Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  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

  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 submi
tted 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.