Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  In spite of vigorous statements to the contrary, it is clear that they were also welcomed by many of the Company’s own factors. No words were too strong, when addressing the Court of Directors, for the ‘naughty, huffing’ interlopers; but it was a very different story when the same naughty gentlemen came calling round the Company’s scattered trading posts with their ships riding high in expectation of cargoes that need never appear in the Company’s records and with pocket books open for confidential commissions and private correspondence. Because of the Company’s strict monopoly of all trade between England and India it could be extremely difficult to transfer either private funds to India or private cargoes back to England. Yet the temptations to private trade were now so great that the Company had been forced to give its grudging permission in respect of its employees engaging in ‘the country trade’ (port-to-port in the East). Retired or, more commonly, dismissed servants were also allowed to stay on in the Company’s settlements to pursue their own commercial ventures. And as this activity grew, so did the difficulty of distinguishing between legitimate private traders and interlopers. Even some of the Company’s men overstepped the mark, like the Reverend John Evans, the ‘merchant-parson’, who eventually absconded; others merely threatened to do so like Captain Lake who ‘if he did not like the Company’s employment this voyage, would turn interlopers the next’.

  On his own voyage out to India in 1682 Agent Hedges had been hailed in mid Atlantic by the Crown, an interloper which had just evaded arrest in England. Her captain was a certain Dorrill and her supercargo (or chief factor) one Thomas Pitt. They too were heading for Bengal and the Crown ‘sailing best, was almost out of sight next morning’. By the time Hedges reached the Hughli, Pitt and Dorrill were comfortably installed in a Balasore mansion, claiming protection from the Dutch and ‘very busy in buying goods’. This was Pitt’s third or fourth visit to Bengal and the Company’s suspicions that he was hand in glove with their Chief Factor were soon confirmed. Indeed Hedges suspected that every one of the Company’s factors had an interest in Pitt’s ventures. ‘He being a desperate fellow of a haughty, huffying and daring temper’ the Company had instructed Hedges to ‘secure his person whatever it cost [in bribes] to the government or other natives’. Accordingly Hedges applied to the Nawab during his diplomatic interlude in Dhaka and was duly assured that Pitt and Dorrill would be detained.

  In the event, of course, nothing of the sort happened. In Bengal Pitt was a valued customer whose trade was almost as dependable as that of the Company and whose bribes were even more generous. He duly sailed back to England in 1683 with a fortune in the making and another career beckoning. For just as Company servants sometimes took to interloping so interlopers sometimes preferred legitimate employment. Dorrill would become second in command in Bengal under Sir John Goldsborough and Pitt would eventually resurface as the Company’s long-serving and influential President at Madras. Ironically he was also the great-grandfather of the prime minister who would one day curtail for good the Company’s monopoly.

  Whilst lording it in Balasore, Pitt had made a point of ‘bespattering’ his rivals by putting it about that the East India Company was on its last legs and about to be replaced by a ‘new English East India Company’ for which he himself was Agent in Bengal. This may have been a ploy to impress the Nawab; but it was also an amazingly faithful, if premature, representation of events. Already the interloping interests in London had found sympathetic allies within the Company who resented the large holdings and the consequent influence accumulated by a group of the directors. Cromwell’s charter had ended the monopoly of office; but the creation of a permanent stock and the substantial dividends which it paid had enabled existing investors to keep out new blood and to buy up any stock that came on the market. Very substantial accumulations resulted, a process that was assisted by the Company’s growing practice of borrowing at comparatively low rates of interest rather than float new stock. Thus, though the offices of governor (or chairman) and deputy continued to rotate, they did so amongst an ever dwindling circle of immensely wealthy stock holders.

  Perceiving this development as being neither in the nation’s nor the Company’s interest, Sir Thomas Papillon, MP for Dover and himself a director of the Company since 1663, championed the idea of opening the trade to a wider public. He was opposed by the redoubtable Sir Josiah Child. Child had made his first fortune as victualler to the fleet at Portsmouth. In the 1680s the diarist John Evelyn estimated his wealth at £200,000. Also an MP and director of the Company since 1677, he had once been Papillon’s protege. But while the latter’s Parliamentary sympathies disposed him towards a freer system of trade, Child’s influence at Court (he had been made a baronet in 1678) and his Tory ideals made him a staunch upholder both of the Company’s monopoly of eastern trade and of his own growing monopoly of the Company.

