Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  For instance, the clause in Farrukhsiyar’s farman which meant most to the Bengal factors was that endorsing the Company’s right to issue dastak, or passes. Throughout Bengal, trade was regulated by a system of inland customs dues which applied to virtually everything and which made a considerable contribution to the government’s revenue. Confirmation that all goods covered by a dastak from the Company should be exempt was therefore a valuable privilege. But the farman failed to specify exactly which goods were covered. According to the Nawab and his officials it was only those items, like silk, saltpetre, muslin and broadcloth, which the Company had traditionally imported or exported. According to the Company’s men, though, it was any goods they cared to invest in, whether on the Company’s behalf or their own and whether for export/import or for internal resale. Further widening of this loophole led to the inclusion of goods belonging to the Company’s Indian agents, and there were soon instances of dastak coverage being sold to complete outsiders.

  This was clearly contrary to the intention of the farman and elicited strong protests from the Bengal government. Fines were imposed for the abuse of dastak and quite legitimate consignments became liable to summary stoppage and examination. The Company, out of whose funds the fines were invariably paid, made several efforts to discipline its factors; but since those entrusted with enforcement of such orders were also those who stood to gain most by ignoring them, the abuses continued. From this period dates the heavy involvement of the English in the internal trade of Bengal. From Dhaka came complaints that English private trade now exceeded that of the Company, while in Patna it was said that it was more than double that of the Company.

  The commodities involved included tobacco, betel, sugar and rice but it was over the river traffic in sea-salt that matters habitually came to a head. Abundantly available in the coastal regions of Bengal and Orissa, salt (sodium chloride) went upriver to Patna where it was eagerly purchased by traders from all over salt-starved upper India. The Company’s trade with Patna, on the other hand, was in saltpetre (potassium nitrate) which was extracted in Bihar and shipped downriver. For this purpose the Company annually despatched from Calcutta a large fleet of river boats complete with military escort. What more natural than that for the upriver journey they should load the mostly empty boats with table salt? And what more responsible? Instead of selling guns for gold here was a European trading company buying gunpowder for condiments.

  But under the Moghul Empire – as under the British 200 years later – salt duties were an important element in the revenue system. The Nawab took strong objection to the Company using its dastak to evade them and rightly guessed that the main culprits were acting in a private capacity. In 1727 government officers seized a huge consignment of salt en route to Patna and demanded 10,000 rupees for its release. Hoping to make their point, the Company’s men refused and threatened to blockade the Hughli river by sinking any Moghul shipping that tried to pass Calcutta. The Nawab responded with an embargo on all English trade and began arresting the Company’s representatives.

  The quarrel eventually spread to other areas of contention and was not resolved till 1731 when the English made an ignominious submission. ‘To prevent all misdemeanours and encroachments which we have made in our trade’, John Stackhouse on behalf of the Company agreed ‘not to trade in any goods but what are proper for Europe’. But this undertaking was never ratified by the President and Council in Calcutta. And although orders were repeatedly issued by the Company against its servants engaging in the salt trade, the practice evidently continued, for in 1734 the escort for the Patna fleet are recorded as having mutinied rather than comply. For the time being the vigilance of the Nawab’s government and the vulnerability of the Company’s trade meant that abuses could not be allowed to get out of hand. Private trade, both within Bengal and beyond, nevertheless prospered and as the cancer at the heart of the Moghul Empire spread outwards, the private trader found new ways to assuage and circumvent the Nawab’s officials.

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  Over-all the impression must be that in the first half of the eighteenth century the trade of the English grew as much in spite of the farman as because of it. But if the Company appeared to acquiesce a little too readily in the Nawab’s idea of what Farrukhsiyar had intended, it had its reasons. They came in the shape of a new breed of ‘interlopers’ – a word which, like ‘fire’ to the Bantam factors of old, could still panic the Court of Directors in London and set Leadenhall Street ablaze.

