by John Keay
For all its inconsequence, the Trivitore affair had revealed the English as capable of limited military intervention in the increasingly lawless hinterland. As in Bengal, so in Golconda (Hyderabad) the Moghul empire was falling apart at its seams. The Emperor’s authority no longer availed the Nawab, or Nizam, in Hyderabad, and in turn the Nizam’s authority was no longer paramount in the conduct of his subordinate nawab, and Madras’s immediate neighbour, in the Carnatic sub-province. Additionally the Marathas, the scourge of western India, were now extending their raids into both Bengal and the Carnatic. Indeed it was from the Marathas that the English had purchased Cuddalore (Fort St David). Finding themselves uneasily wedged between the devil of political turmoil and the deep blue sea of the Bay of Bengal, the English on The Coast increasingly looked to the likes of Major Roach for their security, and it was a heavy blow when the gallant Major, within weeks of his promotion, succumbed to the temptations of private trade and absconded on a speculative voyage to Manila. As a result of the Trivitore affair the garrison had been increased and new fortifications put in hand, the additional cost being defrayed by a land tax. Echoing the sentiments of Sir Josiah Child, the President explained that since greater security benefited those with substantial land-holdings, it was reasonable that they should pay for it.
Some premonition of the looming chaos may well have guided Collet’s predecessor, Edward Harrison, in his plans for the acquisition of Divi Island. This was a spit of low-lying land just off Masulipatnam, the main port of Hyderabad where Madras still maintained a small satellite factory. The island had originally been requested by Thomas Pitt in his negotiations with Ziau-ud-Din and had finally been granted to the Company in an order from Delhi which accompanied the 1717 farman. Susceptible as ever to the charms of off-shore development, the English factors had in the meantime represented Divi as another paradise favoured with abundant timber, excellent water, soil ‘fruitful to a wonder’, and a capacious harbour. There was no doubt, Harrison reported, ‘that the unsufferable usage under the Moor’s government upon the mainland will people the island with the most useful persons for the manufactures [of piece goods] and that a handsome revenue may be raised’. By way of preparation for the hand-over, a fifty man garrison had been sent to Masulipatnam and a shallow-draft ‘galley’ constructed at Madras for shuttling settlers to the new colony.
But Harrison had never actually seen Divi and Collet, his successor, with perhaps a better appreciation of the island’s limited potential, was distinctly cool about the whole idea. Moreover, as with the five townships, it was already clear that Farrukhsiyar’s generosity did not meet with the Nizam’s approval. By 1719 the island had still not been handed over and the Nizam was insisting that since the grant had not actually been included in the farman itself but had been the subject of a separate directive, its validity was questionable now that Farrukhsiyar was no more.
In July 1719 Collet and his Council steeled themselves for a long debate on the subject. The Nizam’s argument was dismissed for what it was – a ruse to elicit a hefty douceur. Already considerable sums had been disbursed to the Hyderabad government and duly condemned by the Court of Directors in London who urged Collet to ‘look back into Governor Pitt’s time’ and emulate his ‘husbandry’. This seemed to preclude the possibility of simply buying off the Nizam. Further careful perusal of the Company’s orders also suggested that the use of force was not encouraged. Had Collet and his Council felt more enamoured of the project they would undoubtedly have ignored what was simply a routine caution. But Divi was 200 miles up the coast and uncomfortably close to the Nizam’s centre of power. Unlike at Trivitore there could be no guarantee of a speedy outcome. On the whole, therefore, and ‘under the restrictions we now lie’, the Council voted to back down.
Divi was not to be another Bombay nor even another Pulo Run. At this point it disappears not only from the records but also from the maps. Presumably siltation in the Kistna river delta reclaimed it for the mainland. But like Trivitore, its brief eminence had necessitated a modest increase in the Company’s military expenditure. With every furlong of new fortification and with every grant of new territory, putative or real, more sentinels were needed, another ensign was appointed, a new gunnery expert was recruited. By 1720, computing the garrisons of Fort St George, Fort St David and Masulipatnam/Divi, the Madras military establishment had risen to about 800 of whom a third were Europeans. The directors, of course, objected. ‘Remember the soldiers are a standing monthly charge which eats deep into the profits of our trade’, they had cautioned in 1718. They suspected their servants of being more interested in ‘a bare show of grandeur’ than in proper ‘husbandry’; Governor Pitt would never have countenanced such extravagance.
Nevertheless The Coast’s military establishment seems to have remained at about 800 throughout the 1720s and 1730s. In 1742 the acquisition of further townships, plus the threat of a Maratha attack, prompted another increase, especially in the number of Europeans, which brought the total to 1200. Along with the trained bands of Madras and whatever troops could be spared from the Company’s ships, this was the military nucleus with which the English faced the troubled times ahead. While Trivitore and Divi had shown the Company not averse to extending its territorial commitments, they had also shown it as anxious as ever to disavow the risk and expense involved. Against a determined challenge, whether Indian or European, the military establishment remained totally inadequate. Survival and eventual triumph in the Carnatic would depend on a new recruitment policy at home, on the raising of a native army, and above all on the availability of Royal regiments and of the Royal Navy.
ii
In deciding against the forcible occupation of Divi Island the Madras Council had taken into consideration the extent and vulnerability of its other territorial commitments. Besides Fort St David (Cuddalore) and Masulipatnam, the president in Madras was heir to the Company’s often forgotten and always mismanaged settlements in the Indonesian archipelago. And it was from there in 1719, during the week before the final decision on Divi, that reports began to reach the Madras Council of another of those dismal affrays which had so often punctured the Company’s self-assurance in the past.
