The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

  Even the two most experienced mariners and Eastern explorers in London, both of whom were present in the Founders’ Hall, had arrived back from their travels with little more than wonderful tales to show for their efforts, and with neither crews nor cargoes intact.

  Ralph Fitch was the first. In 1583 he had set out from Falmouth on the Tyger. Sent to the East to buy spices by Auditor Smythe’s new Levant Company, Fitch had gone overland from the Levantine coast via Aleppo, but had only got as far as Hormuz before he was arrested as a spy by the Portuguese. From there he was sent in chains to Goa where they threatened to subject him to the strappado – the Inquisition’s answer to bungee jumping, where a man was dropped from a height attached to a rope. The bone-jarring jerk when the rope halted his rapid descent was said to be even more exquisitely agonising than the rack, the Elizabethans’ own preferred form of torture.

  Fitch was helped to escape by Fr Thomas Stevens, an English Jesuit long based in Goa, who stood surety for him, and he duly succeeded in travelling through the rich Sultanates of the Deccan to the sixteenth-century Mughal capital of Agra, and hence, via Bengal, to the Moluccas.13 On his return to London three years later, he regaled the city with his traveller’s tales and became such a celebrity that his ship was mentioned by Shakespeare in Macbeth: ‘her husband is to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger’. But while Fitch brought back many enticing details of the pepper trade, he had arrived home with no actual pepper.14

  The Levant Company’s next attempt to break into the spice trade, this time by the sea route, was even more of a disaster. Sir James Lancaster’s 1591 voyage into the Indian Ocean was the first English attempt to reach the East via the Cape. Both its funding, and its armed shipping, was provided by Auditor Smythe and his Levant Company. But in the event, only one of Lancaster’s four ships, the Edward Bonaventure, made it back from the Indies, and that on a skeleton crew. The last survivors, five men and a boy, worked it home with its cargo of pepper which they had earlier looted from a passing Portuguese ship. Lancaster himself, marooned on the Comoro Islands with the rest of his crew after he was shipwrecked during a cyclone, finally found his way home in 1594. On the way he had been stuck in the doldrums, ravaged by scurvy, lost three ships and seen almost all his fellow crew members speared to death by angry islanders. It was lucky that the Levant Company had deep pockets, for the voyage was a devastating financial failure.15

  In contrast to these ragged buccaneers, their more sophisticated Portuguese and Spanish rivals had been busy for over a century establishing profitable and cosmopolitan empires that ranged across the globe – empires whose massive imports of New World gold had turned Spain into the richest country in Europe, and given Portugal control of the seas and spices of the East, so bringing it in a close second place. Indeed, the only rival of the Iberians, gallingly for the English, was the tiny and newly independent republic of Holland, whose population was less than half that of England, and which had thrown off the rule of Spain only twenty years earlier, in 1579.

  It was the recent astonishing success of the Dutch that had brought this diverse group of Londoners together. Three months earlier, on 19 July, Admiral Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck of the Dutch Compagnie Van Verre – the Company of Distant Lands – had successfully returned from Indonesia with a vast cargo of spices – 800 tons of pepper, 200 tons of cloves and great quantities of cinnamon and nutmeg. The voyage made an unprecedented 400 per cent profit: ‘There never arrived in Holland ships so richly laden,’ wrote one envious Levant Company observer.16

  By August, following this ‘successe of the viage performed by the Dutche nation’, English merchants had begun discussing the possibilities of setting up a company to make similar voyages to buy spices not, as before, from Middle Eastern middlemen, who trebled the price as their commission, but instead direct from the producers, half the way around the world, in the East Indies. The prime movers in this initiative were again Smythe’s cabal of Levant Company merchants who realised, as one wrote from the Greek island of Chios, that this Dutch ‘trading to the Indies has clean overthrown our dealings to Aleppo’.17

  The final straw was when the Dutch sent a delegation to London to try to buy up English shipping for further voyages eastwards. This was too much for the pride of Elizabethan London. The Amsterdam Agents, waiting in the Old Steelyard of the Hamburg Company, were told, ‘Our merchants of London have need of all our ships and none to sell to the Dutch. We ourselves intend forthwith to have trade with the East Indies.’18 The meeting at the Founders’ Hall was the direct result of that retort. As they told Elizabeth’ s Privy Council in their petition, they were moved ‘with no less affection to advance the trade of their native country than the Dutch merchants were to benefit their commonwealth … For the honour of our native country and the advancement of trade … to set forth a voyage this present year to the East Indies.’19

  Fully one-quarter of the subscribers to the voyage, and seven of the original fifteen directors of the enterprise, were the Levant Company grandees. They feared, with reason, that the Dutch had ruined their existing investment in the spice trade, and they provided not only one-third of the subscription, but also many of the ships and the offices where the initial meetings took place. ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies’ was thus originally an outgrowth of the Levant Company and a mechanism for its shareholders to extend its existing trade to the Far East by developing the sea route, and to raise as much new capital as possible.20

  This was the reason Smythe and his associates had decided to found a new company, and open it to any subscriber who would contribute, rather than merely extend the remit of their existing monopoly. For, unlike the Levant Company, which had a fixed board of fifty-three tightly knit subscribers, the EIC was from the very first conceived as a joint stock corporation, open to all investors. Smythe and his associates had decided that, because of the huge expenses and high risks involved, ‘a trade so far remote cannot be managed but by a joint and united stock’.21 Costs were, after all, astronomically high. The commodities they wished to buy were extremely expensive and they were carried in huge and costly ships that needed to be manned by large crews and protected by artillery masters and professional musket-men. Moreover, even if everything went according to plan, there would be no return on investment for several years.

