hold, fortify and settle overseas territories. Thanks to the orang kaya of Run, first St Helena, soon after Bombay, then Calcutta, Bengal, India, and the East would come under British sway.
But there Run’s celebrity would end. Ironically it was in the same year that the East India Company took over Bombay that Charles II relinquished his rights to Run. Sixty years of Dutch pressure had finally paid off. By the treaty of Breda the British Crown would cede all rights in the Bandas, receiving by way of compensation a place on the north American seaboard called New Amsterdam together with its own spiceless island of Manhattan. It may have seemed like a good swop but the little nutmeg of Run had arguably more relevance to future empire than did the Big Apple.
ii
Of those first Elizabethan Englishmen who in 1603 trooped, sea weary and surf soaked, on to Run’s scorching sands we know only from the protest registered by a Dutch admiral who happened to be on the Banda island of Neira at the time. The Dutch had reached the Bandas two years earlier and, but for their sensational success there and elsewhere in the East Indies, it must be doubtful whether London’s merchants would ever have entered the ‘spice race’ or subscribed to an East India Company. But then the Dutch were only emulating the Portuguese who had been trading with the Indies for nearly a century; and although it was the Portuguese who had discovered the sea route round the Cape of Good Hope, even they had not invented the spice trade.
Since at least Roman times the traffic in exotic condiments from east to west had sustained the most extensive and profitable trading network the world had yet seen. The buds of the dainty clove tree, the berries of the ivy-like pepper vine, and of course the kernel and membrane of the nutmeg had been ideal cargoes. Dried, husked and bagged, they were light in weight, high in value, and easily broken into loads. Shipped to the Asian mainland in junks, prabus and dhows, they were repacked as camel and donkey loads for the long overland journey to the Levant, and then reshipped across the Mediterranean to the European markets.
In the process their value appreciated phenomenally. What were basic culinary ingredients in south Asia had become exotic luxuries by the time they reached the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. They were the precious metals of the vegetable kingdom and their pungency seemed to enhance their rarity by conferring a whiff of distinction on every household that could afford them. In brines and marinades nutmeg proved a vital preservative; in stews and ragouts pepper masked the smell of ill-cured meat and improved its flavour; and the clove, as well as its culinary uses, was credited with amazing medicinal properties. Like later tea, coffee, and even tobacco, it was as expensive health foods that spices gradually entered everyday diet. As the supply increased, the merchants’ profit margins would fall, but in the sixteenth century it was still calculated that if only one sixth of a cargo reached its destination its owner would still be in profit.
Control of this lucrative trade rested traditionally with the Chinese and Malays in the East, with the Indians and Arabs in its middle reaches, and with the Levantines and Venetians in the West. But around the year 1500 other interested parties had appeared on the scene. It was to reroute the spice trade to the greater advantage of Christendom and their own considerable profit that European seafarers from Spain and Portugal first ventured on to the world’s oceans. Improvements in marine design, in navigational instruments, cartography and gunnery soon gave the newcomers an edge over their Asian rivals. They could sail further, faster, and for longer. They had less need to hug the coastline and, since the spice-producing islands lay on the opposite side of the world, they had a choice of sailing east or west.
But what their charts failed to show was that other lands lay in the way. Hence the search for the Spice Islands threw up the discovery of America, of the Pacific archipelagos, of sub-Saharan Africa, and of the Indian and south-east Asian coastlines. Knowledge of, and eventually dominion over these ‘new worlds’ would follow. Yet such incidental discoveries could not immediately deflect the European parvenus from their main objective. Trade, not conquest or colonization, was the priority. In 1511, only twenty-three years after first rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese had reached Java; and in 1543, twenty-three years after discovering the Magellan strait near Cape Horn, a Spanish fleet from Mexico had laid claim to the islands soon christened the Philippines. Somewhere in the gap remaining between these two global pincer movements lay the Spice Islands.
The perversity of nature in lavishing her most valued products on islands so small and impossibly remote prompted wonder and fable. To what Milton called the ‘islands of spicerie’ an air of mystery clung. When Christopher Columbus had cast about for a sponsor for his projected voyage over the western horizon, he made much of the idea that if he did not find the spice-rich Indies he had a good chance of finding the lost continent of Atlantis. Neither was a geographical certainty; both owed much to the imagination.
Even today, with better and more comprehensive maps, it is hard to put a finger on the exact spot. ‘Spice Islands’ was as much a description as a proper name, and mostly it was reserved for islands which had no other claim on the map-maker’s attention. Thus somewhere as important as Sri Lanka, although always the main producer of cinnamon bark, did not qualify and neither did the main pepper-producing areas of Sumatra and of India’s Malabar coast.
The real spice islands were less obvious and more mysterious, and lay much further to the east between Sulawesi (Celebes), New Guinea, and the Philippines. This, the Moluccan triangle, is also the epicentre of Indonesia’s volcanic ‘Ring of Fire’. On average there is an eruption every five years and deposits of volcanic soil are as crucial to the location of spice groves as the humid sea-breezes. In seventeenth-century drawings Tidore and Ternate, the main clove-producing islands, figure as smoking volcanoes rising sheer from the ocean, the only vegetation being a fringe of coconut palms at their base. Horticulturally they look most unpromising. Yet this is in fact a fairly accurate depiction. The cones rise a mile into the sky and only the narrowest of margins between the encircling ocean and the funnel of fire is available for clove gardens. Likewise the Banda Islands are dominated by the great central volcano of Gunung Api which periodically showers the nutmeg groves with rich volcanic dust. If the production of spices required such an elemental setting, it was no wonder they were a rarity.
The first spice race, won by the Portuguese, was confirmed by the terms of a Papal bull which drew a sort of international date-line between the advancing fleets of Spain and Portugal. With a chain of heavily fortified bases stretching from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to Goa in India, then Malacca near the modern Singapore, and finally Ambon in the central Moluccas, the Portuguese made good their claim to control of the entire spice route. Barring occasional interference from the Spanish in the Philippines, they enjoyed as near a monopoly of the oceanic spice trade as they cared to enforce for most of the sixteenth century.
Other European rivals simply failed to materialize. As yet the Dutch were still enduring the birth pangs of nationhood; and the English, who with the loss of Calais and the break with Rome were at last looking away from Europe, were nevertheless looking in the wrong direction. Observing how, although the Portuguese sailed into the sunrise and the Spanish into the sunset, both had successfully found a path to the Spice Islands, Englishmen had concluded that they too could expect to discover their own corridor to the East. The fact that that same Papal bull gave the Iberian powers a monopoly over their respective routes which might be enforced by any available means was also good reason for Tudor seafarers to find their own route. Like their Spanish and Portuguese rivals, the English were familiar with the latest advances in marine technology and were dimly aware that being located on the European periphery should no longer be a disadvantage. In what was to be the age of the Atlantic powers, the English were not behindhand; only five years after Columbus, John Cabot in an English vessel had been the first to reach the American mainland. But they were unlucky. Portuguese endeavour had been handsomely rewarded by the discovery of a ‘south-east passage’ round the Cape of Good Hope; thereafter the Indies had been plain sailing. Similarly a ‘south-west passage’ round the Horn had awaited the Spanish. But where were their northern equivalents?
Throughout the second half of the sixteenth century English ships determinedly pushed up into the Arctic Circle. In the north-west Frobisher and Davis probed the sounds and channels of Canada’s frozen north; none turned out to be a Magellan strait. Earlier Willoughby and Chancellor, in search of a north-east passage, had rounded Norway’s North Cape and entered the Barents Sea. Novaya Zemlya was no place of balmy refreshment like Madagascar but in an age when men still welcomed some medieval symmetry in their maps, the Norwegian cape showed a happy longitudinal correspondence to that of southern Africa. ‘Good hope’ sprang eternal. Forcing its way through the pack ice, an English ship at last entered the Kara Sea which may fairly be considered as Asiatic water. The fogs and the ice floes drove it back. Instead of rich and civilized Cathay, all that had been discovered was the rough and ready Russia of Ivan the Terrible.
The story did not end there. Well into the seventeenth century London’s Muscovy Company would continue to trade with the Tsar’s territories via Murmansk and to encourage Arctic exploration. In 1602 the East India Company would itself despatch an expedition to the north-west and in 1606, in conjunction with the Muscovy Company, it tried again. Four years later Henry Hudson, cast away by his mutinous crew in the bay that bears his name, probably died believing that he had cleared the north-west passage. It fell to Bylot and Baffin to show that he had done no such thing. The search went on.
The idea that to the English it would be given to open their own sea route to the East proved mighty persistent. It needs to be emphasized that when the East India Company was founded it was by no means a foregone conclusion that its ships would always be sailing east nor, for that matter, that they would ever be going to India. Indeed the Company which received its royal charter on 31 December 1600 was not the ‘English East India Company’ at all but ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’. The ‘London’ was important and so were the ‘East Indies’ which then as now were not synonymous with India.
How the Company’s ships were to get to the Indies was up to them. But if the northern corridor proved elusive, disappointment served only to strengthen an even more fundamental conviction – that somehow or other a share of world trade would nonetheless fall to the English. To the Tudor merchant-adventurer freedom of trade was much like freedom of conscience; he could invoke scripture to justify it and would not have been surprised to see it enshrined in the Thirty-Nine Articles. Just as Rome’s presumptuous claims to a monopoly of Christian truth and authority were no longer acceptable, so Madrid’s claim to the treasures of the Americas and Lisbon’s to the trade of the Indies, for each of which Papal authority was again invoked, were seen as ‘insolencyes’.
Wherever English shipping called, the argument for free trade would be vigorously rehearsed. It was quite simple. In His ‘infinite and unsearchable wisdom’, according to the text of Queen Elizabeth’s standard letter of introduction to eastern princes, God had so ordained matters that no nation was self-sufficient and that ‘out of the abundance of ffruit which some region[s] enjoyeth, the necessitie or wante of others should be supplied’. Thus ‘severall and ffar remote countries’ should have ‘traffique’ with one another and ‘by their interchange of commodities’ should become friends. ‘The Spaniard and the Portingal’, on the other hand, prohibited multilateral exchange and insisted on exclusive trading rights. Such rights, if granted, would be interpreted as tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty. Any prince, warned the Queen’s letter – she could not be more precise because these letters were unaddressed and it was up to whoever delivered them to fill in the name of the local potentate – any prince who traded with only one European nation must expect a degree of political subordination to that nation.
The first prince to receive one of these unconventional and unsolicited royal circulars was most impressed; the sentiments could have been his own. Ala-uddin Shah was Sultan of Aceh, an important city-state on the north-western tip of Sumatra; the date was June 1602; and the bearer of the letter was James Lancaster, commander of the East India Company’s first fleet.
iii
Lancaster’s career well illustrates the momentous events which immediately preceded the foundation of the Company. Born at Basingstoke in the mid-1550s, he had somehow found his way to Portugal where he quickly amassed both wealth and experience as a merchant and soldier. Then in 1580 the Portuguese crown passed to Philip II of Spain. As a result of this dynastic union Spain’s enemies, notably England and Holland, became those of Portugal too. Lisbon was soon closed to English shipping and Lancaster, like other Englishmen, left in a hurry; it seems that he may well have lost property and rank by this unexpected turn of events. The union also cut off the supply of Portuguese spices to Spain’s enemies, thus giving the Dutch and English an incentive to go seek them at source; and it also freed English adventurers from the constraints of the traditional Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Portuguese ships and Portuguese trade routes were now fair game.
Coincidentally it was also in 1580 that Francis Drake returned from his voyage round the world. En route he had called at the clove-rich island of Ternate, one of the Moluccas, and at Java, and had had no difficulty in procuring a cargo. This was thought most encouraging; evidently the Portuguese in the East were neither as well established nor as vigilant as expected. In 1582 an English fleet was sent to renew contacts. It failed to find the Cape of Good Hope, let alone cross the Indian Ocean; this was less encouraging. But in 1587 Drake’s raids in the eastern Atlantic resulted in the capture of a Portuguese carrack, or galleon. The ease with which the giant vessel was overpowered showed, according to the contemporary chronicler Richard Hakluyt, that ‘carracks were no such bugs that they might be taken’; when its cargo was valued at over £100,000 Elizabethan seafarers took up bug hunting in earnest.
Lancaster may well have been serving under Drake at this time. Alternatively he may have been involved in the Levant Company, which, like the Muscovy Company, was another new London syndicate trading, in this case, with the Middle East; from its ranks would come many of the prime movers in the East India Company. At all events, by 1588 Lancaster had learnt something of navigation and had command of a Levant Company ship, the Edward Bonaventure.
In her, he like many others who would sail to the East put to sea to oppose the Invincible Armada. For a generation of English seamen the defeat of the Armada was a turning point. To them, and to all who cared to line the cliffs along the English Channel during the last week of July 1588, it demonstrated that the earlier successes of Drake and Raleigh were not just isolated flashes of brilliance-cum-effrontery; and that well armed, well manned, and cleverly sailed, the smaller English ships were more than a match for the great galleons and carracks. With national self-esteem fluttering at the masthead, the English were now ready to carry their challenge for maritime supremacy down the Atlantic and beyond. Often news of the Armada’s defeat would precede them. Sultan Ala-uddin of Aceh’s gracious reception of his unknown visitors would owe a good deal to rumours that these were the selfsame people who had repelled the most formidable navy either east or west had ever seen. And when the Sultan actually congratulated Lancaster on the affair, the Englishman visibly blushed with delight.
Three years after the Armada, Lancaster again commanded the Edward Bonaventure. She was one of three ‘tall ships’ and she was sailing south from Plymouth, heading at last for the Cape and the East Indies. This voyage, which lasted from 1591 to 1594, is generally regarded as a reconnaissance for those of the East India Company. A Dutch fleet sailed in its wake and the second spice race had begun. But whereas the Dutch voyage would prove a resounding success, that of the English proved the grimmest of odysseys and the most disastrous of investments; if anything it ought finally to have discredited the whole idea of pursuing eastern trade.
Even on the first leg down the African coast things had gone badly wrong. While the ships drifted from one Atlantic doldrum to another, so many of those aboard succumbed to scurvy that from the Cape one of the ships had to be sent home with fifty sick men aboard. In the event they were the lucky ones. The two remaining ships pushed on around the coast of Africa. Somewhere off Mozambique the flagship was lost with all hands in a storm which also killed some of the Bonaventure’s men. Lancaster repaired to the Comoro Islands where a further thirty of his followers were massacred by the natives. He continued on to Zanzibar and, by-passing India, eventually reached Penang and the Malay peninsula.
Neither here nor anywhere else was any attempt made to open honest trade; it was easier to plunder Portuguese ships and easier still to waylay Burmese and Indian vessels which paid for, but rarely enjoyed, Portuguese protection. No doubt Lancaster was under pressure from his decimated and prize-hungry crew. Ever a considerate commander, he openly discussed his plans with his officers and showed unusual solicitude for his men. Thus it was their representations which eventually forced him to head for home, and which, when provisions ran low in the Atlantic, persuaded him to visit the West Indies. There the Bonaventure plus her ill-gotten cargo was finally lost, and the remnant of her crew shipwrecked. Out of 198 men who had rounded the Cape only twenty-five would ever make it back to England; two out of three ships had been lost; and the only cargo to reach home was that boatload of scurvy victims.
Lancaster was among the survivors. Within a few months of his return he was sailing to Brazil in command of a much more successful expedition which managed to storm Pernambuco (Recife) and to get away with so much loot, including the contents of another carrack laden with spices, that additional ships had to be chartered to carry it all home. Undoubtedly no Englishman had more experience of outwitting the Portuguese or of navigation in the Indian Ocean. Lancaster was the obvious choice as commander of the first East India Company fleet.
He had, however, done nothing to persuade merchants and investors that expeditions in search of eastern trade were worthwhile. It was the Dutch with a succession of rewarding voyages to the East Indies in the late 1590s who showed what could be achieved. They too had first hoped to find a north-eastern passage to the Indies, had been duly disappointed, and in 1595 had tried their luck with a small fleet sent round the Cape of Good Hope. A Dutch agency, or ‘factory’, had been established at Bantam in western Java, and the fleet returned home laden with spices. In rapid succession new Dutch syndicates were formed; by 1598 several fleets totalling some eleven vessels were sailing for the Indies. It was one of these which established the Dutch presence at Neira, the nutmeg capital of the Banda Islands. By the end of the century the Dutch had opened further factories in the Moluccas and on the Indian peninsula and had begun trading with Sumatra, Sri Lanka, and the coast of China.
Here was an object lesson in what could be achieved by concerted endeavour and it was not lost on London’s merchants. In particular the members of the Muscovy and Levant Companies, men already accustomed to take a world view of trade, organized into powerful and exclusive syndicates with access to capital and influence, yet independent of both court and government, rose to the challenge. The Levant Company’s hopes of tapping into the overland trade in spices and other eastern commodities through agencies in Persian and Turkish territory were clearly doomed now that the Dutch had shown that they could drive a highly profitable trade direct with the Spice Islands. Imitation remained the only sincere form of competition and it is a measure of the English success that within a decade the Levant Company, instead of importing spices from the Middle East, would be exporting them from London to the Middle East.
The final straw came with the news that the Dutch were now seeking to augment their eastern fleets by purchasing English shipping. Arguing that the national interest was at stake, in July 1599 – just two months after ships of the second Dutch fleet began returning with packed holds – a petition was ready for Queen Elizabeth’s perusal.
For a critical year Her Majesty stalled. Peace negotiations with Spain were at a sensitive stage and it was rightly thought that they would be prejudiced by any English commitment to contest the spice trade. The petitioners responded by producing a list of all the ‘islands, cities, townes, places, castels and fortresses’ occupied by the Portuguese plus another list, even longer, of all those they did not occupy. Their argument, which would later become all too familiar as the interloper’s apologia, was simply that if the Portuguese had no interest in these other ‘places’ – which included such significant markets as Siam, Bengal, Japan, Cambodia and ‘the most mighty and wealthy empire of China’ – then there could be no harm in ‘other princes or people of the world repairing unto them’. There was no need for a direct confrontation with the Portuguese and, as will be seen, the English would go out of their way to develop and explore all of them. On the other hand Her Majesty knew her swashbuckling subjects well enough not to suppose that they would ever willingly forgo a laden carrack. It was not therefore until negotiations with Spain faltered that a new petition was invited and the Royal Charter at last granted.
Amongst the names of the 218 petitioners who celebrated New Year’s Eve 1600 as ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ was that of James Lancaster. He probably helped to draft the original petition and he was certainly one of the Company’s first ‘committees’ (directors). He also had a hand in drafting that standard royal letter, a copy of which he would present at Aceh. But already there were those at Court, like the Lord Treasurer and the Earl of Essex, who saw the new company as a rich mine of patronage and who were all for working it, notably by leaning on the directors to appoint Sir Edward Michelborne as commander of the first fleet. The directors stood firm; their choice was Master James Lancaster and by way of explanation they insisted on being allowed ‘to sort out theire business with men of their own qualitye’. Indeed, lest suspicions of jobbery scare off any of their investors, they resolved ‘not to employ any gentleman in any place of charge’. They approved of Lancaster’s democratic style of leadership and, more to the point, they vigorously resented any Court interference. But as the Company’s annalist would gloomily note, here was evidence that even before the Company had been fully constituted ‘that influence which in the sequel will be found to be equally adverse to the prosperity of their trade and the probity of their directors had its commencement’. Michelborne, incidentally, instead of being the Company’s first commander, would become its rival as the first interloper.
iv
After frantic preparations Lancaster sailed from Woolwich with four ships in February 1601. The Red Dragon, his flagship, had been bought from the Earl of Cumberland who was at this time the only titled member of the Company. The vessel partook of his Lordship’s ‘quality’. She was of 600 tons, had been built for privateering in the West Indies, and like most subsequent ‘East Indiamen’ was as much warship as cargo carrier with thirty-eight guns plus space, if not accommodation, for 200 men. To maintain her complement at 200 Lancaster, mindful of past disasters, prescribed lemon juice for all ranks. Three spoonfuls per man were administered every morning as they sailed into the scurvy latitudes of the south Atlantic. The dosage seemed to work. During the six months that it took to reach the Cape the men of the Red Dragon remained in rude health.
It was not so in the rest of the fleet. The Hector, the Susan and the Ascension were somewhat smaller ships and had all been active in the Levant trade. Each carried about 100 men, the total for the whole fleet being 480. Of these, 105 were dead by the time they reached the Cape. So weak were those that remained that men from the Red Dragon had to be sent to assist in bringing the other ships into Table Bay.
Then known as Saldania, Table Bay proved a good spot to recuperate. Sails were taken ashore and a tented rest camp prepared. Good water, fresh fruit and the mellow winter climate saw the sickly men quickly recover and provided ‘a royal refreshing’ for all. Meanwhile Lancaster renewed his acquaintance – he had stopped here in 1591 – with the ‘Saldanians’. ‘Of a tawny colour, of reasonable stature, swift of foot, and much given to pick and steal’, the Africans were as yet shy of European visitors and were easily kept at a distance. Additionally there was a problem of communication. The natives ‘spoke through the throat’ and ‘clocked with their tongues in such sort that in…seven weeks…the sharpest wit amongst us could not learn one word of their language’. Lancaster, rising to the occasion in a way that no gentleman would have contemplated, spoke to them ‘in cattel’s language’. Thus, wishing to buy sheep, he said ‘baah’ and ‘for oxen and kine “moath”, which language the people understood very well without any interpreter’. Soon droves of livestock were converging on the camp and changing hands at rates which the English found frankly laughable. A piece of old iron, rowlock-size, bought a sheep, and two pieces bought an ox ‘full as bigge as ours and very fat’. With 1000 sheep and 42 oxen – plus wine, olive oil and meal removed from a small Portuguese supply ship which had fallen into English hands – the fleet left Table Bay as well provisioned as it had Woolwich.
As an alternative to Saldania future voyages would often make for one of Madagascar’s sheltered bays. Lancaster’s fleet passed along the east coast of the island and on Christmas Day 1601 put into the bay of Antongil to load water, rice and fruit and to replenish stocks of lemon juice. Here they also assembled a small pinnace of about eighteen tons which they had brought from London in kit form. Of lesser draught, it would be used for sounding in coastal waters and as a tender for bringing cargoes out to the main fleet.
While the ‘pinis’ was being ‘sheathed’, as the anonymous chronicler charmingly puts it – he means the pinnace was being clad with an outer shell of local timber – men again began dying. From the Red Dragon were lost the master’s mate, the preacher, the surgeon and ‘tenne other common men’. Similar losses were reported from the rest of the fleet. ‘Those that died here died most of the flux [dysentery] which, in our opinion, came with the waters which we drancke.’ This was not, however, the case with Captain Brand of the Ascension, who had the unusual misfortune of being shot by the guns of his own ship. In sombre mood he was being rowed ashore to attend the funeral of the Red Dragon’s mate when the Ascension’s gunner let fly with the usual three-gun salute for a deceased officer. Unfortunately the gunner, ‘being not so careful as he should have beene’, had forgotten that his guns were loaded and that the Captain was within range. One ball scored a direct hit and ‘slew the Captain and the boatswain’s mate starke dead; so that they that went to see the funeral of another were both buried themselves’.
This indiscriminate firing of a few ‘pieces’, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, would account for a good many lives. So much so that in London the directors would be moved to protest that it was quite unnecessary to salute every port, every passing vessel, every visitor, every imaginable anniversary. Yet if anything the practice grew and there was probably more powder expended in ceremonial than in battle. To Lancaster and subsequent commanders it was self-evident that the morale and efficiency of their crews demanded the firing of frequent practice salvoes.
Leaving Madagascar in early March the fleet stood out into the Indian Ocean. Its next landfall was at the Nicobar Islands off Sumatra. Here the decks were cleared for action, Lancaster again anticipating prize-taking as much as trade. On 5 June, sixteen months after leaving the Thames, they finally anchored off Aceh.
Here we found sixteen or eighteen sail of shippes of diverse nations – Gujeratis, some of Bengal, some of Calicut [south India] called Malibaris, some of Pegu [Burma] and some of Patani [Thailand] which came to trade here.
To the Muslims of Indonesia Aceh is still ‘The Gateway to Mecca’. Here pilgrims embark for the baj to Arabia and here Arab and Indian traders first brought the teachings of Islam to the Archipelago. Like Venice in the eastern Mediterranean, Aceh traditionally controlled the western approaches to the busy trading world of south-east Asia. It was a cosmopolitan sea power and much of its population was of Arab and Indian descent. By 1602 its concourse of shipping could probably not compare with that at the rival Portuguese establishment of Malacca on the other side of the Straits. It must, nevertheless, have seemed to Lancaster and his men that they had at last, and in every sense, arrived. Ala-uddin Shah was reportedly anxious to meet them and in due course sent ‘sixe greate ellifants with many trumpets, drums and streamers’ to convey the English to his court. The Queen’s letter, suitably addressed by the fleet’s calligrapher, travelled in front, wrapped in silk and reposing in a ewer of gold which was housed in a sumptuous howdah on the biggest elephant of all.
Like most of his contemporaries, Lancaster was easily impressed by oriental magnificence and willingly prostrated himself before Ala-uddin Shah ‘after the manner of the country’. Newcomers in need of a patron and trading partner could do worse than cultivate the Acehnese. They controlled much of Sumatra’s pepper output and had repeatedly contested command of the Malacca straits with the Portuguese. They had also, two years previously, felt no compunction about murdering an objectionable Dutch commander and imprisoning his colleagues.
But that reputation for Islamic fanaticism which would lead a later writer to describe Acehnese hospitality as ‘equivalent to an abduction’ was not yet in evidence. Lancaster found himself confronted with nothing more daunting than an enormous Sumatran banquet which was served on platters of gold while the Sultan sat apart toasting his guests in arrack so fiery that ‘a little will serve to bringe one asleepe’. Belying the myth of the hard-drinking sea-dog, Lancaster diluted his drink and was thus still awake to witness the arrival of a bespangled all-female gamelan orchestra complete with willowy dancers. ‘The king’s damosels’, explained the fleet’s chronicler with obvious pride, ‘are not usually scene of any but such as the king will greatly honour.’
And greatly honoured the English were. Cockfights and other gruesome royal entertainments – buffalo fights, tiger fights, elephant fights – followed. Doubtless there was also a chance to sample the Acehnese speciality of a sub-aqua cocktail party. This usually took place in a nearby river, the guests being seated on submerged stools with water up to their armpits while servants paddled between them with an assortment of spicy delicacies and quantities of that fiery arrack. In 1613 one such party attended by British visitors lasted four hours. Next day two of the partygoers died; their condition was diagnosed as ‘a surfeit taken by immeasurable drunkenness’.
In between these social diversions the Sultan, with the help of Lancaster’s translator, studied Queen Elizabeth’s standard letter. After assurances that Her Majesty’s sentiments on free trade ‘came from the heart’ he graciously acceded to most of its requests. The English were granted a house in Aceh, royal protection, full trading rights, and exemption from customs duties. All that remained was to load the fleet with Sumatra’s famous black pepper and head for home.
