Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  But as Charnock and his much travelled companions kicked their heels in Madras, events were rapidly moving towards their ignominious conclusion on the other side of India. In the autumn of 1689 Aurangzeb accepted the submission of the Bombay garrison and graciously restored the Company’s trading rights throughout his dominions. It was greatly feared that his humiliating terms might include, as well as the expulsion of John Child, that of Job Charnock. But this proved not to be the case.

  Indeed there was now nothing to prevent a return to Bengal. The Nawab was pressing for it; as always his imperial master had need of European silver. So was Madras’s President, Elihu Yale, who had no love for the unruly factors from Bengal; ‘their number are a great charge to this place, [we] not having any other employment for them than martial discipline which here are weekly practising’. And so were Charnock’s men, they ‘being,’ according to the sarcastic Yale, ‘in haste to return to their sweet plenties which sandy Madras could not please them in’.

  Thus with the first shipping of 1690 ‘the Bengal gentlemen’ again sailed for Balasore, transferred to sloops at the mouth of the Hughli, and passing Hijili and Ulubari ascended the river so rich in memories. For a third time they moored at Sutanati, looked in vain for the remnants of their previous settlement, and ‘the rain falling day and night’ recommenced the foundation of Calcutta. Again timbers were felled, reservoirs dug and compounds fenced. Again the Nawab’s favours and the Emperor’s farman were sought. And again the factors fell to quarrelling.

  After so many shared experiences one might have expected the old comrades-in- (and out of) arms to have developed a certain loyalty. But that would be reckoning without Charnock whose cantankerousness seems only to have increased with age and become more devious with experience. Now well into his fifties and quite the grand old man in a society where longevity was unheard of, his ‘strange disposition’ alienated even his closest companions. ‘He loved everybody should be at difference,’ recalled the usually reliable Sir John Goldsborough, ‘further he had another faculty of finding fault with those under him…[though] he would say nothing to their faces.’

  And this I believe is most true, that he never wronged Your Honours in the price of your goods, but he rejoiced to find matter to accuse others of so doing, and thought it was enough to write of it home without meddling with them here.

  Goldsborough had succeeded Yale at Madras and was therefore also responsible for Bengal. But he had been told to stay well clear of Charnock. For Charnock had now been given an authority ‘not formerly given to any Agent in Bengal’ which empowered him to appoint and dismiss whoever he chose ‘without giving any reason for doing so to any but ourselves [i.e. the directors in London]’. Over the past twenty years the Bengal factors had shown themselves ‘not only grossly fraudulent but incurably inclined to faction’. Hence, argued the directors with perverse logic, the need to give Charnock absolute authority.

  How he used this authority during the two and a half years which remained to him is open to question. Basing his judgement on the manuscript records, Sir William Hunter sees him as ‘a block of rough-hewn British manhood’, stoutly defending the undoubted merits of his new settlement against the entreaties of his comfort-loving comrades who pined for the flesh-pots of Hughli. ‘Not a beautiful person’, continued Hunter, ‘for the founders of England’s greatness in the East were not such as wear soft raiment and dwell in king’s houses.’ Uneducated and in old age distinctly eccentric, ‘honest Job’ is seen as rising above the gibes of his men and the criticisms of Madras, borne aloft on the strength of an over-powering conviction. ‘A man who had a great and hard task to do and who did it – did it with small thought of self and with a courage which no danger could daunt nor any difficulties turn aside. It was his lot to found unthanked a capital.’

  All of which goes to show the fundamental ambiguity of all historical source material. With access to much the same sources, another nineteenth-century historian describes Charnock’s foundation of Calcutta as ‘accidental’ adding ‘there does not seem to be anything great or even remarkable in his character. He had no large or comprehensive views; he was vacillating, timid and cruel’.

