Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  For the discourtesy of rebellion the punishments were more summary. In 1684 the Governor turned his guns on a crowd who presumed to ask for the release of one unjustly imprisoned; seventeen protesters were either killed outright or wounded; the rest were rounded up and nineteen condemned to death. When the widow of one was impertinent enough to suggest that her man had been murdered she was given twenty-one lashes, ducked three times at the yard-arm and thrown into prison.

  It was a petition from four of this woman’s bereaved companions, ‘the mournful daughters of St Helena’ as they were called, which in 1689 eventually found its way to Westminster and the sympathetic ear of the Convention Parliament. There, without overlong debate, the House of Commons condemned the proceedings, ordered the punishment of the St Helena ‘butchers’, and – scarcely pausing for breath – set up a committee to enquire into the whole question of the East India trade. Fulfilling Thomas Pitt’s expectations of eight years ago, the committee recommended a new Company which was to be established by Parliament rather than by the Crown. The interlopers scented victory at last; a group of them promptly subscribed £180,000. But the House was then dissolved with the matter still unsettled.

  Before renewing their challenge the interlopers thus had ample time to summon old friends, like Papillon, and organize themselves afresh. Meeting regularly in the rebuilt hall of the Skinners’ Company in Dowgate, the embryonic ‘New Company’, sometimes called the ‘Dowgate Adventurers’, was ready for the fray when in 1691 Child, from the ‘Old Company’s’ headquarters in Leadenhall Street (a brickbat’s throw from Dowgate), proclaimed victory in his war against the Moghul.

  Even by Sir Josiah’s own bragging standards, this talk of triumph in India was the grossest of misrepresentations; and it was duly exposed as such when the humiliating terms of Aurangzeb’s new farman became known. With some reason the Company was now seen as having brought dishonour on the nation; Dowgate rejoiced, Leadenhall Street squirmed, and Parliament was again called on to intervene. Child was unrepentant; for the new House, unlike its predecessor, was more Tory than Whig and so likely to be more amenable. It quickly accepted the idea of a joint stock company under royal charter and resolved that the charter should stay with the Old Company. But there were to be two provisos. The stock was to be considerably increased so that the Dowgate Adventurers could buy into the Company; and no individual holdings were to exceed £5000, thereby preventing the likes of Child from simply buying up the new stock.

  To this not unreasonable compromise Child and his colleagues objected. There could be no question of admitting the Dowgate men, even by the back door; it was to be all or nothing. Nothing, retorted the House, as the bill was dropped and a petition was sent to King William recommending the dissolution of the old Company and the creation of a new one.

  Once again Child’s incorrigible optimism was undented. ‘For the venue’, in Sir William Hunter’s neat phrasing, ‘was now transferred from Parliament, in whose management he was a novice, to the Court, in whose corruption he was a practiced hand.’ The King came up with a compromise solution very similar to that already proposed by Parliament. Once again Child rejected it. Then, in March 1693, with the King about to depart for the war in France, Child seized his moment. Bribes totalling £80,000, twenty times the normal level, passed quickly through the Company’s books and into ministerial pockets; wilfully, according to Hunter, Child forfeited the existing charter on a technicality, applied for a new one, and before Parliament could reassemble was duly gratified by the well-primed gentlemen of the Privy Council.

  In his History of British India Hunter illumines the cut and thrust, or more often the feint and posture, of these highly intricate manoeuvres with a masterly commentary. Sadly it was the last chapter he ever wrote. The task of making sense of Child’s antics may have over-taxed him. Indeed he was unable to revise this section of what, had it been completed, would surely have been the most authoritative work on the 300 years of British involvement in India. As a result we have no ready-made explanation of why Child should have bullied and bribed to such an extent all for a new charter which was little different from those earlier proposed by the Commons and by King William. Perhaps it was sufficient that he had outsmarted Parliament and that under the new charter he and his cronies retained control.