  The idea of a joint stock company was one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations. The spark of the idea sprang from the flint of the medieval craft guilds, where merchants and manufacturers could pool their resources to undertake ventures none could afford to make individually. But the crucial difference in a joint stock company was that the latter could bring in passive investors who had the cash to subscribe to a project but were not themselves involved in the running of it. Such shares could be bought and sold by anyone, and their price could rise or fall depending on demand and the success of the venture.

  Such a company would be ‘one body corporate and politick’ – that is, it would be a corporation, and so could have a legal identity and a form of corporate immortality that allowed it to transcend the deaths of individual shareholders, ‘in like manner’, wrote the legal scholar William Blackstone, ‘as the River Thames is still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance’.22

  Forty years earlier, in 1553, a previous generation of London merchants had begun the process of founding the world’s first chartered joint stock company: the Muscovy Company, or to give it its full and glorious title, The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown.23 The original aim was to explore an idea first mooted by classical geographers, who believed their world to be an island, surrounded by an ocean, which meant there had to be a northern route to the spices and gold of the Far East as well as that by the Cape – and that passage would be free from all Iberian rivalry.

  Although the Muscovy Company directors soon came to the conclusio
n that the northern route did not exist, in the process of looking for it they discovered, and successfully traded along, a direct overland route with Persia via Russia. Before Ottoman Turkish conquests cut the road in 1580, they sent out six successful voyages to Isfahan and the other great bazaar towns of the region, and managed to post a respectable profit.24

  In 1555, the Muscovy Company was finally granted its royal charter laying out its privileges and responsibilities. By 1583 there were chartered Venice and Turkey companies, which merged in 1592 to become the Levant Company. The same year the slave-trading Sierra Leone Company was founded. The East India Company was thus following a fairly well-trod path, and its royal charter should have come through without complication. Moreover, the Queen wanted to keep the City on her side in case of a threatened rebellion by the unruly Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and she proved surprisingly receptive to the petition.25

  But almost immediately orders came from the court of the Privy Council suspending both the formation of the Company and the preparations for the voyage. The peace negotiations with Spain which had followed the death of King Philip II in 1598 were progressing, and their lordships, ‘thinking it more beneficiall … to enterteyne a peace, than that the same should be hindered’ by a quarrel, made the decision that the adventurers should ‘proceade noe further in this matter for this yere’.

  The merchants, none of whom were from the nobility, and so had little standing or influence at court, had no option but to wait. For twelve months it looked as if the ambitious idea of founding an English company to trade with the East would remain just that – a midsummer dream.

  It was only when the Spanish peace talks foundered in the summer of 1600 that the Privy Council had a change of heart and felt confident enough to stress the universal freedom of the seas and the right of all nations to send ships wherever they wished. Almost exactly a year after the petition had been drafted, on 23 September 1600, the subscribers were finally given the go-ahead: ‘It was her Majesty’s pleasure’, they were told, ‘that they shuld proceade in ther purpose … and goe forward in the said viage.’26

  On 31 December 1600, the last day of the first year of the new century, the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies’, a group of 218 men, received their royal charter.27

  This turned out to offer far wider powers than the petitioners had perhaps expected or even hoped for. As well as freedom from all customs duties for their first six voyages, it gave them a British monopoly for fifteen years over ‘trade to the East Indies’, a vaguely defined area that was soon taken to encompass all trade and traffic between the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan, as well as granting semi-sovereign privileges to rule territories and raise armies. The wording was sufficiently ambiguous to allow future generations of EIC officials to use it to claim jurisdiction over all English subjects in Asia, mint money, raise fortifications, make laws, wage war, conduct an independent foreign policy, hold courts, issue punishment, imprison English subjects and plant English settlements. It was not without foundation that a later critic and pamphleteer complained that the Company had been granted monopoly on ‘near two-third parts of the trading World’.28 And though it took two and a half centuries for the potential to be realised, the wording of the EIC’s charter left open from the beginning the possibility of it becoming an imperial power, exercising sovereignty and controlling people and territory.29

  In the intervening year, the merchant adventurers had not been idle. They had been to Deptford to ‘view severall shippes’, one of which, the May Flowre, was later famous for a voyage heading in the opposite direction.30 Four vessels had been bought and put into dry dock to be refitted. Given that time was of the essence, a barrel of beer a day was authorised ‘for the better holding together of the workemen from running from ther worke to drinke’. What was intended as the Company’s 900-ton flagship, a former privateering vessel, specifically built for raiding Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, the Scourge of Malice was renamed the Red Dragon so that it might sound a little less piratical.

