1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  Due to uncertainties of the land route, the prospects of those merchants were limited for any large scale undertaking and the Dutch in the meantime, were advancing with their sea route to India. The British therefore decided to follow the Dutch. In 1589, they got together and applied to the Privy Council to form the British East India Company (EIC). The Charter of Incorporation was given to them on 31st December 1599 in the names of Georg Clifford, Earl of Cumberland and two hundred fifteen other merchants. In the intervening decade, the British experimented travelling to the east via the sea route. In truth, the sea faring venture was profoundly risky but the British had evaluated their desperate financial condition and trade with India was the only hope for their financial emancipation. In 1591, James Lancaster had taken three ships by the Cape which reached the Malay Peninsula and Ceylon but all three ships were lost and Lancaster and some of his crew were brought back in 1594 as castaways and only twenty five men survived. A second attempt in 1596 under John Wood was also a total loss. The Eastern trade was thus far very discouraging. They did not have any other answer to their financial misery so they tried again. In April 1601, five ships sailed again with Lancaster in Red Dragon as General of the Fleet and after a year they reached Achin in Sumatra, but there were continuous conflicts and the business success was limited because of the ongoing battles for business between the Dutch and other Europeans. Lancaster’s ship ‘Red Dragon’, over 600 tons with 40 guns, and built in 1592 was captured by the Dutch at Tiku in Indonesian waters and eventually broken up. Every voyage therefore was a gamble and it was hard to float the stock. The various merchants had to pool the funds for each and every journey and to pay for those trips the British started the pirating raids in the Indian Waters. The country was in the grip of the plague of 1603 and it became difficult to collect further installments from various investors till the profit or loss from the earlier voyages were prepared. Trade with India was however found lucrative; finally when the accounts were made up there was a dividend of two hundred percent. The third voyage was more successful and put a new life into the trading enterprise. It discouraged the skeptics as without that profit, the voyages to India probably might have ended and so would the British colonial history.

  By that time, there was a history of about one hundred years of sea faring voyages and the Dutch and others made it look simple. For the British, the sea lanes were paved by the Dutch and the hazards of long voyages was reduced to simple planning. They had come to know the stops where the ships could pick up water, food, livestock and fodder and seek shelter from fierce storms. They developed contacts with various countries on the African coast where they could pick up mail. They exchanged small gifts with various kings along the way and sought intelligence about the mineral wealth and movement of enemy ships. They picked up mineral samples and targeted areas for future explorations. The British had done their home work and they did not want to miss any opportunity to make money. No wonder that they are deeply involved in mining all over the world.

  The British learnt a lot form Newberry’s trip to India, so they had to come up with a sustainable strategy. They were frustrated because they could not enjoy the prosperity of Indian trade since most Europeans were there and doing lucrative business. So, they sent William Hawkins to the Court of Emperor Jahangir once again and requested permission for their presence in India. He was rebuffed too because their reputation was trailing wherever they went. His predecessor, David Middleton was imprisoned at Mocha and spent six months in Jail. Middleton also tried pillage and loot, he looted Gujrati shipping that entered the Red sea and the Mughal Nabobs were getting tired of the British freebooters. In the meantime, one Thomas Best arrived at Surat, on Dragon with Robert Bonner as master. He was allowed to have a warehouse by a local governor, and the British celebrated that they have been able to establish a foothold of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent. It was a harbinger of the things to come. After that, between 1601 and 1613, the East India Company took twelve more voyages and the company was found profitable by trading in Indian spices and black pepper. They bought low in India and sold high on the European market and the profits from the pepper trade saved England plenty. Typically, two hundred thousand pounds of pepper shipment produced a profit of seventy thousand pounds sterling in those days, which was a huge amount for the starving British.