  But not for the first time Child had also overreached himself. Despairing of redress, interlopers were again putting to sea with Thomas Pitt, MP, well to the fore; in 1693 he returned to Bengal and another welcome from the Nawab. Goldsborough, the Company agent at Calcutta, threatened a second Moghul War; the Nawab paid no heed. Meanwhile Child in London vowed to hound the interlopers through the courts. But, when a second Sandys was arraigned, the House of Commons intervened and, with Papillon as chairman, a committee of the whole House declared that the India trade was open to all. Suddenly interlopers like Pitt in Bengal found that they were bona fide traders. The Dowgate Adventurers took new heart.

  In 1695 the Commons began an investigation of Child’s bribery; in the same year the Scottish Parliament authorized a rival East India company; and in 1697, such was the popular feeling against Child and the monopolists of Leadenhall Street that a mob stormed their premises and had to be dispersed by the militia. All these events were symptomatic of the uncertainty that must arise when a trade opened to all by Parliament was reserved to a single company by the Crown. To resolve this absurdity the Old Company offered a loan to the state of £700,000 in return for Parliamentary confirmation of its exclusive charter. This bid was promptly topped by the Dowgate men with an offer of £2 million. If nothing else, events had established that the licence to trade with the East was a marketable commodity, and that if this licence lay in the gift of Parliament, the state, instead of the King and Court, should benefit. In the wake of an expensive European war, it also followed that the best offer should be accepted. Accordingly, in June 1698, the Commons at last passed a bill for the formation of a new General Society to trade to the East. Such were the expectations of this trade that the £2 million was subscribed within forty-eight hours. Amongst the subscribers the Dowgate men were prominent; so were the King and the Treasury Lords; but far and away the largest subscription was the £315,000 pledged by, of all people, the Old Company.

  Child, of course, was hedging his bets. In addition to the substantial leverage thus gained within the General Society (most of whose subscribers formed themselves into a joint stock known as the ‘New’ or ‘English’ East India Company), he also secured a three-year stay of execution for the Old Company (now sometimes called the ‘London’ East India Company as in the days of Elizabeth). Ostensibly this was to allow the Old Company time to wind up its affairs overseas. In reality it gave it a fighting chance to discredit the New Company throughout the East and to prove that without the experience, without the establishments, and without the trading rights won during a century of endeavour, the East India trade would collapse. The scene was set for a final trial of strength to be waged not in London but in the bazaars of Surat, round the ramparts of Madras, up the tidal creeks of the Hughli and in a host of other still further flung outposts.

  Although the New Company had secured the all-important charter, like Courteen’s Association it entered the Eastern trading world at a great disadvantage. Privileges could be bought, experience could be recruited; nearly all its rapidly appointed agents were drawn from the vast pool of footloose factors who had at one time or another been dismissed by the Old Company. But it lacked factories, let alone forts; it lacked that native network of suppliers, agents and financiers through which all trade in India was conducted; and it lacked trading capital, the original subscription having passed to the Exchequer as the £2 million loan which secured the charter.

  By way of offsetting these commercial handicaps, the New Company betook itself to the high ground of diplomatic respectability. Instead of being mere merchants, its agents enjoyed consular status which they employed to advantage in dealing with Moghul governors and wh
ich they interpreted as giving them authority over all their fellow subjects, including representatives of the Old Company. Additionally a fully fledged ambassador, the first since Sir Thomas Roe, was dispatched to negotiate with Aurangzeb himself on the New Company’s behalf – and at the New Company’s expense. Sir William Norris, MP for Liverpool, was the man chosen, and great were the expectations of his embassy. A contemporary rhymester caught the mood of optimism.

  Indians and English both alike shall share

  The Monarch’s favour and enjoy his care,

  And Britain’s wise ambassador obtain

  Not only leave to trade but also reign.

  Commerce shall spread itself along the coast

  And Norris shall regain what Child has lost.

  At Surat and Bombay the New Company’s affairs were entrusted to Sir Nicholas Waite, who arrived off Bombay in late 1699. Styling himself ‘Consul General and Public Minister’ for the whole west coast, he called on the Old Company’s President, Sir John Gayer, and peremptorily ordered him to acknowledge his authority and start winding up the affairs of his Company. Gayer was unmoved. He had received no official notification from his own masters and in this, the centennial year of his Company, he was not about to make over its most important possession to a rival outfit headed by a man who was once dismissed from its service (Waite had served as Agent in Bantam). Gayer had been in Bombay six years and had been on the point of retirement. Now he changed his mind. For the next ten years he would remain in India as Waite’s implacable rival.