But here a problem arose. The previous year’s crop, it was said, had failed – either that or it had just failed to reach Aceh. As would become apparent in future years, Aceh’s importance was political and strategic but not commercial. The main pepper-growing areas and the main pepper ports were hundreds of miles down the Sumatran coast in the Minangkabau forests. To Priaman, one of the Minangkabau ports on the south coast of the island, Lancaster now despatched the Susan while with the remainder of the fleet plus a Dutch vessel he sallied forth into the Malacca straits to take by force what he had so far failed to secure by trade.
In return for the promise of ‘a faire Portugal maiden’ Ala-uddin Shah connived at this move to the extent of detaining a Portuguese emissary who might have alerted his fellow countrymen. With surprise on their side Lancaster’s ships fanned out across the straits. Almost immediately they trapped and overpowered an enormous Portuguese carrack. She was so laden with Indian piece goods, mostly white calicoes and the famous batiks or ‘pintadoes’ of southern India, that it took six days to unload her.
As yet Indian cottons could not be expected to command much sale amongst fustian-clad Englishmen but they were extremely popular in south-east Asia and were more acceptable as barter for spices than any other commodity. Lancaster carried £20,000 of bullion, mostly in Spanish rials or ‘pieces of eight’, plus some £6000 worth of English exports. But, as he readily appreciated, these Indian cottons more than doubled the value of his stock. Somewhat clumsily he had set a precedent, which would soon become an imperative, of exploiting the existing carrying trade of Asia. He was under no illusions as to its importance. Thanks to an action that had lasted perhaps two hours the success of the Company’s first voyage was assured. Mightily relieved, he confided to his diarist ‘that he was much bound to God that hath eased me of a very heavy care and that he could not be thankful enough to Him for this blessing’.
For He [God] hath not only supplied my necessity to lade these ships I have, but hath given me as much as will lade as many more ships if I had them to lade. So that now my care is not for money but rather where I shall leave these goods…in safety till the returne of ships out of England.
Here was one good reason to establish a ‘factory’ or trading establishment though not, in view of the pepper shortage, in Aceh. Instead he would proceed to Bantam in Java where pepper was supposedly plentiful and the Dutch were already well established.
First, though, he returned to pay his respects to Ala-uddin Shah. Some choice items from the prize had already been set aside for the Sultan. They did not include ‘a faire Portugal maiden’ because Lancaster had seen fit to release all his captives and because Ala-uddin Shah already had wives aplenty. In respect of their own subjects the Sultans of Aceh brooked no refusals in their exercise of the droit de seigneur. ‘If the husband be unwilling to part with her’, noted an English visitor, ‘then he [the Sultan] presently commands her husband’s pricke to be cut off.’
Yet for harem exotics there was always a steady demand. Ala-uddin’s successor would go one better by lodging a request with the Company for two English maidens. By way of incentive he added that, if either bore him a son, the child would be designated his heir. Rather surprisingly the directors of the Company would take him seriously. There could, of course, be no question of condoning bigamy by sending two girls; but one was a possibility and it so happened that ‘a gentleman of honourable parentage’ had a daughter with just the right qualifications, she being ‘of excellent parts for musicke, her needle, and good discourse, also very beautiful and personable’. So keen was the gentleman of honourable parentage to part with this paragon that when theological counsel raised certain objections to marriage with a Muslim, he was ready with a long and closely argued paper rich in scriptural citations which the directors adjudged ‘very pregnant and good’. Happily it was not quite good enough; for the matter was then referred to King James who, as with other contentious issues, determinedly ignored it.
Lancaster was no less diplomatic in the matter of the missing Portuguese maiden. He told Ala-uddin ‘that there was none so worthy that merited to be so presented’, at which, we are told, the Sultan smiled. A fulsome reply to the Queen’s letter plus suitable gifts were now handed over and, having at last got the measure of his guests, Ala-uddin bade them farewell by singing a hymn for their prosperity. Lancaster and his followers replied with a lusty rendering of the psalm of David and on 9 November 1602 the fleet sailed out of Aceh. Two days later the Ascension, being near enough laden with all that Aceh had been able to provide in the way of pepper and spices, was despatched for home. She reached London to a joyous welcome in June 1603 after a voyage remarkable only for the fact that she called at St Helena, thus inaugurating the Company’s long association with that island, and that she fell in with a pair of ‘marmaides’. They were definitely mermaids because ‘their hinde parts were divided into two legges’ and according to the ship’s naturalist they were probably husband and wife ‘because the moste of one of their heads was longer than the other’. ‘They say they are signes of bad weather’, he added, ‘and so we found it.’
Meanwhile the Red Dragon and the Hector had met up with the Susan at Priaman and found her lading almost completed. She sailed for home a few days later and arrived soon after the Ascension. Continuing to coast along the forest-fringed beaches of Sumatra, the main fleet passed the then dormant Krakatoa, entered the Sunda straits between Sumatra and Java, and ‘with a great peale of ordnance such as had never been rung there before’ anchored off Bantam in time for Christmas.
The Portuguese had never really troubled themselves with Java and Sumatra. Their preoccupation had been with the Spice Islands and their pepper requirements had been more than met by the tangled vines of Kerala’s forests. It was thus unsurprising that first the Dutch and now the English would choose Java as their main base in the East Indies. With its enormous population, its rich soil, and its wealthy courts, Java represented a domestic market second only to India and China. Additionally the twin north-coast ports of Bantam and Jakarta attracted maritime trade from all over the archipelago. They were also visited by an annual fleet of magnificent junks, laden with silks and porcelain, from China, and they were home for thriving communities of Chinese financiers and middlemen. Once again Lancaster was reminded that commercial activity in the East had long since spawned a vast and sophisticated network in which the export of spices to Europe was still a marginal sideline.
The Sultan of Bantam turned out to be a mere child of ten years. Government was exercised by a council of nobles headed by a Regent, a state of affairs destined to last long after the Sultan came of age. Lancaster, having sorted out the protocol, applied for trading rights, protection, and permission to establish a factory, all of which were granted. ‘We traded there peacably’, wrote the diarist, ‘although the Javians are reckoned amongst the greatest pickers and theeves in the world.’ So it would prove; but after a few marauders were cut down in the act of breaking into the Company’s premises, business proceeded briskly. ‘Within five weekes much more was sold in goods [mostly Indian cottons] than would have laden our two ships.’ The surplus stock was entrusted to senior factors, or merchants, who were to be left at Bantam to buy and sell in readiness for the next fleet from England. Thus was established the first English factory in the East. In no sense, of course, did this modest agency represent a colonial nucleus or a political toehold. It was simply an expedient which by spreading the Company’s trading activities throughout the year eliminated those market factors which would otherwise inflate the price of spices and deflate the price of piece goods every time an English ship entered port. In theory it also reduced the turn-round time for shipping by ensuring that a cargo was always ready for loading.
As well as the factors left at Bantam, another small group was dispatched to establish a similar factory in the Moluccas. The latter sailed from Bantam in a forty-ton pinnace (which must have been commandeered or chartered since it was considerably larger than that assembled in Madagascar) in early 1603. Such satellite voyages were a necessary feature of European trade throughout the East and especially in the archipelago. The fleets of ‘tall ships’ plying between Europe and India represented only the main trunk of the spice trade. Its twigs and branches were an infinitely complex web of subsidiary voyages in small pinnaces and galleys, in Malay prahus and Chinese junks, often commanded but rarely crewed by Europeans, by which the produce and intelligence of remote parts and shallow waters were delivered to the factories and the fleets. The factory system necessitated this involvement in what was really another aspect of the carrying trade. But to the Company’s directors in London this branch of their servants’ activities, with all its bizarre and colourful ramifications, would ever be a subject for misunderstanding and suspicion. The ‘country trade’, as it was called, invariably confounded the auditors but enriched the adventurers.
In the event the pinnace assigned to the Moluccas was back in Bantam after two months, supposedly defeated by adverse winds. But if it had failed to reach the clove-producing islands of Ternate and Tidore, it is clear from the report of the Dutch admiral at Banda Neira that in March 1603 it had somehow found its way to Pulo Run in the nutmeg-scented Bandas. The English had lost the spice race – but only just and not irrevocably. John Middleton, Lancaster’s second in command, would have been the obvious man to have taken up the challenge of finding more places like Pulo Run where neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese had established monopolies. But he now died, the first of many to succumb to Bantam’s lethal combination of enteric amoebae and malarial mosquitoes. Instead it would be his two brothers, Henry and David, who would open up the Moluccas. Both were now serving under Lancaster; and both would eventually join brother John in an eastern grave.
On 20 February 1603, with another ‘great peale of ordnance’, the fleet at last ‘set sayle to the sea toward England’. Steering straight across the Indian Ocean they crossed the Tropic of Capricorn in mid-March and were off the coast of southern Africa by the end of April. There a storm whipped up such seas ‘that in the reason of man no ship was able to live in them’. Somehow they survived, but on 3 May came ‘another very sore storme’ which so buffeted the Red Dragon that it caused its rudder to shear off. The rudder sank without trace and there was no replacement.
This struck a present fear into the hearts of all men so that the best of us and most experienced knew not what to do. And specially, seeing ourselves in such a tempestuous sea and so stormy a place so that I think there be few worse in all the world. Now our ship drove up and down in the sea like a wreck so that sometimes we were within three or four leagues of the Cape Buena Esperanza [Good Hope], then cometh a contrary wind and drove us almost to forty degrees to the southwards into the hail and snow and sleetie cold weather. And this was another great misery to us that pinched exceeding sore so that our case was miserable and very desperate.
All this time the Hector kept company with the Red Dragon, standing by to take off survivors when it became necessary. A lull in the storms prompted an attempt to improvise a new rudder by using the mizzen mast as a sweep. It failed and the weather again worsened. This time the men were all for abandoning ship. But their commander stood firm and to quell any further ideas of desertion, sent orders to the Hector to leave them immediately and head for England. He also enclosed a note to his employers advising them of his situation and prospects. He would try, he said, to save his ship. He thought there was a good chance and that was why he was risking his life and the lives of his crew. ‘But I cannot tell where you should look for me if you send out any pinnace to meete me.’ Rudderless and undermanned, he might end up anywhere. ‘I live’, he explained, ‘at the devotion of the wind and seas.’
Next day the Hector was seen to be still keeping her station a couple of miles away and carrying little sail. Observing this flagrant disregard of orders Lancaster was clearly moved. ‘These men regard no commission’, he muttered in a celebrated aside which, like his ‘devotion to the wind and seas’, would be remembered long after names and dates and places were forgotten. Of such sentiments myths are made and to an enterprise as ambitious and enduring as the East India Company myths would matter.
With the help of the Hector’s crew a second attempt was made to rig a makeshift rudder. This time it held; so did the weather. On 16 June, after nearly four months out of sight of land, the two ships approached St Helena ‘at the sight whereof there was no small rejoicing among us’. Three weeks of resting, refitting, and replenishing their provisions with the island’s then plentiful stocks of wild goat were followed by an uneventful voyage back to England. They anchored in the Downs on 11 September 1603 ‘for which thanked be Almightie God who hath delivered us from infinite perils and dangers in this long and tedious navigation’.
CHAPTER TWO This Frothy Nation (#ulink_02f5ddaa-2015-57c8-8072-2a820d0d795b)
THE SPICE RACE
So Lancaster’s fleet had reached the East Indies and returned without losing a single ship. It was no small achievement. Valuable experience of the eastern seas had been acquired and something had been learnt of the complexities and potential of the eastern carrying trade. More tangibly a factory with adequate trading capital had been left at Bantam while in London nearly 500 tons of peppercorns were soon being laboriously transferred from the Red Dragon to the Company’s warehouse. A handsome profit was expected and the Company’s future looked promising. Lancaster had earned the nation’s gratitude. James I, who had succeeded Elizabeth earlier in the year, rose to the occasion by rewarding him with a knighthood.
But though a success, the Company’s first voyage had been no sensation. For one thing it had failed to make direct contact with the clove islands, thus giving the Dutch two more crucial years in which to make good their claim to succeed to the Portuguese monopoly. Then there was the question of economics. Already there were those who failed to see how exchanging precious bullion for an inessential condiment like pepper could possibly be in the national interest; they likened the Company to the gullible native of Central America who supposedly congratulated himself on acquiring pretty beads and funny toys in exchange for boring old gold and silver; their numbers would swell with every voyage. But to a benign commander like Lancaster it was the loss of 182 men, two-fifths of his entire following, that rankled. Here was a less equivocal drain on the nation’s resources and one which even lemon juice had failed to staunch.
In the hard-nosed estimation of his fellow directors an even greater source of anxiety was the unfortunate effect that discharging a million pounds of pepper was having on the London market. A dip in prices was anticipated, but it so happened that in late 1603 the King too had come by a large stock of pepper, probably the contents of a captured carrack. His Majesty, as always, had a pressing need for cash and consequently placed an embargo on the Company’s sales until his own stocks had been sold. Naturally the directors protested. A dividend was immediately declared in kind – that is, pepper – and the London market was soon awash with the stuff. Prices halved. Some underwriters would complain that they were still burdened with stocks from the first voyage ‘six or seven years after’.
Had the Company been the brave new venture in joint-stock ownership which it later became, this would not greatly have mattered. After all, the whole point of a company operating on a stock jointly subscribed by its members is that this working capital should be long term, transcending individual ventures and so less vulnerable to the hiccups of the market. But in fact the 218 petitioners who in 1600 had become the Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies had subscribed for only one voyage. The majority now wanted their money back; they were not amused when instead they were told that for every £250 they had subscribed, £200 must be reinvested in a second voyage.
From the start the Company’s stock had appealed to two very different types of investor. On the one hand there was the shareholder interested primarily in a quick and substantial return on his investment. He might be anything from a tradesman to a courtier and, as the Company grew, he might entertain ulterior expectations of influence and patronage within it; but he had no obvious interest in the specifics of its trade. On the other hand there were those who perceived some collateral advantage in the trade itself. This group consisted of wealthy and influential City merchants with extensive commercial and financial interests outside the Company. Such interests might coincide with the Company’s upstream requirements, like the supply of bullion and broadcloth for export, of ships and provisions, of sources of finance, or with its downstream requirements like the sale, re-export and distribution of eastern produce.
At the risk of further over-simplification, these two types of investor may be roughly identified with the Company’s two institutional bodies, the General Court (later the Court of Proprietors) and the Court of Committees. The General Court comprised all those with voting rights, the qualification for which in the early seventeenth century was a minimum holding of, usually, £200. It therefore represented the generality of investors amongst whom those interested primarily in profits and dividends predominated. It was also, of course, the supreme authority within the Company. But, several hundred strong, it necessarily met infrequently and had little to do with the day-to-day running of the business.
Under the terms of the original charter this was left to the Court of Committees consisting of the Governor, Deputy-Governor and twenty-four ‘committees’, or directors, all of whom were elected by the General Court. The Court of Committees was the Company’s executive, making policy decisions which had to be ratified by the General Court as well as directing all operations. For specific and recurrent functions like purchasing bullion, timber, provisions, etc., handling correspondence with overseas factors, and managing the Company’s sales it divided into a host of influential sub-committees. Both these and the Court of Committees met frequently. Naturally their work demanded managerial and commercial experience, and so naturally the ‘committees’ were predominantly City merchants.
Such men were usually senior members of one of the City’s livery companies and leading figures in some line of business that was relevant to the Company’s. Thus Alderman Sir Thomas Smythe, the Company’s first governor, was also involved in the Levant Company, previously the main importer of Eastern produce, in the Muscovy Company and in settlement projects in North America. On and off he held the governorship until 1621. Three years later Sir Morris Abbot, also of the Levant Company and also a founder member of the East India Company, succeeded. Abbot, originally of the Mercers’ Company, operated a large export business in cloth, indigo and spices. Retiring in 1638 to become Lord Mayor of London, he was succeeded first by Sir Christopher Clitherow and then by Sir Henry Garraway, both leading City merchants and both themselves ex-Lord Mayors. Other directors had financial interests in Europe’s capitals whence the supply of rials for export must be obtained and whither the Company was now looking to re-export its Eastern imports. In other words these City interests saw English participation in Eastern trade in an international context and attached more importance to its ramifications in terms of borrowing, shipping and commercial requirements than they did to the profit or loss on a single cargo. They took a longer view of the Company’s prospects and a broader view of its role in the national economy.
The potential for conflict between the Company’s management and the majority of its shareholders stemmed also from a flaw in its structure. The organization of the Company is usually characterized as a half way stage in the evolution of the medieval guild into today’s public limited company. It is also regarded as the most sophisticated example of an Elizabethan chartered company; and certainly it was significantly different from most of its Tudor predecessors. An organization such as the Levant Company was more like a regulatory body, licensing and governing the commercial activities of its members who formed individual syndicates to raise capital and trade on their own account. The Levant Company was not itself an operational concern and in this respect resembled the guilds of old.
In contrast the East India Company was both regulatory body and sole operator. In recognition of the national importance that attached to its activities and of their long term, high risk nature which must involve considerable overheads – shipping, factories – it was accepted that the Company, and the Company alone, must itself conduct all business. From this it followed that raising capital must also be on a corporate basis. And thus, as the directors put it, ‘the trade of the Indias being so far remote from hence [it] cannot be traded but in a joint and united stock.’ Theoretically this opened the Company’s membership to any who were willing to subscribe and indeed, initially, subscription was the commonest avenue of induction into the Company. This remained the case during the boom years of 1610-20 and the bust years of mid century. But later it would work the other way. Come the Restoration, when profits became more dependable and stock less terminable, the privilege of subscribing to new stock was effectively restricted to existing shareholders.
Perhaps the most significant point about the Company’s organization is not where it stood in the evolutionary chain of commercial institutions but the extent to which this organization itself evolved. For though indeed a self-declared joint stock company, it began operations more like a regulated company. One third of those who first petitioned for a charter were, like Sir Thomas Smythe, members of the regulated Levant Company. They included its treasurer, its governor, and two of its founders. Initially the two organizations shared the same secretary and even used the same correspondence book. The Court of Committees and its numerous sub-groups met in Sir Thomas Smythe’s house, which doubled as the Company’s headquarters until Smythe’s retirement in 1621. Even by then the Company’s permanent London staff consisted only of the secretary, a beadle, a book-keeper-cum-accountant, a cashier, a solicitor and a ‘ship’s husband’ (who organized the provisioning, loading and unloading of fleets). Almost an offshoot of the Levant Company then, the East India Company was expected to operate with the minimal staff and informal arrangements typical of a regulatory body.
Consistent with such traditional thinking the Company had begun life with no fixed capital, the idea being simply to raise a separate stock for each voyage; hence the expectation by investors in the First Voyage of a speedy pay-out. Since a willingness to invest in further voyages depended on the success of previous ones, this ad hoc system bred uncertainty and delay; and because in uncertain times new subscriptions were often hard to realize, it also put an additional strain on relations between the directors and the majority of shareholders.
The normal procedure for raising a new subscription began with the Court of Committees recommending a new voyage to the General Court. If the idea was approved, a target figure was set and a subscription book was opened. It was first taken round by the Company’s beadle; then, assuming the target figure was not already reached, it was taken up by the Committees who privately urged its merits on those susceptible to pressure. Such arm-twisting usually proved effective, but there was still the problem of actually collecting the subscribed sums. They were called in by instalments as and when expenditure was required. But late payment frequently necessitated heavy borrowing, and non-payment obliged the Committees to petition the Privy Council for injunctions against the defaulters.
Prosperous times would, of course, make for more amicable relations; from 1609-16 the subscription books would fill readily enough. But in 1601-3, while the fate of the First Voyage was still unknown, the General Court had refused to hear of a new venture round the Cape. Even when Lancaster returned and a second voyage was at last approved, the new subscription brought in only £11,000 against the £60,000 subscribed for the First Voyage. It was in this crisis that the Court of Committees insisted that investors in the First Voyage support the Second to the tune of £200 for every £250 previously subscribed. It was not a popular move and it would appear that it was strongly resisted. For whereas the First Voyage had exported freight, mostly silver, to the value of over £28,000, the Second carried only £12,000. Assuming that, as with subsequent stocks, up to two thirds of the total subscription went on fixed costs and shipping (including provisioning, manning, armaments, etc) and little more than one third on exports, the sum actually realized cannot have exceeded £40,000.
In this fraught climate Henry Middleton, brother of Lancaster’s second in command and captain of the Susan on her return voyage, received his orders as commander of the Second Voyage. Not surprisingly he was instructed to make the Spice Islands his priority and to bring back cloves, nutmegs, mace, cinnamon, raw silk – anything rather than pepper. He was also to avoid ‘refreshing’ at Table Bay, presumably because of Lancaster’s near-disaster off the stormy Cape, and to forgo taking any Portuguese prizes, peace negotiations with Spain-Portugal being near a happy conclusion. Far from capitalizing on the successes of Lancaster’s voyage, Middleton was in effect to make good Lancaster’s failures. With the same four ships, a similar complement and a similar mix of cargo and bullion, he sailed from Gravesend on 25 March 1604.
Four months later the long bluff of Table Mountain hove above the horizon. Already sixty of the Red Dragon’s men were down with scurvy including Middleton. ‘Perusing their pitiful complaint and looking out his cabin door where did attend a swarme of lame and weake diseased cripples’ he decided to ignore orders and succumb to the temptation of fresh fruit and red meat. They spent nearly five weeks in Table Bay. The sick recovered and Middleton began to exhibit that spirited conduct which would characterize his later career. He organized a rather amateurish ambush of the Saldanian herdsmen and very nearly came to grief in an epic struggle with a mother whale. Thence, without stopping at Madagascar, the fleet made straight for Bantam, arriving, once again crewed by ‘diseased cripples’, on 22 December 1604.
‘They had hardlie fiftie sound men in theire foure ships’ noted Edmund Scot who came aboard from the Bantam factory. His ‘extraordinarie great joye’ at the prospect of relief after nearly two years marooned in Java quickly evaporated. Middleton was again on the sick list and, as Scot knew only too well, Bantam was no place for convalescence. Here, unlike at the Cape, the sick died and the healthy sickened. An equatorial haze hung over the mud flats and marshes which passed for a coastline and across which the tide oozed its way towards the city’s brimming sewers. During the four hot months men longed for the drenching rains and during the eight wet months they longed for the unbearable heat. Neither was remotely agreeable and even the nights brought no relief. Sweat seeped from ever-open pores, soaking bedding and clothing alike and blistering the skin with prickly heat. This did not deter the mosquitoes which rose in clouds from the marshes and sought out the palest flesh on offer. Malaria was unavoidable; so was dysentery. Typhoid came and went – only to be replaced by cholera. Within a matter of decades Bantam would be abandoned to the undergrowth and insects which to this day smother its unhappy ruins.
To men who had already spent nine months at sea it can have been little comfort to be told that their only hope of survival lay in again putting to sea as quickly as their business permitted. Yet Scot’s account of life at Bantam left them no choice. He had been one of eight factors left behind by Lancaster. Now he was one of two. (The other survivor, Gabriel Towerson, must have been blessed with a constitution of concrete for he would outlast all his contemporaries only to succumb, twenty years later, to the cruellest cut of all.) Times had been hard in Bantam. The factory, a compound consisting of a timber warehouse with adjoining living quarters surrounded by a high palisade of stakes, had been in a state of siege for most of the two years, Scot’s visit to the Red Dragon being only his second outing since the previous summer. ‘My feare was so great’, he explained, ‘because I thought all would be burnt before I could come back againe.’ Indeed there had been so many attempts to set the place on fire that he had become quite paranoid on the subject.
Oh this worde fire! Had it been spoken in English, Malay, Javan or Chinese, although I had been sound asleep, yet I should have leapt out of my bedde, the which I had done sometimes when our men on watch had but whispered to one another of fire; insomuch that I was forced to warn them not to talke of fire in the night except they had great occasion.
Sometimes it was just the danger of those general conflagrations that raged in all the wood-built cities of the tropics whenever a dry wind blew. At other times it was more personal. In the dead of night a shower of flaming arrows would come arcing over the stockade or a gang of Javanese arsonists would rush the gate. Once some Chinese managed to tunnel under the fence, across the compound, and up under the floor of the warehouse. Here their attempt to burn a hole through the floorboards went disastrously wrong. There was an almighty blaze and although the thieves got away with nothing, precious bundles of calicoes were destroyed. The stench of burnt pepper hung about for days.
Hearing their story Middleton must have found it hard not to sympathize with the beleaguered Bantam factors. In the suffocating heat of their West Javan hell-hole they fought their fires and buried their dead, filled their ledgers and said their prayers, all with a clear conscience and three cheers for the Company. Yet they were no innocents abroad and, if one may judge by their penal code, their ideas of civilized conduct fell short of those of their Javanese hosts. In an otherwise beguiling narrative Scot cheerily announces the capture of the Chinese tunnellers. Instantly the Honourable Factors of the Worshipful Company turn demon torturers. Out come the pincers and the bone screws. The smell of burnt pepper gives way to that of burnt flesh. They collect white ants to tip over open wounds and at last despatch their victims with a brutality worthy of Tyburn. ‘Now a worde or two concerning the Dutch shipping,’ continues Scot’s breezy narrative, ‘and shortly after into fyre and troubles againe.’
At the root of these troubles lay the failure of the Javanese to distinguish between Dutchmen and Englishmen. The former, now organized into the United East Indian Company (V.O.C.) with Bantam as its eastern headquarters, were a formidable presence. Their fleets shuttling between the Moluccas and Europe regularly disgorged into the city unruly mobs of red-faced sex-starved sailors while their merchants became increasingly high-handed in their dealings with the local authorities. The Dutch were deservedly unpopular and this unpopularity rubbed off on to the English. Hence, thought Scot, the endless fires and raids.
But at this stage there could be no question of denouncing the Dutch. Their presence was actually some comfort to the English. ‘Though we were mortal enemies in our trade’, wrote Scot, ‘yet in other matters we were friends and would have lived and died for one another.’ In Europe the English had championed the cause of Dutch independence; there was no shame in Englishmen now accepting a measure of Dutch protection in the East. All that was needed was some way of showing the Javanese that there was a difference. A solution of dazzling simplicity was proposed by Gabriel Towerson. They would mount a parade. Mastering his ‘fear of being counted fantasticall’ Scot agreed and, as 17 November approached, ‘the which we held to be our coronation day’, the factors and their servants ‘suited ourselves in new apparel of silk and made us all scarves of red and white taffeta (being our country’s colours) and a flag with the redde cross through the middle’.
Our day being come, we set up our banner of St George upon the top of our house and with drum and shot we marched up and down within our grounde; being but fourteen in number, we could march but single one after another, plying our shot and casting ourselves in rings and S’s.
The commotion duly attracted a goodly audience to whom it was explained that they were celebrating their Queen’s coronation (‘for at that time we knew no other but that Queen Elizabeth was still lyving’). In the afternoon Scot took a calculated risk and dismissed his whole company with instructions to roam the town. ‘Their redde and white scarves and hatbands made such a shew that the inhabitants of these parts had never seen the like.’ And to every enquiry as to why ‘the Englishmen at the other factory’ were not also celebrating, it was emphatically pointed out that ‘they were no Englishmen but Hollanders and that they had no king but the land was ruled by governors’.