  We give you this early caution [wrote the directors to all their Indian presidencies in March 1717] that you do whatever lies in your power to disappoint the interlops expectations of trade either in the sale of goods brought from Europe, or in purchasing goods for Europe, or affording them the least assistance of provisions, necessaries, or other helps, which we think a very reasonable order to give considering this project…is of pernicious consequence to the trade of the nation, to His Majesty in the loss of customs, and to this Company who have paid £3,200,000 for the trade thither exclusive of all the subjects of the Crown of Great Britain.

  Yet this ‘early caution’ seems not to have been heeded, for in the same year the directors had occasion to castigate their Madras servants for letting an interloper reprovision at San Thomé and their Bengal servants for selling silks to the same ship. Meanwhile Leadenhall Street was also frantically lobbying Parliament with the result that in 1719 the first of three Acts was passed outlawing British subjects who served under foreign flags. For, as with Samuel White’s Siamese interlopers, the newcomers came with the blessing of a sovereign state – in this case the mighty Hapsburg Empire. To the English they were just ‘Ostenders’ or ‘Flemings’ but Ostend and Flanders were now, by the Treaty of Utrecht, under Hapsburg protection and in 1723 it was from Vienna that the new company received its charter. Worse still, the Imperial or Ostend Company had not only formidable patronage but also considerable experience in that many of its backers and most of its supercargoes and skippers had previously served with the English Company. Some, with Jacobite sympathies, had sound political and religious reasons for their defection; most were simply attracted by the more generous allowances in terms of cargo space for private trade which the Ostend Company offered.

  The alarm over the appearance of this new rival proved justified. Concentrating on Bengal and China, the Ostenders quickly established themselves as ruthless and highly successful traders. In vain did the English and the Dutch in Bengal disclaim any connection with them and appeal to the Nawab to do the same. ‘The answer he made was that he did not care what nation they were so that they did but bring money.’ That was in 1720. By 1726 the Ostend Company was able to declare a thirty-three per cent dividend: it now boasted a partly fortified factory at Bankibazar, just fifteen miles upriver from Calcutta, and subordinate establishments at most of the main Bengal trading centres. Silently the Ostend ships glided past the ramparts of Fort William, whence all intercourse with the renegades was strictly forbidden, while their energetic chief, one Alexander Hume, sweetened the Nawab with generous payments.

  In the same year there came news from Europe that under pressure from the English and the Dutch the Emperor Charles VI had in fact suspended the Ostenders’ charter. But it made little difference in Bengal. Evidently prepared for just such an eventuality, the resourceful Ostenders now claimed that they sailed ‘under the King of Poland’s pass’ and that no one had ever ‘called in question His Majesty of Poland’s right to send ships with his passport to India’. To the Nawab, Polish, Austrian or Flemish, it was all the same. So long as they kept paying for their trading rights he remained deaf to the insinuations of the custom-free English and cunningly played off the Europeans one against the other.

  In a bid to force the issue the English factors once again opted for aggression. With their Dutch allies they commissioned ships to patrol the mouth of the Hughli and others to keep the Ostenders penned up in their basin at Bankibazar. Additionally the contingent of troops annuall
y raised to help escort the saltpetre convoy from Patna was kept under orders. But when a small Ostend vessel was actually taken, the Nawab threatened commercial retaliation and the prize was quickly restored. In Bengal, as later on the Coromandel coast, so long as Moghul authority lasted, it acted as an effective brake on the rivalries of the European companies. But once it crumbled there would be nothing to stop every European quarrel from spreading to the trading settlements and thence, inevitably, to their hinterland.

  In 1730 the tide at last began to turn against the Ostenders. Their trade had slowed and it was intimated that for a hefty payment the Nawab might now disown them and that for an even heftier payment he might overlook one exemplary assault. 325,000 rupees changed hands and the Saint Therésa, under Polish colours, was duly corralled into Calcutta. With some reason Hume, the Ostenders’ chief, claimed that he had been betrayed. The English factors celebrated their victory as though it were a second Blenheim and quietly wrote off the military expenditure under ‘extraordinary charges’. When interlopers were involved even the Court of Directors did not grudge the expense.