  Rebuffed in Bombay, Waite’s flotilla sailed on to Surat, which city was to be his headquarters. At Swalley his eye lit upon the Old Company’s flag, a St George’s cross, fluttering atop their warehouse; before he would even land he demanded it be lowered. He himself flew the flag of King William and it was important, if his authority was to be recognized, that all English establishments should defer to the royal ensign. But the factors of the old Company refused point blank. Like Gayer, they would take orders only from their own Court of Directors. Waite, a peppery character at the best of times, flew into a rage and sent troops ashore to haul it down. Next day it was back, this time on the orders of the Moghul governor.

  As Waite soon discovered, the attitude of the Moghul authorities was to prove crucial in the squabble between the two Companies. For suitable payments Waite would quickly obtain trading rights, a factory of his own from which to fly the King’s flag, and the grandest reception ever accorded to an Englishman in Surat. But these things did not denote any partiality as between the rival factors. The Moghul officials showed a decided lack of interest in the constitutional rights and wrongs of the situation. They saw it simply as a heaven-sent opportunity to garner double the customary douceurs and to settle a grievance which had become as dear to the emperor’s heart as it had to the city’s traders – namely the upsurge in piracy. Waite’s success would depend entirely on the depth of his pocket and the plausibility of his measures to suppress pirates and compensate their victims.

  iii

  Although a few interlopers had taken up piracy in the days before Child’s Moghul War, annual raids on the Indian shipping between Gujarat and the Red Sea began in earnest only after John Child had set the example. The first report of trouble had come in 1689 when the Reverend Ovington heard of three vessels, two English and one Dutch, sheltering in St Augustine’s Bay in Madagascar. All were much battered but ‘richly laden with store of silks which they had taken in the Red Sea from Asian merchants that traded from Mocha to Surat’. Indeed they were so richly laden that their sails, for want of canvas, had been replaced with silk; in exchange for a few bottles of brandy their crews were prepared to give as much silk as was demanded ‘guzzling down the noble wine as if they were both wearied with the possession of the rapine’ and anxious only to drown ‘all melancholy reflections concerning it’.

  Ovington had this news from a ship at St Helena which was transporting slaves from Madagascar to New York. This was undoubtedly the trade route by which word of the rich pickings to be had in the Arabian Sea reached the North American freebooters. By 1690 there were two pirate-cum-slaving bases in Madagascar, one at St Augustine’s Bay in the south-west and the other on St Mary’s Island off the east coast. From the latter the Bachelor’s Delight raided Indian shipping in the Red Sea in 1691, each of the crew receiving prize money of £1100 when the vessel returned to Carolina. It may have been this raid which accounted for the plunder of another ship belonging to Abdul Ghafar, the Surat merchant who had lost a cargo to the Danes in 1685. Again the Company’s factors in Surat came under suspicion and were confined to their factory pending evidence that the miscreants were not Company employees.

  Next year there was a repeat performance and again in 1694. In each case the luckess victim was the same Abdul Ghafar (which was not surprising considering that he was Surat’s greatest shipping magnate with a fleet that reportedly exceeded that of the Company); and in each case the English factors came under increasing suspicion. The crunch came in 1695 when the infamous Captain John Avery (alias Henry Every, John Bridgeman, etc.) formed a pirate confederation. As ‘The Arch-pirate’, ‘The King of the Pirates’, Avery would be so glamorized by the likes of Daniel Defoe that his origins cannot be clearly discerned. Certain it is, though, that he was an outstanding commander ‘daring and good-humoured but insolent, uneasy, and unforgiving to the last degree if at any time imposed upon’. This mixture of bonhomie and menace found full expression in a letter, still extant, which he left at the Comoro Islands for any English shipping that called there.