Ever after that day we were known from the Hollanders; and manie times the children in the streets would runne after us crying ‘Oran Engrees bayck, Oran Hollanda jahad’ which is ‘The English are good, the Hollanders are nought’.
Vigilance was necessary but Scot and Towerson were no longer held responsible for the riotous conduct of every drunken Dutchman. They were free to sell their calicoes and, blissfully unaware of trends in the London market, to amass substantial stocks of pepper.
These stocks, and the need to withdraw from Bantam as quickly as possible, soon persuaded Middleton to ignore the Company’s instructions once again. Within two months the Hector and the Susan were loaded with pepper and sent to England. Even this speedy turnaround proved too slow for most of the sick, the Hector losing its captain, its master and its master’s mate not to mention ‘common men’. Matters stood no better on the Susan and after recruiting local seamen both ships were still woefully undermanned. They left Bantam on 4 March 1605. What happened thereafter is unrecorded. We know only that the Susan with a crew of forty-seven was never seen again; and that of the Hector’s crew of fifty-three only fourteen reached the Cape, where they were discovered ineffectually trying to beach their ship to save her cargo.
Meanwhile Middleton, with the Red Dragon and the Ascension, was at last exploring the Moluccas. His first port of call was Ambon (Amboina), a well populated island off the coast of Ceram with some clove plantations and much to recommend it as the key to the Spice Islands. On the south shore of a deep inlet which nearly severs the island, the Portuguese had erected an impressive fortress whence troops could be dispatched north to the clove kingdoms of Ternate and Tidore or south to the nutmeg isles of Banda. But the Dutch were also aware of its importance and were already planning the replacement of this Portuguese garrison with one of their own. A large fleet had assembled at Bantam for precisely this purpose. To win time for Middleton, the breezy Scot arranged a send-off party at which the Dutch consumed so much ‘likker’ that they were sick for a week. Middleton therefore got there first. On 10 February he concluded an agreement with the Portuguese to load his ships with cloves but on 11 February five Dutch ships entered port and proceeded to pound the Portuguese into surrender. Not wishing to get involved, the English withdrew from Ambon. Thus, inauspiciously, the Company’s direct involvement with the Spice Islands began at the very fort where – within a couple of decades – it was to end so catastrophically.
Anxious to stay ahead of the Dutch fleet the Ascension was now sent post-haste to the Bandas. There Captain Colthurst renewed contacts with the remote outposts of Run and Ai, and secured a good cargo of nutmegs. When the Dutch ships eventually anchored beneath the smoking mass of Gunung Api, relations were strained but not openly hostile. Indeed the two commanders dined amicably together; if they could share the same chicken pie they could surely share the nutmeg harvest.
Middleton in the Red Dragon was also successful up to a point. Sailing north for the twin volcanoes of Ternate and Tidore he unwittingly entered another war zone in which the Dutch were allied with the Sultan of Ternate against the Portuguese and the Sultan of Tidore. To Middleton, a choleric commander with no head for niceties, it was all Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Even supposing it had been self-evident which party it was politic to support he had neither the authority nor the ships to engage in hostilities. For what it was worth he did exploit the situation, accepting a load of cloves at Tidore and the promise of permission to settle a factory at Ternate. But once it was clear that he had no intention of lending either side his active support, he was no longer welcome.
With the English looking on, the Dutch at last stormed Tidore. Middleton was permitted to negotiate the Portuguese surrender and then, on the suspicion that he had supplied the Portuguese with arms, was peremptorily ordered away. It was Dutch policy, he was informed, to allow no other nation to trade with their island subjects. Middleton left in a black rage. ‘If this frothy nation [he meant the Dutch] may have the trade of the Indies to themselves (which is the thing they hope for) their pride and insolencie will be intollerable.’ He headed back to Bantam, was there joined by the Ascension, and reached the Cape in time to save the Hector from being beached by her depleted crew. Together the three ships returned to England in May 1606.
To Middleton, who would prove anything but battle-shy, and to most of those Englishmen who followed him to the Moluccas, the Company’s insistence on ‘a quiet trafficke’ would seem dangerously naive. The Portuguese had boasted of their Estado da India. From strongly fortified havens they had policed the sea lanes and overawed the coastlines. Now the Dutch, although less bothered with the sea lanes, were pursuing a no less ruthless policy of acquisition in respect of the spice-producing islands. As befitted an emergent nation sensitive about foreign rule, they gave their eastern adventures a gloss of international respectability by signing treaties of protection with the islanders. But the treaties were often exacted under duress and enforced by brutal reprisals against any dissenters. The forts supposedly built to protect the islands against the ‘Portingall’ were as often used to subdue the islanders. And any trade that the islanders held with other than the Dutch was regarded as treason.
By contrast the English Company would build no forts east of Sumatra and would rarely land any guns. It deployed no troops in the East Indies and its objectives there would remain purely commercial. Unlike the Portuguese, the English were not as yet conscious of fulfilling some Christian destiny and unlike the Dutch they were not proudly investing in their nation’s future. However patriotically inclined, they served the Company not the King, and put profits – their own as well as the Company’s – before power.
Every man in the Company’s employ, whether factor or deckhand, expected a financial reward commensurate with the risks he faced; and since salaries were notoriously miserly, he devoted most of his energies to realizing it through private speculation. The Court of Committees took every possible precaution against this infringement by exacting a bond, often for as much as £500, from their factors and by taking great care in their initial selection. Applicants, besides being of blameless character, were expected to have some particular aptitude ‘in navigation and calicoes’ like Nathaniel Courthope, or ‘in Merchant account and arithmetic’ like John Clark. Others spoke Turkish, Portuguese, Arabic or some other relevant language. Many, and nearly all the more senior factors, had some previous experience of working overseas either with the Levant Company or the Merchant Adventurers. In such regulated companies individual merchants were often involved in the syndicate they served or at least received some form of commission from it. They expected to share in any corporate profits and the East India Company at first acknowledged this fact by remunerating their appointees with a small amount of stock in the voyage to which they were attached.
In 1609 this was replaced with a system of fixed salaries ranging from £5 to £200 per year. There were also allowances for outfit and for a small quantity of private trade goods. But neither the stick of censure nor the carrot of concessions made much difference. Entrusted with vast stocks, surrounded by tempting opportunities, and a world away from the day of reckoning, the Company’s overseas factors followed their entrepreneurial instincts to the full. At the top of the scale a Bantam factor might become a very rich man indeed. Judging from the Company’s records the squabbling in Bantam over the personal estates of those who succumbed to the climate was almost as bitter as the actions brought against those who returned home to enjoy their fortunes. Even the conscientious Scot would be involved in lengthy recriminations with his employers.
Yet the majority of the Company’s shareholders subscribed to no loftier principles. Their expectations of a quick and handsome profit were tempered only by their acute anxiety to keep the expenses of eastern trade to a minimum. With each voyage representing a separate investment on which the profits were of interest only to its subscribers, there was little incentive for ensuring long-term profitability. And it was the same overseas where factors from different voyages would soon be openly competing for trade. Under these circumstances, to secure a loading of, say, cloves, while the Hollanders’ back was turned was thought wonderfully clever. It was as good as Drake singeing the King of Spain’s beard. The English positively relished their role of underdogs.
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‘They had privie trade with the island people by night and by day were jovial and frolicke with the Spaniards’, wrote the Reverend Samuel Purchas, not without relish, of the next English vessel to visit the Moluccas. The ship, the Consent, at 150 tons little more than a pinnace, was even less capable of asserting an English presence than the Red Dragon. David Middleton, the third of the brothers and now commander of the Consent, was aware of the problem. In an unofficial capacity he had accompanied his brother Henry aboard the Red Dragon and had been back in England a mere nine months before being assigned to the Company’s Third Voyage (1607). Nothing if not impatient he left ahead of the rest of the fleet and never in fact joined it. With a healthy crew and favourable winds he saw no reason to delay – which was just as well, the Third Voyage proving the slowest on record. By the time it reached the Moluccas the Consent would be back in England.
Putting into Table Bay and St Augustine’s Bay (Madagascar) the youngest Middleton took just eight months from Tilbury to Bantam. There the indestructible Towerson had taken over as chief factor, Scot having returned with Henry Middleton. ‘We found the merchants in verie good health and all things in order’, noted David Middleton. Unlike his brother, he would invariably find things in order and he would make a point of leaving them so.
Continuing east he reached Tidore in early January 1608 and again found a pleasant surprise. The Portuguese had received assistance from their Spanish allies in the Philippines and had thus managed to evict the Dutch and their Ternate friends. Not that this made the English any more welcome. Again they were expected ‘to do, or seeme to doe, some piece of service’ – like sailing against the Dutch – ‘which our Captain absolutely refused, being against his commission’. Trading rights were therefore withdrawn and hence that necessity for ‘privie trade by night’. By the time they were ordered to sea the Consent had obtained perhaps half a loading of cloves.
She sailed south-west for one of Sulawesi’s (Celebes) many tentacles and there established excellent relations with the rulers of Butung and Kabaena. These two islands, though densely forested, produced no spices. However, like Macassar on Sulawesi’s next tentacle, they were of considerable importance as free ports and safe harbours in the native trade of the Archipelago. At Butung, or ‘Button’, where the king threw a series of memorable parties, Middleton found a Javanese vessel laden with cloves which her skipper readily sold to the English. Evidently such local craft stood a much better chance of sneaking spices past the Dutch than did an English vessel. Moreover, with Sulawesi dominated by Malays and Bugis, the most formidable seafarers and warriors in the whole archipelago, there was no danger of the Dutch coming in hot pursuit. Here then was a weak spot at which the Dutch monopoly might be dented without inviting hostilities. Middleton resolved to return to Butung, and the Company would soon be posting a factor to Macassar.
On 2 May 1608, with a three-gun salute to the jolly king of ‘Button’, the Consent, now fully laden, sailed for Bantam and home. She reached England in six months, another notably fast voyage, and her cargo of cloves, purchased for less than £3000, sold for £36,000. Three months later, in command of the much larger Expedition, David Middleton was again sailing for Butung.
Off Bantam he narrowly missed making the acquaintance of Captain Keeling, commander of the Third Voyage. This was the dilatory fleet, now at last homeward bound, with which David Middleton was supposed to have sailed on the previous voyage. ‘He passed us in the night,’ reported Keeling who must by now have been having serious doubts about the chimerical Middleton, ‘else we should surely have seene him.’
As usual Middleton was crowding on the sail. He spent just ten days at Bantam and by the New Year of 1610 was again bearing down on Butung. Its king had promised to lay in stocks of cloves, nutmegs and mace, and he had been as good as his word. But as he now explained amidst convulsions of grief, the whole lot had just been burnt along with his palace and ‘sundry of his wives and women’. The jolly king was anything but jolly and was now committed to a war with one of his neighbours. There could be no guarantee of a cargo here; Middleton therefore determined to try his luck elsewhere.
From the Bandas the news was not good. Keeling had been there and had left word of his reception with the factors at Bantam who had duly informed Middleton. Evidently the Dutch were losing patience with both the Bandanese and the English. One of their fleets numbering no less than thirteen ships had anchored off Neira and proceeded to land troops, erect forts, and cajole the bemused Bandanese into signing away the bulk of their produce exclusively to the V.O.C. Keeling in high dudgeon had been forced to withdraw to the outermost islands of Ai and Run. ‘Sixtie-two men against a thousand or more could not perform much’, he explained. He had defiantly left representatives on Ai and Run, but basically the English were relegated to their usual role of spectators as the Dutch doggedly pursued their monopolistic ambitions.
On the whole Middleton preferred not to try the Bandas. But in the event he had no choice; the usual alternative of a foray to Tidore for cloves was precluded by adverse winds. He therefore resolved on one last bid to establish the Company’s right to a share of the nutmeg market. Feigning that sublime confidence that was his hallmark, he approached the Dutch shipping at Neira ‘with flagge and ensigne [flying] and at each yard arm a pennant in as comely a manner as we could devise’. The Dutch were unmoved. There was no trade here but for ships of the V.O.C. They rejected his argument that ‘it were not good’ for nations that were friends in Europe to be ‘enemies among the heathen people’, they refused his offer of a bribe, and they were unimpressed by a sight of his royal commission. More words were exchanged, ‘some sharpe, some sweete’ according to Middleton, yet all to no avail. He was ordered back to sea. Complying in all but spirit, he gave the fortress at Ambon a wide berth and set up base a day’s sailing from the Bandas on the little-frequented island of Ceram.
For if the Dutch were anxious to see him off, the Bandanese were no less anxious to have him trade with them. In particular the outlying islands of Run and Ai were still resisting the ‘frothy’ Hollanders and saw the English as their natural allies. Middleton, ‘knowing well that in troubled waters it is good fishing’, set about frustrating the Dutch blockade by improvising a bizarre fleet to ply back and forth between the Bandas and the Expedition in her safe haven on Ceram. There was the Hopewell, his pinnace, which alone made nine trips, and the Middleton, a chartered junk which jauntily sailed amongst the Dutchmen. Then there was the Diligence, a resurrected barque which did her best, and finally a six-oared skiff which came to grief in a typhoon off the coast of Ceram.
Amongst the skiff’s castaways was Middleton himself. Washed ashore, he managed to evade Ceram’s supposed cannibals as he made his way back to base. He must have been almost there when, attempting to swim an alligator-infested river, he was swept out to sea and battered on the rocks ‘till neere hand drowned’; for ‘every suffe washed mee into the sea againe’. He was eventually hauled to safety clinging to a long pole. ‘After resting a reasonable space’, he declared himself fit ‘to the amazement of all my company.’
Six months of such scrapes, and as many near disasters at the hands of the Dutch, found the Expedition crammed with spices and a sufficient surplus to fill the Middleton and another still larger junk. Leaving men on Ai to complete the lading of the latter, Middleton sailed for Bantam and home, reaching London in the summer of 1611. His two voyages, the Company’s Third (which included Keeling’s ships) and Fifth, were financed by the same subscribers. In effect, as with the First and Second Voyages, investors in the Third had been obliged to reinvest in the Fifth. But confidence in the trade, which had reached such a low ebb at the end of the Second Voyage that ‘most of the members were inclined to wind up their affairs and drop the business’, was now reviving. For whereas the combined profit on the first two voyages had come to 95 per cent, that on the Third and Fifth was put at 234 per cent.
What these figures represented in terms of an annual rate of return on investment is difficult to calculate. Each stock took many years to sort out, dividends – like subscriptions – being paid in instalments. Thus 95 per cent over as much as eight years represented no great improvement on standard rates of interest then prevailing. But 234 per cent over a similar period was a much more exciting prospect. The Third and Fifth voyages represent a turning point in the infant Company’s fortunes. David Middleton had demonstrated that the high-value trade in nutmegs, mace and cloves was not yet lost to the Company; Keeling’s fleet, as will be seen, had located a source of calicoes in India with which to pay for them; and thanks to better arrangements for re-export to European markets, even pepper was looking a more attractive prospect.
In the light of these encouraging developments, the Company secured in 1609 a new and more favourable charter from the King. Elizabeth’s original grant had given the Company a guaranteed monopoly of Eastern trade for only fifteen years. The new grant made it indefinite. It also redefined the monopoly to exclude interlopers like Sir Edward Michelborne (who with Royal encouragement had ravaged Dutch trade while supposedly endeavouring to open markets in China) and even any shipping that should chance to reach the East ‘indirectly’, that is via the Pacific or one of the polar ‘passages’. No less significantly, the new charter was seen as evidence of clear and unequivocal backing of the Company by His Majesty. His lead was followed by his government and court. Heading the list of subscribers under the new charter were the Lord Treasurer, the Lord High Admiral, and the Master of the King’s Horse. Henceforth the Company’s General Court would invariably include a large and influential group of courtiers and peers. Their interests might not always coincide with those of the committees (directors) but they endowed the Company’s stock with greater respectability and they provided access and insight into the corridors of power.
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To secure some concession in the way of access to the spice-producing islands, and to win redress for past wrongs, the government now took up the Company’s cause and entered into protracted negotiations with the Dutch States General. These negotiations would have some bearing on events in the East; but word of any agreement could take a year to reach the Moluccas and even then amity between the two governments was no guarantee of amity between the two Companies. All too often a dispatch from London would add only poignancy to the disasters that now unfolded.
In the Bandas Keeling and David Middleton had occasionally cleared their decks for action and had supposedly unmasked several Dutch plots to assassinate them. Whether or not their fears were justified there can be no doubting Middleton’s assertion that the Hollanders, seeing his cockleshell fleet beating round the islands, ‘grew starke madde’. ‘The Dutch envy is so great towards us,’ noted one of the Company’s Bantam factors, ‘that to take out one of our eyes they will lose both theire own.’ While the English stood by, pretending neutrality but in fact encouraging local resistance, the V.O.C. was incurring enormous costs and losing good men – in 1610 their garrison in Neira had been almost annihilated in a Bandanese ambush. Methodical and determined, the Dutch bitterly resented both Michelborne’s piracy and the Company’s opportunism. They saw no reason why, because of services rendered in Europe under a previous sovereign and in the previous century, the English – ‘a pernicious, haughty and incompatible nation’ – should now presume on preferential treatment from a Dutch trading company on the other side of the world.
‘The Hollanders say we go aboute to reape the fruits of their labours’, wrote John Jourdain as he renewed the arguments of his English predecessors during a visit to Ambon and Ceram in 1613. ‘It is rather the contrarye for that they seem to barre us of our libertie to trade in a free countrye, having manie times traded in these places, and nowe they seeke to defraud us of that we have so long sought for.’ The young Dutch commander who had just intercepted him was unimpressed. With vastly superior forces at his command, Jan Pieterson Coen forbade Jourdain any trade and declared that every bag of cloves that found its way into an English hold was a bag stolen from the Dutch nation. Jourdain, ‘a clever fellow’ according to Coen, stood his ground and unexpectedly invoked the principle of self-determination. He summoned an assembly of the local headmen and, knowing full well their answer, asked them in the presence of the Dutch whether they would trade with him.
To which wordes all the country people made a great shoute saying ‘we are willing to deal with the English’ [and] demanding the Hollanders what say they to itt. Whereunto they [the Dutch] were silent, answering neither yea nor naye.
Needless to say this impromptu referendum, conducted to the accompaniment of a pounding ‘suffe’ on some Ceramese promontory, did nothing to improve Jourdain’s chance of securing a cargo. He was ordered to sea and could retaliate only with a muttered threat to settle matters ‘when next we meete twixt Dover and Calais’. It also did nothing to endear him to Jan Pieterson Coen. As Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, Coen was destined to become his lifelong adversary. They would meet again, but not ‘twixt Dover and Calais’.
Calling at Butung, where Middleton had left a lone British factor who was now happily married to an island siren and reluctant ever to move (although truly grateful for a new supply of linen), and then at Macassar where he established a factory among ‘the kindest people in all the Indies’, Jourdain repaired to Bantam and the unenviable job of Chief Factor for the next four years. Towerson was gone (he was now commanding the Hector on her fifth and last voyage to the East) and there were more Englishmen in Bantam. But not much else was changed.
As he entered the oily waters of Bantam’s sheltered anchorage Jourdain looked for a resounding welcome from the Trades Increase of the Sixth Voyage. At 1200 tons far and away the biggest ship in the Company’s fleet, she had been launched with great ceremony by James I and was now on her maiden voyage with Sir Henry Middleton in command. It had not been a happy voyage. As will appear, the choleric Sir Henry had spent part of it in an Arab dog-kennel and, far from increasing trade, his flagship had seemingly hastened the demise of British commerce in India.
Spying her enormous bulk now lying off Bantam, Jourdain fired a salvo. There came no reply. Then ‘we hailed them but could have no answer, neither could we perceive any man stirring’. The Company’s flagship had in fact become a grounded and gutted hulk; her commander was dead, her crew decimated, and her hull was now serving as a hospice for the terminally sick. Instead of a rumbustious homecoming Jourdain was received by four factors, ‘all of them like ghosts of men fraighted’, who came aboard from a native prabu.
I demanded for the General [Middleton] and all the rest of our friends in particular; but I could not name any man of note but was dead, to the number of 140 persons; and the rest remaining were all sick, these four being the strongest of them and they scarce able to go on their legges.
To malaria and dysentery were now added the perils of ‘our people dangerously disordering themselves with drinke and whores ashoare’. But a worse disorder stemmed from the system of separate voyages, which meant that there were now three separate English factories in Bantam, each with its residue of competing, quarrelling and dying factors and each a prime target for the town’s busy ‘pickers, thievers and fire raisers’. In search of a peaceful solution Jourdain visited each establishment. At one he was greeted by a fevered factor ‘who came running forth like a madman asking for the bilboes [shackles]’ and at the next by another tottering invalid who tried to run him through with a sword. ‘If he had been strong he might have slaine me.’
Just preserving some order among his own people taxed Jourdain’s considerable abilities, never mind the Dutch threat. In 1614 no shipping at all could be spared for the Moluccas but in 1615 a vessel was sent to Ceram and a pinnace to the Bandas. Both fared badly, their crews being captured and briefly imprisoned by the Dutch. A factor was again left on the Banda island of Ai and he was still there a year later when a much larger British fleet meekly withdrew at the first threat of a Dutch attack.
By now there had been regular visits to Run and Ai for ten years, and for at least six years there had been a permanent British representative on the islands. It could be argued that two isolated spice gardens, together totalling little more than three square miles, were scarcely worth an armed confrontation between two of the world’s strongest maritime nations. But that, according to Jourdain, was not the point. Principle was at stake. The Dutch based their claims on prior occupation and on the dubious treaties they had signed with the islanders. But in the case of Ai and Run the English could claim to have been first on the scene; and if documentary evidence were needed, it would be found.
In 1616 the Dutch prepared for another attack on Ai. On behalf of the Company, Captain Castleton agreed not to interfere so long as an English factor was allowed to continue on the island and so long as Run was recognized as being outside the Dutch sphere of monopoly. The Dutch commander agreed to these terms in writing. All that remained was to secure the consent of the Run islanders. It was not hard to come by. When the Dutch duly overran Ai, the headmen of both islands voluntarily and indeed eagerly pressed their little nutmeg seedling on Richard Hunt, the English factor. It was a token, he understood, that they formally made over their ‘cattel and countrie for the use of the English nation’. In due course it was ratified in an impressive document declaring King James I ‘by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’. Henceforth the status of Run and Ai would involve more than commercial concessions and the rights of a trading company. The issue of national sovereignty was involved and the rights of the English Crown would have to be taken into account.
Escaping from Ai in the company of its loyal chiefs, Hunt made his way back to Bantam. There the outwitted Dutch showed what they thought of his treaty and his wilting nutmeg tree. Hunt was immediately waylaid in the street by a mob of Hollanders, beaten up, ‘hailed through the durte by the haire of the head’, and clamped in irons ‘in the hotte sun without hatt’. Jourdain retaliated by seizing a Dutch merchant and giving him the same treatment. Although the prisoners were eventually exchanged, English and Dutch now fought openly in the city’s lanes and Jourdain determined to strike back in the Bandas.
iv
In October 1616 Nathaniel Courthope, who had previously served in one of the Company’s speculative agencies on the Borneo coast, was despatched to the Bandas with the Swan and the Defence, both of 400 tons. His instructions were simple: occupy the island of Run and hold it – indefinitely. After purchasing such provisions as Macassar had to offer, he arrived on 23 December. The islanders again proclaimed their loyalty to King James while Courthope’s men ‘spread St. George upon the island and shot off most of our ordnance’. Christmas Day brought the first snooping Dutch vessel. Courthope hastily landed guns to command the only anchorage and thus began his long, anxious and soon forgotten resistance.
A variety of exotic fruits grew on Run but most of its 700 acres were down to nutmeg trees. Rice had to be imported, and to drink there was only such rain water as could be collected. The ships were therefore essential for any long-term defence; yet the ships were the first to go. In January the master of the Swan, ‘obstinately contrarying’ Courthope’s orders, took his vessel over to the largest of the Banda islands in search of fresh water. He was promptly captured. Five of his men were killed and the rest were clamped in irons and stowed aboard Dutch vessels. Two months later the Defence broke – or was cut – from her moorings and also came into Dutch possession. Using these ships and their crews as bargaining counters the Dutch commander opened negotiations; if Courthope would relinquish Run he would return both prizes and prisoners. Many of the prisoners also wrote urging compliance. They were being wretchedly treated and, worse still for men on the make, they had been robbed of all they possessed. ‘If I lose any more by your [Courthope’s] arrogance’, wrote the master of the Swan from his captivity, ‘our lives and blouds shall rest upon your head.’
Courthope refused to budge. He would not withdraw because to do so would be an act of treason to his king and a betrayal of the good people of Run. Instead he dispatched a prahu to Bantam urgently requesting assistance. It would be the first of many such pleas to go unanswered. Though Dutch ships repeatedly tested his defences, the year 1617 wore away with no sign of relief.
On 12 March 1618 the islands were shaken by a major earthquake. This triggered the volcano of Gunung Api, which for some years had been ominously grumbling as if to protest at the European presence. It erupted with unprecedented fury, showering the Dutch forts on neighbouring Neira with scorching debris. Two weeks later Courthope spied ‘two of our ships coming from the westwards with the last of the westerly winds’. Excitement mounted. The guns were primed for a mighty welcome and the English lined the rocks. But the first shot came not from the approaching ships but from the east. Four Dutch vessels, beating into the wind, were manoeuvring to cut off the English fleet. Their range was greater, the English ships lying low in the water under the weight of their provisions for the besieged. As the sun went down the issue was still unresolved. But then the wind changed. The Dutchmen’s sails filled and they bore down on the English. By eight o’clock it was all over; next day saw the Dutch ships trailing the English colours from their sterns as they escorted their prizes to the fort of Neira.
Courthope believed that had the relief force arrived even a day earlier all would have been well. The winds were seasonal, blowing hard from the west from December till March and from the east from March onwards. The master of one of the captured vessels agreed. ‘For what cannot now be’ he blamed the factors in Bantam where Jourdain’s departure for England had heralded more quarrelling and indecision. They had ‘so carelessly kept these ships there so long, unto the 8th of Januarie last, before they sent them away from thence which hath brought upon us all this miserie’.
Shackled and incarcerated in the Dutch fort the new prisoners were indeed in some misery. According to the deposition of one of them ‘they kept twelve of us in a dungeon where they pisst and shatt upon our heads and in this manner we lay until we were broken out from top to toe like lepers, having nothing to eate but durtie rice and stinking raine water’. ‘But God will provide for his servants’, declared Kellum Throgmorton, another prisoner, ‘though He give these Horse-turds leave to domineere a while.’
To Courthope it now seemed certain that the Horse-turds must descend on Run any minute.
I have but thirtie-eight men to withstand their force and tyranny, our wants extreame: Neither have we victuals nor drinke but only rice and water. They have at present here eight ships and two gallies, and to my knowledge all fitted to come against us. I look daily and howerly for them.
