Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  By then Avery, having divided his spoils at the French island of Bourbon and left some of his men at Madagascar, was living it up in the Bahamas. Other desperadoes had taken over where he left off and, soon after Annesley’s release, another of Abdul Ghafar’s ships was relieved of its treasure. ‘If there be not care taken to suppress the pyrats’, wrote Gayer to the directors, the English could expect to have their throats cut and ‘your Honours’ trade in India will be wholly lost’. Goaded into action by the gravity of this last prediction, the Company in London secured a royal proclamation against piracy and against Avery in particular. Curiously, though, this proclamation was never published in Surat. It seems that the Company’s factors baulked at its phrasing, which was tantamount to an admission that the pirates were English, and at its costing of Avery’s ill-gotten gains. It was not that they disputed the figure of £130,000, just that any mention of it would be bound to encourage those who were demanding damages.

  There was also talk of sending a naval squadron to deal with the pirates. The Government declined on the grounds of expense but then, as it were, put the job out to tender. A syndicate headed by the newly appointed Governor of New York won the contract and duly hired a ship of formidable firepower plus a commander of great experience and unimpeachable character. The former was the well-named Adventure; the latter, equally well-named, was Captain Kidd.

  Whether William Kidd was really the archetypal cut-throat or just a misunderstood mariner at the mercy of circumstance is not relevant here. Suffice it to note that far from suppressing piracy he was soon engaged in it, most notably in 1697 when he raided several small vessels in the Arabian Sea, and in early 1698 when he took the Quedah Merchant with a cargo valued at £30,000. Once again trade at Surat was suspended, the factors placed under house arrest, and heavy compensation demanded. Late in the same year their situation worsened still further with the news that another pilgrim ship as big and nobly patronized as the Gang-i-Sawai had been taken, amidst all the usual atrocities, by two of the most notorious Madagascar men.

  Of these latter gentlemen one, Captain ‘Cutlass’ Culliford, was English and the other, Captain Dirk (a proper name in this case) Shivers, Dutch; and it so happened that it was the French who were escorting the convoy which they had attacked. Clearly the scheme for international protection of the Mocha fleet was not working. Aurangzeb, through Surat’s Governor, therefore demanded both compensation and a written agreement making the Europeans in future responsible for all acts of piracy. To secure this agreement the English factors were threatened with either expulsion or execution; their native bankers were publicly whipped; trade was at a standstill and the factory again besieged. In vain did Annesley appeal for time and a chance to refer the matter home. He was forced to capitulate and immediately afterwards was dismissed from the Company’s service.

  iv

  Such was the situation when Sir Nicholas Waite arrived off Swalley flying his new flag and proclaiming the New Company. For the factors-of the Old Company, the cup of tribulation was running over. Choking on the bitter draught of their new financial and military commitments to the Moghul, they were now confronted with one of the most unprincipled and vindictive mandarins ever to strut upon the Anglo-Indian scene. Waite, with little in the way of commerce to conduct or protect, was a free agent; he was at liberty to make extravagant promises, like undertaking the Moghul’s cherished crusade against piracy; and he was at liberty to apply himself to that which he did best of all – discrediting his insolent rivals. The factors of the Old Company were, he told the Moghul authorities, no better than ‘theeves and confederates of pyrates’; they must, he told the likes of Abdul Ghafar, be made to pay generous compensation; they might, he hinted to the Moghul governor, decamp to Bombay if not closely guarded. Cash inducements lent weight to his words but still the factors defied his consular authority and responded with lively disparagement of his pretensions.

  Throughout 1700 charge and counter-charge whistled back and forth over the rooftops of Surat. Then in November of that year both of the rival factions received an unexpected boost in their firepower when there arrived at the mouth of the Tapti Sir John Gayer, the Old Company’s President from Bombay, closely followed by Sir William Norris, the New Company’s ambassador to the Moghul.