  Papillon’s first challenge was mounted within the Company when in 1681 he proposed that the joint stock launched under Cromwell’s charter of 1657 be wound up and replaced with a new stock to which any might subscribe. Thus the Company’s monopoly would be retained by in effect offering to accommodate those who were challenging it. But this move was defeated. An appeal was then made to the Crown in the form of an application by the old Levant Company that the ships of its adventurers might use the sea route by the Cape of Good Hope to reach those parts of the Ottoman Empire (its exclusive trading zone) which bordered on the Red and Arabian Seas. This too was rejected and at about the same time Papillon was removed from the Company’s Court of Directors. (It was doubtless in anticipation of one of these challenges succeeding that Pitt confidently announced the foundation of a rival East India Company.)

  Having failed in the boardroom and at Court, the opponents of the existing monopoly now turned to the law courts. In 1683 Child, acting on new powers conferred by the King, had seized the ship and cargo of an interloper named Sandys. Some twenty-four other interloping vessels were also seized but it was Sandys’s plight which provided the test case. With encouragement from Papillon’s lobby, an appeal was made to the King’s Bench as the supreme court of common law and a ruling was obtained which obliged Child and the Company to substantiate their action by proving damages against Sandys. Each side engaged the ablest counsel of the day and thus began ‘The Great Case of Monopolies between the East India Company, plaintiffs, and Thomas Sandys, defendant’.

  Although it was a year before judgement was given, there seems to have been little doubt about whom it would favour. As Lord Chief Justice, the sanguinary Judge Jeffreys could be expected to find for the Crown and the Company; Child was crowing with victory after the first few hearings. But at least the case brought the issues into the public domain. On the one hand there was the sovereign’s prerogative to regulate all trade with infidels, a right based on the assumption that an unbeliever was automatically an enemy of the realm. On the other hand there was the merchant’s established right to the freedom of the seas plus the nation’s legitimate concern for access to a trade now ‘the greatest that England ever knew’. Significantly, there also surfaced the interesting question of whether this was not a matter which should really be decided by Parliament. Jeffreys exploded with indignation at this last suggestion and in an extraordinarily partisan judgement compared the interlopers to regicides. He also denounced the very idea of anyone presuming to question a royal prerogative thus inadvertently issuing a challenge to Parliament which, come more propitious times, would be remembered.

  Outvoted in the Company and outbribed at Court, Papillon was himself dragged through the courts and obliged to flee to Holland. Sandys was duly fined, and in 1684 some forty-eight interlopers were restrained, amongst them the returning Thomas Pitt. After further litigation Pitt was eventually fined £1000 and retired to Wiltshire. There he bought the rotten borough of Old Sarum and in 1687 sat as a Member of Parliament. So effectually had Child stifled the interlopers that those who failed to restrict their activities to the East now had only two possib
ilities – to turn Parliamentarian or to turn pirate. Pitt chose the former, John Hand of the Bristol chose the latter.

  In 1683 Hand sailed from England supposedly for Brazil. Some months later he turned up at Surat, then the Maldive Islands where he fired on the principal town, then Sumatra where he attacked a Dutch vessel. ‘Captain, you must consider what you do’, cautioned his mate as they boarded yet another disabled ship. But the Captain, ‘being a mighty passionate man’ devoid of scruple and no lover of small talk, ‘kicked him off the quarter deck and several others for the same reason’. It was only poetic justice that, soon after, he accidentally shot himself in the leg and died of the wound. Next year, 1685, his ship was surprised in the Comoro islands off the coast of East Africa by HMS Phoenix.

