London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  John Sanderson was sent out to Constantinople by tenacious and hard-working merchants who recognized that in order to succeed with the Ottomans they would have to work with them. The chartered company model was well established by the 1580s: as London’s Muscovy Company had shown, pooling resources and expertise was vital to the success of long-distance trade, where huge amounts of capital were necessary to rig out ships, establish local bases and pay staff. There were disasters, endemic problems of corruption (the Muscovy Company in the 1570s and 1580s was plagued by its agents and factors in Russia running their own private businesses), and foreign competition. In the eastern Mediterranean, French and especially Venetian merchants ran long-established and formidably efficient trading operations. They were naturally hostile towards a new syndicate of English merchants trying to muscle in on the eastern spice business.

  The visionaries of this new Levant trade were two London merchants called Edward Osborne and Richard Staper. They were rich and successful, each with a large portfolio of commercial interests: Osborne in Spain and Portugal; Staper in Spain also, as well as North Africa and Brazil, where, in the 1580s, he, other Londoners and aggressive privateers were trying to break into the trade of the once-powerful Portuguese empire. Osborne and Staper had their eyes on Constantinople, and sent one of their factors, William Harborne, there in the late 1570s.

  Harborne was an inspired choice: fearless, robust, flamboyant, his self-confidence formidable. He was a merchant-diplomat, the queen’s man whose job it was to look to English commercial interests. On the model of the ambassadors sent out to Moscow, he took his instructions from the government, but his salary from the merchants. It worked: in 1580 Sultan Murād III agreed to a licence for English merchants to trade in his empire. Harborne, like everyone else, knew that this kind of commercial breakthrough had to be recognized by gifts for the sultan and his officials, and the new syndicate of Levant merchants paid thousands of pounds for silver tableware, fine cloths of blue, scarlet, violet, green and black, greyhounds, spaniels, mastiffs and bloodhounds; obviously Murād was fond of dogs.5 News of the sumptuousness of these gifts spread throughout London, with Ben Jonson giving one of the characters in Every Man In His Humour (1616) the line: ‘I have such a present for thee (our Turkey Company never sent the like to the Grand Signior!)’ (I. ii. 69–70)

  Harborne’s style and flamboyance made him something of an Elizabethan celebrity. In 1599 Thomas Nashe wrote that, thanks to Harborne, ‘not an infant of the curtailed skinclipping [i.e. circumcised] pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their Prophet’s tomb at Mecca’. ‘So from the prepotent [pre-eminently powerful] goddess of the earth, Eliza,’ Nashe continued, ‘was he sent to set free the English captives and open unto us the passage into the Red Sea and Euphrates.’6 In Constantinople, William Harborne was young John Sanderson’s boss.

  In 1581 the goddess Eliza as plain Queen Elizabeth I gave to a small group of London merchants a commercial monopoly on the Levant trade for a period of seven years.7 Hopes were high, and in 1582 Elizabeth lent to Osborne and three other merchants a little over £42,000 worth of fine silver bullion, to be paid back over five years.8 Success came quickly. In its first half-decade, the new company’s business thrived. It boasted of employing nineteen ships and 782 mariners in making twenty-seven voyages, paying £11,359 in customs to the royal exchequer. The cargo of one of its ships in 1588 was valued at over £70,000.9 Either those figures were inflated or trade tailed off a little. Still, the Levant operation was a sizeable one. In the middle 1590s, 900 tons of English shipping and 216 mariners sailed between England and Alexandria, and a further 1,130 tons and 264 sailors navigated the ports and islands of the Aegean Sea. The Jewel, Centurion, Royal Exchange, Great Susan and Margaret and Elizabeth brought home from Syria commodities like raw silk, indigo (in high demand by London’s dyers), medicines, mohair, cotton wool and yarn, spices and currants. Cloth and tin were exported out of England, and the company’s ships moved between Constantinople, the island of Chios, Syria and Egypt. For all its successes, the company was always keen to remind its friends in Elizabeth’s government of the enormous costs of the Mediterranean trade. In the 1590s cost of the hire of all the ships and their crews came to the huge sum of £16,910.10