In fact a Dutch attack would be positively welcome. ‘I wish it’, he wrote, ‘being not so much able to stand out as willing to make them pay deare.’ In eighteen months he had received not a word from his superiors in Bantam. He could only assume his original orders still stood and in April 1618 sent two more desperate appeals, advising of the capture of the relief fleet and begging for provisions and reinforcements.
Forwarded via Butung and Macassar these letters reached Bantam in the late summer. Soon after, Jourdain returned to Bantam for a second term as Chief Factor and found himself in the happy position of having more ships in the Java Sea than the Dutch. It was a God-given opportunity to hit back once again. In December the richly-laden Zwaarte Leeuw was captured off Bantam. Coen retaliated by setting fire to a new English factory in Jakarta. Provocation had at last become war. In a full-blooded battle off Jakarta both fleets proclaimed victory but neither followed it up. Coen retired – or ‘fled’ – to refit at Ambon and, after an inconclusive siege of Jakarta, the British, instead of heading for the Bandas, repaired – or ‘retreated’ – to the east coast of India.
With the easterly winds of April Coen returned to the fray. Off the Malay peninsula his ships surprised two English vessels. Both were worsted and in the course of the surrender negotiations the English commander was killed by a single shot from a Dutch marksman. Such a flagrant disregard of a flag of truce was a serious matter, but in this case the culprit, far from being punished, would be rewarded. For the man he had shot was John Jourdain.
Jourdain died in July 1619. From then on the English position rapidly worsened. In August the Star was captured in the Straits of Sunda and in October the Red Dragon, the Bear, the Expedition and the Rose were surprised while loading pepper at the Sumatran port of Tecu. When finally the main fleet arrived back from India in March 1620 it was intercepted by the news that in Europe the Anglo-Dutch negotiations had at last been concluded and that far from being enemies the two Companies were now allies. In fact the agreement had been signed in July 1619. The English losses had all occurred after the hostilities were officially over. This was neither consolation nor compensation; the agreement would soon prove to be unworkable and the losses irreparable.
And what of Courthope and his hard-pressed band on Run? They had not been entirely forgotten. In June 1618 they had repulsed a Dutch attack and in January 1619 they had welcomed a small pinnace sent from Bantam with instructions to ‘proceed in your resolution’ and a promise that the whole English fleet would soon be coming to their rescue. In the event, of course, the fleet withdrew to India. Another year, Courthope’s third on Run, slipped slowly by. The activities of Jourdain and the English fleet did have the effect of diverting Dutch attention and for once he was able to raise his head above Run’s makeshift parapets. Encouragement was sent – and support promised – to pockets of Bandanese resistance on the other islands and in return came provisions and protestations of loyalty to the English crown. ‘Had the English ships come as promised I verilie thinke there would not at the end of this monsoon have beene left one Hollander enemie to us.’ But the ships did not come and although basic provisions were now reaching him, he had no money to pay for them. Even the islanders ‘had spent their gold and estates, beggaring themselves…in expectation of the English forces’. ‘We have rubbed off the skinne alreadie’, reported Courthope, ‘and if we rub any longer, we shall rub to the bone. I pray you looke to it etc.’
By now he must have known every nutmeg tree on the island. In June, three and a half years after he had begun his heroic resistance, he wrote again to Bantam demanding, in the name of all that Englishmen held dear, some means of redeeming his pledges to the Bandanese. ‘Except some such course be taken’, he advised, ‘you shall see me before you heare any further from me.’ Needless to say, no word of the peace, signed eighteen months before, had yet reached him. No word ever would.
On 20 October 1620, for reasons that remain obscure, he broke cover for the first time and rowed over to the neighbouring island of Lonthor. On the way back his prahu with twenty-one men aboard was surprised by two Dutch vessels. ‘Not so much able to stand out as willing to make them pay deare’, the English fought back and Courthope was shot in the chest. He had always maintained that English commanders were too faint-hearted and had criticized the manner in which ships were surrendered while yet afloat and amply crewed. War was war, declared or not, and three and a half years had done nothing to alter his views. True to form, he therefore refused to surrender, preferring to roll overboard and swim for it. ‘What became of him I know not’, wrote Robert Hayes, his second in command. In fact the Dutch recovered his body and ‘buried him so stately and honestly as ever we could’; it was, they said, ‘only fitting for such a man’.
Thus ended the protracted defiance of Nathaniel Courthope. Here surely was another episode to savour, another saga of truly heroic proportions. Yet Courthope’s is not a name to conjure with; Run features on no roll of honour; and the English affair with the Banda Islands was speedily forgotten. For, conducted with spirit, it ended with ignominy. Two months after Courthope’s death Hayes intercepted letters to the Dutch containing news of the peace treaty. He could hardly bring himself to tell the islanders and when he did so they rightly saw it as a betrayal. By the summer of 1621 Dutch troops were swarming all over Run and the Bandanese were either fleeing for their lives or being systematically deported. Later critics would call it genocide. The Dutch claimed they were acting in the interests of both Companies. This did not prevent them from treating their English allies with hostility and even brutality. The latter complained, protested, denounced, but could do nothing. As so often before, they had neither the authority nor the ships to interfere.
v
On the face of it the Anglo-Dutch agreement of 1619 had given the English all they wanted. With at last a guaranteed share of the spice trade they quickly established factories at Ambon, Ternate, and Banda Neira, and they removed their headquarters from Bantam to Batavia (Jakarta). Officially, though, the agreement was a ‘Treaty of Defence’ which bound both signatories to contributing ships, men and money to the defence of the Indies. Military expenditure had never appealed to the London Company and it was highly suspicious of this clause. It had in fact only signed the treaty under pressure from the government. To the Dutch, however, this commitment on defence was the treaty’s saving grace. As they cheerfully mounted a series of expensive campaigns, like that against the Bandanese, they put the English in the embarrassing position of being party to objectionable policies which they could neither moderate nor afford. And when English ships and cash failed to materialize, the Dutch had every reason to make life and business for the English factors more difficult than ever.
Surveying the position at the end of 1622 the Chief Factor – or President as he then was – at Batavia decided that enough was enough. In January he discussed the dissolution of all the new factories with Coen and by 9 February the order had evidently gone out. Sadly it was once again too late to avert a tragic postscript to the English involvement in the spice trade.
On that same night, while pacing the low parapets of the gloomy Dutch fort at Ambon, a Japanese mercenary in Dutch employ fell into conversation with a Hollander on guard duty. ‘Amongst other talke’, the Japanese asked the Dutchman some pertinent questions about the disposition of the fort’s defences. He was promptly arrested and under torture confessed that he and several other Japanese had been planning a mutiny. Tortured again he implicated the English.
In charge of the English factory on Ambon was none other than Gabriel Towerson who twenty-two years earlier had sailed with Lancaster and been left at Bantam with Scot. Under him were about fourteen other Englishmen – factors, servants, a tailor and a surgeon-cum-barber. On 15 February all were invited to the fort and, suspecting nothing, all attended. They were immediately arrested and imprisoned, some being held in the fort’s dungeons, others aboard ships riding nearby. Next day, and for the whole of the following week, each in turn was tortured.
Remembering how Towerson himself had treated the arsonists at Bantam, the ordeals that he and his men now underwent at the hands of the Dutch fiscal (judge) were not perhaps exceptional. It was indeed a brutal age. On the other hand the subsequent outrage in England, and the embarrassment in Holland, belie the idea that what happened at Ambon was acceptable. Typically the prisoner was spread-eagled on a vertical rack that was in fact a door frame. A cylindrical sleeve of material was then slipped over his head and tightly secured at the neck with a tourniquet.
That done, they poured the water softly upon his head untill the cloth was full up to the mouth and nostrils and somewhat higher; so that he could not draw breath but must withal suck in the water; which still being poured in softly, forced all his inward partes [and] came out of his nose, eares and eyes; and often as it were stifling him, at length took his breath away and brought him to a swoone or fainting.
The prisoner was then freed and encouraged to vomit. Then the treatment began again. After thus being topped up three or four times ‘his body was swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead’.
Some got off lightly. As soon as they confessed to whatever role in the plot they were supposed to have played, and as soon as they had implicated Towerson and the other factors, they were returned to their cells. Others proved extremely hard to break. Clark, one of the factors, survived four water sessions and then was subjected to lighted candles being played on the soles of his feet ‘untill the fat dropt and put out the candles’. He still refused to co-operate. The candles were relit and applied to his armpits ‘until his innards might evidently be seene’. ‘Thus wearied and overcome by torment’, he confessed.
So eventually did they all with the possible exception of Towerson whose fate was unknown. He was, however, alive for at the end of the week he was brought forth to hear his men denounce him. Confronted by their commander, ‘that honest and godly man’, according to one of them, ‘who harboured no ill will to anyone, much lesse attempt any such business as this’, most retracted. ‘They fell upon their knees before him praying for God’s sake to forgive them.’
On 25 February they were sentenced; ten were to die; so were nine Japanese and one Portuguese. They were returned to their cells to settle their affairs and say their prayers. In signing (or ‘firming’) a payment release for some small consignment of piece goods, Towerson wrote his last words.
Firmed by the firme of mee, Gabriel Towerson, now appointed to dye, guiltless of anything that can be laid to my charge. God forgive them their guilt and receive me to his mercy, Amen.
Others scribbled on the fly-leaves of their prayer books. ‘Having no better meanes to make my innocence knowne, I have writ this in this book, hoping some good Englishman will see it.’ ‘As I mean, and hope, to have pardon for my sins, I knowe no more than the child unborn of this business.’ ‘I was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I desire this book may come that my friends may knowe of my innocency.’ With the merchant’s instinct to turn every situation to some profit, one of the factors shouted as they were led off to execution, ‘If I be guilty, let me never partake of thye heavenly joyes, O Lord’. ‘Amen for me’, cried each in turn, ‘amen for me, good Lord.’ Assuredly no crime had been committed by the condemned. They died like martyrs and indeed the account of their sufferings reads much like a piece of Tudor martyrology. It was another massacre of innocents, and hence, ever after, it would be remembered and glorified as ‘The Amboina Massacre’.
The job of winding up the factory’s affairs fell to Richard Welden who for more than a decade had been the lone factor left on Butung by David Middleton. Transferred to the Bandas, where he had also had to pick up the pieces, he now shrugged off Dutch attempts to implicate him and sailed over to Ambon to collect the survivors and enquire into the circumstances. Thence he proceeded to Batavia, where complaints were duly lodged and duly rejected, and then on to England.
He arrived in the summer of 1624. Word of the massacre had preceded him via Holland but now ‘this crying business of Amboina’ provoked a major furore. Some wanted to take the next Dutch ship that entered the English Channel and see the culprits ‘hung up upon the cliffs of Dover’. Protests were lodged in Holland. Reluctantly James I agreed to reprisals. But nothing was actually done and in 1625 a Dutch fleet from the East was allowed to sail quietly past Dover in full view of the Royal Navy. This was too much for the East India Company. Suspecting the then Governor, Sir Morris Abbot, of being too easily duped by royal promises, subscribers withheld their payments and pressured the directors into announcing that due to Government inaction they must finally ‘give over the trade of the Indies’.
In reality they had already done so. Closure of the factories in the Spice Islands and a withdrawal from Batavia – temporary but soon to be permanent – signalled a long hiatus in English ambitions to participate in the spice trade. At Macassar a small English establishment buying cloves from native prabus would survive until 1667; and Bantam would linger on until the 1680s as a source of pepper. But perhaps the disillusionment of the English is best seen in the unlikely outcome of diplomatic wrangles over the status of Run. For, frequently revived, English claims to the islet were actually recognized after Cromwell’s Dutch War and in 1665 the place was officially handed over. Vindication at last. A fort and colony were planned and several ships revisited the island. Yet never, it would appear, was it actually reoccupied. Depopulated and denuded of its nutmeg trees, it may well have been worthless.
To the likes of Nathaniel Courthope, turning in his sandy grave on a neighbouring atoll, the neglect of Pulo Run must have seemed like a terrible betrayal. Yet, after a lapse of forty years, his refusal to concede to the Dutch yielded that substantial dividend on the other side of the world at the mouth of the Hudson river. Just as improbably, more than 150 years later, servants of the same Honourable Company that Courthope had served so devotedly would revive his hopes of the spice trade and again load nutmegs at the Bandas and pace the parapets of Ambon’s unhappy fort.
CHAPTER THREE Pleasant and Fruitfull Lands (#ulink_2de5064b-6b28-5d12-9bcf-dedcfd436316)
JAPAN, SIAM, AND THE COAST
History is not short of reasons why the East India Company was founded. Some have already been noticed: the expected profits from the spice trade, the growth of English sea power in the Armada period, the about-turn in Anglo-Portuguese relations following the dynastic union of Spain and Portugal, and the encouragement afforded by the first Dutch voyages to the East. Another and an older reason of which much was made in contemporary debate was the need to find new markets for England’s staple export of woollen cloth. Ever since the 1570s and the sack of Antwerp, the traditional entrepot for English cloth, the search for new markets and new distributive systems had been a national priority. The Muscovy (Russia), Eastland (Baltic), and Levant Companies were all export-orientated and the various attempts to find a north-west passage were partly inspired by expectations of discovering potential buyers for English woollens shivering somewhere in the northern hemisphere.
The East India Company, it is true, was different. Right from the start its directors insisted on their ships carrying more bullion than broadcloth. They had no illusions about clothing the spice islanders in tweed; the Company was determinedly import-orientated and much criticized for it. But to counter this criticism, to assuage national expectations about woollen exports, and to find some alternative to bullion as a purchasing agent, the directors urged early diversification of the Company’s trading activities. Factors were encouraged to report on the patterns of existing trade in the East and, in the case of Bantam, they quickly discovered the south-east Asian archipelago’s insatiable demand for both Indian cottons and Chinese silks. In a perfect world, of course, the Indians and the Chinese would have been crying out for tweeds and thus a triangular trade, boosting English exports and involving no transfer of bullion, would have been established.
Unfortunately no such simple solution would emerge; but between 1607 and 1611 departing fleets were instructed to conduct commercial reconnaissances in the Indian Ocean en route to Bantam and indeed in the South China Sea beyond Bantam. These remarkable voyages would have far-reaching consequences. They gave the Company a multi-national complexion which would never fade. And they provided an alternative direction for the Company’s activities once expectations of the spice trade dimmed.
Given the desirability of starting any trade cycle with an outgoing fleet laden with broadcloth, those countries with a cooler climate were of particular interest. Judging by Dutch experience, China was exceedingly difficult to penetrate but in 1608 John Saris (or sometimes ‘Sayers’), serving as a factor under Towerson at Bantam, submitted a report on all those eastern lands with which the Dutch were trading and singled out as especially promising the islands of Japan. There and there alone he foresaw substantial sales for ‘broad-cloathes’ and he put them at the top of his list of ‘requestable commodities’.
This information was soon after confirmed from a most unlikely source, namely an Englishman who was already resident in Japan; indeed he had been there since 1600. William Adams had apparently sailed through the Straits of Magellan as pilot of a Dutch fleet and had eventually come ashore, one of only six men on his ship still able to walk, on the island of Kyushu. The ship had been confiscated but Adams had since done extremely well for himself. He was now in high favour with the Shogun as a marine architect and had been handsomely rewarded with a salary and an estate. He had also acquired a Japanese wife and family. But he had not forgotten his home in Rochester in Kent, nor his English wife to whom he somehow managed to write, nor his countrymen. He was at their service, and his story seemed to confirm that in Japan not only was woollen cloth in demand but also that ‘there is here much silver and gold [which would] serve their turnes in other places where need requireth in the East Indies’. The Dutch, he said, already recognized Japan as ‘an Indies of money’, so much so that ‘they need not now bring silver out of Holland’.
Such news was music to English ears. Broadcloth to Japan, Japanese silver to Java and the Spice Islands, and pepper and spices back to England – it was the perfect trading cycle. In 1611 John Saris, just back from his first five years in the East, was given command of a new fleet (the Company’s Eighth Voyage) and instructed, after numerous other commissions, to take the Clove and proceed from Bantam ‘with all possible speede for Japan’. There he was to consult with Adams, assess the commercial climate and, if favourable, establish an English factory.
The first part of his voyage, a veritable Odyssey if ever there was one, will be noticed later. By the time he left Bantam for Japan in January 1613 he had sailed right round the Indian Ocean and had been at sea for most of the past twenty-one months. He had also earned for himself the reputation of an able but harsh commander whose men had more than once been on the point of mutiny. Specifically they had complained of their rations, which were more inadequate and monotonous than usual and which Saris refused to supplement with those local delicacies that more considerate commanders made a point of procuring. Aware that such complaints would reach the ears of his employers, he now adopted the unusual practice of filling his journal with catering details. ‘Two meales rice and honey, sack and biskett’, ‘1 meale beefe and dumplings, 1 meale wheate’; it was hardly mouth-watering. But as the Clove sailed east for the Moluccas and then north into unknown seas, only the weather and the menu afforded his diary any variety at all.
For a chart he used the book of maps and sailing directions prepared by the Dutch cartographer, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. During five years as secretary to the Archbishop of Goa (the Portuguese headquarters in India) van Linschoten had quietly compiled a dossier on the eastern sea routes which he then smuggled back to Europe, an achievement which may constitute the most momentous piece of commercial and maritime espionage ever. Published in Holland in 1595-6, Linschoten’s works were the inspiration for the first Dutch voyages to the East and, translated into English in 1598, they played no small part in the East India Company’s designs on the spice trade. The book of maps was required reading for every Dutch and English navigator, and Saris for one found it invaluable and ‘verie true’.
On 3 June, seven long weeks after leaving the Moluccas, the Clove came within sight of an island which Saris identified as part of Linschoten’s ‘Dos Reys Magos’. It may well have been Okinawa and to men who had now spent over two years sailing half way round the world in a ship not much bigger than a railway carriage this first glimpse of Japanese soil and journey’s end was not without excitement. ‘It seemed’, as well it might, ‘a most pleasant and fruitfull lande as anye we have scene since we came out of England’, wrote Saris. A sudden squall prevented their landing but other islands took its place and a week later they learned from a fishing fleet that they were off Nagasaki. The Portugese had trading rights at Nagasaki and had long since converted many of its people to Catholicism. As yet the English preferred the company of coreligionists, so the Clove made for Hirado, an island just off the west coast of Kyushu where the Dutch had established themselves four years earlier.
Unlike in the Spice Islands, in Japan there was of course no question of Europeans dictating their own terms. Here foreigners prospered or languished at the Shogun’s pleasure; they came as petitioners and they stayed on sufferance. A martial and self-sufficient state, Japan was ruled by warlords who tolerated Europeans only so long as they were an irrelevance. Hirado buzzed with rumours of distant campaigns and sacked cities while the Europeans doled out presents and paraded their wares in an atmosphere of friendship tinged with menace. Saris and his seventy-odd followers were in for a number of surprises.
As the Clove dropped anchor some forty boats ‘some with tenne, some with fifteen oars a side’ raced forth to meet them. From one the ‘king’ (governor) of Hirado and his grandson came aboard. They were dressed in silk with long swords by their sides and ‘the forepartes of their heads were shaven to the crowne, and the rest of their hair, which was very long, was gathered together and bound up in a knot behind’. The ‘king’ was about seventy. Both seemed friendly and saluted Saris ‘after their manner which is this’:
First…they put off their shoes (stockings they weare none), and then clapping their right hand with their left, they put them downe towards their knees, and so wagging or moving of their hands a little to and fro, they stooping steppe with small steps sideling from the party saluted, and crie ‘Augh, Augh’.
Sadly Saris fails to mention whether he returned this salute. ‘I led them into my cabbin where I had prepared a banquet for them and a good consorte of musicke.’ Saris was fond of music and had managed to purloin a viol, flute and tabor from the Trades Increase, Henry Middleton’s ill-starred flagship that was now rotting at Bantam. Being ‘much delighted’ with the madrigals, the ‘king’ next day returned the compliment, coming aboard with four female musicians. Although ‘somewhat bashfull’ they soon recognized Saris as a connoisseur and ‘became frolicke’. ‘They were well faced, headed and footed, clear skinned and white but wanting colour which they amended by arte.’ Their hair was long and tied up ‘in a comely fashion’ and he could not but notice that beneath gowns of silk their legs were bare.
Between these official exchanges the ship became overrun with such a multitude of visitors that it was impossible to move on deck. All, ‘boath men and women’, had produce to sell and services to offer. It was the sort of landfall sailors dreamt of and soon the entire crew would be absconding ashore. Not that Saris himself was setting much of an example. Singling out ‘divers of the better sort of women’ he enticed them into his cabin ‘where a picture of Venus hung, most lasciviously sett out’. Pin-ups and pornography were destined to cause him some embarrassment, but in this instance they were simply misunderstood. For ‘with showes of great devotion’ the ladies ‘fell down and worshipped the picture [mistaking it] for Our Ladye…whereby we perceaved them to be of the Portingall-made papists’.
Tainting pleasure with business, Saris wrote to summon Adams, rented a house and store-room, and began to unload his cargo. Trade was far from brisk. His journal for the period, while less exercised over the catering, is taken up with a succession of disciplinary actions. The gunner’s mate, one Christopher Evans, was the worst offender, habitually staying ashore without leave and refusing to come even when summoned. ‘In most lewd fashion’ he persisted in ‘spending his time in most base bawdy places.’
For which cause I gave order to sett him in the bilbowes [stocks] where, before the boatswain and most of the company, he did most deepelye swear to be the destruction of Jack Saris, for so it pleased him to call me.
Fearing Evans quite capable of breaking loose and making good his threat, Saris ordered a double guard. He still broke loose and when, a month later, he was dragged reluctantly from a Hirado whorehouse, he had to be chained to the masthead, ‘the bilbowes by one of his crew having been throwne overboard’. Other commanders might have sentenced him to the lash or the near fatal ordeal of being dragged underneath the ship’s keel. Perhaps Saris, usually far from lenient, had a sneaking admiration for the incorrigible Evans whose best defence had been ‘to stand boldly in it that he was a man and would have a woman if he could get her’.
On 29 July the long-awaited Adams at last made his appearance. Saris ordered a nine-gun salute and ‘received him in the best manner I could for his better grace’. But Adams seemed not to notice. He was more inscrutable than the Japanese. He evinced no discernible pleasure at meeting some of his long lost countrymen, and when quizzed about trading prospects, became infuriatingly vague. ‘He said it [trade] was not always alike, but sometimes better and sometimes worse, yet doubted not that we should doe as well as others and saying he would doe his best.’ He then talked, with some enthusiasm, about the delights of Japan and prepared to take his leave. This was not at all what Saris had in mind. Rooms in the house were ready for him and Mr Cocks, Saris’s senior merchant, was looking forward to showing him round the town. ‘Praying him to remember that I was alone and that I should be glad to enjoy his most acceptable company which I had long expected’, Saris prevailed on him to stay for dinner. But there was no moving him in the matter of accommodation. He had hoisted his colours – ‘a St George made of coarse cloth’ – over a run-down house on the other side of town and there he would stay, refusing entry to his fellow countrymen and not even permitting them to walk home with him, ‘which unto us was very strange’. The men of the Clove, ‘thinking that he thought them not good enoffe to walk with him’, concluded that Adams was already ‘a naturalised Japanner’.
Dealing with such a man was never going to be easy; but in fairness to Adams it may be noted that he had far more to lose than Saris and could ill afford to identify himself too closely with the truculent crew of the Clove. As an intermediary and patron he would prove as good as his word and, two weeks later, he was ready to accompany Saris on the long journey to Yedo (Tokyo) where presents and a letter from King James must be delivered as a preliminary to any grant of trading privileges.
The first leg of this journey was from Hirado off the island of Kyushu to Osaka on that of Honshu. They passed a mammoth junk, ‘much like Noah’s ark’, of 1000 tons (the Clove was a mere 500) and found both Fukuoka and Osaka ‘as bigge as London is within the walls’. The latter boasted ‘a marvellous large and strong castle’ with walls seven yards thick and bristling with drawbridges. Thence they continued overland, riding in palanquins with a pike-bearer jogging in front to clear the way. Shizuoka (Sampu) was even larger than Osaka, ‘as bigge as London with all the suburbs’, and Yedo larger still and of dazzling magnificence with its gilded roofs and lintels. The whole country was an eye-opener and Saris marvelled unreservedly at the roads, the people, the towns and the temples. (James I would not be impressed; on reading one of Saris’s letters he pronounced its observations ‘the loudest lies I have ever scene’.)
By contrast the audiences with Iyeyasu and his son, the latter the Shogun but the former still the power in the land, were somewhat disappointing. The gilt basin and ewer, standard centrepieces in any Company presentation to an Eastern potentate, were received without comment; so were the assorted lengths of finest cambric, lawn, and kersey, and the ornate looking-glass. Evidently the Japanese regarded such things as nothing wonderful; they accepted them out of a sense of obligation. But trading rights were granted and Saris returned towards Hirado well pleased. He even signified his gratitude to Adams by sending presents to Mrs Adams and the children.
It was November (1613) by the time the Yedo party put into Hirado and right glad was Richard Cocks, Saris’s second in command, to see them. ‘The honest Mr Cocks’, as Saris always called him, was an elderly and endearing figure already much attached to his vegetable garden and his pigeons. He was not cut out for authority and had made heavy weather of his stewardship. A Hirado brothel owner had threatened to kill him if he came calling for his men again, and Cocks had twice had to make official apologies for their drunken assaults on the townsfolk. Finally indiscipline had become mutiny when seven men, the womanizing Evans amongst them, had made off with one of the Clove’s boats; they were now said to be living it up with the ‘Portingalls’ in Nagasaki. Additionally a typhoon had demolished part of the English factory, several fires had almost consumed it, and trade was at a standstill. Even news of the privileges granted by the Shogun was making little difference. The Dutch had evidently resolved to dispose of their new rivals by undercutting them, and in effect, dumping on to the Japanese market all the woollens they could obtain.
That, at least, was the official reason. Saris, though, thought there might be another.
The natives were now more backward to buy than before because they saw that we ourselves were no forwarder in wearing the thing which we recommended to them. ‘For’, said they, ‘you commend your cloth unto us but you yourselves wear least thereof, the better sort of you wearing silken garments, the meaner fustians’. Wherefore I wish our nation would be more forward to use and spend this natural commoditye of our own countrey; so shal we better encourage and allure others to the entertainment and expence thereof.
It would seem that this advice was ignored. The market for broadcloth remained sluggish and of that famous Japanese silver little found its way into the Clove’s coffers. There were, however, other reasons for the factory which Saris devoted his last few weeks to setting up. Adams still maintained that cloth would sell, if not in Kyushu and Honshu then certainly in Hokkaido, the northernmost of the islands. He also urged that from there there was a real prospect of discovering the western end of the north-west passage (i.e. in the vicinity of the Bering Strait). In this view he no doubt received some encouragement from the youngest of the Hirado factors, Richard Hudson, whose father, Henry, had perished in the search for the eastern end. To assist in this and other projected ventures, Adams was taken into the employ of the Company as second in command to ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ as Chief Factor.