  There is also some doubt about what, apart from ‘continuing there beyond all reason’, he actually did for Calcutta. A year after his return his men were still living ‘in a wild unsettled condition’ with only ‘tents, hutts and boats’. Three years later there was still no factory, let alone a fort, and the settlement was still unauthorized by the Nawab. ‘Everyone built stragglingly where and how they pleased’, reported Goldsborough, ‘even on the most properest place for a factory…Therefore I thought fit to order the enclosing of a piece of ground with a mud wall whereon to build a factory when we have a parwanna [Nawab’s permit].’

  Already more populous than the ‘stragglingly’ built settlement was the plot reserved for graves, in one of which lay the mortal remains of Job Charnock. He had died on 10 January 1693 but his very Indian-looking mausoleum, still standing in what later became St John’s Churchyard, must have been erected at least a decade later. Domed, three storeys high, and closely resembling other minor tombs of the Moghul period, it must even then have been a prominent and extravagant monument for such a young township. This would seem to argue some early recognition of Charnock’s fame as the founder of the future city. Yet curiously his epitaph, neatly engraved on a black slab, makes no mention either of Calcutta or of his connection with the place.

  The mausoleum is believed to have been commissioned by Charles Eyre who had married one of Charnock’s Anglo-Indian daughters. In 1693 Eyre was appointed Agent for Bengal by Goldsborough, a post which he would hold until 1699 and briefly regain in 1700-1. By any Indian standards, let alone those of Bengal, this constituted a long tenure of office. Charnock had chosen the site, but there is a case to be made for crediting his son-in-law with having secured Calcutta’s future.

  At first it must have seemed to Eyre that what Charnock had considered the advantages of the place were actually disadvantages. It was true that ‘Europe’ ships could, with the help of one of the pilots that the Company now maintained, ascend the Hughli river to moor in the Calcutta basin. But the shifting mud banks and the vicious tides continued to make this a dangerous option. Within months of Eyre taking office the Royal James and Mary entered the river homeward bound with a cargo of pepper from Sumatra plus some timber from Madras. She was half way up and almost in sight of Calcutta when she ‘fell on a sand,…immediately over-set and broke her back’. Five men were drowned; apart from what could be salvaged in the way of guns and rigging the ship was a write-off. Thenceforth she served as a marker buoy for the sandbank in question – now ‘The James and Mary Sand’ – and as a salutary reminder of the river’s dangers.

  What if anything in the way of Bengal produce awaited the ship had she reached Calcutta the records do not reveal. But just as the new port was proving a little bit too far upriver for safe sailing, so it was proving not quite far enough upriver for expeditious trading. The saltpetre of Patna, the raw silks of Kasimbazar and the muslins of Dhaka had still to be forwarded by smaller river craft, but now, instead of being consigned from Hughli town, they had to pass on down to Calcutta. To the several points at which this river trade was liable to be interrupted by venal officials and adventurous rajas was thus added that of Hughli itself. Most of Calcutta’s small complement of troops were permanently engaged escorting cargoes on the river and until Calcutta could attract a commercial infrastructure of money-lenders and commissioning agents, trade there remained something of a white elephant.

  To appeal to the trading classes what Calcutta needed was that air of permanence and security which only a sturdy fort and a substantial leasehold could confer. Eyre maintained the pressure on Dhaka for both; but in the event it was thanks to circumstance rather than diplomacy that he got his way. In 1696 a local rebellion broke out in west Bengal. Normally it would have been crushed without comment. But the Nawab was proving
exceptionally supine and the rebels managed to interest in their cause some Afghan mercenaries who were roaming northern India throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Suddenly the affair assumed major proportions. Hughli fell to the rebels, then Kasimbazar, Malda and the entire west bank of the river. Naturally in this crisis the English proffered their loyal support to the Nawab. Across the river they eyeballed the rebels and using their substantial fleet of river craft they were able to prevent an advance and to relieve the Nawab’s isolated garrisons on the west bank. In return it was agreed that on land they might take whatever steps they deemed necessary for their defence. Without too much hesitation Eyre began the construction of ‘Fort William’.