  Before long the adventurers had begun to purchase not only shipping, but new masts, anchors and rigging, and to begin constructing detailed inventories of their seafaring equipment – their ‘kedgers’, ‘drabblers’, ‘all standard rigging and running ropes’, ‘cables good and bad, a mayne course bonnet very good’ and ‘1 great warping hauser’. There was also the armament they would need: ‘40 muskets, 24 pikes … 13 sackers, 2 fowlers, 25 barrelles of powder’ as well as the ‘Spunges, Ladles and Ramers’ for the cannon.31

  They also set about energetically commissioning hogsheads to be filled with ‘biere, 170 tonnes, 40 tonnes of hogshed for Porke, 12 tonnes drie caske for Oatemeal, one tonne dryie caske for mustard seed, one tonne dry caske for Rice … bisket well dryed … good fish … very Dry’ as well as ‘120 oxen’ and ‘60 Tons of syder’. Meanwhile, the financiers among them began to collect £30,000* of bullion, as well as divers items to trade on arrival – what they termed an ‘investment’ of iron, tin and English broadcloth, all of which they hoped would be acceptable items to trade against Indonesian pepper, nutmeg, cloves, mace, cardamom and the other aromatic spices and jewels they hoped to bring home.32

  There was one last hiccup. In February 1601, the presiding genius of the nascent Company, Auditor Smythe, was briefly incarcerated in the Tower of London on a charge of complicity in the rebellion of the hot-headed Earl of Essex.33 Nevertheless, only two months after the formal granting of their charter, on 13 February 1601, the refitted Red Dragon slipped its Woolwich moorings and glided through the cold February Thames fog, followed closely by its three smaller escorts, the Hector, the Susan and the Ascension. In command again was the stern but now-chastened figure of Sir James Lancaster. Lancaster had learned several lessons from his previous adventures and brought along lemon juice to administer to his crew to prevent scurvy, and enough armament – no less than thirty-eight guns – to take on any competition he might encounter en route.34

  The voyage got off to an almost comically bad start. As they were leaving the Thames estuary, the wind dropped and for two months the fleet stood humiliatingly becalmed in the Channel, within sight of Dover. But the wind eventually picked up and by September the fleet had rounded the Cape, where it stopped in for provisions. Wishing to indicate to the waiting tribesmen that he wanted to buy meat, Lancaster, showing a linguistic aptitude that would come to distinguish English imperialism, ‘spake to them in cattel’s language … moath [‘moo’] for kine and oxen, and baah for sheep’. They then headed on to Mauritius where, on the shore, they found a series of carvings on a rock. It was not good news: five Dutch ships had recorded their visit only five months earlier.35

  It was not until June 1602 that Lancaster’s fleet made it to Acheh and began to negotiate with the Sultan for his spices. Shortly afterwards the crew spied a Portuguese carrack. Lancaster had been advised to conduct his men ‘in a merchantlike course’, but was also authorised to indulge in piracy against Spanish or Portuguese ships should ‘an opportunity be offered without prejudice or hazard’. He did not hesitate.

  A year later, on 1 June 1603, rumours began to filter into London via France that the Company’s first fleet had returned safely into European waters. But it was not until 6 June that Lancaster finally anchored on the south coast at the Downs, ‘for which thanked be Almightie God who hath delivered us from infinite perils and dangers’.36 This time Lancaster had brought back all four of his vessels, intact and fully loaded. He was carrying no less than 900 tons of pepper, cinnamon and cloves, much of it taken from the Portuguese carrack, which along with more spices bought in Acheh made the voyage an impressive 300 per cent profit.

  It would be the first of fifteen more EIC expeditions that would set out over the next fifteen years. But the truth was that this was small fry compared with what the Dutch were already achieving on the other side of the Channel. For in March 1602, while Lancaster was still in the Moluccas, the dif
ferent Dutch East India Companies had all agreed to amalgamate and the Dutch East India Company, the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), had received its state monopoly to trade with the East. When the Amsterdam accountants had totted up all the subscriptions, it was found that the VOC had raised almost ten times the capital base of the English EIC, and was immediately in a position to offer investors a 3,600 per cent dividend.37

  Compared to this, the English Company was for many years an extremely modest venture, and one with relatively limited ambitions. For all the initial excitement at the Founders’ Hall, the merchants had raised only a relatively paltry £68,373 capital, as opposed to the Dutch who had by then pulled together a magnificent £550,000* for their rival venture. Since then, further Dutch subscriptions had poured in, while the English Company had, on the contrary, found it difficult to squeeze out even what the initial subscribers had promised.

  In October 1599 the Company records contain the first complaints about the ‘slacknes of many of the contributors who had sett down ther names’ but had ‘hitherto brought in noe moneys’. A few months later the directors began to threaten more severe sanctions against those who had failed to deliver on their promises at the Founders’ Hall. On 11 January 1600 they ‘ordered that any brother of this fellowship who shall … have fallen into breach of any of ye ordinances … then such person shall be committed to prison there to remaine duringe ye pleasure of ye generalitie’. A warrant was then issued for four persons to be committed to Marshalsea unless they paid up in four days.