For their part, Cocks and Saris pinned their hopes on the China trade. Disappointingly the Shogun had specifically refused their request to land any goods taken from Chinese junks by force. But Chinese silks and satins were in great demand and there were other ways of obtaining them. Hirado, facing the Chinese mainland, was ideally sited for contacts with China and Cocks would soon be engaged in delicate and protracted negotiations for direct access to this forbidden market. Yet another possibility was that of trading with the fleets of Chinese junks which annually coasted the South China Sea to Siam (Thailand) via Cochin China (south Vietnam) and Cambodia. In 1614 Adams was dispatched to Siam to intercept this Chinese trade and buy local dyes and leathers; and in the same year two other Hirado factors would be sent to Cochin China. What made the first of these ventures especially attractive was the news that two English factories had just been established in Siam.
But the future of Far Eastern trade would be of no concern to Saris himself. To take advantage of the winds the Clove sailed from Hirado on 5 December (1613) leaving Cocks and Adams to handle affairs in Japan. After some bitterness with Jourdain at Bantam over a loading of pepper, Saris continued homewards and reached Plymouth in September 1614. There, for several weeks, the Clove stayed, much to the fury of the Company’s directors who assumed that any ship which put into a Channel port must be up to no good. The interception of a letter from Saris to his brother bidding him to meet him off Gravesend with a barge added substance to these suspicions; for ‘they gave the Company great cause to suspect that Capn Saris had used very great trade for himself and proposed to convey away his goods out of the ship’. To the inevitable hue and cry that followed over Saris’s private trade were added the wrath of his crew’s womenfolk for that meanness over the rations and the indignation of all right-minded shareholders when tipped off about his ‘lascivious bookes and pictures’. Soon after his arrival in London a bonfire was lit in the courtyard of Sir Thomas Smythe’s house and, with a crowd of indignant shareholders acting as official witnesses, Saris’s entire collection of pictures and books was dumped in the flames ‘where they continewed till they burnt and turned to ashes’. The row over his personal trade lasted longer; he was never again employed by the Company.
ii
Like other commanders, Saris would attempt to justify his personal trade on the grounds that it was common practice. So it was and so, in spite of repeated proscriptions, it would remain. There were a few exceptions, a few men of extraordinary probity like ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ who never ventured a penny on their own account; but, as will be seen, they rarely made effective factors. It stood to reason that any man willing to gamble his life on a voyage to the Indies would think nothing of gambling his wages on a few diamonds or a sack of cloves.
Even the Dutch Company was finding it impossible to suppress the entrepreneurial spirit of its merchants. In 1609 two Dutchmen, lately returned from the East with a handsome profit of £600, offered to invest their nest egg in the London Company. From the uncertainty over their real identities it may be assumed that the V.O.C. had refused to re-employ them and that they were keen to cover their tracks. To the directors of the London Company they were ‘Peter Floris’ and ‘Lucas Antheuniss’ and their offer was in the nature of a rather intriguing proposal.
Evidently both men had served at Dutch establishments on the east, or Coromandel, coast of India. This was an area of considerable interest to the London Company as a principal source of those Indian cottons so beloved of the Javanese. Keeling had been instructed to call there on the Company’s Third Voyage (1607) but had failed to do so. Now Floris and Antheuniss were proposing to take up the challenge on the Company’s behalf and open trade not only on the Coromandel coast but also in the Gulf of Siam. They asked no wages, they would venture their own £600 towards the capital, and they would be happy with a share of the returns which they confidently predicted at 300 per cent.
After due consideration and some careful vetting of the Dutchmen’s characters, their proposal was accepted by the Court of Committees. A subscription book was opened and a single ship, the Globe of about 300 tons, was made ready. She sailed, the Company’s Seventh Voyage, in January 1611 (so three months ahead of Saris).
Apart from its casual inception the voyage of the Globe was unusual in that it afforded clear evidence of the Company’s interest in Asia’s internal carrying trade. The original proposal envisaged an absence of four years during which the ship would ply back and forth between the Coromandel coast, Bantam and Siam. In the event some of this shuttling had to be curtailed; but the Globe would still be away some four and a half years and for most of that time would be carrying, or awaiting, cargoes that were never intended for European consumption. The two Dutchmen knew the eastern markets and the trading seasons and they had done their sums carefully. While English commanders like Saris or the Middletons were making speculative calls and optimistic assessments at any port that would entertain them, Floris and Antheuniss had a definite plan of investment.
The total subscription for the voyage came to some £15,000 of which perhaps £7,000 was available as trading capital (after equipping and provisioning the ship). Most of this sum was in pieces of eight. By repeatedly investing them in Indian cottons and then reinvesting them in Thai and Chinese products, and eventually buying pepper and Chinese silks for the homeward voyage, they aimed to raise the value of their trading stock to over £45,000, thus giving the desired return of 300 per cent on the original £15,000. Other voyages of the period operated on a similar cumulative principle; but in this case because there was only one ship, because its commanders had a high stake in its success, and because they were in no position to engage in any political posturing, the bare commercial realities are more pronounced. It is significant that the Court of Committees when faced with such a juicy proposal allowed no reservations about the proposers’ nationality to cloud their judgement.
With all possible speed the Globe made straight for the Bay of Bengal. By late August 1611 its factors were ashore at Petapoli and Masulipatnam, ports within the independent kingdom of Golconda (later Hyderabad, now Andhra Pradesh) at which the Dutch were already established. Cottons suitable for the eastern market were ordered and monies advanced to the weavers and dyers. There was the usual wrangling over customs dues but by February they had acquired a good loading ‘without having made any penny in bad dettes or leaving any remnants behind us on shoare’. Profits on the sale of their few English exports had more than covered all duties and gifts, and ‘having yett a good monsoon to performe our voyage’ Floris was pleased to report that ‘our estate is att this present in verye good being’.
In April 1612 they called at Bantam and landed part of their Indian cargo plus a factor who was to sell the cottons and buy pepper whenever the markets were favourable. The Globe then sailed north and thereafter matters went less smoothly. The plan had been for a quick turn-round in Siam so that the ship could catch the south-east monsoon back to India at the end of the year. This proved over-optimistic, and the Globe was to remain in the Gulf of Siam until the autumn of the following year, 1613.
Floris and Antheuniss had miscalculated on three counts. The first was the attitude of their countrymen. At both Patani and Ayuthia, the two Siamese cities at which the Globe attempted to trade, Dutch factories were already in existence. Not without reason would Coen complain that the English fed off Dutch enterprise. Relations between the two nations were rapidly deteriorating and, as in Japan, the Dutch did their utmost to flood the local markets. They also agreed to exorbitant customs dues and other restrictions that might discourage their would-be competitors. Floris was frankly nonplussed. Four years earlier he had seen ‘such a vente [sale]’ at Patani that ‘it seemed the whole world had not clothings enough to provyde this place as was needful’. Now it was so ‘overcloyed’ that instead of a 400 per cent profit ‘I cannot at this present make 5 per cento’. He would happily have abandoned the Siamese trade altogether were it not for the fact that his remaining stock of Indian cottons had been specially ordered for the Siamese market and would not sell elsewhere.
But if disposing of his cargo presented difficulties so did the purchase of a new lading. Siam turned out to be in a state of turmoil, with war threatening on several fronts and internal trade at a standstill. When a factor was sent north to Chieng Mai in search of those forest products – skins, dyes and resins – for which the country was famous, he was captured by the Burmese and not heard of for four years. Yet somehow Floris must employ his capital during the long sojourn in Siam. He therefore dispatched another factor with a cargo for Japan (he knew of Adams’s existence but not yet of Saris’s arrival) and yet another for Macassar. Neither of these ventures brought a speedy return so that when in the spring Chinese junks began to appear at Patani and Ayuthia he had no cash with which to buy their silks and porcelains.
To make matters still worse he was having acute problems with his men. The captain of the Globe, Anthony Hippon, had died as soon as the ship reached Patani. Of the three men who in turn took his place, two proved to be dangerous drunkards, the third turned mutineer, and all were professionally incompetent. To the crime of fisticuffs on deck they added that of private trade ashore. Floris and Antheuniss, if anyone, might have been disposed to overlook this matter were it not that the crew’s trade was competing directly with that of the Company. The men were habitually underselling their chief factors by ‘up to 50 per cento’.
With his estate now far from ‘in verie good being’, the methodical Floris dreamt up contingency plans and reworked his figures. The case looked nigh on hopeless when in January 1613 help came from an unexpected quarter. In Ayuthia, the capital, the king of Siam, anxious to encourage English competition with the Dutch, bought a substantial part of the Globe’s cargo. Then, following suit, in Patani the local Sultana advanced Floris the cash he needed to buy Chinese goods. Suddenly they were in business again.
The Sultana, or ‘queen’, of Patani made a deep impression on Floris. ‘A comely oulde woman nowe about three score yeares…she was tall of person and full of majestie.’ She was also ‘a good sport’, thought nothing of hunting wild buffalo in the forest, and was a great patron of the arts. Her dance troupe was the best Floris had ever seen; and when by request the Dutch and English obliged her with a few steps in their national idioms ‘the oulde Queen was much rejoyced’. With perhaps a republican’s sneaking respect for monarchy, Floris was moved to uncharacteristic adulation ‘having in all the Indies not scene any lyke her’.
Leaving Antheuniss in charge of the factory at Ayuthia, Floris sailed back to India at the end of 1613. By now the Globe was leaking badly and with the prospect of the long voyage to England ahead of her, he resolved to beach and repair her in an estuary near Masulipatnam. In the meantime the factors were busy selling their Thai and Chinese goods to Golconda’s merchants and buying more Indian cottons. When another Company vessel arrived to continue the Coromandel-Siam trade, Floris finally abandoned the idea of a return visit to Patani and Ayuthia. With the cottons he was now ordering at Masulipatnam, plus the Bantam pepper he had still to collect, he reckoned that he already had a cargo that would sell in London for the desired £45,000.
In the event it did rather better. Thanks to a growing expertise in the re-exporting of pepper to Europe, London prices had started to climb. Pepper was still being offered to subscribers to each voyage as a dividend in kind; but what in 1603 had been an unwelcome expedient to offset a market glut had now become a prized privilege. The Company itself took no part in the re-export trade; on the advice of the directors the General Court, i.e. the shareholders, set a price and then the same shareholders could bid to the value of their shareholding for stocks. This practice continued until the 1620s; for shareholders with the right commercial connections in Europe it could mean a profit comparable with that on the original voyage.
There is some confusion about the exact profit of the Seventh Voyage but it certainly showed a return of 318 per cent and possibly 400 per cent. The Globe had eventually reached London in August 1615. Sadly Floris never lived to enjoy the fortune that awaited him. He was taken ashore on a stretcher and died in London three weeks later.
Antheuniss continued the good work alone. At about the time of his partner’s death he was transferring from Ayuthia to Masulipatnam. The Siamese trade was scarcely buoyant but this was mainly due to the infrequency of English shipping. Indeed more news and more ships were reaching Siam from Japan than from Bantam. Most years ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ managed to send Adams or one of his other factors in a variety of junks either to Ayuthia, Patani or Cambodia (where Antheuniss had posted a small agency).
In 1617 even this lifeline slackened. The Dutch negotiated new and more favourable terms with the Siamese and began to show those monopolistic tendencies that were making life impossible for the English in the Spice Islands. Then in 1618 came news of the capture of the Zwaarte Leeuw at Bantam. The Companies were now at war and the English in Siam isolated. It was while trying to redress this situation that Jourdain, in 1619, was surprised off Patani and killed by that marksman’s bullet.
iii
In Japan Cocks was also complaining bitterly about the dearth of English shipping. The Hosiander in 1614 and the Thomas and Advice in 1615 called at Hirado but thereafter ‘by the indirect dealinges and unlooked for proceadings of the Hollander’ four years passed without sight of an English sail. Cocks withdrew his factors from Osaka and Yedo as trade ground from a crawl to a halt. The Dutch had put a price upon his greying head, ‘50 Rials to any man that could kill me and 30 Rials for each other Englishman they could kill’. Pitched battles took place at the gates of the English factory and only Japanese protection saved them.
By March 1620 Cocks was at his wits’ end. He could now see no hope of ever interesting the Japanese in broadcloth and even Siamese hides were not selling. The Dutch were waylaying his men at every opportunity. The Shogun had curtailed the original trading privileges. And what support was he getting? Two of his factors were permanently sick and Adams was now behaving like a naturalized Hollander. ‘I cannot chuse but note it down’, whispered Cocks to his diary, ‘that both I myself and all the rest of our nation doe see that he (I mean Will Adams) is much more frend to the Dutch than to the Englishmen which are his own countreymen, God forgeve hym.’ An English ship had at last entered Hirado but it turned out that her crew was Dutch; she had been taken in the Spice Islands. More disgrace.
The last straw was that the President at Bantam was querying his accounts. ‘He never gave me roast beef but beat me with the spit’, moaned Cocks in a letter to the Company in London. ‘I beseeke Your Worships to pardon me if I be too forward of tongue herein’, he rambled on, ‘but my griefe is that I lie in a place of much losse and expence to Your Worships and no benefit to myself but loss of tyme in my ould age, although God knoweth my care and paines is as much as if benefite did come thereby.’
Of course, even Japanese clouds had silver linings. His sweet potatoes were doing well and he had acquired some much prized goldfish. They came from China and of the China trade in general he still had high hopes. Yet even these were destined for a setback. Late in 1620 there reached Hirado an English ship bearing news of the Anglo-Dutch agreement. To the amazement of their Japanese hosts, Dutch and English buried the hatchet and immediately took it up again against the Portuguese. Well placed to savage Portuguese shipping carrying China goods from Macao to the Philippines, both the Dutch and English companies were soon doing a brisk trade in Chinese silks without the expense of a Chinese factory. For perhaps the first time in its history the English house at Hirado was busily and profitably engaged.
It was not to last. As elsewhere the Anglo-Dutch alliance was resented by both parties. The Dutch complained of English indifference and the English of Dutch extravagance. When in 1622 it was officially terminated, Cocks felt that he was again on the verge of a breakthrough in his China negotiations. He therefore ignored orders from Bantam to withdraw from Japan, much to the fury of his superiors. In April 1623 Bantam tried again to winkle him out. This time a ship was sent with orders to remove the whole Hirado factory and to bid its inmates ‘to fulfil our said order as you will answer the contrary at your perils’. The same letter accused Cocks of having squandered vast sums on his China contacts ‘who hath too long deluded you through your own stupidity’ and of having ‘made what construction you pleased of our previous commission for coming from thence’. ‘We do now reiterate our commission [to depart]’, ended the letter, ‘lest, having read it in the former part hereof, you should forget it before you come to the end.’
Poor ‘honest Mr Cocks’, this was not the gratitude he had looked for. Reluctantly he gathered in his debts, sold off his stock, and found homes for his pigeons and his goldfish. ‘On December 22 many of the townsfolk came with their wives and families to take leave of the Factors, some weeping at their departure.’ Adams had died in 1620 but there were now other Englishmen who were leaving behind much loved wives and mystified children. Even the Dutch seemed to regret the passing of their old sparring partners. To save face, Cocks claimed that it was just a temporary withdrawal. But he knew otherwise. Disgraced and disgruntled, he died on the voyage home.
As part of the same retrenching policy the factories at Ayuthia and Patani were also closed. As in the Spice Islands, the English bid for a commercial role in the Far East had proved to be an historical cul-de-sac. Yet the experience was not forgotten. The Company would never abandon its interest in either the Far East or the archipelago. In ten years’ time English ships would again be trying to force open the China trade; and plans to reopen the Hirado factory were resurrected at least once a decade throughout the seventeenth century. In 1673 an English vessel would actually call at Nagasaki but be refused trading rights. It was said that the house at Hirado was still being kept vacant pending an English return and the same was found to be true of the Ayuthia factory to which, in 1659, a party of Company factors would repair after being driven out of Cambodia. As a result of their favourable reception, Ayuthia would reopen for another fraught but colourful interlude.
In what may seem like a catalogue of defeats and retreats, of commercial bravado undermined by political reticence, there was, though, one outstanding exception: the factory established at Masulipatnam survived and continued to supply the eastern market and to look for new maritime outlets. Antheuniss had arrived back there in 1616. He did not send any factors inland, not even apparently to the court of Golconda (Hyderabad); but he did try to trade with Burma. From native merchants he learnt that Thomas Samuel, the man he had sent from Ayuthia to Chieng Mai in 1613 only to be captured by the Burmese, had been taken to Pegu (north-east of Rangoon). There he had died but it was reliably reported that the king was holding his merchandise pending the arrival of a claimant.
In 1617 claimants in the shape of two Masulipatnam factors duly landed on Burmese soil. They had come in an Indian ship and with only sufficient goods ‘to make tryall of the trade’ This was a disappointment to the Burmese king who had high expectations of English shipping. His visitors, though well received, soon found themselves in the altogether novel position of being so welcome that they were detained. ‘We beseech you,’ they wrote to Masulipatnam, ‘to pitie our poor distressed estate and not to let us be left in a heathen country slaves to a tyrannous king.’ For, they went on, ‘we are like lost sheepe and still in feare of being brought to the slaughter’. It sounded much like a cry of ‘Wolf’ and indeed it was. A year later news reached Masulipatnam that the two men had in fact sold all their stock and were now borrowing heavily on the expectation of a well-laden English ship coming to relieve them. When, in 1620, no such vessel materialized, the king had ‘to enforce them to depart’. Very sensibly he withheld Samuel’s stock until they were already afloat ‘lest their ryot should consume all’. When eventually brought to book by their superiors ‘they could give no other account [for their expenditure] but that most was lost at play and the rest profusely spent’.
The man who had the job of enquiring into these irregularities was William Methwold, who had succeeded to the charge of the Masulipatnam factory in 1618. Destined for a long and distinguished career in the Company, he remained on the Coromandel coast till 1622 and thus piloted it through the crisis years in Anglo-Dutch relations. Under the terms of the 1619 agreement, or Treaty of Defence, the English company obtained the right to establish a factory at the Dutch base of Pulicat. This accorded well with Methwold’s wishes. Masulipatnam he found ‘unwalled, ill-built and worse situated’; the exactions of its governor siphoned off the profits; and the local chintzes were not those in greatest demand in Java. Better by far were the ‘pintadoes’ (batiks produced by applying the wax with a pen), which were a speciality of the Tamil country for which Pulicat was the principal outlet. The place was also well walled, having been fortified against the Portuguese, and it was beyond the reach of Golconda’s venal officials in a pocket of south India still ruled by a Hindu dynasty.
But once established at Pulicat the English found that, as at Ambon, they were at a serious disadvantage. For they were expected to contribute to the expense of the Dutch fortress yet not permitted to settle within the security of its walls. Far from being any protection, the place was a distinct menace and trade suffered accordingly. In 1626 the English finally withdrew to the village of Armagon and there, for the first time on Indian soil, landed guns and constructed some basic fortifications. The disturbed state of the country, where there was no strong authority as in Golconda, plus the hostility of the Dutch, seemed to justify this departure from usual practice. In London the Company was unconvinced and repeatedly refused authorization for improving these defences.
During the course of the 1630s the headquarters of the Coromandel factors shifted from Masulipatnam to Armagon and back again to Masulipatnam. Famine, the Dutch, and wars between Golconda and its neighbours all contributed to the uncertain climate. But in 1633-4 the first English factors were sent north to Bengal and obtained permission from the Moghul Governor of Orissa to establish agencies at Harihapur and Balasore (Baleshwar) to the west of the mouth of the Hughli river. Thenceforth Bengal supplied the Coromandel factories with rice, sugar and a few items of trade, especially raw silk and muslins.
Of greater significance at the time was a short voyage made by Francis Day, the agent at Armagon. In 1639 he sailed down the Coromandel coast calling at San Thomé, the Portuguese fort, and then at a fishing village three miles north of San Thomé where he successfully negotiated with the local naik, or ruler, for a building plot. The plot was of about one square mile and on it he proposed to build a fort to which the Armagon agency should remove. The name of the village, he was told, was Madraspatnam. Precisely why these few acres of surf-swept beach, dune and lagoon should so have attracted Mr Day is hard to explain. To all appearances they were as exposed, featureless and uninviting to shipping as the rest of India’s east coast but with the added disadvantage of being only a few minutes’ march from the Portuguese establishment.
Day, though, had his reasons of which the most convincing must be that he had a ‘mistris’ at San Thomé. According to common report he was ‘so enamoured of her’ and so anxious that their ‘interviews’ might be ‘more frequent and uninterrupted’ that his selection of Madras (the ‘patnam’ was soon dropped) was a foregone conclusion. Certainly he had been to call at San Thomé on previous occasions and certainly his passionate advocacy of the new site now went rather beyond the call of duty. He wagered his salary for the whole of his period of service in the Company that cottons would there prove fifteen per cent cheaper than at Armagon; he threatened to resign if his plan was not accepted; and he volunteered to meet all interest charges on money raised to build the fort out of his own pocket. This latter undertaking only became necessary when it transpired that the wording of the naik’s grant was misleading. It seemed to say that the naik himself would pay for the new fort and under this happy impression the Coromandel factors voted to remove there. In fact it could be read as meaning that the English would pay for the fort, a more reasonable construction but one which came to light only when the English had already deserted Armagon and were encamped on the new site. Probably Day was not alone in wanting to force the Company’s hand. When he eventually reneged on his offer to defray the interest charges, he again met with no opposition from his colleagues.
It was in February 1640 that the English landed at their new base. Soon the first of the fort’s bastions was rising above the flat sandscape. Fort St George, as it was to be called, was an elementary castle, square, with four corner bastions and curtain walls of about 100 yards long. It took fourteen years to complete and the Court of Directors in London baulked at every penny of the £3000 it cost. But if not immediately realized, ‘the growing hopes of a new, nimble and most cheape plantation’ continued to grow. By the end of the first year some 300-400 cloth weavers and finishers had set up home outside the fort, a motley collection of merchants, servants, publicans, money-lenders, gardeners, soldiers and prostitutes had decamped there from San Thomé, and the English factors were busy turning beach into real estate.
But Madras was to prosper against the odds. ‘The most incommodious place I ever saw’ was how Alexander Hamilton would describe it towards the end of the century. He was a sea-captain and to seamen it would ever remain a place of hideous danger. In 1640, while Day and his men were encamped round their first bastion, the ships which had transported them from Armagon were overtaken by a typhoon. In so exposed an anchorage they stood little chance. One ran aground and ‘sodainly spleet to peeces’ while the other, after an epic struggle, was also beached and then found to be past repair. Hair-raising stories of crossing the ‘bar’ – that continuous reef of sand running parallel to the beach and near which no large vessel dared venture – became part of the Madras experience. Men and merchandise, pets, wives and furniture, had all to be transhipped over it in lighters and catamarans of minimal draft while a pounding surf tossed them like a salad. Thrills and spills were commonplace, disasters fairly regular. Scarcely a decade would pass without at least one fleet being pounded to ‘peeces’ in Madras roads.
In 1656 ‘a common country boate’ carrying the captains of three departing East India ships, plus most of the local factors who had come to see them off, grounded on the bar and immediately capsized. It was an open boat but with a decked poop on which most of the Englishmen were reclining ‘verie merrie in discourse’ as they ‘solemnised the day in valedictory ceremonies’. As the ship struck they were all washed overboard; three were drowned. The whole thing happened so suddenly that others in the bottom of the boat simply rolled over with her. ‘Suddenly we found ourselves tumbled together in the water among chests, cases of liquor and other such lumber and with a score of sheep that we were carrying aboard.’ The writer, three other Englishmen, and some twenty native seamen were still in the boat although now under it ‘as within a dish swimming with the bottome upwards and the keele in the zenith’.
‘It was thare as dark as in the earth’s centre.’ But amazingly a pocket of air had been trapped with them. By sitting on the thwarts in water up to their necks, twenty-four men and several sheep, gulping like goldfish, survived. ‘And in this condition we lived two hours.’ They prayed of course, they debated their chances of survival, and they thought much about Jonah in the whale. They also stripped off their clothes in case they should have to swim for it.
In fine [or to cut a long story short], the boate running ashore upon the sand, and whyles the water was still as high as our necks, with our feet we digged a pitt in the sand near the boate’s side, in doing whereof the current helped us; and then sinking down into the water and diveing, krept out under the side of the boate one by one.
They emerged to find themselves 180 paces from the shore. The water, though only waist deep, was running with such a ferocious undertow that sixteen of the survivors were immediately sucked out of their depths and drowned.
Captaine Lucas and I held each other by the armes and (naked) waded through the current, suckering each other in perilous stips; for if either had but lost his footing, the violent torrent was so great that we should neaver have rise more in this world.
At last being gott out of the water as naked as Adam, we had a mile and a halfe to run to the towne, with the hot sand scalding our feet, and the sun scorching over our heads, which caused all the skin of our bodies to peel off although we ran a pace; and the first Christian whom we met was a good Dutchman who lent me his hatt and his slippers.
CHAPTER FOUR Jarres and Brabbles (#ulink_89a31b55-4e1f-51dc-a08d-f302daab8893)
THE ARABIAN SEA
In the seventeenth century the words ‘India’ and ‘Indies’ had no precise geographical connotation. They were used indiscriminately to describe anywhere east of the Cape and west of the Azores. Thus the Spice Islands might be regarded as part of ‘India’, and Goa as somewhere in the ‘Indies’. As seen from the crow’s nest of a European merchantman the south Asian subcontinent, like the Far East, comprised several distinct trading areas – the Coromandel coast, the Malabar coast, Bengal, Gujarat, etc. Each belonged to a different and independent state with its distinctive language and its particular productions; each was historically and commercially linked to various trading areas in east and west Asia; and each was separated from the others by weeks, even months, of sailing. For the Jacobean navigator, as for his employers in England, India as a political entity simply did not exist.
The case of the Coromandel coast was typical. Its commercial and historical links were with Burma, Bengal, Persia (the kings of Golconda were of Persian extraction) and above all with the south-east Asian archipelago. The English retained Masulipatnam and founded Madras because on the supply of cottons from ‘The Coast’ depended the purchase of pepper in Java and Sumatra. ‘The Coast’ served Bantam and was administered from Bantam. In the same way the Portuguese had their Coromandel base at San Thome which served Malacca, and the Dutch their Coromandel base at Pulicat which served Jakarta (Batavia). At none of the Coromandel ports did Europeans glance further inland than they need for their own trade and security. Rather did they face resolutely out to sea, scanning the eastern horizon for a sail and sniffing the breeze for new overseas markets.
It was the same on the coast of Gujarat where at Surat the London East India Company would establish its main factory in what we now call India. Gujarati ships had always sailed to Java and Sumatra to exchange cottons for spices and pepper, but no less important were their annual sailings to the ports of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. It was to exploit these trade links, not to open up India’s internal trade and certainly not to gain a political toehold on the subcontinent, that the Company first directed its ships to western India.
Of course, from a nineteenth-century perspective things would look very different. British imperialism craved as long and proud a pedigree as possible; it was a kind of legitimization. Hence Surat, whence its ‘founders’ were known to have treated with ‘The Great Mogoll’, was represented as the seed of the Raj. Into all the earliest English contacts with the subcontinent a special significance had to be read. Factories in India were different; they were ‘settlements’. Their disposition round the perimeter of the peninsula was seen as a pincer movement which would lead inexorably to the acquisition of the whole country. If there was no master plan, there was surely a destiny at work; and the factors at Surat, Masulipatnam and Madras were seen as living and labouring with a rugged spirit born of the conviction that one day their Clive would come.