  By January 1697 four brick bastions were taking shape and cannon were requested from Madras. In May the revolt was suppressed but the building went on. Curtain walls connected the bastions; within, a new store and offices were under construction. Thanks to the disturbances, that commercial infrastructure was also materializing. A local raja had deposited his wealth in the safe keeping of Calcutta and members of the influential Armenian business class took refuge there. It was partly thanks to the representations of one of their number that in 1698 the Nawab granted to the Company the nearest thing to a land-owning grant which the Moghul empire recognized. In return for a payment of 16,000 rupees the Company was given permission to purchase the tax-gathering rights to the three villages amidst which Calcutta was taking shape. At last the Company had a legal right to a few square miles of Bengal plus a fort from which to discourage marauders and a factory within which to conduct its trade.

  In the year during which Eyre was out of office that ancient dispute about customs exactions, the one which had so exercised Hedges and which had precipitated the Moghul War, was at last settled in the Company’s favour. And when Eyre returned in 1700 it was as head of what was once again a separate Presidency independent of Madras. Of past grievances there remained only the vexed question of a trading farman from the Emperor himself. In so far as the terms granted to the English after the submission of Bombay implied a right to continue trading this was not an immediate problem. It would become so after 1707 when Aurangzeb died but then so would other circumstances which the men of Charnock’s era had taken for granted. One was the Moghul Empire, now about to succumb to a spectacular slow-motion decline. Another was the Honourable Company itself, now outlawed in England, opposed by new rivals in the East, and about to undergo a very painful reincarnation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Renegades and Rivals

  PIRATES, INTERLOPERS AND COMPETITORS

  A century later, at the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke would describe the rule of the East India Company as ‘a government of writing and a government of record’. A standing committee of the Company’s directors took charge of correspondence and to their epistolary bombardment of their employees throughout the world they expected a page for page response of frank yet respectful prose. Not for nothing was the largest class of junior factors known as ‘Writers’. In this copperplate empire, paperwork was everything. Merchants and accountants by profession, the Company’s men lived by the ledger and ruled with the quill.

  The resultant records would be a credit to any major state archive and as the historian’s source material they are unlikely ever to be exhausted. But it seems that for every researcher who with light and expectant tread enters London’s India Office Library and Records, another doyen of scholarship ends his days slumped behind a lectern in mid sentence. There are enough incomplete histories of the Company to justify a health warning.

  Undeterred, in 1968 Dr K. N. Chaudhuri immersed himself in a detailed study of the monumental collection of Company Accounts Books. Using a computer and deploying much flow-chart algebra, the professor stuck to his Herculean labour for nearly ten years; even then he declared himself reluctant to relinquish it. The results, published in 1978 (The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company), provide the first comprehensive analysis of the Company’s trading fortunes between 1660 and 1760.

  To the layman their most surprising feature is the highly erratic growth pattern that emerges from the statistical tables and graphs. Leaping about as on an electro-cardiograph, the lines representing annual import and export totals plunge to the base line, zigzag to new pinnacles of activity, and then plummet once again. The impression is of convulsive fits rather than of solid progress; and of these convulsions the most dramatic is a dizzying climb which occurs between 1660 and 1683. ‘Truly phenomenal’, observes Chaudhuri; ‘imports expanded by £25,430 per year according to the linear model and by 14.4 per cent according to the exponential. The expansion of exports was at a similar rate, though at a slightly lower level.’

  Collating quotations of the Company’s share values for this period, Sir William Hunter had reached much the same conclusion. £100 of stock purchased under Cromwell’s new charter of 1657 had slumped to £70 by 1665 but thereafter appreciated dramatically. By 1677 it was valued at £245 and by 1683 was selling at anything between £360 and £500. Such profits had not been known since the beginning of the century; and such levels of trade would not again be approached until the 1740s.