  The British forays to the East continued. Simultaneously, they sent Anthony Jenkins to Persia and he was expelled by Shah Abbas’s grandfather Tahmasp I as a spy. In 1603, Captain Christopher Newport, the celebrated captain who had sailed five times to Virginia, took two Anthony brothers Robert and Shirley to the Shah of Persia as envoys to inquire about the anti Ottoman alliance and returned disappointed. Their history of espionage, pillage, fire and piracy did not sit well with those foreign rulers. The Mughal Emperors and the Persians were traditional allies and had close contacts and such visits were no secret to them. As a matter of fact, Hamuyan (Second Mughal Emperor) had given to Shah Abbas’s grandfather Shah Tahmasp, the province of Kandahar as a gift, which Akbar (Third Mughal emperor) later took back in the sixteenth century. The British were not able to hide from their reputation.

  The Englishman’s journey from England to the coast of India via the Cape had its perils. Britain had no shortage of sailors in spite of the hardship of life at sea, sea sickness and disease and five pound wages per year. Misery of course is relative, because their life at home was no better and they were escaping from known misery at home to the promise of better life abroad. In spite of the dangers, the great floating population of Britain, the sea and land pirates, vagabonds and swindlers who lived on charity, extortion or by violence joined the voyages of six months and at least half of them never made it back. Unfortunately for India, they formed the composition of the trading people who landed in India. Many of those people were England’s minorities, Scottish and Irish. The British mostly stayed home as they were the merchant class. The British cemetery built in 1767 at Calcutta, a reminder of their struggling past, beyond the Bengal Club where the Governor-Generals and the East India Company hatched schemes to plunder the colony, was full before the century ended. Their memorial pyramids, stone markers, obelisks and pavilions, ten or twenty feet tall and crammed together, unfortunately commemorated the death at a younger age. Some of those sailors were extolled for their character and loyalty, they died young on those perilous voyages, pickled on board, brought ashore and buried. Those tombs are mildewed today and give a perpetual crepuscular feeling.

  The prosperity and industry of India surprised the Europeans. The Portuguese King Manuel wrote to Spanish King Ferdinand and Isabella about East. “Large cities, large buildings, rivers and great population centers. No naked savages like in the New World and bragged about precious stones, spices, mines of gold, nothing of scurvy and death and nothing of Muslim merchants. Here was a kind of place, Columbus was looking for and did not find one”. India played a big part in providing Western Europe with economic growth & improving the standard of life of its people.

  After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, James I (1603-1625) became the King of England. His royal realm was very un-royal. He was the son of Mary Stuart of Scotland, where he had ruled as James VI. He was coarse and vulgar with very extreme views of his prerogatives and did not get along with the Parliament. He had no money and sought help from the Spanish Ambassador Don Diego Sarmiento, his poverty left him no choice. By 1618, his health began to fail. He had gout and suffered from kidney stone attacks. Mentally, he was not very smart. In 1620, Spain attacked palatinate but James I got no help from the Parliament so he dissolved the Parliament. The breach with the Commons was final. Financially, James I was bankrupt, died in 1625 and left behind an empty treasury, struggling and an impoverished nation.

  The British did not give up. After Hawkins failed trip, they made another attempt to approach the Mughal Court for permission to trade and in 1615, they sent Thomas Roe aboard the Fleet Captained by William Keeling. He had four ships und
er his command. They sailed from Gravesend, the four ships were Dragon, Lyon, Peppercorn and the Expedition. The governor of the EIC, Thomas Smyth and some of the directors of the company were there to see him off. Captain Keeling had also insisted to bring his wife along with some other female companions. The cargo in the two bigger ships Peppercorn and the Expedition consisted of English Iron bars, pipes of English lead, and packs of cloth and sheet lead wrappers. Lyon built in 1614, carried elephant tusks, quick silver and two barrels of vermillion and Dragon of just about the same size as the Lyon, carried English knives, chests of glass, some spectacles ( mirrors), burning glasses and several cases of hot waters such as aqua vitae and some livestock and fodder for fresh meat.