  Thanks to its commercial clout and the success of the embassy in Constantinople, this first Turkey Company (as it was commonly known) was recognized in a new charter of 1592. This opened up the monopoly to a few more London merchants and set a further limit of time before its renewal – the company could not afford to sit on its hands as the Muscovy Company had done in its ventures and navigations.11

  One of the fifty-three members of this newly reshaped Levant Company was Ralph Fitch. Of all of them, as grand as they were (the company boasted a number of London aldermen), Fitch was the most extraordinary. In 1583 he and three others had set out to travel east, reaching as far as Fatehpur Sikri, the city of the Mughal emperor Akbar. They had travelled out from London to Aleppo, and then on to Basra and Hormuz. Taken prisoner by the Portuguese authorities in Hormuz, the party was sent to Goa, from where they escaped to Bijapur, going northwards to Agra. After that they divided. John Newberry, co-leader of the expedition, took the overland route back to Aleppo, while Fitch travelled down the Jamuna and Ganges rivers to Bengal, Burma and Malacca. Fitch and Newberry agreed to meet, two years hence, in the city of Pegu in Burma. Newberry, however, disappeared, and so Fitch made his own journey back to London. He arrived, in April 1591, eight years after leaving.12

  Fitch’s account of his fantastic journey was printed by Richard Hakluyt in 1599. Fitch made it sound as routine and unremarkable as taking a boat across to Antwerp:

  In the year of our Lord 1583, I Ralph Fitch of London, merchant, being desirous to see the countries of the East India, in the company of Master John Newberry merchant (which had been at Hormuz once before) … being chiefly set forth by the right worshipful Sir Edward Osborne knight, and Master Richard Staper, citizens and merchants of London, did ship myself in a ship of London called the Tiger, wherein we went for Tripoli in Syria …13

  The familiar names of Osborne and Staper are important here: two of the masterminds behind the Turkey Company of 1581, both were naturally members of the newly chartered Levant Company. Indeed, they were largely responsible for the Levant commerce in the first place.14 Fitch’s travels opened up possibilities of which Osborne and Staper must have dreamed for a decade. The Levant charter of 1592 allowed the company to operate on land and at sea in the eastern Mediterranean ‘and also by land through the countries of the said Grand Signior [the sultan] into and from the East India, lately discovered by John Newberry [and] Ralph Fitch’.15 Here was the prospect of overland trade from the eastern Mediterranean all the way to India. There had been nothing like it before.

  But there was another obvious route out to the east. For decades, the English cosmographers and navigators of the northern voyages to Cathay had mocked the arduous efforts of the Portuguese in sailing all the way around the southern tip of Africa to get to their territories in the East Indies. By the 1590s, however, such a journey around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indies looked like an opportunity waiting to be seized by English navigators; Drake, after all, had managed to sail all the way around the world, and privateering expeditions out to the Caribbean and the coasts of South America were common.

  It was nevertheless a heavy slog. An early effort, in which John Sanderson himself invested, failed in 1590. A more successful attempt, at least in reaching the Indies, was that of James Lancaster four years later. Lancaster sailed to the island of Penang, off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, circling back to England via the Caribbean. The keynotes of his expedition were scurvy, disease, desertion and capture: a miserable and punishing failure, it was emphatically not an heroic breakthrough to Asia. But Lancaster’s efforts at least suggested that it might be viable for London merchantmen to sail all the way to the East Indies. By a coincidence – or was it for Elizabethans a sig
n of providence? – Lancaster’s vessel was the Edward Bonaventure, sharing the very name of the ship that Richard Chancellor had taken to Russia forty years earlier.16

  Yet by now old habits were hard to break, especially in a time of Anglo-Spanish war. Organized privateering was a long-standing instrument of aggression against Spain. It offered a great opportunity for making huge amounts of money (for captains, merchants, the queen and her courtiers alike) by smashing up Portuguese ports and plundering Spanish ships for gold and silver (Philip II had absorbed Portugal into his empire in 1580). Certainly it was much less demanding of money and infrastructure than the building up of long-term trade with the East Indies.17 In the middle 1590s the kind of East Indies syndicate that made such a success of the Levant business did not exist in London or anywhere else in England – at least not yet. But circumstances would soon prod London’s merchants to get themselves organized very quickly indeed.