  The Phoenix had been sent out to carry Sir Josiah Child’s crusade against the interlopers to all the havens and high seas east of the Cape. On the face of it, this was a sensible move; for in 1686 more pirates, supposedly belonging to Denmark’s new East India company but widely tipped as English interlopers, seized a vessel belonging to Abdul Ghafar, a wealthy Surat merchant. By the Moghul authorities the English Company was held responsible and its trade at Surat stopped. Clearly some policing of the sea lanes was necessary and indeed the Phoenix duly caught up with the culprits, ascertained that they were in fact Danes, and so to some extent cleared the air.

  But in wilfully confusing interlopers and pirates, and in claiming the right to waylay either wherever they threatened legitimate trade, the Company was setting a dangerous double precedent. Its actions, however legitimate, would come to look just as piratical as those they were supposed to be preventing. Thus in 1687 the captain of an interloping vessel taken in the Red Sea was killed in his cabin ‘because he would not surrender up his ship voluntarily’; such strong-arm tactics positively invited retaliation in kind. More ominously, by exercising its right to defend its monopoly, the Company appeared to be accepting some responsibility for suppressing the outrages committed by the likes of John Hand. That, at any rate, was how the Moghul governor of Surat saw the matter. What the Company regarded as its right he soon construed as its obligation and one which he could always enforce by once again holding the Surat factors to ransom. Unwittingly the Company had assumed the responsibility of protecting the Moghul’s shipping as well as its own just as the great age of Eastern piracy dawned.

  In the short term, protecting the Moghul’s merchantmen was scarcely a priority. At Surat and Hughli the first muddled moves in Child’s undeclared war against the Moghul empire were just unfolding; it was the Company, not the pirates, who posed the most immediate threat to Indian shipping. In 1688 Alexander Hamilton counted fourteen Surat vessels corralled into Bombay harbour as prizes. In the following year their numbers were swollen by the fleet of provisioning vessels taken by Sir John Child as he fled from Surat. And more prizes were taken, some by Hamilton himself, during the course of the Bombay siege. They scarcely affected the course of the war, let alone beggared the Moghul as Child had predicted. But news of such juicy prize-taking spread far and fast. Arguably it was the ease with which the Company’s vessels in the Arabian Sea so quickly overwhelmed the Moghul marine which, more than anything else, alerted the buccaneering fraternities of North America and the West Indies to the possibilities of the India trade.

  ii

  Dr Chaudhuri’s invaluable statistics reveal that the value of the Company’s total annual imports, after their dizzy climb to £800,000 in 1684, plummeted to just £80,000 in 1691. Such was the price exacted first by the rivalry of the interlopers and then by the near cessation of trade at Surat and Bengal during the Moghul War (1686-9); Sir Josiah Child had much to answer for. But thereafter the trickle of trade, instead of assuming its earlier volume, languished, falling to a mere dribble of under £30,000 in both 1692 and 1695. The Company’s troubles were far from over.

  At the time, though, Child and his fellow monopolists could not have been in more buoyant mood. In 1686 James II had issued the Company with a new charter which seemingly inured it to any further challenge from within and empowered it to meet any assault from without. For the charter confirmed all the powers and privileges granted by Charles II, including those of arresting and trying interlopers and of using troops and ships against native princes. It was only seven years since the directors had insisted that they were ‘averse to all kinds of war in India’.

  It would [they had explained] be a very great imprudence for us at this distance, (being merchants and engaged in commerce) to contend with those great and mighty princes which might seem to obstruct our trade and ruin us.

  Child, already a director, had been a signatory to this caution. Yet five years later, emboldened by the Company’s commercial success and impatient alike of the Moghul’s exactions and the interlopers’ challenge, he had begun to sound like a bullish imperialist.

  If any natives fall upon you [he told the Surat factors], we would have you take the first and best opportunity you can to right us and yourselves without expecting further orders from England, for we are now in such a posture in India that we need not sneak or put up [with] palpable injuries from any nation whatsoever…

  And now, in 1686, thanks to the new charter, he chose to construe the Company’s position as that ‘of a sovereign state in India.’ Exactly what this meant Child spelled out in uncompromising terms to the new President in Madras.