  Norris was not a vindictive man, just an increasingly impatient one. In spite of those brave lines about regaining what Child had lost, he had now been in India more than a year and had yet to secure leave to treat with the Moghul. In part this had been due to an unfortunate decision to launch the embassy from Masulipatnam, the main port of Golconda (Hyderabad) and coincidentally the place where Peter Floris had first raised the Old Company’s standard in the Bay of Bengal. Since then Golconda had been brought within the Moghul’s domain, while the Old Company had of course downgraded its Masulipatnam operation in favour of Madras. With the latter now under the vigorous rule of the ex-interloper Thomas Pitt and wholly committed to the Old Company, there was a certain logic in the New Company’s choosing the former as its Coromandel headquarters.

  But it was not a good place whence to track down the Emperor, especially for an ambassador encumbered with a retinue of several hundred servants plus gifts that included twelve brass cannon. There had been a rumour that Aurangzeb was somewhere in the vicinity of Bijapur; but by the time the lengthy formalities of an ambassadorial landing had been completed, the old Emperor’s restless campaigning had taken him hundreds of miles to the north and west, much nearer in fact to Surat. Moreover the intervening wastes of the Deccan were still disturbed and practically unknown to Europeans. After nine months of prevarication and expense, Norris had despaired of ever receiving the necessary safe conduct and escort from Masulipatnam, and had taken ship for Surat.

  Like Waite, Norris was pointedly shunned by Surat’s beleaguered complement of Old Company factors; he took it as a snub to his ambassadorial dignity and so to his royal master. Gayer protested. Word had just reached Surat that in London his Company’s fortunes had revived. Under the terms of the bill which set up the General Society, the Old Company was supposed to cease trading within three years, that is by 1701. Now with Sir Josiah Child dead and the directors more conciliatory to Parliament, a stay of execution had been secured. By virtue of its holding in the General Society the Old Company might continue to trade until that £2 million loan was repaid by the Treasury; this meant almost indefinitely. ‘Now we are established by Act of Parliament’, announced the directors, ‘it secures our foundation…We can now call our estate our own.’ Suddenly matters at Surat took on a very different complexion. The same act also exonerated the Old Company from contributing towards the expenses of the Norris mission, an exemption which seemed to confirm Gayer’s contention that he and his men could ignore the ambassador.

  Sensing that the tide was about to turn against him, Waite decided to wait no longer. Charging some of the Old Company’s factors with calling King William ‘a madman and a fool’, he demanded that Surat’s Governor arrest them for treason. Gayer, as usual, sent a note of protest. But this time the men who delivered it to the New Company’s premises were arrested, trussed up with ropes, and charged with forcible entry. Rather incongruously they were also entertained with ‘rosted fowles and a piece of beef, boiled, and carrots’ plus ‘claret, punch, pipes and tobacco’. Next day they were retrussed and dragged through the bazaars to the governor’s house, there to be formally charged.

  Norris seems to have approved of this action. He was less happy about its sequel but by then he was at last on the road in search of the elusive Emperor. He left Surat at the end of January 1701. A week later Gayer, Lady Gayer, and their companions were all arrested by the Governor at Waite’s instigation and confined ‘in a little nasty hole where we all lay on the ground’. Later they were given the freedom of the Surat factory but still held as hostages; and so they would remain, thanks to the repeated machinations of the dreadful Waite, for the next nine years.

  Sir Nicholas Waite was
already assured of a certain notoriety if only because of his recent marriage to his teen-age niece, a union deemed both incestuous and bigamous (there was another Lady Waite in England). But it was his vendetta against the Old Company which most antagonized contemporaries and scandalized posterity. Conveying news of the first arrests to Calcutta, Thomas Pitt hoped that ‘our Masters will revenge [them] to the last degree in England and…will write it in red letters upon his [Waite’s] person’. As for the arrest of Sir John and Lady Gayer ‘the like I have not known, heard, nor read of’. For later generations the spectacle of Englishmen, nay baronets, dragging one another through the bazaars and denouncing one another to the natives was just too painful to contemplate. ‘In the history of the English in India there is no more shameful episode’, writes Annesley’s biographer, ‘it was race treachery of the worst kind, and its evil fruits remained to be gathered for many dreary years in the tears and maledictions of his [Waite’s] countrymen.’