  In trade in the sixteenth century there were always competitors. French and Italian merchants were busy in the Mediterranean, and for a decade at least Richard Hakluyt had worried about France’s colonial ambitions. Printing in 1599 a letter sent by Ralph Fitch from Goa in 1583, Hakluyt allowed himself a marginal comment: ‘The Italians our great enemies for the trade in the East.’18 But at the end of the sixteenth century, Hakluyt and everyone in London knew that in the Indies competition came from one nation only: the Dutch of the United Provinces, England’s ally in the war against Spain.

  The Dutch were themselves reacting to difficult circumstances. Spanish military action around the Scheldt river in 1585 meant the end of the Antwerp spice market, encouraging Dutch merchants to find a new way to trade – this time directly – with Asia. This meant challenging Portuguese dominance of the Cape sea route to the East Indies. A ‘Company of Far Lands’ based in Amsterdam sent four ships out to the east in 1595; three returned in 1597 with a cargo of pepper, nutmeg and mace. Other merchants organized themselves for the Asian trade, a second in Amsterdam and others in Zeeland and Rotterdam. The Amsterdam companies merged to form an organization known as the ‘Old Company’. Its expedition of 1598–9 was a huge success: profit on investment in the voyage was estimated at about 400 per cent.19

  And so Dutch merchants began to embed themselves in East Indies trade. By the late 1590s they had built for themselves a base in the city of Bantam in western Java, a map view of which was printed in Amsterdam in 1598. It was a modest enough beginning. They shared a western suburb of the city with the Chinese, protecting their interests with a stockade. But what the Amsterdam merchants had done – and what London’s merchants soon desperately wanted to do – was to position themselves in a nexus of Asian trading routes that extended out to China and Japan. East Asia was waiting to be opened up to north-western Europe, with pepper from the Malabar coast of India, Sumatra and Java, and cloves, nutmeg and mace from the Molucca Islands.20

  The East Indies, 1599.

  It was Dutch success in the East Indies that shocked London’s merchants into action. In 1599 a pamphlet was on sale in Paul’s Churchyard, a translation of the latest Dutch voyage called A true report of the gainefull, prosperous and speedy voiage to Java in the East Indies, performed by a fleete of eight ships of Amsterdam. The final paragraph of the expedition’s journal made clear the scale of what was involved, as well as the fantastic potential of trade. The ships had arrived home, ‘having performed in the short space of one year, two months and nineteen days, almost as long a voyage as if we should have compassed the globe of the earth, and bringing home with us our full freight of rich and gainful merchandize’.21 One of John Sanderson’s contacts in London wrote to him from Constantinople: ‘The Flemings have found traffic in the East Indies and have come home very rich … and [are] going again in good readiness.’ He was pessimistic: ‘It will be a hurt to your company.’22

  The Dutch seemed to be everywhere. The Levant merchants had felt them nipping at their heels for some time. The Levant Company complained in 1595 that their Dutch competitors wanted for free what it had cost the company tens of thousands of pounds to build up from scratch: a hugely expensive and complex trade involving a Mediterranean fleet, teams of consuls and agents throughout the Ottoman Empire, and an embassy in Constantinople. And the Dutch were even seeking English government protection for their ships voyaging between Amsterdam and Turkey. If such a thing were allowed to happen, the company complained, the national interest and Elizabeth’s treasury were bound to suffer.23

  Now, in 1599, the situation looked worse. The London Levant trade relied on long and expensive caravans to carry its spices overland from the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast. A more straightforward (if still long and perilous) journey by sea from the East Indies to Holland threatened to cut off at the knees England’s Mediterranean trade. This was what worried the Levant Company’s agent in Aleppo in November 1599: ‘I assure you our Aleppo trade is such as is not worth the venture, except it amend this year, whereof there is no great likelihood.’24 He was convinced that the city’s spice trade would collapse. And he was not alone in this belief. Another of his and John Sanderson’s colleagues gave a sombre analysis a month later:

  The Flemings are returned richly laden from the East Indies, and six great ships were to depart out of London for those places in September last. This trading to the Indies have clean overthrown our dealings to Aleppo, as by experience ere long we shall see; and by means thereof our company shall not be able to undergo the charges they are at.