  Until well into the 1740s the Ostend factory at Bankibazar lingered on. But it never again posed much of a challenge; and neither, for that matter, did the Danish East India Company, which reappeared in Bengal in the 1750s, or the Swedish East India Company – another ‘company of convenience’ formed by a group of ex-privateers from Madagascar. Much more serious, though, was the growing rivalry of the French. In 1719 the Compagnie des Indes was formed to regulate and expand the hitherto uncertain pattern of French endeavour in the East. Although occupied in 1690 it was only now that Chandernagar, the French settlement on the Hughli, began to prosper. In the 1730s under Joseph, Marquis de Dupleix the French trade in Bengal overtook that of the Dutch and was second only to the English. The French had refused to join in the concerted moves against the Ostenders and, as their investment grew, so did their resentment of the privileges and preponderance enjoyed by the English. In 1742 Dupleix was transferred to Pondicherry and the governorship of the French possessions on the Coromandel coast. The English in Bengal heaved a sigh of relief; but Calcutta’s reprieve was to prove Madras’s downfall.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Outposts of Effrontery

  THE LESSER SETTLEMENTS

  In managing the affairs of Calcutta, Bombay or Madras, the president/ governor was expected to act in consort with his council. This body usually had six to nine members, all senior factors several of whom, as with cabinet ministers, held specific posts like accountant, storekeeper, sea customs collector. In Madras in the early eighteenth century the council met once a week in Fort St George, the consultation beginning at 6 a.m. to avoid the heat and rarely lasting beyond midday. All resolutions, along with any relevant documents and reports, were minuted and entered in a register, ‘The Diary and Consultations’ books, which invaluable record thus provides a fairly detailed picture of day-to-day concerns.

  Here great events, like the granting of the farman or the reappearance of the ‘interlops’, are seen to engage anxious attention; but they are not necessarily given that prominence which history has subsequently accorded them. Sometimes they are quite swamped by matters of distinctly lesser moment; and it is this juxtaposition of affairs of state with domestic trivia – of the Nawab’s latest ultimatum with an inventory of the humble effects of some late lamented ensign- which gives the records their considerable charm.

  The Company’s London directors, whose letters to India were recorded in separate volumes, also made no clear distinction between important policy directives and seemingly petty exhortations. ‘Enclosed we send you 2 declarations of war with Spain’, begins paragraph 44 of their letter of October 1718. Such startling news comes almost as a reassurance when read in the context of a far longer previous paragraph in which the gentlemen of Leadenhall Street are clearly beside themselves with rage over the drinks bill for the public table at Fort St George. ‘This is an extravagancy’, they tell President Collet and his Council, ‘that every one of you ought to blush at the thought of – to give 9 Pagodas [about 30 rupees] a dozen for Burton ale.’ ‘If you must have liquors at such prices, pray gratify your pallats at your own, not our, expence.’

  Soon after this outburst the public table at which all the Company’s officials had once been obliged to dine, but were now simply entitled to dine, was abolished. Instead each received a fixed diet allowance in addition to his salary. The days of collegiate living were gone. From their factories and their forts the English community was venturing forth into the bazaars and the neighbouring countryside. While the President and his colleagues acquired garden estates and airy mansions, the lower orders thronged the punch houses and sampled the local flesh trade. At a Consultation held on 29 April 1717, the President announced that he had ‘received very full evidences against Daniel Haines, sentinel, for being guilty of so beastly an action as is not fit to be mentioned in this register’. Given that three months previously one John Boggins, also a sentinel, had been, according to the same register, ‘surprised in a sodo-metical attempt’, one wonders about this new abomination. Close confinement on a diet of rice and water, followed by speedy deportation, was the punishment for such unnatural conduct; in this case both men were consigned to penal servitude on the island of St Helena. They were packed aboard the same ship, doubtless happy enough in one another’s company.