  Seen from a Raj perspective it was only right that the Norris embassy, dispatched in the midst of such flagrant betrayals of racial solidarity, should come unstuck. Waite had badly prejudiced its negotiating position by his unauthorized offer to police the seas against pirates, an undertaking which the New Company could not begin to perform and which Norris therefore had to repudiate. But Gayer and his colleagues also did their utmost to frustrate the embassy and even Pitt in Madras seems to have used his influence at Court to assure Norris of a rough ride.

  Three months after leaving Surat, Norris was at last ushered into the imperial presence. Preceded by his gifts of cannon, horses, cartloads of cloth and assorted glassware, then by drums, trumpets, bagpipes and flags, the ambassador made the most of his moment of glory. Thereafter there would be little to celebrate. During six months of wearisome and expensive negotiation, the Emperor refused to budge on the piracy issue; unless the New Comnpany would assume responsibility for the suppression of the pirates it could forget about any imperial farman for trade and privileges. Norris tried to buy off this stipulation, then to water it down to just convoy duty for the Mocha fleet. All to no avail. Eventually his patience ran out and the embassy withdrew without even a formal leave-taking.

  Eleven days later, on 16 November 1701, the Emperor issued an edict for the confinement of all Europeans, the seizure of their goods and the cessation of their trade; the reason given was their failure to protect Indian shipping. Norris himself was detained and released only after another hefty payment. He arrived back in Surat to find that Waite was now as contemptuous of his authority as was Gayer. The embassy had cost a staggering £80,000 and had achieved nothing. It was hardly Norris’s fault. Against both Waite and Gayer he vowed to get his revenge back in England; but he died on the homeward voyage, a bitter and broken man.

  Meanwhile the Emperor’s edict was taking effect. In Surat Gayer came under closer guard, and Waite tasted something of his own medicine. In Bengal the Old Company’s factors were comparatively safe behind the walls of Fort William but their rivals of the New Company, scattered through the old trading centres of Patna, Kasimbazar and Hughli, were swiftly rounded up. Bombay was left undisturbed; its Governor, after all, was safely under lock and key in Surat and its trade was negligible. That left just Madras. In January 1702 a Moghul army appeared at San Thomé within sight of Fort St George. ‘There are ill designs on foot against this place’, surmised the Governor’s council. Long immune from the struggles between Aurangzeb and the Company, Madras under the redoubtable Thomas Pitt was about to be drawn into the mainstream of Indian politics; but not before making the most of its independence to champion significant new initiatives in east and south-east Asia.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Eastern Approaches

  MADRAS, SIAM AND CHINA

  The port cities of south and south-east Asia were rarely located on the actual sea. For reasons of defence and for the convenience of internal trade and administration they generally lay several miles inland up a tortuous and capricious river system. Having cleared the coastal bar, the approaching seafarer entered a maze of broad silt-laden waterways flanked by sombre mangrove and oppressive jungle. Cormorants watched from the limbs of uprooted trees aground on unseen mud banks; a temple finial gleamed gold amidst the nauseous verdure. Gone were the clean horizons and bracing airs of the ocean. Whether journey’s end was to be Calcutta or Canton, Batavia or Bangkok, there was a sameness of setting and a sameness of menace.

  Doubtless there were exceptions. Macassar in distant Sulawesi, where the English had retained a toehold in the spice trade until the 1660s, was almost a seaboard city. But then its Bugis population had acquired a reputation as the most aggressive native seafarers in the East; seemingly it was naval prowess alone which made the coasts safe for major settlements. No polity that was vulnerable to seaborne aggression could afford to indulge a taste for esplanades and corniches. Hong Kong and Singapore would have to wait until the Napoleonic Wars had demonstrated that Britannia really did rule the waves. So would Bombay; although already established, the infant settlement would take most of the eighteenth century to emerge from its canopy of coconut palms, bravely front the Arabian Sea, and declare itself the Gateway to India.