  If spices found their way into England by any route other than Aleppo, he continued, the company would not be able to cover half of the heavy charges it incurred in the Mediterranean.25 This was global trade in the raw: the commercial breakthrough by the Dutch in the East Indies was a direct threat to what had been a valuable English trade in the Mediterranean.

  Sanderson was not himself one of the doom-mongers, treating as a bad joke the report that the Dutch had returned from the Indies with a cargo of indigo merely as ballast for their ships.26 The senior merchants of the Levant Company agreed. They wrote in March 1600 that Dutch success was not inevitable:

  We see not any reason why that [the Dutch voyages to the East Indies] should be any just discouragement … there are many impediments that may hinder their voyages of so long courses and great adventures, and may move the Dutch merchants rather to frequent a known and peaceable trade in Turkey than hazard the danger of seas and enemies of so long a circuit and infestious climates.27

  That, at any rate, was the official line. But we might compare those sober words to Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom’s scene of the homecoming of the Dutch expedition in 1599. Doubtless stylized, but nevertheless brimming with pride and self-confidence, the picture shows a festival of boats around the four great galleons returned to Europe from the East Indies. There were no such celebrations on the River Thames.

  *

  The official position of the Levant Company gave away not a hint of how many of London’s Levant merchants were beginning to organize themselves into action. In the autumn of 1599 the city’s mercantile elite was being recruited for a new venture into the East Indies. In September a full list was produced of all those merchants who were committed to the enterprise. For the record, each man wrote out his name in his own handwriting, adding the amount of money he would lay out ‘to venture in the pretended [i.e. intended] voyage to the East Indias’. The first name in the register was that of the lord mayor, Sir Stephen Soame. One of the biggest investors was Leonard Halliday, who seven years later would plant a tree close to John Sanderson’s in the new Moorfields. Halliday put £1,000 into the voyage. Most others invested between £100 and £500, and five men sums between £800 and £3,000. The total amount raised was £30,133.

  Many of the investors met together two days later on Monday, 24 September. They set out what they wanted to do. For the honour of their native country and for the advancement of English trade, they proposed to make that year a voyage ‘to the East Ind
ies and other the islands and countries thereabouts’. A board of fifteen directors was elected, along with a treasurer to handle the sums invested.28

  The following day they agreed a plan to petition the queen’s council for support. Their reason for action, they said, was the successful Dutch voyage out to the Indies. They understood that a second Dutch expedition was being planned; in fact, several ships for that new voyage had been bought in England. ‘Stirred up with no less affection to advance the trade of their native country than the Dutch merchants were to benefit their commonwealth’, they proposed to make their own voyage out to the East Indies. What they wanted most was recognition as a single and united company, ‘for that the trade of the Indias being so far remote from hence cannot be traded but in a joint and united stock’.29 The venture was to be right from the beginning a robust pooling of resources and resolve.

  There is a sense from the minutes of their meeting of an iron resolution to get on with the job. They found ships and crews and petitioned the Privy Council. They made progress. But because Elizabeth’s government was negotiating a peace treaty with Spain, there was a temporary stall. Too politically and diplomatically sensitive to support for the moment, the East India project was put to one side for the time being. The merchants looked instead to a voyage the following year.30

  Driving the ambitious new company were some of the most experienced merchants of the Mediterranean trade. Five of the fifteen directors had been Levant Company men for the best part of a decade. One was Richard Staper, who had spent twenty years petitioning queen and Privy Council to support the Turkey merchants; it was no surprise that Staper was one of the team of new East India directors whose job it was to lobby Elizabeth’s advisers. Two other East India directors would join a newly chartered Levant Company in 1605 and 1610, showing that the weave of overlapping commercial interests in London was as dense as ever.31 The Levant merchants drove the East India project, which needed their experience and above all their capital.