But the difference did not lie in size alone. Most merchant ships were officered by men who had worked their way up from before the mast; sometimes no more than two of them were really capable navigators, and their Captains were often drunkards; whereas the officers of the Company's ships ranked nearly as high as those of the Royal Navy. Indeed transferences between the two Services were frequent, particularly from the Navy to the Company in peace time, as the Commander of an Indiaman, although usually financed by City Merchants, could often show a profit of as much as £10,000 on his personal trading in a single voyage.
In addition to six mates and four midshipmen, the average Indiaman carried a purser, surgeon, surgeon's mate, boatswain, gunner, coxswain, six quartermasters, captain's steward, captain's cook, barber, armourer, sailmaker, caulker, cooper, butcher, baker, poulterer, and teams of carpenters, cooks and stewards. The crews of such ships were well-drilled in arms and they were equipped with as many as thirty-two guns; so convoys had nothing to dread from sea-rovers, and had often given a good account of themselves when attacked by enemy squadrons during the wars with France.
It was on Sunday mornings that these fine ships were seen at their best, as the officers donned their uniforms, which differed only slightly from those of the Royal Navy, all beardless seamen had to shave, the whole ship's company put on their best clothes, and everything was made spick and span for the Commander's inspection. He began by making a round of the whole ship while the men stood to attention at their various posts. When he had finished, drums beat to quarters and everyone, including the male passengers who were armed with boarding-pikes, went to their action stations. Afterwards the Commander held a service, and the rest of the day was one of leisure for the crew.
On week days, weather permitting, from eight o'clock onward, a good part of the deck was occupied by the army officers drilling their men to keep them as fit as possible. By half-past eight the space reserved for passengers began to fill up, and they either read their books or played games such as quoits, cup and ball, darts and shuttle cock, until one o'clock, when they went down to change for dinner. In the evenings they amused themselves with music, amateur theatricals, charades, spelling bees, poetry readings and guessing games.
At table the conversation, as was to be expected, turned frequently to Indian affairs. Even those who were going out for the first time were fairly well informed upon them, as for the past quarter of a century they had been the subject of many a heated discussion in England, and Parliament had given as much time to debating them as it was later to do in the 1890's and 1900's to the affairs of Ireland.
Within living memory the whole sub-continent had been the Empire of the Great Moguls, whose capital was at Delhi, For two centuries they had ruled it through their Nizams or Nawabs, as were called the Viceroys to whom they delegated their authority over vast areas of the country. But early in the reign of King George II the Mogul Empire had begun to disintegrate.
The Persians invaded, and for a time annexed, the provinces in the north-west; the Nawabs of Oudh, Bihar and Bengal, in the north-east, asserted their independence, and all central and southern India also broke away. Hyderabad, Mysore, and the Carnatic became great sovereign states in the south. The Rajput Princes formed their own confederacy, and below it the whole of central India, from Gujaret on the Arabian sea to Orissa on the Bay of Bengal, became a still more powerful confederacy under the Maratha Princes, who had their capital at Poona. The result had been that during the middle decades of the century, these many nobles, great and small, had torn the country with a score of wars, each seeking to enlarge his territories or to overrun temporarily and plunder those of his neighbours.
This long period of strife and uncertainty had had a profound effect on the affairs of the Honourable East India Company. For a hundred and fifty years the Company had adhered to the Charter granted to it by Queen Elizabeth, in the heart of which stood the noble phrase, 'for the honour of this our realm of England as for the increase of our navigation and the advancement of trade…' The Company had never sought conquest and had resorted little to arms, except against its competitors: the Portuguese, Dutch and French; and its monopoly of the right to trade, which included China and the whole of South East Asia, had brought it enormous wealth. But with India divided into as many states as Europe, and a number of them ruled by treacherous warrior adventurers, the Company found itself compelled not only to wage minor wars in the protection of its interests, but, in certain cases, to protect them for the future by assuming permanent control over territories in which those interests lay.
Apart from outlying trading posts, these territories were three in number. The most important was in the most distant part of India: its extreme north-eastern province of Bengal. In the wide mouth of the Hooghly river there the Portuguese had very early established a settlement, but in 1632 Shah Jahan had exterminated it and soon afterwards, the Dutch and English managed to get a foothold; although it was not until sixty years later the Company received permission to move its headquarters farther up the river to a little fishing village, later to become the great city of Calcutta.
In the hundred years that followed, the Company's Servants penetrated deep into the interior to the north-west, through the rich provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Oudh up to Delhi and far beyond into the Punjab and Kashmir. The river of trade that flowed back had, by Roger's day, made Calcutta one of the great metropoli of India with its British residents and garrison already numbering several thousands.
The Company's next most important centre was at Madras, another small fishing village a thousand miles south-west of Calcutta, on the Carnatic coast, at which in 1640 they had been given permission to erect a fort. From it they traded right up the east coast of India, across its tip through Mysore to the Malabar coast on the west, and up into the great province of Hyderabad, which occupied nearly the whole of the central part of Southern India.
