The Spoils of Conquest

by Seth Hunter

  Nelson’s letter in the Prologue is a close approximation of the real despatch he wrote at the time to the Governor of Bombay. It forms part of the collection assembled between 1844 and 1846 by the historian and former naval officer Sir Nicholas Nicolas, and you can see the originals, in Nelson’s own handwriting, in the National Archives at Kew.

  The principle change I have made is to the postscript.

  In the real postscript he wrote:

  The Officer, Lieutenant Duval, who carries this Despatch voluntarily to you, will, I trust, be immediately sent to England, with such recommendations as his conduct will deserve.

  Lieutenant Thomas Duval was an officer on the seventy-four-gun Zealous, which had taken part in the battle. He travelled by Scanderoon to Iskanderun and then by horse and camel overland through Aleppo to Baghdad, where he transferred to a sambuk for the journey down the Tigris to Bassara, or Basra. Thence by the Fly packet to Bombay where he delivered his despatches to the Governor, Jonathan Duncan.

  I’ve appropriated this journey for Nathan Peake and his companions. The chief of these, Spiridion Foresti, is based on a real-life character of that name who was British consul in Corfu until the French invasion of the previous year and was known to Nelson and others as the best intelligence agent in the region. However, at the time the novel is set, he was held by the French as a British spy and although he was later released, I have no evidence that he was ever in Egypt, Syria or Iraq.

  Ben Hallowell is another real-life character – he was the captain of the Swiftsure, which Duval encountered on his journey to Iskanderun just after it had captured the French corvette Fortune. I’ve invented the meeting between Nathan and Hallowell, of course, but the rather unlikely story of the mast from L’Orient is true. Hallowell did have it made into a coffin for Nelson, who was touched by the gift. He kept it behind his chair in his dining room on the flagship, until his captains and his servants complained about it, and he had it sent to his undertaker in London. On his last leave home, before Trafalgar, he visited the undertaker and had it upholstered in satin, ready for his use. After the battle, his body was brought back to England preserved in brandy and wine. It was transferred to Ben Hallowell’s coffin where it was viewed by the populace in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital, before it travelled to its final resting place in the crypt of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

  Although Nathan follows the exact route taken by Duval, the events on the journey are either invented or taken from the journal of Abraham Parsons, former British consul in Iskanderun who made a similar journey in 1774.

  I’ve described Bombay Harbour and the ships of the Bombay Marine from contemporary accounts in the East India Company archives kept in the British Library. The landing of the French in Mangalore is also true, but the encounter between the Bombay Marine and the French squadron is a piece of fiction.

  The French squadron itself was real enough and I’ve used the names of the real ships and commanders. However, the events at Mangalore, Devil’s Point and the Andaman Isles are imagined.

  In fact, the Forte was captured in battle with the frigate Sybille in February 1799 in the Balasore Roads in the Bay of Bengal. An excellent account of the battle by Lieutenant Hardyman of the Sybille can be found in the Asiatic Annual Register of 1798/99. The Forte was a monster. She mounted thirty 24-pounders on her main gun deck and fourteen 12-pounders, with eight 36-pounder carronades on her forecastle and quarterdeck (which were not counted as ‘proper’ guns in her rating), and she was crewed by 470 officers and men. The Sybille had 38 guns and about 350 men, but she took the Forte prize with the loss of almost half the French crew dead and wounded. One interesting detail of Hardyman’s account, which I have used in my story, is the crucial role of smoke in a sea battle. The smoke from the guns was so dense that the Forte could not see her opponent for much of the battle and fired at a merchant vessel on her starboard quarter while the Sybille came up on the opposite side and pounded her into submission.

  The battle of Port Blair is my own invention entirely. The port had been a penal colony run by the British East India Company but was abandoned at the time, because of the death toll from disease, probably malaria. Colonel Arthur Wellesley – who later became the Duke of Wellington – was in Madras at the time, preparing for the invasion of Mysore.

  The story of Tipu’s death in the Epilogue is true – as far as we know. The story of Lieutenant Joyce is not. There has never, to my knowledge, been a Zoroastrian in command of a ship of the Royal Navy, but I am happy to stand corrected.