The effects of such chronological rewinding are still evident in twentieth-century studies. It may, for instance, be unhelpful to bill the first visit by a Company factor to the Moghul court as ‘the opening scene in the history of British India’; or to applaud his successor as ‘the first of the many great Englishmen who have served their country in India’; or to describe the commander of a fleet that called at Surat in 1615 as ‘a most undoubted worker on the foundations of Empire in India’. The imperial perspective wildly distorts the endeavours of the young Company in India just as it marginalizes the activities of the Company elsewhere.
In 1607, as part of that policy to diversify its activities, exploit the existing carrying trade, and find a market for English woollens, the Company instructed the ships of its Third Voyage to proceed to Bantam by way of the Arabian Sea. Specifically they were to call at Socotra, Aden ‘or some other place thereaboute’, and Surat. Lancaster, whose advice is evident in the detailed instructions for the voyage, had identified the Arabian Sea as a distinct trading basin with the Gujarat-Red Sea axis as its main trade route. This was the last leg of the sea journey by which spices, cottons, silks and other luxury items reached the Middle East. The London Company’s numerous ex-Levant directors were familiar with the desert caravans which conveyed these goods onward to Cairo and Damascus; and they knew that most Red Sea purchases of such goods were made for cash.
The Company’s factors were therefore to inquire into all aspects of this trade with three objectives in mind. One was the possibility of selling broadcloth for cash; another the possibility of obviating the Company’s existing and much troubled trade with the Spice Islands by buying spices at Aden or Surat; and the third and ideal solution was that of improving their purchasing position at Bantam by obtaining, in return for English exports, the Indian cottons so sought after in the East. This could be done either at source in Gujarat (Surat) or where the Gujaratis finally disposed of their cottons (Aden and Mocha).
Whichever scheme proved more viable it was hoped, as usual, that English woollens would find a better market in the ports of the Asian mainland than they were ever likely to in Java and the archipelago. The Third Voyage carried an unusually large stock of broadcloth samples and included a factor ‘brought up in the trade of woollen commodities’. There was also William Hawkins, who spoke Turkish, a useful medium throughout the Islamic world, and who, as second in command, would be entrusted with all diplomatic negotiations.
The commander was William Keeling, although there was some doubt about his appointment until the fleet was actually under way. Keeling, a family man, had submitted an unprecedented request to the effect that Anne, his wife, might accompany him. She was willing; the Company was not. Undeterred, Mrs Keeling smuggled herself aboard the Red Dragon. As was surely inevitable in a ship of 600 tons crammed with nearly 200 men, her presence was quickly detected and Keeling was ordered to land the stowaway or hand over command. She was put ashore at the Downs. Three years later when Keeling returned, it is pleasant to record that she was again at the Downs. Having been the last to leave the ship, she would be the first to board it.
Perhaps it was the delay caused by this domestic affair which led the Consent of David Middleton to leave ahead of the other two ships. As already noted, Keeling never caught up with her. Minus a wife and minus a ship, he left the Downs in the Red Dragon accompanied by the Hector on April Fool’s Day 1607. Experience showed that April was rather late for seeking the trade winds of the South Atlantic and so it proved. By June they were on the coast of Brazil and by August they were back at Sierra Leone in West Africa. Here they spent a whole month reprovisioning and awaiting a change of wind. The crew of the Red Dragon staged a performance of Hamlet and Keeling fought the pangs of separation with net and gun. ‘I tooke within one houre and a halfe six thousand small and good fish’, he reports. Looking for sterner stuff, he then tried tracking an elephant – or, according to a colleague, ‘a behemoth’. ‘He hath a body like a house but a tayle like a ratte, erecting it like a cedar, little eyes but great sight, very melancholly but wise (they say) and full of understanding for a beaste.’ This succinct description applied to an Indian elephant. Keeling’s quarry was African and distinctly less melancholic – until, that is, ‘I shot seven or eight bullets into him and made him bleed exceadingly’. The behemoth made off and so did the hunters; ‘being neare night, we were constrayned aboord without effecting our purposes on him’.
In September the ships again weighed anchor, crossed the Equator for the third time, and reached Table Bay for Christmas. A message scratched on a rock informed them that the Consent was already six months ahead of them. With no hope of effecting a rendezvous, the Third Voyage continued its leisurely progress calling at Madagascar, where one of the Hector’s men had the misfortune of ‘being shrewdly bitten with an aligarta’, and then attempting a landing at Zanzibar. It was late April, more than a year since leaving England, when they finally sighted Socotra off the horn of Africa.
Here, in an island setting of date palms and desert that might have been designed for The Tempest, the Red Dragon’s Shakespearian enthusiasts perversely rehearsed for Richard II. Meanwhile Keeling quizzed the skipper of a Gujarati vessel for navigational tips. His informant spoke highly of Aden’s trade but, as the English ships discovered on an abortive excursion to the west, the winds were now unfavourable.
Socotra itself, apart from its strategic position as a safe haven at the mouth of the Red Sea, was popular with shipping because it produced large quantities of the ‘nauseous, bitter purgative’ known as aloes. According to the dictionary this substance is produced ‘from the inspissated juice of the agalloch plant’. Socotra was covered with the prickly agalloch and annually inspissated ‘more than Christianity can spende’. But aloes enjoyed a good demand throughout the constipated East and Keeling bought nearly a ton of the stuff. Subsequent visitors to the island would not fail to follow his example although the Socotrans, marooned on their burning rocks amidst a boiling sea, would never discover a use for English woollens.
With plans for Aden aborted, Keeling now wrote off the Arabian Sea and shaped his course direct for Bantam, leaving Hawkins in the Hector to investigate Surat’s potential. On 28 August 1608, the latter became the first commander of an East India Company vessel to set foot on Indian soil. Muddy tidal creeks and low-lying mangrove make Gujarat’s coast one of India’s less inviting. Surat owed its considerable importance simply to its being the principal port of the as yet mainly land-locked Moghul empire. From the account of Will Finch, Hawkins’s companion, it appears that the city lined the banks of the Tapti river some twenty miles upstream from its mouth and the inevitable ‘bar’ beyond which lay the Hector. (Because of estuarine silting it is now rather less accessible from the sea.) ‘Many faire merchants houses’ fronted the river and flanked the castle and maidan ‘which is a pleasant greene in the midst wherof is a maypole’. Beside it stood the custom-house, scene of many all too taxing encounters. Here Hawkins’s trunks were ‘searched and tumbled to our great dislike’. Doubtless their owners, like later factors, were also frisked. ‘They very familiarlye searched all of us to the bottome of our pocketts and nearer too (in modestie to speak of yt [i.e. to put it modestly]).’
Hawkins’s journal is silent on these details. He fails even to marvel at the city’s busy streets ‘humming like bees in swarmes with multitudes of people in white coates’. In truth he was far too worried for such trivial observations. For within days of landing he had crossed swords with the two parties who for the next ten years would make it their business to frustrate English endeavours. On the one hand there was the man whom Hawkins usually called ‘that dogge Mocreb-chan’, otherwise Mukarrab Khan, the Moghul official in charge of the Gujarat ports; his would be the happy task of impounding the Company’s goods, extracting what he pleased, and referring all complaints and requests to his emperor seven hundred miles away at Agra. And on the other hand there were Mukarrab Khan’s accomplices and agents provocateurs, the Portuguese.
For over a century the Portuguese had policed the maritime trade of the Arabian Sea and, although their power might be declining further east, they still had formidable influence at the Moghul court and at every port between Goa and their Persian base at Hormuz. England and Spain (and hence Portugal) were now at peace, a point which Hawkins ingenuously pressed as reason enough for the Portuguese in India not to molest Englishmen. Empowered by the usual royal commission to deliver James I’s letter of introduction to the Emperor Akbar (now, incidentally, dead) Hawkins made no bones about calling himself ‘the King of England’s Embassadour’. And in this capacity he protested vigorously when two of the Hector’s boats were taken by ‘Portingalls’ in the Tapti river.
But the Portuguese had no intention of surrendering any part of the lucrative Moghul trade to newcomers, friend or foe. Their commander at Surat, ‘a proud rascall’ and ‘base villain’ according to Hawkins, rejected the latter’s complaint in language distinctly combative. England he called ‘an island of no import’, King James was ‘a king of fishermen’ and subject to Portugal, and the English were really Hollanders and so traitors; as for Hawkins, ‘a fart for his commission’. It was too much. Exploding with rage, Hawkins challenged the man to a duel. ‘Perceaving I was moved’ the Portuguese commander withdrew and promptly sent his English prisoners off to Goa. Soon after the Hector too left for Bantam. Trade at Surat was obviously going to be long term. Only Hawkins and Finch remained behind. They would seek redress, sell their merchandise, and petition the Emperor for a factory.
Posterity, and especially the chroniclers of British India, have been hard on Hawkins. They criticize his willingness to play the oriental courtier, condemn his moral laxity, and complain that during three years in India he achieved nothing. Whether or not he was the William Hawkins, from the third generation of the Tudors’ most distinguished naval family, who had sailed round the world with Drake is uncertain. But he was undoubtedly a colourful and rumbustious figure. With or without a ship, Finch always calls him ‘The Captain’. He was no stripling and in both conduct and character he seems to belong among the adventurers of Elizabeth’s reign.
Combining vigilance with a ready resort to the sword, he survived two Portuguese attempts on his life before, in February 1609, departing from Surat on the long overland journey to the Moghul court at Agra. (Finch, who had been suffering from dysentery, was left behind at Surat ‘with all things touching the trade of merchandise in his power’.) The journey took ten weeks. Hawkins had a guard of faithful Pathans and was mostly well received. But unlike Saris on his way to Yedo, he scarcely noticed the countryside and was not easily impressed even by Agra, ‘one of the biggest cities in the world’. Although he was an employee of the Company his circumstances were really more analogous to those of Will Adams than of Saris. He too was alone, without a ship, with little to sell, and utterly dependent on an emperor’s favour. Like Adams he would quickly attain a position of considerable influence at an oriental court. And like Adams, there would be some uncertainty as to where his real loyalties lay.
Initially Jehangir, who had succeeded the illustrious Akbar on the Moghul throne in 1603, probably saw the ‘embassadour’ from King James as an acceptable adornment to his circle of courtiers. But this relationship seems to have developed into something much closer. Hawkins was elevated to a pride of place in the imperial entourage which none of his successors would achieve. He was bidden to remain indefinitely at the Emperor’s side and by way of inducement was offered a salary equivalent to £3200 per annum, the rank of ‘khan’ (‘in Persia it is the title for a Duke’, he explains) and permission for a factory at Surat. His reasons for accepting he gave in a convoluted but revealing passage addressed to his employers.
I trusting upon his [Jehangir’s] promise and seeing it was beneficial both to my nation and myself, being dispossessed of that benefite I should have reaped if I had gone to Bantam, and [seeing] that after halfe a dozen yeeres Your Worships would send another man of sort to my place, in the meane time I should feather my neast and doe you service; and further perceaving great injuries offered us by reason the king is so farre from the ports, I did not think it amiss to yeeld unto this request.
Nor, a few weeks later, did he think it amiss to yield to another imperial request. Jehangir, ever considerate, was insistent that he ‘take a whyte mayden out of his palace’. It was simply a precaution, of course; the girl could oversee the preparation of his victuals and thus frustrate attempts to poison him. Jehangir would supply her dowry and her servants and, if the ‘Inglis Khan’ so wished, she might turn Christian. Hawkins, feigning strong religious scruples, claims to have refused unless the white maiden were already baptized. ‘I little thought’, he writes, ‘that a Christian’s daughter could be found.’ But lo, Jehangir knew just the person. She was the daughter of an Armenian Christian who had been high in Akbar’s favour but had since died leaving her ‘only a few jewels’. To the Emperor’s solicitude were now added the dictates of compassion. ‘I, seeing she was of so honest descent and having passed [i.e. given] my worde to the king, could not withstand my fortune.’ They were duly married by his English servant and ‘for ever after I lived content and without feare, she being willing to go where I went and live as I lived’.
When Hawkins prevaricates he is at his most transparent. Subtlety was never his strongest suit but for six months he had successfully consolidated his position and was now one of the Emperor’s closest companions. Matters began to change as soon as news reached Agra that another Company vessel was approaching the ‘bar’ at Surat. At first the change was in Hawkins’ favour. In expectation of at last receiving worthy tokens of English esteem, Jehangir issued the desired trading rights. When word came that the ship had in fact been wrecked on the Gujarat coast he even issued orders for the reception of the castaways and their cargo.
But such favours aroused the jealousy of Jehangir’s ministers ‘for it went against their hearts that a Christian should be so great and neere the king’. Additionally the threat of more English shipping activated the Portuguese at court. And, to cap it all, ‘that dogge’ Mukarrab Khan put in another appearance. Officially he was in disgrace for having appropriated Hawkins’s cargo but, with an ingenuity one can only admire, he managed to turn an imperial order to reimburse Hawkins into the means of disgracing him. He did this by undervaluing the goods in question and then representing Hawkins’s refusal to accept payment at this questionable valuation as an act of disobedience to the Emperor. It was a complex dispute but with so many anxious to discredit the Englishman, and with Hawkins himself exhibiting a pugnacious stubbornness, his reputation plummeted.
The arrival of ‘unrulie’ English hordes from the wrecked Ascension contributed to his discomfiture. In Surat they had already disgraced themselves ‘with palmita drinke (toddy) and raisin wine’. According to Finch they ‘made themselves beasts and soe fell to lewd women that in shorte time manie fell sicke’. Worse still, one Thomas Tucker, perhaps tired of singing for his supper, butchered a calf which Finch rightly described as ‘a slaughter more than murther in India’. Local Brahmins organized a lynch mob and Tucker was saved only when the English themselves were seen to whip him into insensibility. To Finch’s immense relief the officers and men of the Ascension at last set off for Agra. Many never arrived but amongst those who did was the factor, John Jourdain, who was to figure so prominently at Bantam.
Hawkins, Jourdain reported, was ‘in some disgrace with the kinge’. The factor had taken an instant dislike to the Captain and, not without gloating, he proceeded to list the reasons for Hawkins’s disgrace. Amongst them occurs the oft-quoted reference to Hawkins’s drunkenness. According to Jourdain he had been publicly reprimanded for appearing at court after ‘filling his head with stronge drinke’. Perhaps he had. But Jehangir was not noted for his abstinence and Hawkins mentions having passed many paralytic hours in the Emperor’s company. Even if the Emperor had undergone some conscience-stricken reformation it seems unlikely that he would have objected to Hawkins drinking in his own home. More probably this was simply another instance of the Captain’s many enemies trying to engineer his disgrace.
After five wasted months Jourdain and most of his followers returned towards Surat in the hopes of being rescued by another English vessel. Hawkins remained at Agra and briefly his fortunes revived. ‘Againe I was afloat’, he writes. Jehangir seemed disposed to make Mukarrab Khan settle with him and to grant the cherished farman for an English factory. Hawkins also had high hopes of receiving back payment of his promised salary. Then once again his enemies rallied and the Portuguese outbid him for the Emperor’s favour. He applied for leave to depart from Agra and, instead of being detained with fair promises as expected, he found himself dismissed. With Mrs Hawkins, her few jewels and her many relatives, he left Agra in November 1611. His plan was to head for Goa and with the help of the Portuguese, only too pleased to hasten his retreat, to sail from there to Europe. In the event he changed his plans and headed for Surat. An English vessel, indeed a most impressive fleet, was off the ‘bar’ and its commander was adopting a radically different approach to both Moghul officialdom and the Portuguese.
ii
While English attempts to establish themselves at Surat were getting nowhere very slowly, events on the other side of the Arabian Sea had overtaken them. Although Keeling and Hawkins had failed to reach the Red Sea ports the Ascension, before running aground on the coast of Gujarat, had made good this omission. By chance she had also discovered the Seychelle Islands. ‘They seemed to us’, opined the ship’s boatswain, ‘an earthly paradise.’ But they were as yet uninhabited save for giant turtles and even the most pie-eyed of factors could see no commercial potential for turtle flesh ‘because they did look so uglie before they were boyled’.
Aden, ‘that famous and stronge place’, could hardly compare with the Seychelles. ‘A most uncomfortable place’, thought Jourdain, ‘for within the walls there is not any green thing growing, onlie your delight must be in the cragged rocks and decayed houses.’ The city was still in ruins following its conquest by the Turks in 1538. Small quantities of gum arabic, frankincense and myrrh were obtainable but the main terminus for oceanic shipping was now round the coast at Mocha in the Red Sea itself.
While the Ascension made for Mocha through the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, Jourdain, with the usual royal letter of introduction, journeyed inland to Sana’a, the capital. Yemen was a land of picturesque surprises; high passes gave way to fertile valleys in one of which he identified extensive plantations of what he called ‘cohoo. ‘The seeds of this cohoo is a great marchandise for it is carried to Grand Cairo and all other places of Turkey and the Indias.’ ‘Kahwa’ was the word used by the Arabs; in English it was sometimes rendered as ‘coughe’ and eventually ‘coffee’. Nowhere else in the world was it to be found and as yet there was no market for it in Europe. But by the 1660s coffee would become the staple export of the Red Sea ports.
At Sana’a Jourdain obtained permission to trade from the Turkish Pasha, or governor, and then proceeded on to Mocha. Thence a letter was sent via Cairo to London representing the potential of Mocha in highly favourable but misleading terms. In fact the town proved ‘unreasonable hott’; the Pasha’s permission was for the Ascension’s trade only, not for the establishment of a factory; and a profitable sale for the ship’s ballast, mostly iron, was lost through her commander ‘bursting out in anger saying that the merchants of Mocha mocked him to offer so little’.
But the Company knew nothing of this and in 1609, believing Hawkins favourably established in India and the Red Sea trade already wide open to them, the directors instructed the ships of their Sixth Voyage to concentrate on the Arabian Sea. After much deliberation James I had just granted the Company that new and enlarged charter; thanks largely to David Middleton’s success in the Spice Islands, confidence in the profitability of Eastern trade was growing; peers of the realm and ministers of state were willing to invest. To discredit the arguments of its critics and to capitalize on this spirit of optimism, it was vital that the Company be seen to be making the most of its eastern monopoly and to be doing its utmost for English exports. At £82,000 the subscription raised for this voyage was the highest yet. Two of its three ships – the wishfully named Trades Increase and the Peppercorn were brand new and the total tonnage for the voyage was second only to that of Lancaster’s fleet. English manufactures, mostly woollens, made up half the value of its trading stock. And Henry Middleton, now Sir Henry, was appointed commander. It was the sort of fleet of which a man of quality need not feel ashamed.
Having taken seven months over a voyage which took Keeling eighteen, all three ships were off the coast of Socotra by 18 October 1609. They ‘sheathed their pinis’ and learnt from the sultan of the island that the Ascension ‘had sold all her goods’ at Mocha. ‘This newes gave mee good content,’ noted Middleton. In expectation of doing as well if not better he headed for the Red Sea. The Peppercorn was left at Aden and on 13 November the other two ships came to rest off Mocha. In the case of the Trades Increase anchors were unnecessary. The enormous ship was in fact aground and had to be almost entirely unloaded before she could be refloated. This was contrary to the Company’s instructions which insisted that, where there was no factory, goods should never be landed until sold. Under the circumstances Middleton had little choice; but the landing of his cargo undoubtedly weakened his bargaining position and aroused the cupidity – and suspicions – of Mocha’s officials.
The Turkish official in charge of the port had the title of Aga and for two weeks the English could find no fault with the warmth of his welcome. They were given an extensive property, Middleton was honoured with a robe of crimson silk embroidered with silver thread, and every day presents arrived from the castle. On the evening of 28 November, records Middleton, ‘according to my wonted custom I caused stooles to be sett at the doore where myself, Master Femmel and Master Pemberton [the principal factors] sat to take the fresh aire’. The red sun slid, orb-like, into the Red Sea; the muezzin sounded from the city’s mosques; contentment reigned. An emissary from the Aga dropped by and Middleton sent his servant to fetch the interpreter. The man burbled on in Arabic. ‘As he was aboute to say somewhat else, my man returned in great feare telling us wee were all betrayed, for that the Turkes and my people were by the eares at the backe of the house.’
I myself ranne after them, calling upon them as loud as I could to return backe and make good our house. But whiles I was thus speaking I was strooke upon the head downe to the grounde by one that came behinde mee.
Consciousness returned with the ‘extreame paine’ of having his hands tightly bound. He was immediately jerked to his feet and dragged off to prison. On the way he was robbed of all his money and of his three gold rings. ‘Then beganne they to put us in irons, myself with seven men being chained by the neckes all together.’ Eight of his men had been killed in the fighting, fourteen were badly wounded, and the remaining forty-eight were in chains. The only ray of hope was that a simultaneous assault on the ships had failed. But there too blood had been spilt and three Englishmen killed.
Why the Aga had so abruptly changed his tune was something of a mystery. In the interrogations that followed he accused the English of having broken a long-standing embargo against any Christian shipping calling at the pilgrim ports of the Red Sea. This was nonsense, although Islamic sensibilities could easily be aroused so near the sacred cities of Medina and Mecca and particularly so when, as now, fanaticism was heightened by the pangs of Ramadan. The Aga claimed to be acting on the orders of the Pasha at Sana’a; but the sight of Middleton and his men brazenly quaffing their madeira outside their house would have constituted a powerful provocation.
There was also, of course, the incentive of loot. To persuade Middleton to order the surrender of his shipping was now the Aga’s top priority. He tried bargaining – life and liberty for his captives in return for their ships’ cargoes – and he tried intimidation.
They stowed me all that day in a dirty dogge’s kennell under a paire of stairs…my lodging was upon the hard grounde, my pillow a stone, and my companions to keep me waking were griefe of heart and multitude of rats which, if I chanced to sleepe, would awake me with running over me.
For three weeks Sir Henry languished in his kennel daily expecting to be led away for execution. Instead he and all the rest were ordered up to Sana’a. ‘Our irons were knockt off our legges’ and a string of donkeys was provided for their conveyance. So was a guard of soldiers.
At Ta’iz, four days from Mocha, they were ‘marshalled into the citie two by two in a ranke as they doe at Stamboul with captives taken in the warres’. The townsfolk stood, stared and jeered and a sickly youth in Master Pemberton’s employ fell by the wayside. It was Christmas Day.
I kept no journal from this time forward [writes Middleton] but this I remember: we found it very colde all the way from Ta’iz to Sana’a, our lodging being the colde grounde covered with horie frost. In Sana’a we had ice a finger thicke in one night, which I could hardly have beleeved had I not seene it. I bought most of our men furred gowns to keep them from the colde; otherwise I think they would have starved.
They were fifteen days on the road and at Sana’a, ‘a citie somewhat bigger than Bristoll’, they were again paraded ignominiously through the streets. Then they were ‘clapt in waightie irons’ and consigned to prison.
The Pasha, like the Aga, claimed that he was only following orders. But it now emerged that the orders came from Istanbul and were in fact based on sound commercial considerations. In outbidding local merchants for the cargoes of Indian vessels reaching Mocha, the Ascension’s factors had unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of resentment. From Mecca, Cairo and Damascus had come complaints about the consequent dearth of Indian goods; additionally Mocha had been deprived of its customary import duties. Not so long ago the Arabs and the Turks had seen the bulk of their transit trade in spices diverted round the Cape by the Portuguese; now the remaining trickle of spices plus the valuable trade in Indian cottons and indigo were being threatened on their own doorstep by the English. English trade in the Red Sea was clearly detrimental to that of Arabia and Egypt; the English must therefore be discouraged from ever again entering the region.
Middleton took the point. While still fuming over the treacherous manner in which he had been treated, he had no answer to the Pasha’s logic and agreed that English ships would in future steer clear of the area. The way was now open for negotiations over the release of the hostages. In these Middleton relied heavily on the intercession of other merchants, especially the powerful Indian community. The Gujaratis had welcomed the English as trading partners and were not without blame in dislocating Arabian trade. They were also fearful of English retribution – and with good reason.
For by the time Middleton and his men had been authorized to trail back to Mocha, it was March and the season for the arrival of shipping from India. April saw the port fill with dhows from Cambay, Surat and Dabhol, from the Malabar coast, Socotra, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. They were met by enormous camel caravans from Damascus, Suez and Mecca. This was the ancient exchange on which the prosperity of Arabia had subsisted and which the advent of English shipping threatened. There was no chance of Middleton being allowed to open shop but there was every chance that if the bullish Englishman were to regain his ships he would come amongst the dhows to wreak vengeance. The Aga therefore prevaricated over actually dismissing the English and saw to it that their commander was closely guarded.
On 11 May Middleton smuggled a note out to his fleet. The Turks were feasting their Indian guests, his guards were drunk, and ‘God had put into my head a devise.’ The ‘devise’ was a plan of escape. He instructed his men to saunter, ever so casually, to two pre-arranged embarkation points and await a boat. He himself climbed into an empty water butt; the butt was then sealed and floated out to sea. After what, even by seventeenth-century standards, must have been a cramped voyage, he was taken in tow by a tender from the English fleet, ‘which being done, I forced out the heade of the caske and came aboord’. His men fared less well, half of them being taken before they could be embarked’. But Middleton was free and once back on the heavily armed Trades Increase he gave his anger full rein. ‘I sent the Aga word that if he did not send me all my people with those provisions of the ships which he detained…I would fire the [Indian] ships in the road and do my best to batter the towne about his eares.’ To show he meant business he blockaded the port, interposing his own ships between the dhows and the shore.
The Aga ‘began to sing a new song’ – but at the same tempo; he was still playing for time. It was 28 May before all the English were released and 2 July before a final settlement was reached about the cargo. Middleton still hankered after revenge and for a whole month more he lay in wait for a richly laden vessel that was expected from Suez. Both the Pasha and the Aga supposedly had shares in her. ‘Yett she escaped us in the night.’ On 9 August, to catch the last of the westerly monsoon, Middleton ordered his ships to sail for Surat. The Aga must have breathed a long Turkish sigh of relief. It seemed reasonable to suppose that he had seen the last of the English and the last of Sir Henry Middleton.
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In India Middleton’s appraisal of the English position was inevitably coloured by his recent experiences at Mocha. He had hoped to find a factory at Surat, Hawkins in high favour at Agra, and the Ascension’s factors manfully extending English trade. In the event he found no factory and no factors. His letters ashore were answered by a ship’s carpenter (the well named Nicholas Bangham who had absconded from the Hector in 1607) who reported that Jourdain and his followers were even now straggling back from Agra and that a disgraced Hawkins with his family were not far behind. Worse still, Middleton could not even get ashore to ascertain matters. A small armada of Portuguese frigates was blocking the mouth of the Tapti and both on land and sea Portuguese patrols lay in wait for his men. Under the circumstances trade seemed out of the question. Another rescue mission was the most he could hope to achieve. Accordingly he positioned his fleet alongside three Gujarati vessels that were anchored off the ‘bar’ and announced in a now familiar ultimatum that they ‘should not depart till I had all the Englishmen aboord of me’.