Lastly, more than half way up the west coast, six hundred miles from Madras and over a thousand from Calcutta-both across country as the crow flies-lay the island of Bombay. It had come to the British crown as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, and in 1667 King Charles II had leased it to the Company for £10 per annum. It was the finest natural harbour in India, no greater distance from London than Madras and a thousand miles nearer than Calcutta; but it had not developed to anything approaching the other two, the reason being that it was too far north to handle the Malabar coast trade and was cut off by difficult mountain country from the productive regions to the north and east. Nevertheless, it had grown into a considerable city and was a most valuable naval base.
The anarchy following the dissolution of the Mogul Empire had been further aggravated by the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1743 over the question of the Austrian Succession. By this time the French, who had come later into the field than the Portuguese, Dutch and British, had also established powerful trading centres, notably at Chander-nagore on the Hooghly and at Pondicherry, about a hundred miles south of Madras.
Pondicherry was the French headquarters and its able and energetic governor, the Marquis de Dupliex, promptly attempted to bring the whole of Southern India under French influence. He captured Madras and forced the remnant of the British community there to shut themselves up in Fort St. David. He then supported the claims of two pretenders to the thrones of Hyderabad and the Carnatic and ousted the pro-British potentates who occupied them.
It was then that Robert, afterwards Lord, Clive had first made a name for himself. Originally a young writer to the Company, he had early transferred to a cadetship in its armed forces. By 1751 the British cause was in a parlous state. Mohammed Ali, whom they were supporting as the rightful ruler of the Carnatic, had been driven from his capital at Arcot and, heavily outnumbered, was besieged in Trichinopoly. Clive's force was so meagre that he could not possibly hope to defeat the besieging army. Instead, with the intention of drawing them off, he surp
rised and took Arcot, the capital newly won by the pretender.
This brilliant stroke succeeded. Mohammed Ali was saved from surrender and death by the pretender's hurriedly abandoning the siege and hastening back with his army to Arcot; but he now bottled Clive up in it. With only eight young officers, two hundred Europeans and six hundred Indian troops, Clive withstood for fifty days a siege and assaults by an army twenty thousand strong. At length a Maratha Prince, out of admiration for his bravery, brought an army to his assistance. Arcot was relieved and the Carnatic preserved as a sphere of British influence.
In Hyderabad, things went the other way. Dupliex's talented second-in-command, the Comte de Bussy, secured this vast central territory for the French and became, in effect, for several years, its ruler.
In 1754, peace in Europe brought peace in India. Dupliex was recalled and Clive went home. But the peace was only a very temporary one. In '56, the general war broke out again, and it was in that year that the young, dissolute and avaricious Nawab of Bengal, Surajah Dowlah, inspired by the French, made a treacherous surprise attack on Calcutta. The fortress was in an ill state of repair and the garrison below strength, but that hardly excuses the cowardly conduct of the governor who fled with his council to the ships in the harbour, leaving 146 Europeans to the mercy of the enemy. They were jammed into in old prison known as the Black Hole, and only 23 of them were still alive next morning.
In the meantime, Clive was on his way out again, now with full powers as the Company's General. The following January he took the field. With nine hundred British soldiers and fifteen hundred 'sepoys', as the European trained Indian troops were called, he recaptured Calcutta and repulsed the forty-thousand-strong army of Surajah Dowlah. In the spring, the French settlement of Chandernagore was captured and, in June, Clive again faced Surajah Dowlah's army at Plassey. The young Prince's contemptuous treatment of his nobles had made him many enemies at his own court, and his principal General, Mir Jafer, treacherously advised retreat. Clive then fell upon and routed Surajah Dowlah's army; he was murdered and Mir Jafer placed on his throne.
That was the end of French influence in Northern India and they were soon to lose their hold in the south. In January 1760, they were decisively defeated at Waniswash and a year later had to surrender Pondicherry. Meanwhile, a year earlier, Clive had defeated a powerful Dutch expedition, and when he left India no European power remained there capable of challenging British interests.
The Indian States were, however, far from permanently pacified, and in 1765 Clive was sent back for a further term of office. With a diplomacy equalling his military renown, he entered into treaties with numerous potentates, including the titular Emperor in Delhi, which gave the Company control of the state revenues in Bengal and Bihar, made it the virtual master of Oudh and the Carnatic, and gave it the trading rights in the Northern Circas, which had previously been enjoyed by the French.
There followed the events which for the whole of Roger's lifetime had caused an almost constant succession of heated debates in the British Parliament.
The struggle with France and Clive's activities had changed the Company from a great organisation concerned only with trade to one also responsible for the administration of vast territories. The Company had not sought, and was actually averse to assuming, such responsibilities, and the majority of its Servants were unsuited, by habits they had already acquired, to be trusted with such work.