  There was an assortment of people on board. The Expedition may have had about 75 people and only 36 would return. The Dragon suffered a casualty of 62 dead. The Fleet had 19 condemned prisoners and possibly some private passengers. Thomas Roe boarded the Lyon along with his retinue of some fifteen people. The British historians have characterized Thomas Roe as the first official ambassador to India, which was a great stretch. The British did not have a presence in India nor were they welcomed. Their main goal to go to India was for pecuniary reasons, their bid for Eastern trade. Their writings unfortunately which evolved after three centuries continue to paint a larger than life story of Britain of that time. Thomas Roe himself matriculated at age 12 from Magdalen College, Oxford and got the knighthood at age 24 and the only person to travel to India after wasting years in jungles of Guiana and the Amazon looking for gold. There was nothing in his biography to prepare him for the role in which he was being cast. Thomas Roe’s visit to the court of Jahangir was purely for eastern trade and did not have any political significance for India.

  The British historians have made a lot of the trip of Thomas Roe to India. In ‘Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India’ by William Foster, who joined the India Office in 1882 as Asst. to the Registrar & superintendent of Records in 1901, portrayed Roe as the drinking partner of Mughal Emperor Jahangir. Foster concluded that the gifts Roe gave Jahangir on behalf of King James I pleased the Emperor and he guaranteed the company the trading right. Foster was writing three hundred years after the event when the British were re-writing history and there was no evidence of any gift on board the fleet of four ships when Roe traveled to India, (the cargo details are available from London Port Books- Public Record Office) nor was James I in a position to send any gifts. Mughal Emperors never mixed with commoners because of security considerations and the protocol. The Mughal Kings were unapproachable, even Emperor Akbar, Jahangir’s father, had to send a military force to talk to his son accompanied by his most trusted courtier, Abul Fazal. Jahangir decapitated the head of Abul Fazal and sent it to his father, Emperor Akbar, and he was unable to meet his son Jahangir. Besides, no gift could sway the Mughal Emperors who were so wealthy that it was beyond the imagination of the British King James I, who was bankrupt, vulgar and mentally insane. The British historians, a highly chauvinistic bunch, have increasingly tried to cast their nation in a very regal light to repair their historical legacy of a poor impoverished nation who made their living by pillage, piracy and plunder.

  Kelly’s Fleet picked up some Spanish rials (silver coins), at one of the Channel Ports before hitting the open waters. Silver coins were the currency of necessity to do any trade in India. There were four ships to take care of and all they could muster was about one thousand pounds for each ship at the rate of four British shillings per rial. Lack of money continued to haunt the British traders which they made up by conducting piracy raids in the India coastal waters and with all kinds of chicanery and foul play.

  The fleet arrived at Surat around September 18. Thomas Roe got off the ship and arrived at shore and had an altercation with the custom officials. He was ordered back to the ship. The local authorities and the fleet had serious altercations and the Governor of Surat refused any cargo to be off loaded and demanded all merchandise to be sold on the spot to recover the duties owed on the cargo. The Governor did not allow any personnel to leave the fleet either. The logjam continued until mid November and no supplies were allowed to the fleet either before the British Trading party was allowed to off load.

  Thomas Roe (1588-1644), and his retinue spent four years in India from 1615-19, for the purpose of consolidating British commercial interests, of which he spent two years following the Mughal Emperor from camp to camp looking for trade concessions. It was only through permission of the Mughal Emperor and the advice of his ministers that the company would have been able to trade at all. Visits had to be paid to the Mughal Court; the representatives had to prostrate themselves before the Pea –Cock Throne in Diwan-Am (Court for meeting the commoners). In 1617, Emperor Jahangir, granted a limited “’ Farman’ (decree), agreeing to the conduct of English trade at Surat only on the west coast of India. What was the British gratitude? According to British literature, Thomas Roe disparaged the court, “religions infinite, laws none”. The company directors complained too: ‘These governors have the art of trampling on us and extorting what they please of our estate from us, by besieging our factories and stopping of our boats up in the Ganges River, they will never forbear doing so till we had made them sensible of our power”. The British did not have any factories at that time or boats plying in the Ganges River and Surat, the western port city, were about a thousand miles from the Ganges River. The facts did not support British writings.