The first of his would-be passengers to arrive at Surat was Jourdain. With help from Mukarrab Khan, of whom he had a better opinion than did Hawkins, he donned disguise and slipped past the Portuguese land patrols. Then he hid in the fields for three days, swam across a muddy creek, and eventually gained the attention of one of the English fleet’s boats by scaling a sand dune and waving his unravelled turban. ‘The skiffe came near the shore and I waded into her.’ He had arrived in India as a castaway (from the Ascension); now he left in the same bedraggled state.
His news, however, was not all depressing. Mukarrab Khan was evidently keen to obtain whatever the new fleet carried in the way of novelties suitable for Jehangir and was therefore making tempting offers about trade. So was the governor of Surat and from him Jourdain had learnt of a safe inshore anchorage just north of the mouth of the Tapti. It was called, rather uninvitingly, Swalley Hole. On the second attempt Middleton found the spot and safely eased two of his ships over its mud ‘bar’. It was not exactly a port, just an unremarkable piece of Gujarati shoreline. But amidst the lush fields and marsh grasses there soon sprang up an instant bazaar. The English fleet badly needed fresh water, meat, vegetables, whatever the land could offer; the men hankered after exercise and alcohol, and the merchants revived their expectations of trade. Swalley became the first purely English addition to the map of India.
From November 1611 till February 1612 the fleet remained there. Portuguese troops continued to molest any who trod the twelve crosscountry miles to Surat but at Swalley itself the English were safe. So much so that goods were landed and some calicoes and indigo bought. When Mukarrab Khan himself came aboard and was visibly impressed by the ships’ strength and contents, it looked as if Middleton’s gloomy forebodings had been misplaced. A factory at Surat was again being mentioned, although it was unclear to what extent this depended on further gratifying Mukarrab Khan’s curiosity. Already he had been through Middleton’s lockers and successfully wheedled out of him his ‘perfumed jerkin’, a beaver hat and a ‘spaniell dogge’. ‘Whatsoever he sawe there of mine that he tooke liking to, I gave him for nothing.’
There were a few tense exchanges about the price of Indian goods and the accuracy of Indian scales but well into January trade was still proceeding and Mukarrab Khan still smiling. Then the Hawkins ménage reached Surat and matters abruptly changed. Without so much as an explanation Mukarrab Khan denied ever having mentioned a factory and peremptorily ordered the English fleet to depart. Jourdain, for one, made the obvious connection; Hawkins ‘was the chiefest cause Mukarrab Khan made such haste for us to be gone’ and was ‘the cause that Sir Henrie had not settled a factory’. But this was surely just another attempt to discredit ‘the Captain’. It was Jehangir, under pressure from the Portuguese, who had dismissed Hawkins and it was almost certainly Jehangir who ordered Mukarrab Khan to get rid of the English fleet.
With Hawkins, Mrs Hawkins, Jourdain, most of the Ascension’s factors and officers, and any other Englishmen keen to see their homes again, the fleet finally sailed on 9 February. After four years the first English attempt to trade with the Moghul empire had come to nothing; and during four months Middleton had not so much as seen Surat. Ironically, just as he was leaving he received a letter ‘from one Peter Floris’ recently arrived at somewhere called Masulipatnam. His ‘estate’, Floris reported, was ‘in good being’. There at least trade had been established.
Middleton proceeded on down the west coast of India to Dabhol, the main port of the kingdom of Bijapur and a place of considerably more importance than the nearby Portuguese settlement at Bon Bahia (later Bombay). At Dabhol some broadcloth was sold while on board the Trades Increase an important conference took place. The question was whether the fleet should continue to Bantam or whether it should first return to the Red Sea. The monsoon winds favoured the Red Sea and so did Middleton. The others concurred ‘though for divers reasons’.
One was that the letter from Floris had spoken of another Company fleet already on its way there; they must be warned off. Another was the juicy prospect of interfering with that great spring concourse of Indian shipping at Mocha. Jourdain saw this simply as a means of ‘recompense of the wrong done us at Suratt’; and in conformity with this Indo-centric view, Middleton’s conduct has often been represented as a vengeful and unscrupulous act of piracy against the Moghul shipping.
But this was not how Middleton saw it. He had no quarrel with the commanders of India’s Arabian Sea fleets and had in fact received much kindness from them during his earlier tribulations in the Yemen. As he explained, by staying their ships ‘I thought we should do ourselves some right and them no wrong to cause them to barter with us, we to take their goods as they were worth and they ours in lieu thereof’. It would be trade under duress certainly, but not pillage; and the party to suffer most by it would not be the ships of the Moghul, but the officials of Mocha. For in Sir Henry’s opinion the decisive reason for sailing back to the Red Sea was ‘to take some revenge for the great and insufferable wrongs and injuries done me by the Turkes there’. He was thinking of his dead comrades, of those ‘waightie irons’ and of the ‘dirty dogge’s kennell’.
By April the fleet was in position across the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Indian dhows were being corralled into a holding area in the Bay of Assab. Here, on the Ethiopian coast, each vessel was ‘rommaged’. A selection was made of its most desirable commodities, and broadcloth put in their place. Middleton meanwhile wrote to the Aga of Mocha explaining his behaviour and inviting compensation if not capitulation. Dearly would he have loved to witness the Aga’s reaction. But his old adversary had, it transpired, been replaced; and the new incumbent claimed an unexpected ally in John Saris, commander of the Company’s Eighth Voyage amongst whose ships was the Japan-bound Clove.
Armed with a magnificent specimen of Arabic calligraphy that was in fact a safe-conduct from the Sultan in Istanbul, Saris had seen fit to ignore a letter of caution left by Middleton at Socotra and had duly sailed into Mocha. A sumptuous reception from the new Aga and his entourage – Saris called them ‘his buggering boyes’ – left the newcomers in no doubt that their trade was welcome. Already the first bargains had been struck and an English deputation was about to pay a courtesy call on the Pasha at Sana’a.
Not surprisingly word of Middleton’s interference went down badly with the Aga and badly with Saris. The former abruptly broke off trade and accused Saris of abusing the Sultan’s protection. Saris himself saw what he called ‘Sir Henrie’s brabbles and jarres with the Turkes and the Cambayans [i.e. the people of Surat]’ as threatening the success of his own voyage throughout the Arabian Sea. On 15 April he went aboard the Trades Increase and demanded an explanation. Middleton stuck to his guns; he would take from the Indian ships ‘what he thought fitting and then’, according to Saris, ‘if I would, I might take the rest’. Saris replied that in that case he would sail away to windward and forestall him. ‘Whereat Sir Henrie swore most deeply that if I did take that course he would sinke me and sett fire of all such ships as traded with me.’
The preoccupation with personal trade plus the system of separate accounting for each voyage meant that the common good of the Company received little consideration. It was every fleet for itself, and although Middleton and Saris eventually reached an agreement on the division of spoils, the bickering continued; mutineers on ‘Jack’ Saris’s ships looked to Middleton for redress; Middleton tried to deprive Saris of any cottons that might compete with his own cargo when they eventually reached Bantam. Jourdain and Hawkins looked on in disgust. The two commanders ‘used very grosse speeches not fitting to men of their ranke’ thought Jourdain, ‘and were so crosse the one to the other as if they had beene enymies’.
In all some fifteen Indian vessels were ‘rommaged’ including one of over 1000 tons. Their goods were generally valued at above cost price but then so was the English broadcloth given in exchange. In a letter to Jehangir Middleton described his proceedings and, by way of explanation, catalogued the English grievances, especially Hawkins’s losses on Mukarrab Khan’s account. Jehangir, it seems, was not much bothered. Whilst not exactly approving, he refused to take up the cause of his skippers and thought that they had been reasonably treated.
In August 1612, having effectively ended all hopes of trade both in the Red Sea and in Gujarat for the foreseeable future, the last English vessels departed. They sailed for the pepper ports of Sumatra and Java and were soon locked in further quarrels with one another. Most of Middleton’s men succumbed to that Bantam epidemic which Jourdain so graphically described. As the Trades Increase burnt and then rotted, Middleton’s own demise was credited simply to a broken heart. In the meantime Saris went on to Japan, Jourdain to the Moluccas, and Hawkins to England. ‘The Captain’ sailed on the Hector, the ship which five years before had deposited him at Surat; but he died before he reached home. That left Mrs Hawkins, the Armenian ‘mayden’, an English widow before she saw England. She was not, however, friendless. Gabriel Towerson, the indestructible Bantam factor, was the commander of the Hector and by the time he sailed back to the Indies Mrs Hawkins had become Mrs Towerson. She sailed with him, regained her numerous family in India, and, courtesy of the Amboina Massacre, would be a widow once again within the decade.
CHAPTER FIVE The Keye of All India (#ulink_685694ee-d404-5a6c-940f-13b9835a990f)
THE CAPE, SURAT AND PERSIA
In 1613, as well as Mrs Hawkins, his future bride, Gabriel Towerson brought home another curiosity – the first South African to set foot in England. ‘Coree’, as the man was called, was a reluctant immigrant. With a fellow ‘Saldanian’ of Table Bay he had made the mistake of accepting an invitation to board the Hector. Acting on previous instructions from the Company, Towerson detained both men. The ship put back to sea, ‘the poor wretches’ grieved pitifully, and the companion died; it was ‘merely out of extreme sullenness’, complained his captors, ‘for he was very well used’. Coree, although equally unappreciative of his good fortune, had at least the grace to survive and was duly landed in London. There Sir Thomas Smythe himself, still Governor of the Company, accommodated him and nobly assumed the responsibility of equipping him for civilized society.
By common consent – and not a little conceit – the natives of Table Bay were reckoned the most primitive creatures Europe had yet encountered. Indeed ‘I think the world could not yield a more heathenish people and more beastlie’, declared Jourdain as he witnessed a horde of them devouring a mound of putrid fish guts ‘that noe Christian could abyde to come within a myle of’. Their meat too, especially entrails, they preferred well hung; and for convenience as well as appearance, where they hung it was round their necks. ‘They would pull off and eate these greasy tripes half raw, the blood loathsomely slavering.’ To English eyes it was not a pretty sight and because the Saldanians also anointed their bodies with decomposing animal fats, to English noses they gave off a most offensive smell. Additionally they stole, cringed and lied. They tilled no fields (they were, as their visitors knew to their advantage, pastoralists), they said no prayers, and they wore very few clothes, ‘onlie a short cloake of sheepe or seale skinnes to their middle, a cap of the same, and a kind of ratte skinne about their privities’.
The women’s habit is as the men’s. They were shamefac’d at first; but on our returne homewards they would lift up their ratte skinnes and shew their privities. Their breasts hang to the middle; their hair curled.
This was the Reverend Patrick Copland, chaplain of the Tenth Voyage. The nicest thing that he could find to say of them was that they danced ‘in true measure’ and that, once they had overcome a fear born of too many Dutchmen rustling their cattle, they were ‘loving’.
If Coree was anything to go by, they were also obstinate. ‘He had good diet, good cloaths, good lodging and all other fitting accommodations…yet all this contented him not.’ With perverse determination he pined for his heathenish homeland and ‘would daily lie upon the ground and cry very often thus in broken English “Coree home go, Saldania go, home go”’. His only consolation was a suit of chain mail complete with armoured breastplate, helmet and backplate and all forged out of brass, ‘his beloved metal’. This conspicuous outfit he cherished greatly and wore whenever occasion offered. In it, in March 1614, he at last stumbled aboard the New Year’s Gift and, still wearing it, clanked off into Africa when the ship called at Table Bay. It was his only memento of civilization for ‘he had no sooner sett foot on his own shore but did presently throw away his cloaths, his linen and other covering and got his sheepskin upon his back and guts aboute his neck’.
Whether, as hoped, he repaid his patrons by disposing his people towards the English remains a moot point. One seafarer complained that he simply acquainted the Saldanians with the going rates for fatstock and ironmongery in London. As a result ‘we had never after such a free exchange of our brass and iron for their cattle’. But in 1615 the commander of the Expedition was royally entertained by Coree’s family and found the people ‘nothing as fearful as at other times nor so thievish’. Cattle were both plentiful and cheap and in Coree’s ‘towne’ even the youngest inhabitants could say ‘Sir Thomas Smythe’ and ‘English ships’ which ‘they often with great glorie repeat’. Some actually begged a passage to England ‘seeing Coree had sped so well and returned so rich with his brass suit which he yet keepeth in his house very charily’.
While the Company’s fleets plied back and forth grimly bent on momentous matters of war and trade, southern Africa – whose undreamt of reserves in gold and diamonds could have bought more cottons and spices than all Europe could consume – provided mere light relief. Here outgoing crews took a last bracing breath before plunging into Asia’s malarial miasma and here returning wanderers dared to dream again of cool green pastures and dank ale houses. The Cape was deliciously temperate and many a passing factor marvelled at its agricultural potential. A dedicated band of horticulturalists and hoteliers could turn it into a veritable paradise ‘healthfull and commodious for all who trade the East Indyes’. Jourdain even suspected that it might afford some saleable commodities. For it was ‘in the midst of two rich countries, Ginnee [Guinea] and Mozambique’. He was thinking particularly of ‘elephaunt’s teeth’, for that we saw the footinge of manie’. Much in demand throughout the East, ivory sometimes made up a substantial percentage of outgoing investments. But it could only be purchased in Europe which it reached by way of north Africa, and was therefore never cheap.
Responding to such promptings, in 1615 the Company agreed to an experiment. Ten condemned men who had lately been awaiting execution in Newgate prison were shipped aboard the Expedition. They proved troublesome shipmates and reluctant pioneers. But in due course they were dumped at one end of Table Bay and thus became the first English convicts to be deported to the southern hemisphere. They were also the Company’s first colonists and south Africa’s first white settlers. With such dubious claims to fame it was hardly surprising that they fared badly.
Tools and provisions were also landed and one Captain Cross, a yeoman of the royal guard who had been convicted of several duelling deaths, assumed command. Expectations of ‘a plantation or at leaste a discoverye further into that countrye’ were quickly disappointed. When the homeward-bound Hope sent Cross in search of beef cattle he was ambushed by Coree’s Saldanians and one of his followers killed. A peace of sorts was patched up and Coree obligingly sent cattle ‘and as an extraordinarie favour one of his wifes’. ‘The cattell we bought’, wrote the Hope’s commander, pointedly. In return for the promise of a house ‘built after the mannor in England’ Coree also agreed to help the settlers. Captain Cross, however, was taking no chances. He successfully pleaded for muskets and a boat and was understood to be planning the removal of his camp to an island in the bay. Already densely populated with creatures described as part beast, part bird and part fish ‘which hath a strange and proude kind of going and finny wings’, the island was duly called Penguin Island. Its name has since been changed to Robben Island. Captain Cross and his men must have been the only convicts ever voluntarily to have removed to a penal settlement more notorious than Alcatraz.
Like later exiles, Cross soon discovered that penguins were poor company and rank eating, and that escaping from Robben Island could be difficult. Their boat was ‘split in pieces’ and a raft constructed in its stead proved far from satisfactory. While paddling out to rendezvous with the New Year’s Gift in February 1616 it was upset by two whales. ‘Terrified with the whales and benummed with water’ Cross somehow regained the island and ‘having shifted a shirt and refreshed himself’ tried again. He seemed to be making fair progress, then suddenly disappeared ‘which is the last newes of him’.
With Cross gone, his followers made it known that they would rather return to Newgate than continue the unequal struggle. The New Year’s Gift gave passage to three of them and the rest seem to have got aboard a passing Portuguese ship. When news of their failure reached a second consignment of deportees they begged that rather than be abandoned in Africa they be hanged from the yard-arm. Instead they were landed at Bantam, which was much the same thing. Meanwhile Coree and his people enjoyed a few more precious years in undisputed possession of their homeland.
In 1620, with James I taking a lively interest in East India Company affairs as a result of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of Defence, Saldania was unofficially annexed by the Company on behalf of the Crown. Andrew Shilling, commander of the London, performed the honours by issuing to the empty veldt ‘a solemn publication of His Majesty’s title’ and causing the erection of ‘King James his mount’ at Table Bay. But no fort was built and no English were settled. It was purely a tactical move designed to pre-empt the Dutch ‘since no European power had at this time claimed a right to that part of the coast of Africa’. Coree was eventually superseded by Hadah who after picking up some English at Bantam was deposited on Robben Island, there to act as the Company’s ‘postman’. Whenever a ship anchored in the Bay he quickly donned jacket and hose and pushed past the penguins with whatever messages had been left in his care. Not till 1652 and Cromwell’s Anglo-Dutch war was a permanent station established. Five years later the first colonists began erecting their homesteads. They were Dutch. A century and a half would elapse before the Company’s claims, based on the adventures of Coree and Cross and the opportunism of Andrew Shilling, would be revived.
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Although for much of the seventeenth century the Dutch and English were bitter rivals throughout the East, on the long voyage to and from Europe hostilities were usually suspended. At the Cape and at St Helena ships of the London Company amicably exchanged news and provisions with those of the V.O.C. Hadah was postman for both Companies; and occasionally Dutch and English ships actually sailed together.
This was not the case with the Portuguese. Anywhere outside European waters Spain/Portugal continued to regard the ships of the Protestant powers as little better than pirates and, peace treaties notwithstanding, they jealously maintained the exclusive character of their eastern bases. In the Arabian Sea further English endeavours at Surat and Swalley between 1612 and 1620 were seen as a direct challenge to Portugal’s maritime supremacy on the very threshold of its eastern metropolis at Goa. The Portuguese would respond vigorously. But once again a purely Indo-centric reading of these engagements is misleading. At stake was a dominant role not just in India’s external trade but in that of all the trading coasts of the Arabian Sea including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Naval battles in the Gulf of Cambay would have counted for little had not the Portuguese also been challenged at Hormuz, Goa, and a host of lesser ports from the coast of Mozambique to that of Malabar. Hostilities would last for twenty years; and they would embrace the whole trading world between Africa and India.
In 1612, blissfully ignorant of Sir Henry Middleton’s débâcles at Mocha and Surat, the Company had despatched two more ships for Surat, the Twelfth Voyage, under the command of Thomas Best, a highly experienced master mariner. The commander, or ‘General’, of an East India Company fleet controlled two distinct establishments, the one nautical and headed by his subordinate captains and masters and the other commercial and headed by one or more chief merchants. Almost invariably commanders were appointed on the strength of their performances during a previous voyage; and usually they were merchants who had thus acquired some knowledge of navigation. Hence the ideal commander should be part sailor, part merchant and, if possible, part ‘man of fashion and good respect’. But Thomas Best was just a sailor. Presumably the loss of the Ascension had convinced the directors that amongst Gujarat’s treacherous mud banks navigational skills were more important than social graces. The difference is evident in Best’s journal which triumphantly belies the idea that seventeenth-century travelogues were necessarily discursive and entertaining. True to his calling, Best merely kept a log.
Terse and laconic as it is, it is nevertheless odd that this document contains no mention of the fleet’s first contact with the Portuguese which occurred in the Mozambique channel north of Madagascar. In what may be a reference to it, Best elsewhere refers to ‘the goodliest ship thatt ever I sawe’ as being a Portuguese carrack ‘with a tower of ordnance beseeming a castell’. From the journal of one of his subordinates it appears that there were in fact two such ships off Madagascar, each of over 1500 tons and each intent on putting its tower of ordnance to good use. Broadsides were exchanged and at least three Portuguese killed before Best ‘steered away his course’. ‘For yt was contrarie to commission to meddle with them in respecte of peace we have with their king.’ But the English crews were ‘prepared to feight’ and if they felt somewhat cheated by Best’s delicacy, their rancour would be short-lived.
Best reached the mouth of the Tapti river in September 1612, only six months after Middleton had been ordered to sea by Mukarrab Khan. The news that all the English factors had been withdrawn was depressing enough but when word arrived of Middleton’s retaliatory activities in the Red Sea, Best despaired. The news affected him ‘like a drinke of cold water to a man on a cold and frostie morning’. Already two of his factors had been captured by the Portuguese. As soon as he could secure their release he was all for beating a hasty retreat towards Bantam.
But his remaining factors were more sanguine and Best, reckoning they knew their own business best, sensibly deferred to them. It seemed that for once the Moghul officials were being positively obliging. Perhaps they were worried that Best might follow Middleton’s example and blockade their shipping in the Red Sea. Perhaps they had simply reevaluated the advantages of a new trading partner and a new source of largesse. At all events a farman granting interim trading rights was immediately forthcoming, a promise was made that within forty days it would be ratified by Jehangir, and the English were invited to send another representative to Agra to negotiate a permanent agreement. It was as if the dismissals of Hawkins and Middleton had all been a terrible mistake. Within days of the fleet’s arrival new emissaries and a new letter from King James were on their way to Court. So were some of the presents known to please the dilettante emperor. There were paintings ‘espetially such as discover Venus’ and Cupid’s actes’ and there were various musical instruments in the care of Lancelot Canning, a virtuoso on the virginals, and Robert Trully, a cornettist. The latter found high favour with Jehangir. He converted to Islam and eventually blew his cornet in half the courts of India. Not so Lancelot Canning. The virginals proved too insipid for Moghul tastes and the mortified Canning, a distant kinsman of India’s future Viceroy, is described as having ‘dyed of conceitt’.
Best meanwhile repaired to Swalley to await Jehangir’s confirmation of the farman. As usual during any period in port the crews took to drinking and gambling. Even at ill-appointed Swalley Hole two men were ducked from the yard-arm for swimming ashore on the Sabbath and getting ‘drinking drunke with whores ashore’. Instructions issued to the commanders of all Company fleets proscribed such conduct in the most vigorous terms. But as with the injunctions against private trade, those against blasphemy, gaming and drunkenness were habitually ignored. They may be seen as implying not that the English seafarer of the seventeenth century was a God-fearing paragon of Puritan virtues but exactly the opposite.
It took the arrival of an impressive Portuguese fleet to bring the Swalley revellers to their senses. There were four galleons (warships, smaller than the cargo-carrying carracks but larger than any of the English vessels) and twenty-five inshore frigates. They had been dispatched from Goa and their instructions were to disperse the new English challenge by force of arms.
In the engagements that followed – and in those fought by ships of Richard Downton’s fleet two years later – the Portuguese were apparently the stronger. They had more ships and their ships had more men. They were also larger and, under full sail, faster. But they were of deeper draught, less manoeuvrable, poorly crewed, and under-gunned. Portuguese tactics still relied heavily on grappling-irons and fire-ships, the idea being to panic the enemy and then get alongside him for a full-blooded boarding in which higher superstructures and numerical superiority must prove decisive.
But all this assumed that men-of-war were just floating castles and that their defenders would always heave to and fight it out. This was not how the English had frustrated the Armada and, according to a disgruntled Portuguese account, it was not how Best chose to conduct his battles in the Gulf of Cambay.
The reason [for the Portuguese failure] was that the enemy’s [i.e. the English] vessels drew less water and thus could retreat or attack when they pleased, not making it a point of honour never to show their backs as did our men; for being ships of war we should feel it a great disgrace to avoid an encounter, while they, relying only on artillery fire from a distance, withdrew or came on as they pleased thanks to the hardiness of their vessels which were well-fitted and better sailers than ours.
Although the Portuguese galleons never got within grappling-iron distance of Best’s ships they did manage to surprise the Merchant’s Hope of Downton’s fleet. Swordsmen swarmed aboard her and a desperate struggle ensued. Three times the English appeared to be done for, and it was only thanks to the timely arrival of their whole fleet that the boarders were finally repelled. The ship had been dismasted and would require an elaborate refit. ‘I never sawe menn fight with greater resolution than the Portingales’, declared Downton; in no way could they be ‘taxed with cowardice as some have done.’
But this close encounter was the exception. For the most part the English persisted with their gun-boat tactics, keeping at a safe distance and exploiting wind and tide to manoeuvre over the mud banks and swoop in open water. All the aggression came from the gunners. ‘We began to play upon their Vice-Admiral with great and small shott’, writes Best of his first engagement. In the second the Red Dragon (Lancaster’s old flagship) ‘steered from one to another and gave them such banges as maid their verie sides crack’. Her sister ship, the Hosiander, is described as ‘dancing the hay’ amongst the enemy or, better still since her master was a certain Nathaniel Salmon, as ‘swimming, frisking lightly (but not without effect), and leaping about these huge whale carkasses’. Among the English, losses were negligible, typically three or four dead and as many injured. The Portuguese fared worse but since no large ships were either sunk or captured, estimates of several hundred dead were probably exaggerated. There would be sterner battles between the English and the Portuguese but they were not fought in the waters off Surat and are therefore often ignored in histories of the Company’s doings in India.
Best outsmarted the Portuguese in two two-day encounters and Downton in a series of protracted skirmishes. The factors naturally took great delight in these victories. Besides confounding their commercial rivals, they had made a most salutary impression on the Moghul authorities. Best’s second assault was watched by a whole Moghul army which lined the shore and later ‘divulged the same farre and near to our nation’s great fame’. Yet at the time both Best and Downton, mindful of the Company’s instruction to avoid hostilities, were reluctant warriors. Best could see no prospect of either loot or lasting commercial advantage and to provide his men with some token of appreciation for their bravery he was obliged to waylay a number of innocent Malabar dhows. The moment the Portuguese backed off he too was all for withdrawing and hastening to Bantam to proceed with the main business of his voyage. Only the urgent protestations of Thomas Aldworth, one of his factors, persuaded him to wait on for Jehangir’s confirmation of the farman and then to leave behind goods and factors at Surat.
Aldworth was immensely optimistic about prospects for trade at Surat. It was, he told the Company in a letter of January 1613, ‘the fountainhead from which we may draw all the trade of the East Indies, for we find here merchandise we can take and sell in nearly all parts of the Indies and in England’. Moreover he hazarded that it could all be paid for with exports of English broadcloth. Best was too ‘incredulous’; in other words he was unconvinced. Profits – his own as well as the Company’s – lay in pepper and spices. He proved his point by eventually showing a handsome return on the investment for his voyage and a colossal profit on his own investment. On his private stock of pepper the freight charges alone would be estimated at £300 and in the wake of his returning fleet the Channel ports were said to be awash with contraband spices. He was saved from prosecution only by the celebrity that attached to his victories over the Portuguese.
Aldworth’s expectations of driving a brisk trade in broadcloth soon proved mistaken. Some was sold as horse blankets – or as their elephant equivalents – but in India as in Japan English tweed never caught on as human apparel. Nevertheless the Indian trade prospered. Indigo, the blue dye obtained from a species of vetch, and of course the usual cornucopia of Indian cottons were readily available and sold well both in the Indonesian archipelago and, increasingly, in England. The Merchant’s Hope, refitted after the Portuguese attack, was the first vessel to sail straight from Surat to England where her cargo of mainly cotton goods was quickly disbursed. Instead of English tweeds revolutionizing Eastern fashions, Indian cottons were about to invade English domestic life. Napkins and table-cloths, bed sheets and soft furnishings, not to mention underwear and dress fabrics, quite suddenly became indispensable to every respectable household. A new vocabulary of chintzes and calicoes, taffetas, muslins, ginghams and cashmeres entered everyday use. Having first invaded the larder, Eastern produce was about to take over the linen cupboard.