Those habits arose from the fact that the Company paid its Servants hopelessly inadequate salaries, compensating them with the right to trade on their own account, and that in the East immemorial custom decreed that anyone who benefited from a transaction should give the other party to it a present. Mir Jafer, for example, on being placed by the British on the throne of Bengal, had distributed among Clive and his officers half-a-million pounds. Later Clive had been called to account by Parliament. His reaction had been to protest that he stood astonished that he had been content with such a modest sum, and Parliament, knowing the circumstances, unanimously acquitted him of having used his power to enrich himself unreasonably. But, now that the Servants of the Company, great and small, had become officials with such wide powers of patronage, they proceeded to use them most unscrupulously.
Stories came home to England of Indian merchants and land-owners being blackmailed and otherwise oppressed. Such tales were soon followed by an influx of middle-class and often vulgar Servants of the Company who had brought home fortunes, were termed in no friendly spirit 'Nabobs', and whose ostentation gave considerable offence in the country areas where they bought properties from the worse-off of the old land-owning class. The misery of the Indian people had been further increased in 1770 by the most terrible famine on record, and hundreds of influential people in Britain were agitating for their interests to be protected.
This national outcry led to the Regulating Act of 1773, by which the Company's nominee for Governor-General had to be approved by Government and, although given authority over Madras and Bombay as well as Calcutta, his every act had to receive the sanction of a Council, a majority of whom could, if they disagreed with his policy, obstruct it with a veto. The Act also created a High Court of Justice to which Indians could appeal without fear that it would favour the Company, since its Judges were responsible only to the Home Government.
This was the first shackle put upon the complete independence of the Company, and it fell heaviest on Warren Hastings, whom they had appointed as Governor of Bengal the previous year. Hastings was a man of integrity, vision and vigour, but he was faced with the still unsettled state of India and the competing ambitions of its many Princes.
The Marathas, who had combined under the Peshwa at Poona, were again in control in the north at Delhi. To the east of it an Afghan chief had usurped the throne of Rohilkhand and was threatening Oudh. In the west, owing to a trade route dispute, the Marathas were threatening Bombay. In the south Hyderabad had become hostile to the Company and the throne of Mysore had been seized by a Mohammedan adventurer named Hyder Ali, who threatened to. and later did, overrun the Carnatic.
The new Council consisted of five members: Hastings, who was its chairman, Barwell, a Senior Servant who understood the problems of the Company and so loyally supported Hastings, and three nominees of Parliament whose ignorance of India was such that, on landing in Calcutta, they thought that because the natives had bare feet it was because the Company had inflicted taxes so crushing upon them that they could no longer afford boots. Led by Philip Francis, the newcomers at once adopted a line of violent opposition to Hastings, and by their majority in Council consistently thwarted his attempts to bring order out of chaos.
For two years his position was made intolerable, then one of Francis's supporters died, giving Hastings control through his casting vote as chairman. But the bitter struggle continued for another four years until Francis, after having been wounded in a duel by Hastings, went home.
During those years Britain had become involved in war with her American Colonists, France, Holland and Spain, and once more events in Europe had their repercussions in India. Although Britain's enemies could no longer put an army in the field there, they could still stimulate avaricious Princes to take up arms against the Company, and Hastings had to wage wars against the Marathas who menaced Bombay, the Rohillas in support of Britain's ally Oudh, and Hyder Ali the bold usurper of the throne of Mysore. With the aid of three fine soldiers, General Sir Eyre Coote and Colonels Goddard and Popham, all three wars were won. and by brilliant diplomacy Hastings secured the paramountcy of the Company over vast areas of India.
But the wars had to be paid for. The Company grudged every penny spent on military operations and, owing to many years of rapacity and mismanagement by its Servants, its funds had dwindled alarmingly. The war in America and Europe had strained the resources of the Government at home to such a point that it could not afford to give help. So Hastings had to find the money himself. He found it in the onl
y way possible for him: by withholding subsidies the Company had contracted to pay to certain potentates whose friendship was now doubtful, and by extracting great sums from the Indian allies whose territories he was protecting.
In 1873 a general peace was agreed by the Powers. The following year young Mr. Pitt, who had recently become Prime Minister, put through Parliament his India Act. Its object was to put an end to corrupt and arbitrary administration by the Company's Servants. In effect, Parliament took over the responsibility for ruling all areas that were, or should come, under British control. An India Board was created with Dundas as its President, and for the future the Company was required to frame its policy, and nominate its senior Servants, in consultation with the Board. Thus after two hundred years the Company finally lost all power in India other than its trading monopoly.
In the teeth of extraordinary difficulties, Hastings had already introduced many of the reforms which were the object of Pitt's Bill. He was the best friend that the people of India ever had, and he laid the foundations for the just and honourable administration of the Indian Civil Service which, in the following century, did so much to develop the country and bring western civilisation to it.
But in 1784 he returned home to be met with ingratitude and obloquy. With almost unbelievable venom his old enemy Francis stirred up Parliament against him. He was made the scapegoat for his corrupt predecessors and colleagues, and impeached. Burke, the most brilliant orator of the day, had taken up the cause of the oppressed people of India and hurled invective at him. Fox and Sheridan resorted to every mean trick their excellent intelligences could devise to pull him down.
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