  Later in December, the rest of the fleet bought cargo of Indigo, green ginger, cotton yarn, cotton cloth and that cargo was consigned to Lyons. The other ships received cotton goods to be sold in Java and Sumatra. On Feb 19, Lyon parted company from the fleet and sailed back to Britain and the rest of the fleet headed along the Indian coast, where as usual the British fleet attacked what ever ship they happened to sight and plundered their cargo. While sailing past Calicut, they made contact with the ruler of Calicut through a messenger and requested permission to set up a factory there. The Portuguese did not have good relations with the local rulers particularly the Muslims and the local king probably welcomed such a request to mitigate Portuguese aggressive behavior. The fleet captured a 400 ton ship from Bengal and its cargo was looted and sold at Achin. The loot was divided between the company and the crew.

  This is quite a contrast with the present day Britain. The change was fueled by the Indian wealth. In Indian vernacular, there is a saying: Is Dunya mein Maya ke ha teen nam, parsoo, parsa, pars ram. (In this world, money has three names: Billy, Bill and Mr. William.). With the loot of India, the British got intoxicated with money, so they created so many names of money, William, Sir William, Lord William, Baron William, Marquis William. They have always graded their populace in different social classes depending on their worth in terms of money. They also attempted to reshape history by presenting themselves in a very exalted light but it lacked authenticity.

  Political Conditions in India:

  The Mughal power was at its zenith in north India and the Mughal throne was occupied by Jahangir (1569-1627), when Roe arrived. Since the capture of Delhi in 1525 by Babur, a Turkic ruler and a descendant of Genghis Khan, the Mughal dynasty had established itself in North India. Babur inspired his successors by his character, personality and leadership. He was a great soldier and an inspiring leader and honest. He left full records of the treasuries of India that he conquered and he gave full account of the revenues he received. He was also a man of letters with fine literary taste; his father was a descendant of Timur. The Mughals though foreigners to India earned the respect of the Indians as they enormously enriched the cultural life of India and gave India new architecture, terraced gardens and new style of paintings. A succession of Mughal Emperors followed after the death of its founder Babur on 26 December 1530.

  Jahangir’s rule displayed the full grandeur and majesty of the Mughal Empire and he had inherited the kingdom from his father, Akbar the Great, in 1605. The Mughals controlled a sweep of territory from the Bay
of Bengal to Kandahar and Badakshan and touched the western sea at Surat. Jahangir had the richest as well as the most vigorous territory including Northwest India. The Persian Empire and the Iranian Plateau lay on their western boarder which itself was occupied by the Ottoman Turks. The Mughals had the resources and revenues of Bengal and the profits of the Middle Eastern trade, and provided a century of stable government. India was united; there was universal allegiance to the Emperor.

  There was life and vigor among the subjects. People were both craftsmen and architects and built some of the fine buildings and monuments that stand till this day. Legendary beauties surrounded the Mughals of the period. Jahangir’s attachment to his wife Nur Jehan (Light of the world) was well known. He commemorated his love by issuing a special gold Mohur (Sovereign). Gold in India was in abundance. After Jahangir’s death, Nur Jehan built a fine Mausoleum in his memory, which was as magnificent as the Taj Mahal except that it was built from red stone and survives today at the banks of Ravi River in Lahore Pakistan. Nur Jehan was heartbroken after the death of her husband and she was buried outside the Mausoleum in a simple tomb which carried a couplet in Persian which translated, “on my humble tomb, do not light any lamp or put any flowers, because insects will sacrifice themselves at the lamp signifying love, and flowers will attract nightingales and they will sing.”