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In 1614 the Indian trade was particularly profitable thanks to a temporary falling out between the Emperor and his Portuguese allies which led to an embargo on Portuguese shipping. Cottons became cheaper, indigo plentiful.
At about the same time the Company in London voted to end the system of a separate subscription for each voyage and to replace it with what is usually called the First Joint Stock (1613-16). The joint-stock principle of corporate investment had of course applied to the separate voyages; and in that some of these subscriptions had been extended to include a second voyage while others had been subject to long delays before they could be finally wound up, subscribers had seldom received the quick return which they had anticipated. The First Joint Stock, which was to finance a fleet every year for four years, did not therefore represent a very significant change from the shareholders’ point of view. As with subsequent issues – the Second Joint Stock (1617-22), etc – subscriptions were called in by yearly instalments and dividends paid out in the same way. But it did ensure greater continuity of investment; it enabled the Court of Committees to plan operations over a longer period; and, above all, it promised to end that spectacle, so prevalent at Bantam and to a lesser extent in India, of voyages undercutting one another and of rival factors squabbling over cargoes.
With a view to reorganizing and integrating its various overseas establishments in the light of this development, the Company dispatched William Keeling in 1614 with a supervisory authority to appoint regional Agents, later known as Presidents or Governors. A year later, with encouraging news of Best’s activities at Surat, the Company judged the time right to step up its investment in India; and to match Portuguese influence there, the directors hit on the idea of appealing to King James to appoint an ambassador to the court of Jehangir. This was a novel departure, especially in the context of oriental diplomacy which scarcely recognized commerce as a legitimate reason for accreditation. It seemed sensible enough, though, to King James, especially when the Company volunteered to meet all the ambassadorial expenses. Accordingly, armed with suitable presents and a long list of demands, in 1615 Sir Thomas Roe sailed for Surat. It was, according to most accounts, ‘the turning point in the history of the British in Western India’ and ‘a landmark in the relations between England and India’.
For once the directors had broken their resolution to consort only with ‘men of their own quality’. Roe, a courtier, diplomat and sometime Member of Parliament, described himself as ‘a man of quality’ which, as he proceeded to demonstrate, was a very different thing. When the Governor of Surat received him sitting down and advised him of the usual customs inspection and body search, Roe simply gathered up his entourage and returned to the fleet. Clearly the Indians did ‘not sufficiently understand the rights belonging to my qualitye’; for ‘my king’s honour was engaged more deeply than I did expect and I was resolved to rectifye all or lay my life and fortune both in the ground’. Too many money-grubbing factors – like Hawkins – had been posing as ambassadors. Roe had to make the difference in ‘quality’ plain. He saw his job as ‘repayring a ruined house and making streight that which was crooked’ by, in both speech and conduct, conveying an altogether more exalted and dignified impression of English society and sovereignty. He would make no secret of his contempt for India; it was ‘the dullest, basest place that ever I saw and maketh me weary of speaking of it’. Nor would he brook any nonsense from Moghul officials who ‘triumph over such as yield but are humble enough when they are held up’.
In such utterances there is more than a hint of that distasteful conviction of moral superiority which would one day characterize imperialistic jingo. And perhaps some sense of affinity with Roe explains the enormous importance attached to his mission in later accounts of British beginnings in India. But Roe’s posturing was based on ‘quality’ and class consciousness, not colour and race consciousness. If he was scathing about Jehangir’s subordinates he was no less disdainful of the English factors. In Gujarat, as at Bantam, representatives of the different Company voyages had been quarrelling. Roe was expected to act as peacemaker. In the event it was the universal distrust of his motives and conduct, plus the death of Aldworth (after two years of dysentery he was described as ‘more like an anatomy than a man’), which did most to unite the factors.
With matters of protocol at Surat still unresolved, Roe proceeded inland with a growing list of complaints to lay before the Emperor plus the terms of a rather one-sided treaty of trade and friendship which he hoped to persuade the Emperor to sign. His sobriety and high principles created a favourable impression. Jehangir ‘had never used any ambassadour with so much respect’, he reported. Aloof to the point of priggishness he shunned any imperial camaraderie that might prejudice his own dignity and proved more than a match for the Portuguese representatives. But during three long and weary years at court he failed to secure the desired treaty, he further alienated most of the Company’s factors, and he very nearly sabotaged the one encouraging development of the period. When his term of office ended he was generously applauded by both King and Company but it is significant that a successor was never sought and indeed Roe himself advised against it. ‘My qualitye either begets you enemies or suffers unworthily’, he told the directors; a consul on 1000 rupees a year ‘will serve you better than ten ambassadours’. Jehangir opposed any treaty that would impose limitations on his autocratic behaviour, and his court was no place for a selfless public servant; ‘no conversation,’ moaned Roe, ‘…no such entertainment as my qualitye requireth’.
In matters of trade the Ambassador’s commission forbade him to interfere with the English factors. Although he eventually prevailed on the Company to change this, and although he frequently expressed his commercial opinons with much cogency, they were neither consistent nor convincing. The man who is often credited with having established the Company’s affairs in India on a sound commercial basis in fact condemned what he called ‘the errour of factories’, advised against opening trade with Bengal and Sind (although he had at first favoured both and, from Masulipatnam, Antheuniss was strongly urging the case of Bengal) and took the gloomiest possible view of future prospects. Because English exports, other than bullion, were not in great demand in India, the trade ‘must fall to the ground by the weakness of its own legs’. ‘I hope not in success but I would not the failing were on my part’. At one point he was all for abandoning Surat as the main English port, at another he was asking for permission to build a fort there. Yet, in an oft quoted and supposedly prophetic passage, he strongly advised against fortified settlements. ‘If he [Prince Kurram, the future Shah Jehan] would offer me ten I would not accept one…for without controversy it is an errour to affect garrisons and land warrs in India’. He was thinking of the Portuguese whose ‘many rich residences and territoryes’ were the ‘beggering’ of their trade. ‘Lett this be received as a rule, that if you will profitt, seek it at sea and in quiett trade.’
This quiet maritime trade was, however, to include gratuitous assaults on both Moghul and Portuguese shipping ‘for the offensive is both the nobler and safer part’. ‘We must chasten these people…’ Goa should be blockaded and ‘if the Mogul’s shipps be taken but once in four years there shall come more clear gayne without loss of honour than will advance in seven years by trade’.
Roe was aware that his own influence at Court had as much to do with English naval prowess as with his supposed ‘qualitye’. In 1616 a fleet from England had again fallen in with a Portuguese carrack off the east African coast. ‘She was a ship of exceeding great bulk and burthen, our Charles though a ship of 1000 tons looking like a pinnace when she was beside her.’ Within an hour of the cannonade beginning Benjamin Joseph, commander of the English fleet, was slain. Again the Portuguese fought gallantly, hanging out a lantern at night so that the English could not accuse them of flight. Next day Captain Pepwell of the Globe, Floris’s old ship, was struck by ‘a great shot in his halfe deck’. His master lost an arm and ‘another had his head shot away’. But the carrack was dismasted and rather than surrender, was run aground on one of the Comoro islands. There she was set on fire to prevent the English extracting her cargo. ‘This is the greatest disaster and disgrace that has ever befallen them’, gloated Roe when he heard the news, ‘for they never lost…any such vessel as this which was esteemed invincible; and without supplies they [i.e. the Portuguese at Goa] perish utterly.’
In the same year William Keeling, while making his supervisory tour of the East, violated another Portuguese preserve by entering the Malabar ports. At Calicut he signed a treaty with the ruler, at Cranganore he left a small factory, and at Quilon he captured a Portuguese vessel. But the Dutch also had an eye on the Malabar trade and it would be some time before it figured prominently in English ambitions. The real trial of strength with the Portuguese was to take place a thousand miles away off the coast of Persia.
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Under the great Shah Abbas, Persia had achieved the distinction of being the one Eastern country to reverse the west-east tide of commercial endeavour by actively canvassing its exports, particularly raw silk, in Europe. As the sequel would show, the value of this trade was not inconsiderable. Yet Persia was slow to figure in the reckonings of the London Company.
Interest was first kindled when in 1611 a Persian ambassador presented himself to King James at Hampton Court. Oddly the Shah’s emissary turned out to be an Englishman. Sir Robert Sherley, one of two Catholic brothers who had entered the Shah’s service during the reign of Elizabeth, was also extremely plausible. To end Persia’s dependence on the good will of her Turkish neighbour he sought a contract for the export of raw silk direct from a Persian port to Europe. There was, though, a catch. Payment must be made in bullion and, as well as Turkish resentment, the successful contractor would have to cope with the Portuguese who from their fortress at Hormuz controlled the Persian coast. On the whole the Company, scarcely able to finance its existing trade, felt obliged to decline. But the directors did undertake to provide a passage home for the ambassador, his glamorous Circassian wife and their considerable entourage, plus King James’s ambassador to the Shah, his wife and their entourage. Thus, in 1613, the first Company vessel to sail for Persia was carrying mainly passengers.
After calling at Dhofar in Oman the Expedition somehow managed to overshoot Persia and first attempted to land its distinguished company at Gwadar in ‘the rugged and mouldy land’ of Baluchistan. This was almost a disaster. Far from being loyal Persian subjects as the Sherleys imagined, the Baluchis were in fact at war with the Shah and had every intention of massacring both ambassadors. Fortunately the mistake was discovered in time and the Expedition put back to sea. The next port was Lahribandar in Sind, near the modern Karachi. Here the party was put ashore amid considerable protest. Sir Thomas Powell, the English ambassador, died immediately and was soon followed by his wife, who died in childbirth. Their infant son (probably the first entirely English child to be born in India) survived his parents by only a few days. But the Sherleys fared better; after a visit to Jehangir at Agra, they eventually regained Isfahan, the Persian capital.
It was word of Sherley’s influence there, plus the encouraging reports of an overland traveller called Steel, which alerted the English factors at Surat to the possibilities of the Persian trade. With large stocks of unsaleable broadcloth on their hands they first sent Steel back to Persia to assess the tweed market. Then, in 1616, they dispatched the first vessel to the Persian port of Jask. Sherley had secured from the Shah the necessary farman and the factors were thus willing to take up an initiative that had been scorned by the Company in London.
It was also being scorned by Sir Thomas Roe. In 1615 he had declared Jask the ideal place for selling cloth and buying silk; and in 1618 he would rightly see the Persian silk trade as ‘the best of all India’. But in 1616, because the initiative was coming from the factors, he told them the venture was ‘against all reason’ and ‘at extreme peril and chardge’. Far from deterring the factors this only encouraged them. The James landed her cargo at Jask, the chief factor was well received by Shah Abbas, and factories were opened at Shiraz and Isfahan. Roe continued to try and discredit the venture but in 1618 the first consignment of raw silk reached Surat and eventually London. It sold for three times its cost price. The factors were vindicated.
In the following year the whole Surat fleet went on to Jask and in 1620 Andrew Shilling, he who had just annexed the Cape, also took his four ships into Persian waters. But by now the Portuguese had bestirred themselves. Ruy Freire de Andrade, ‘the Pride of Portugal’, had been dispatched from Lisbon and was awaiting the English fleet off Jask with four ships and numerous frigates. ‘In a word’, recalled one of Shilling’s men, ‘the drums and trumpets summoned us and we went chearfully to the business.’
Persia’s rugged and uncompromising coastline was little suited to wily English tactics. For two days the opposing fleets slogged it out with a murderous exchange of shot and ball, fireworks and bullets. On the second day, ‘while we were wrapt in smoake and sweating in blood’ Shilling was hit. He died in what the English chose to regard as the hour of victory; for ‘not to receive a supper as hot as their dinner’ the Portuguese ships ‘cut their cables and drove with the tide’. The English, who were practically out of ammunition, did not give chase.
Next year John Weddell in command of five ships and as many pinnaces came well prepared. Ruy Freire was known to have received reinforcements and Weddell confidently expected another trial of strength. He was not however expecting to end Portugal’s 100 years of domination in Persian waters and was neither prepared nor authorized for any such offensive.
Just as in south-east Asia Portuguese power hinged on command of the Malacca Straits so in south-west Asia it hinged on command of the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf. On the island of Hormuz their main fortress was seen as the western bastion of their empire. If the world were an egg, Hormuz, according to the proverb, was its yolk. The fortress was thought to be impregnable and likely to outlast even Malacca. But this had not deterred the Shah. Stung into action by a series of Portuguese raids designed to induce him to dismiss the English, he had dispatched to the Straits in 1621 a formidable army. Given that Hormuz was an island, a navy might have been more effective but the Persians possessed no such force. Thus when Weddell sailed into sight at the end of the year, stalemate had been reached. The Persians were besieging a fort on the nearby island of Qishm (Kishm) whence the Hormuz garrison usually obtained its water and provisions. But Portuguese ships still controlled the seaways and Hormuz itself looked as impregnable as ever.
Naturally Weddell was never so welcome. The Persians hailed his timely arrival as evidence of divine intervention and quickly explained what was expected of him. Though often dubbed ‘the stormy petrel’ of the Company’s commanders, Weddell hesitated. There was some doubt about whether morally the English should side with a heathen prince against fellow Christians, albeit of the most detested persuasion; there was good reason to suppose that a skipper’s right to defend himself on the high seas did not extend to taking the offensive against a land base belonging to a nation with whom England was supposedly on good terms; and there was the absolute certainty that what the Surat President (or Chief Factor) chose to call ‘this airye enterprise’ would be censured by their employers on the grounds of cost, risk and delay.
Yet this was all by the by. The Persians were offering attractive incentives – like a contribution to costs, a share of the plunder, increased trading rights, customs exemption, and half the proceeds from the customs of the nearby port of Gombroon (Bandar Abbas, Bandar Khomeini) – and they were backing them with some unthinkable threats. Unless the English co-operated they could expect to leave without a cargo and without a trading future in Persia.
Under the circumstances and after much heart searching and persuasion, Weddell declared that he had no choice. Accordingly on 23 January 1622 ‘it was resolved to invite our enymies to a banquet of fire flying bullits’. The Portuguese refused to relinquish the safety of Hormuz’s batteries so the English went into Qishm. Guns were landed and on 1 February ‘the Pertian general and wee hand in hand’ took possession of Qishm fort. It was probably the first time that the cross of St George had flown beside the Shah’s ensign. Ruy Freire was among the prisoners and was duly sent to Surat. But the English too had lost a valued Captain. ‘The man who we shall find the greatest miss of’, wrote Weddell, ‘is Mr Baffin who was killed outright with a muskit on shoare.’ Apparently he ‘gave three leaps and died immediately.’ In a grave of Persian sand the Arctic explorer was laid to rest.
The Persian troops were now ferried across to Hormuz and on 9 February the main siege began. Mining and tunnelling to great effect the Persians breached the walls; but more Portuguese poured out than Persians in. For two months, while the English concentrated on battering the enemy’s ships to extinction, the issue remained in doubt. Without hope of relief the Portuguese yet defended valiantly. In the end it was disease as much as destruction that gradually undermined their position. A second breach was repaired but, knowing a third must prove fatal, on 23 April the garrison surrendered and Albuquerque’s fortress fell to the allies. It was indeed St George’s Day.
Subsequent squabbles somewhat obscured the achievement. Weddell and his men would be held responsible for the general pillage that took place and would be suspected of having made off with much of the booty. Moreover, the Company’s complaints about the cost of the operation would be doubly compounded, first by the Lord High Admiral demanding a £10,000 share of the supposed proceeds and then by the King demanding a similar sum for ignoring the inevitable diplomatic protests from Lisbon. But on the credit side, English prestige throughout the East now soared. ‘If you may have possession of Ormuz’, wrote President Fursland from Bantam, ‘Your Worships may reckon that you have gotten the keye of all India.’ He had just presided over the English withdrawal from the Spice Islands, Japan and Siam. Success at Hormuz and the vitality of the Persian trade was a greater compensation than anything that had been achieved within the realm of the Moghul; it would be ‘a bridle to our faithless neighbours the Dutch and keepe all Moores in awe of us’. Without doubt the capture of Hormuz was the most sensational proof yet afforded of the Company’s naval might in Asia.
The Portuguese took their loss to heart. In Lisbon the commander of the Hormuz garrison was tried in his absence and hanged in effigy. Fleets from Goa attempted to blockade Gombroon, the port to which the English had removed from Jask, and in 1625 they precipitated another titanic engagement. It was ‘thought to be one of the greatest that ever was fought’ according to Weddell who again commanded the English contingent and who was not given to exaggeration. But this time he had a new ally. The Dutch had duly noted English successes in the Arabian Sea and had opened their own factory at Surat. They still regarded the Portuguese as their natural foe and, by that Treaty of Defence which proved so disastrous for the English in the Archipelago, they were officially in alliance with the Company. Thus Weddell’s four ships were now joined by a Dutch fleet of similar size.
In all sixteen vessels plus a host of frigates and pinnaces were involved. The battle raged for three days and a final reckoning seemed to give victory to the allies; to their sixty dead it was claimed that the Portuguese had lost nearly 500. But this must have been an exaggeration for six months later the same Portuguese fleet was back in Persian waters and taking its revenge. It fell on the ill-starred Lion, a ship of about 400 tons crewed, if John Taylor, ‘the water-poet’, is to be believed, entirely by heroes. At their first attempt the Portuguese detached the Lion from her fleet, partially fired her, then boarded her and took her in tow. The English prepared to blow her up, but ‘God in his wisdome stayed us by putting it into the mind of some of our men to let fall an anchor’.
Which being done (the tide running very strong) brought our ship to so strong a bitter [i.e. halt] that the fast which the Portugals had upon us brake, whose unexpected suddaine departure from us left 50 or 60 of their men upon our poope, who still maintained their fire in such sort that we were forced to blow them up, which blast tore all the sterne of our ship to peeces from the middle decke upwards.
Miraculously the Lion, charred, battered and half demolished, was still afloat. She limped into Gombroon, discharged her cargo, and was promptly assailed by another Portuguese squadron. This time there was no escape. Forty-two men died as they finally blew up the ship, twenty-six were captured and beheaded, and of the rest all except ten had fallen in battle. ‘Thus was this good ship and men unfortunately and lamentably lost’, writes Taylor with admirable restraint, ‘yet as much courage and manly resolution as possibly could bee was performed by the English, nor can it bee imagined how more industry and truer valour could have been shewed.’
Nothing fuelled English resolve like a magnificent disaster. When word reached Surat that the Portuguese had ‘got into a hole called Bombay’ to refit, Weddell’s Anglo-Dutch fleet stormed down the coast. They were too late; the enemy had fled leaving only the town for the English to avenge themselves on. Thus, in October 1626, the first English to visit Bombay came as raiders. Warehouse, friary, fort and mansions were put to the torch along with two new frigates ‘not yett from the stocks’. A wild notion that this ‘excellent harbour’ with its ‘pleasant fruitfull soil’ might be worth occupying was scouted but firmly rejected as far too provocative.
Hostilities with the Portuguese rumbled on. The eventual peace which was signed at Goa in 1635 by William Methwold, now President at Surat, should have changed the whole balance of maritime power in the East. That was how the Dutch and the Moghul emperor saw it and they bitterly opposed it. It opened to the English Goa itself, the Portuguese settlements on the Malabar coast, and numerous other ports from Basra in Iraq to Tatta in Sind and Macao off the Chinese mainland. It would also last indefinitely, thus ironically enabling the Portuguese settlements in India to survive even the British Raj. But at the time its possible advantages were not paramount. The main point was that neither the Portuguese nor the English could afford to go on quarrelling. Thanks mainly to the Dutch in the East and the Spanish at home, the Portuguese empire was in an advanced state of decline. (In 1641 Malacca itself would fall to the Dutch.) And as for the English, the London Company was now approaching what may be regarded as the nadir of its eastern commerce.
PART TWO FLUCTUATING FORTUNES 1640-1710 (#ulink_ec6b2608-16a7-5aa8-afcd-8ee52927740b)
CHAPTER SIX These Frowning Times (#ulink_987585ce-2202-5882-be97-106f50c18efc)
RECESSION, FAMINE AND WAR
Overseas the growth of the East India Company during the first two decades of its existence had been decidedly impressive. By 1620 the Presidencies of Bantam and Surat – ‘Presidencies’ because from about that time their Chief Factors were designated ‘Presidents’ – controlled nearly 200 factors scattered over more than a dozen trading centres. In the case of Bantam these stretched from Macassar to Masulipatnam and in the case of Surat from the Malabar Coast to the Red Sea.
But to the stay-at-home Englishman, dodging the sewers of his timbered metropolis and worrying about the next outbreak of plague, these exotic claims meant little. Masulipatnam could have been Mars – and to the lazy-tongued it probably was. For a peck of pepper and a bolt of brocade why, he might have asked, so much fuss? Or to so much fuss, why so little substance?
To remedy such unenlightened comment the loyal Company servant would have recommended a trip down the Thames. As yet the Company boasted no prestigious offices and until 1621 it still operated from the home of Sir Thomas Smythe, its governor. Built by his father, ‘Customer Smythe’ (because he had belonged to a syndicate which farmed the realm’s customs), this establishment was in Philpot Lane off Fenchurch Street. It was evidently of some size for it included a hall large enough for meetings of the General Court and could sleep 120 people. But with a permanent staff of half a dozen, the Company occupied only two or three rooms. For a warehouse it leased a disused section of Cosby House, a much grander edifice in Bishopsgate. In 1617, with subscriptions for the Second Joint Stock pouring in, the optimistic directors rented the whole of Cosby House. Here Sir Morris Abbot presided over the Court of Committees as they fulminated over the Amboina affair or greeted the news of Methwold’s Anglo-Portuguese truce. But in 1638 the Cosby House lease expired and once again the Company became a live-in tenant, this time in the Lime Street home of its new governor, Sir Christopher Clitherow. Although destined to remain on this site, colonizing abutting buildings and eventually acquiring a frontage on adjacent Leadenhall Street, the Company’s initial occupancy extended only to a few small and badly lit apartments.
But downriver from the City’s cramped thoroughfares, anytime during the winter months, the launch-pad of Eastern enterprise provided a sight to savour. Here, attended by a host of lighters, seven or eight of the tall ships later known as Indiamen might be viewed riding at anchor while final preparations were made for their dispatch. From every masthead and yard-arm there flapped flags and pennants of disproportionate size; all bore the red on white cross of St George. Seamen swarmed through the rigging; crates of livestock cluttered the decks. It was a sight, according to one traveller, rivalled only by that of ‘St Paul’s great church’.
Larger than most merchantmen of their day and as heavily armed as warships, the Indiamen were a source of national pride. Maritime artists generally preferred a low-angle half-profile from astern which would reveal the architectural character of a high blunt poop. Here arabesques in red and gold framed a deep veranda with, stacked above it, a row of leaded Tudor casements and perhaps a bow window. Lace curtains hinted at luxury within, for this was the roundhouse, the most sought-after accommodation on board; the captain’s apartments were on the next timbered storey. But amidships the ‘tea-shoppe’ aspect disappeared. From a row of square ports cannon and culverin of brass gleamed brightly between the scuppers and the waterline.
By 1620 the Company operated thirty to forty ‘tall ships’. Most belonged to the Company and many had been built in its own dockyards at Deptford and Blackwall. The latter, commissioned in 1614, was the first yard to be constructed on the left bank of the Thames and was the genesis of the later East India Dock. To anyone curious about technological advance, it was another of the capital’s sights ‘daily visited and viewed by strangers as well [as] Embassadours’. Here, besides wet and dry docks, there were timber yards, a foundry and cordage works for supplying the ships’ hardware and a bakery and saltings for their provisioning. More than 200 craftsmen were directly employed in the yard. Added to the ships’ crewing requirements they made the Company one of London’s largest employers.
An industrial as well as a mercantile enterprise, the Company had also become a financial giant. The First Joint Stock (1613-16) raised £418,000 and the Second (1617-22) a colossal £1.6 million. Part of these sums had somehow to be converted into Spanish silver rials, the most acceptable currency in the East. Thus the procurement of rials – like that of ships, ships’ supplies, armaments, provisions, and export cargoes – became a major preoccupation which absorbed the attentions of an important sub-committee drawn from the members of the Court of Committees. It also spawned a network of financiers and overseas agents. In conjunction with the Company’s other financial requirements, particularly borrowing facilities, it is no exaggeration to say that East India business generated the London money market just as it did the London docks.
But expansion so fast and so furious had not gone unnoticed. Abroad it had attracted enemies, notably the Dutch in the East Indies and the Portuguese in the Arabian Sea; at home it stimulated outspoken critics both outside the Company and within it plus, eventually, determined rivals. Extraneous factors – like famine in India and civil war in England – would prove catastrophic. Yet so dramatic had been the rise in the Company’s fixed charges for ships, dockyards, factories, and office staff (whose number had risen to eighteen in the spacious surroundings of Cosby House) that even in ideal trading conditions the pace of expansion must have faltered.
In the event it was dramatically reversed. If histories of the Company in the seventeenth century tend to dwell at length on its first few decades this is simply because so much of its business was concentrated in that period.
Statistics tell one side of the story. Whereas between 1611 and 1620 the Company despatched fifty-five ships to the east, during the 1620s the total fell to forty-six, during the 1630s to thirty-five, and during the 1640s and 1650s to around twenty. On the twelve separate voyages prior to 1613 profits had often been sensational; an average figure of 155 per cent has been suggested. And on the First Joint Stock a respectable 87 per cent was recorded. But on the Second Joint Stock the figure was down to 12 per cent and the period of investment was the longest yet; on an annual basis it appreciated less than 1 per cent. Not surprisingly a Third Joint Stock, launched in 1631, raised only a comparatively modest £420,000 much of which proved difficult to call in. And four successive stocks between 1636 and 1656 raised just £600,000 in aggregate.
As in 1602-6, the crisis of confidence provoked bitter disagreements between the directors, or Committees, and the shareholders, or General Court. The latter, primarily interested in a quick return on their investment and now including factions representing both court and government, saw their declining dividends as evidence of mismanagement. They vigorously attacked the conduct of the directors and of Sir Morris Abbot in particular, demanding greater access to the Company’s accounts, a secret ballot for the election of directors, and regular quarterly meetings of the General Court. The directors, most of whom were still wealthy city merchants and aldermen, fought back. They conceded the ballot and conciliated their more influential opponents; but Abbot, supported by the King, insisted that the Company’s constitution could only be changed by altering its charter. In 1628 Abbot also managed to push through a resolution that in future only those with holdings worth £2000 or more could stand for election as directors. Far from undermining the directors’ authority, these early quarrels therefore tended to entrench it. Between them just three men (Smythe, Abbot and William Cockayne, governor from 1643 till 1657) monopolized the governorship for forty-seven of the Company’s first fifty-seven years; and it was much the same story with the deputy-governorship. Continuity of management made up for the discontinuity inevitable with a system of short-term stocks. Boardroom dissent was not therefore the cause of the financial crisis, merely a symptom of it.
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