  Any explanation for this sudden growth would have to include a wide range of contributory factors – the Company’s favourable treatment by the later Stuarts, the comparative stability in India during the early years of Aurangzeb’s long reign, the buoyancy of European markets, the importance of Bengal as a new trading arena, the comparative safety of the sea lanes, and so on. Given the general profitability of Eastern trade, it would be essentially a list of restrictions which for once did not apply. With a free hand and a clear run, the Company could only prosper. But of far greater significance for its future was the suddenness with which this expansion had taken place. Such an impressive turn-round could not pass unnoticed. It prompted unease, envy, and hostility. Was it right, it was asked, that a single company should account for what now amounted to ‘above half the trade of the nation’? And was it right that that Company should operate behind the closed doors of a monopoly which excluded even its own servants, never mind outsiders, from a share of its profits?

  Profits apart, there was also the question of regulation. Was it constitutional for a consortium of London businessmen to govern overseas territories, construct forts, dispense justice, raise revenues, coin money, and wage war and yet be outside the control of Parliament and answerable only and indirectly (through the royal charter) to the Crown? The Company’s cosy relationship with the later Stuarts was fine while it lasted but was bound to be challenged the moment the Company lost the confidence of the City or the Crown the confidence of Parliament. In the event both these crisis would occur almost simultaneously in the late 1680s. They were anticipated, though, both by some within the Company who had serious doubts about its monopoly and by many outside it who were already mounting a direct challenge.

  During his brief but pained sojourn in Bengal, Agent William Hedges had been one of the first to recommend the seizure of a fortifiable position at the mouth of the Hughli which might become the Bengal equivalent of Madras or Bombay. A fort provided the necessary base whence to menace with impunity the Moghul’s shipping and, just as important, ‘it is also the only remedy to prevent the interlopers infesting us’. On 26 September 1683, as Hedges sat drafting his recommendation in the Company’s Hughli factory, interlopers – or private traders – were much on his mind. On the river outside his window a certain Captain Alley was even then reclining in a stately barge. A musical quartet played for the Captain’s delight and ten stalwart English seamen in a livery of ‘blew capps and coats edged with red’ rowed him ashore. There, above the landing steps, ‘a splendid equipage’ waited; it was trimmed with scarlet and lace, attended by eighty servants, and preceded by two flags. Alley was conducting himself ‘like an Agent’. Hedges fumed with indignation. But he had to admit that Alley was no fool. ‘A gawdy show and great noise adds much to a public perso
n’s credit in this country.’

  For two decades the Company had been little troubled by interlopers. But once eastern profits had again become the talk of London town, new syndicates formed, new ships sailed, and interlopers reappeared in Indian waters. Alley was one of the first of this new breed. Well financed and protected by powerful interests, he was now on his second if not his third voyage. ‘The interlopers must be suppressed in England’, insisted Hedges, tis impossible to be done here.’ And the Company had of course secured a royal commission for Alley’s arrest. But Alley saw to it that he rarely called at any English port where it could be executed. To avoid suspicion he had originally sailed to Cadiz and it was from there and other European ports that he traded to India.

  According to the Company’s directors, suppressing the interlopers in England was not therefore so simple. Better by far to cut off their trade in India. To this end, valiantly did Hedges endeavour to persuade the Nawab and his governor at Hughli to have nothing to do with Alley. Interlopers, he implied, were little better than pirates, answerable to no one and quite capable of taking by force what they were denied by law. If the Moghul’s representatives continued to encourage them, the Company could not be held responsible for the consequences. (Hedges was not to know that European pirates, like interlopers, were also about to reappear in Indian waters, and that equating the two would only confuse the issue.)

  But while politely sympathetic to all these arguments, the Nawab did nothing. On the Coromandel Coast Alley had apparently secured some sort of trading permit. From an Indian point of view competition was good. It weakened the English Company’s intractable stance over that question of customs duties and it obliged the Company to boost its Indian investment in an effort to outbid its rivals (another reason for that dramatic increase in trade). Without all the overheads of permanent establishments, the interlopers could afford to pay well and bribe handsomely. They were welcome.