  That which we promise ourselves in a most espetial manner from our new President and Council is that they will establish such a politie of civil and military power, and create and secure such a large revenue to maintain both at that place [Madras], as may be the foundation of a large, well grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come.

  Naturally these prophetic words receive a good deal of attention in British imperial histories wherein Child is revealed as an empire-builder with rugged qualities to match his visionary ideals. Perhaps, though, they are also noteworthy as examples of Child’s dismal judgement or of his incorrigible bravado. For, within eighteen months of this letter being written, Charnock and Heath had abandoned Bengal, Bombay was under siege as was the Surat factory, and worst of all James II, the Company’s champion and benefactor, was a powerless exile in France. The English factors in Bombay, as they pledged their loyalty to William of Orange on the very day that the Moghul siege of the settlement was lifted, must have marvelled how no sooner was one crisis averted than another loomed. Their Dutch rivals were already advising the Moghul authorities that England had succumbed to an invasion from Holland. And in London the Convention Parliament was about to take a long hard look at the whole question of the Company’s charter.

  Since the failure of Papillon’s attempts at reform, criticism of the Company had found expression mainly in anonymous pamphlets. Some of these condemned the India trade as a whole for flooding the home market with imported textiles; others condemned the Company for monopolizing this trade and a clique of its directors for monopolizing the Company. It was said that fourteen shareholders had acquired a third of the entire stock and that one in particular held a seventh of the total. Bestriding the Company’s finances as he did its direction, this man was Sir Josiah Child.

  Allegations that Child had bought and bribed his way into both the Company’s direction and the royal favour are hard to substantiate; but for later critics of the Company, like Lord Macaulay, lack of evidence was no obstacle. ‘All who could help or hurt at Court, ministers, mistresses, priests, were kept in good humour by presents of shawls, silks, birds’ nest and attar of roses, bulses of diamonds, and bags of guineas.’ The Macaulay embroidery may be fanciful but the coat fits. Child’s relationships with John Child at Surat and Job Charnock in Bengal invite suspicion while his manipulation of the Company’s share values won him recognition as ‘the original of stock-jobbing’. In dealings which would have merited prosecution in a later age he floated rumours of shipping losses in order to depress stocks, then bought heavily at the discounted price and sold out
when the price had recovered. Domineering, unscrupulous and arrogant, he is sometimes seen as possessing the energy and influence which alone preserved the Company during its years of crisis. Alternatively these same traits may be regarded – as they were by the pamphleteers – as an unbearable provocation and as the root cause of the Company’s misfortunes.

  The new Parliament was of the latter opinion. And with its Whig sympathies and its distaste for all those on whom the Catholic James had showered his favours, it soon found an unlikely but emotive issue with which to discredit Child and the Company. Compared with the excitements at Bombay and Calcutta, news from the Company’s first and half-forgotten settlement at St Helena had rarely troubled the directors’ slumbers. So long as the Dutch were kept at bay (preferably the Cape’s Table Bay) and so long as St Helena always had enough green vegetables and fresh fruit for scorbutic English crews, the Company had been content to ignore it. Yet for its first inhabitants, originally destined for the Banda island of Run, and for their successors – both Madagascan slaves and English paupers – life in the South Atlantic had been far from congenial.

  Originally they had worked their smallholdings for an annual quit rent consisting of a bunch of bananas, a pint of peas, a pound of potatoes and a pound of ‘cassava bread’. But in the changed climate of the 1670s the Company had decided against this Cromwellian commonwealth of market gardeners and in favour of a plantation economy in which the erstwhile smallholders became feudal serfs obliged to work the land and supply recruits for the garrison. The change prompted a series of rebellions and a series of ferocious reprisals. In 1683 two apprentices had the tips of their right ears clipped, pot-hooks riveted round their necks, the letter R branded on their foreheads (R for Rogue, P was for Pirate; piratical rogues could end up with both) and were then handed over for a week-long programme of floggings, ‘viz. 21 lashes on Friday, 21 on Monday, and on Thursday 6 in town, 6 on top of the hill, 6 at half-way tree, and 6 more on arriving at home’. To merit this calvary the crime had been merely that of breaking and entering.