by John Keay
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
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.