  …I have never as yet wronged any English or Dutch, or ever intend whilst I am commander. Wherefore…make your ancient [flag] up in a ball or bundle and hoist him at the mizzen peak, the mizzen being furled. I shall answer with the same, and never molest you, for my men are hungry, stout and resolute, and should they exceed my desire I cannot help myself. As yet an Englishman’s friend,

  Henry Avery.

  At Johanna, 28 February, 1695.

  With two American ships, Avery in the Fancy sailed north from the Comoro Islands rendezvousing with the Madagascar men as he went. At first the annual Surat-Mocha shipping eluded them; but in September they fell in with the Fateh Mohammed carrying treasure valued at £30-40,000. Inevitably she belonged to Abdul Ghafar. Then, off the west coast of India, they finally overhauled the Gang-i-Sawai, the pride of the Indian fleet, a gigantic vessel which belonged to the Emperor himself and carried both returning pilgrims and treasure estimated at over 5 million rupees. It was said that the Indian ship made a poor defence, its Captain dressing up some Turki slave girls as soldiers and hiding himself in the hold. Avery’s men made no allowances for this considerate behaviour and proceeded to ransack the ship and ‘lie with the womenfolk’. Presumably the slave girls were fair game, but to discover the whereabouts of the treasure the pirates soon resorted to torturing the henna-ed pilgrims and ‘dishonouring’ their veiled companions. Many of the women killed themselves or jumped overboard rather than undergo instant ‘marriage’.

  For himself Avery is supposed to have secured a Moghul princess. There were certainly high-bred ladies aboard but the only one mentioned in the records as being related to the Emperor was an elderly matron. It seems more probable, then, that ‘Mulatto Tom’, Avery’s son who later carved out a kingdom for himself in Madagascar, was not her offspring but that of one of her attendants. ‘All this will raise a black cloud at court’, reported the Bombay factors when news of the outrage reached them. They hoped, but can scarcely have believed, that the cloud would ‘not produce a severe storm’.

  In the event the storm broke first, not at court, but at Surat. On previous occasions the Moghul governor had simply thrown a cordon of troops round the English factory. This served the dual purpose of punishing the factors if guilty and protecting them from their accusers if not. But this time more positive action was called for. Robbery on the high seas was one thing; violating the sanctity of the haj another. It wa
s not just a crime but a sacrilege as appalling to the pious old Emperor as to the Muslim mob which now stormed through the city baying for the blood of the English.

  Samuel Annesley, the Chief Factor, argued vigorously that a Company dependent on the Moghul’s goodwill and his merchants’ credit would hardly choose to alienate both by such gratuitous provocation – an argument which would have carried more weight had it not been flatly contradicted by Child’s actions in the previous decade. Annesley also offered double compensation to any who could prove that the Company’s ships were involved. But this did not mollify the incensed mob. It was known that the pirates were English; they flew the cross of St George and some, evidently ex-employees of the Company, had spoken openly of avenging the siege of Bombay. As the mob paraded a sorry file of dishonoured matrons, maimed patriarchs and wailing relatives past the Governor’s house, every Englishman in Surat, Company employee or not, was rounded up and clapped in irons. Three hundred troops took over the English factory and stood guard over the prisoners. ‘It is needless to write’, Annesley needlessly wrote, ‘of the indignities, slavish usages and tyrannical insultings wee hourly bear day and night; and to expatiate on so hateful a subject woud no wayes redress or alleviate our sufferings.’

  Their fate now rested with the Emperor whose fury, on hearing of the Gang-i-Sawai’s sacking, was wholly predictable. Piracy, sacrilege and lèse-majesté had all been compounded in the one action; no punishment was too severe for such treacherous infidels; Bombay and Madras must be attacked immediately, and the English banished for ever. But saner counsels and hefty bribes soon prevailed. Aurangzeb came to appreciate that the English Company might not be wholly to blame; and this being the case, he eventually preferred a scheme whereby they, along with the Dutch and French companies, should henceforth assume the duty of providing an armed escort for the Mocha fleet. This was agreed to by Annesley and his colleagues, although its corollary – that they would accept responsibility for suppressing piracy and for compensating any who suffered by it – was left to further negotiation. After nine months of imprisonment the Surat factors were released and trade resumed.