  Most of what I have written about the British East India Company is true. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a group of London merchants a royal charter giving them a monopoly on trade between Britain and the East Indies. Shares were owned by wealthy merchants and aristocrats, and over the next hundred years the company established factories in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, trading mainly in cotton, silk and spices.

  India was then part of the Islamic Mughul Empire, but the emperor’s authority was in decline and the country was torn by wars between rival factions and dynasties, many of whom established semi-independent provinces. European powers led by the Portuguese established bases in many coastal areas – and the rivalry between them led to more wars.

  The British East India Company built up a large private army, initially to protect its trading interests and to expel its European rivals. It formed alliances with native princes and supported them against their own internal rivals. Eventually, it had the biggest army in India and controlled vast swathes of India territory, dispensing justice and collecting taxes. It also established its own navy – the Bombay Marine. It was, in effect, an imperial power. The taxes it collected made far more profit than trade. In fact, by the end of the eighteenth century, the company’s profits came down to two things – taxes and tea.

  The English love affair with tea began in the 1660s when Charles II’s Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza, introduced it to the English court. By the 1750s, it had become the national drink.

  The British East India Company had the monopoly on the supply of tea, which came exclusively from China, and which they paid for by exporting English wool and Indian cotton.

  But in the 1750s, the Qing emperor decreed that as China had all the goods it could ever need, all trade with foreigners must be paid for in silver.

  This would have crippled the company. They explored the idea of growing tea in India – where it grew wild in the forests of Assam. But it was too much trouble. They had a better idea. They would pay for their tea with opium.

  Opium had been used in medicine in China and other places since at least the seventh century, but in the seventeenth century, the Dutch introduced the Chinese to the practice of mixing it with tobacco and smoking it. Consequently, over the next 200 years, millions of Chinese became addicted to the drug. And this provided the British East India Company with a golden opportunity. They grew loads of the stuff ‘for medicinal purposes’ in Bengal – and they decided to use it to finance their trade with China.

  The Chinese had made the opium trade illegal. Ships carrying the drug were seized and the crews put to death. So the company held an annual auction in Calcutta where the opium harvest was sold to independent merchants known as ‘the country firms’. It was these firms which took the risk of smuggling the drug into China. But the company insisted the smugglers paid for it in silver bullion – in Canton.

  And they used the silver to pay for their tea.

  This is the story I have appropriated for the plot of The Spoils of Conquest. The character of the Marquis de la Marche is fictitious, but there were plenty of real-life characters like him. They bought the opium at the company auction and then ferried it to China, where it was stored on hulks moored in Canton Bay and then sold to criminal gangs who smuggled it ashore in Chinese galleys called centipedes or scrambling dragons. Then it was sold at a vast profit to their millions of customers across China. The Chinese called it foreign mud.

  It led to
two major wars between Britain and China and a lasting legacy of bitterness.

  But it was not just the Chinese government who objected. The fact that a British trading company employed a large private army and navy, made war and peace, controlled vast overseas territories, and sold huge quantities of opium to smugglers, did not escape censure in Britain itself. However, the immense wealth of the company directors enabled them to buy a number of seats in Parliament and form a powerful political lobby which for many years blocked any attempt at reform. The company also lent vast amounts of money to the Government, provided troops and ships for imperial wars, and supported their political allies in Westminster against their rivals, just as they did in India.

  It took the Indians themselves to bring the company’s rule to an end. The Indian Rebellion of 1857, also known as the Indian Mutiny, and the repression which followed, caused such revulsion in England, not least from Queen Victoria herself, that Parliament was forced to take action, and the company’s territorial holdings came under the direct rule of the British Crown. The company itself was formally dissolved in 1873.

  East India House, the Leadenhall Street headquarters of the company, was demolished in 1861 and the site is now occupied by the Lloyds Building. But there is an excellent permanent exhibition telling the history of the company at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and over 200 years of company archives are kept at the British Library – both of which institutions provided an invaluable source of research material.