  In 1700 it was Madras and, of the English settlements, Madras alone that pioneered this new seaside development. Francis Day had built his four-square fort right on the beach and from there the town had spread, north and south along the tideline. Heavy seas often threatened its walls, and for want of a sheltered harbour ocean-going vessels had to lie off the bar, to the considerable discomfort of their disembarking passengers who must brave the breakers in flimsy canoes.

  It was ‘one of the most incommodious places I ever saw’, wrote Captain Alexander Hamilton, the interloper, who seldom had a good word for the Company, its servants or its settlements. One side of the town was pounded by the heaviest surf on the whole Coromandel Coast, the other periodically flooded by a salt-water lagoon which during the rains became a river in urgent search of the sea. There was no natural drinking water within a mile and the soil was so sandy that nothing would grow in it. Additionally Hamilton was most disparaging about Madras’s commercial importance. Compared to Bengal or Gujarat, its hinterland boasted neither a good market for English imports nor a manufacturing base from which to draw Indian exports. It was simply an entrepôt ‘supplying foreign markets with foreign goods’.

  This was a little unfair to The Coast’s celebrated weavers and dyers who had been flocking into Madras’s so-called ‘Black Town’ ever since its foundation and who now accounted for a sizeable part of the 80,000 native population. And it was contradicted by Hamilton’s previous paragraph in which, with some relish, he had discoursed on the diamond mines of Golconda ‘but a week’s journey from Fort St George’. It also overlooked the main attraction of the place. For unlike almost anywhere else that an Englishman might seek his fortune in the East, Madras offered reasonable odds on his living long enough to realize it. According to the Reverend Charles Lockyer, who was there for a couple of years at the turn of the century, ‘the inhabitants enjoy as perfect a health as they would do in England’; it was ‘plainly discovered in their ruddy complexions’; even the summer heat was tolerable, for after a few hours ‘the sea breeze coming on, the town seems to be new born’.

  With so little fresh water and no sanitation it was potentially as unhealthy as any other Indian – or for that matter, English – town of the period. But thanks to those bracing breezes plus a vigorous administration, the fort area known as ‘White Town’ looked spruce and felt orderly. The pavements were of brick, well swept, and the central roadways more sand than dirt so less dusty. They formed a grid at the centre of which stood Day’s sand-castle fortress, now dwarfed by a stately mansion whose three high-ceilinged storeys reared above the fort’s pepperpot bastions. This was the residence of the Governor and the hub of the settlement. A large airy hall on the top floor doubled as council chamber and stock exchange. Firearms arranged in scallops and flore
ts, ‘like those in the armoury of the Tower of London’, adorned the walls and from the windows there was a commanding view of the ships in the roadstead. Only one building could claim a greater elevation above the city walls and that was St Mary’s, the first Anglican church east of Suez. Lockyer, who had probably preached there, was undoubtedly proud of it, although somewhat at a loss to describe its architecture.

  The church is a large pile of arched building, adorned with curious carved work, a stately altar, organs, a white copper candlestick, very large windows, etc which render it inferior to the churches of London in nothing but bells, there being only one to mind sinners of their devotion.

  The neo-classical colonnades and the gracious mansions for which the city would become famous were not yet in evidence. Instead of ‘the garden city’ it was still a tight-packed town of terraced houses with wooden balconies, flat roofs and castellated parapets. Only the already widespread use of chunam gave a hint of things to come. This was a shell-based lime which when polished had a finish like marble. Peeking above its rust-red walls, White Town’s chunam-ed terraces must have made a brave show in the dancing sunlight. The rows of windows faced the sea. Madras still had its back to the Indian subcontinent and Hamilton was right to the extent that it was less dependent on up-country trade than either Surat or Bengal. Fort St George still looked to the East.