  Although the soldiers of Fort St George were willing to venture forth in search of gratification, they were not yet anxious to invite a military engagement beyond the range of their cannon. In 1701 Thomas Pitt had stood his ground against Daud Khan from within the fort’s ramparts. Subsequently he had ordered the fortification of Black Town but as fast as the walls enclosed new ground, further settlements grew up beyond them. Additionally, under the terms of the 1717 farman, the English acquired five townships on the outskirts of Madras, one of which, Trivitore (Tiruvottiyur), was a good two hours’ march from Fort St George.

  Ten years previously these same townships had been made over to Thomas Pitt and then reclaimed by the Nawab on the pretext that the grant was personal to the President; thus when Pitt left, the villages must revert. The Company had protested but had not felt able to risk hostilities. Now, in 1717, the farman clearly made over these villages in perpetuity and to the Company rather than to one of its servants. They were duly occupied by the English in September of the same year and, when the Nawab objected, President Collet sat back to await developments, boldly declaring his intention of defending the Company’s rights ‘to the utmost of our power’.

  At the time the Madras garrison consisted of about 360 Europeans, some recruited locally, others sent from England; it was the common belief that the latter had chosen the Company’s service in preference to one of His Majesty’s prisons. They were divided into three companies, each under an English lieutenant and including both horse and foot. A few of these ‘sentinels’ had some military experience; most knew no more of warfare than the trained bands of ‘peons’ and the Portuguese ‘topazes’ who were recruited in the bazaar and could be summoned from their various trades as a makeshift reserve whenever needed.

  On 18 October there arrived at Fort St George a Brahmin intermediary who, ‘after a very long harangue wide of his purpose’, intimated that the Nawab’s troops would reoccupy the five townships unless a substantial cash payment was immediately forthcoming. However, so long and so wide of its purpose was the Brahmin’s harangue that before he had unburdened himself of the final ultimatum, news arrived that Trivitore had already been attacked. A force of 1250 had entered the township, torn down the Company’s flagstaff, and was apparently determined to stay put.

  At the uncongenial hour of 5 p.m. President Collet convened an extraordinary meeting of his Council. The issue was simple. Either they should buy peace and ‘sit down tamely with the affront given us of cutting down our flag’, or they must ‘make a vigorous charge with our forces and endeavour to drive them out’. For once the
Madras garrison was up to strength, ‘pretty well disciplined and completely officered’. The council had no doubt that it could perform the task in question and that, thanks to the farman, they would be acting well within their rights. The final vote was unanimous; at 2 a.m. the following morning Lieutenant Roach with 150 men marched out of the fort. He fell upon Trivitore as dawn broke. The enemy ‘presuming we durst not march out of the reach of our cannon’ were surprised and dispersed; a second company under Lieutenant Fullerton chased off further marauders; and at nightfall both companies marched back to Fort St George in triumph.

  The enemy’s losses were put at six horses, a camel, and perhaps a dozen men. The English had sustained no casualties at all thanks, it was said, to the great skill of Lieutenant Roach, who was rewarded with promotion to major, command of all the English forces on The Coast, and a ‘gold medal set with diamond sparks (value 300 Pagodas)’. With passing mention, under Extraordinary Charges, of a celebratory feast (‘cost 700 Pagodas’) the Trivitore affair disappears from the records. And so back to business with news of a property auction in Black Town and of a hefty fine for one Dr Jolly who had disgraced both his nation and his name by ‘cruelty in ye treatment of slaves and servants’.

  Dr Jolly practised – it is not clear whether his doctorate was in medicine or divinity – at Cuddalore, a port 100 miles south of Madras and near to the French settlement of Pondicherry. It had been acquired by the Company in 1688 and subsequently fortified and renamed Fort St David. Now the second most important English settlement on The Coast, it was more defensible than Madras and a useful vantage point from which to observe and frustrate the energies of the French Compagnie des Indes. To Fort St David the English would withdraw after the fall of Madras and from Fort St David Stringer Lawrence and Robert Clive would launch their bid for revenge.