Known simply – if confusingly – as ‘the West Coast’, all that now remained of the spice-laden dreams of the Middletons and Jourdain was a place called York Fort, otherwise Benkulen, in south-west Sumatra, plus its several outposts scattered along 300 miles of adjacent but harbour-less shoreline. Following the loss of trading rights at Bantam (Java) in 1683, it was to Sumatra and Benkulen that the English had removed. They had been there ever since. As in the days of James Lancaster, they bought what they could in the way of Sumatran pepper and sold what they could in the way of Indian cottons. The pattern of trade had scarcely changed in more than a century.
Neither, unfortunately, had its volume. To increase and regulate the pepper supply, various schemes were tried including the establishment of plantations for which, as in St Helena, convicts and slaves were imported. But Benkulen remained a trial both to the Company’s directors and to its servants. Rarely did the pepper yield even cover the standing costs of the place; the climate was even more poisonous than that of Bombay; and the opportunities for private trade were decidedly limited. It was not a popular destination. Only the disgraced and the truly desperate found their way to ‘the West Coast’.
Such a one had been Joseph Collet, the future President of Madras, when he had launched his Eastern career by accepting the governorship of Benkulen in 1712. One may judge of his plight by his need to borrow not only the surety money customarily demanded by the Company of its senior agents, but also the wherewithal to pay for his outfit plus a few hundred pounds ‘venture’ money with which to launch his private trade. He was in fact a bankrupt who was further beset by the misfortune of having numerous female dependants plus an over-scrupulous conscience. The former expected him to provide for them, the latter insisted that he honour even debts from which the courts had dis
charged him. Collet was at his wits’ end. As a born-again Baptist he could hardly contemplate suicide; but he could contemplate Fort York, regarded by many as an equally certain way of putting an end to things.
Happily for the righteous, Collet’s great gamble paid off. Confounding predictions, he invested his trading capital so shrewdly that within three years he had satisfied his creditors. He was also able to relieve his impoverished daughters by sending home sumptuous presents – a slave girl to one, a length of chintz to another, and in time substantial dowries for all. Not without scares he survived Sumatra’s malarial plagues for his full four-year term and in so doing outlasted most of those senior to him in the Madras hierarchy. Hence his reward, the premier post in India, the Presidency of Fort St George, to which he succeeded in 1717.
By then he had introduced some important changes on the West Coast which included the construction of Fort Marlborough, a substantial edifice which replaced Fort York and which was still garrisoned a century later when Thomas Raffles took up residence. He had also reorganized the Sumatran pepper trade and predicted a great future for the settlement if only others would follow his example. Time and again Collet had had occasion to complain about the quality of the men sent to serve under him. A Mr Ballard ‘drank himself dead a few weeks after his arrival’ while Sergeant Eaton, the bearer of impeccable credentials, was arraigned for ‘mutiny, piracy and murder’ before he had even stepped ashore. Raising moral standards had been even more difficult than raising the pepper yield but by 1715 Collet was already reviewing his labours and seeing that they were good. Another long-awaited recruit had just turned out to be ‘a notorious drunkard, a profane swearer and a scandalous defamer’. ‘Perhaps formerly he might have met with fit associates in this place’, wrote the righteous Collet, ‘but I must say that the general reformation of manners here is such as I believe will hardly find credit in England.’
However, intimations that the prospects for Benkulen were not quite as rosy as Collet had suggested began to surface as soon as he left. Trade was again declining and in a letter of 1717 the directors returned to the attack, admonishing their West Coast factors in language that even wayward imbeciles might comprehend. ‘We have by every ship pressed you urgently for pepper, showed you the reasons, told you it is the one thing necessary expected of you, urged the charge we are at to obtain it, and allowed all needful disbursements to enable you to get it.’ So where was it? In the old days a ship of 600 tons might call at one of the Sumatran pepper ports and come away with a full lading within a matter of weeks. Now, though maintaining a resident staff, a fort, warehouses and plantations, the Company was lucky to get half that much a year. ‘Promise upon promise’ had been made, ‘fine stories’ told of new plantations and advantageous arrangements with the native powers. Yet the flow of pepper dwindled and the catalogue of excuses grew. ‘Good words will no longer go down with us’, they fulminated. A series of minor skirmishes with the local tribes had supposedly disrupted supplies. Did the Benkulen factors not appreciate that just and civil treatment was the only way to guarantee trade and that every instance of oppression ‘though it lie for a while festering, will at last break out into a dangerous if not incurable sore’?
These prophetic words were accompanied by paragraph upon paragraph of miscellaneous censure, not all of it unwarranted. The directors were especially scathing about Collet’s claimed ‘reformation of manners’, ‘You tell us that all are now diligent, no drunkenness and revelling permitted, all candles are out and all gone to bed before ten at night…which is owing to the regular living and good table you keep.’ But how then to explain Fort Marlborough’s quite astronomical liquor bills which in one month alone came to more than the value of all the pepper exported that year. ‘The monstrous month’ in question was July 1716, the last of Collet’s term, during which the nineteen covenanted servants entitled to the Company’s table appeared to have consumed ‘74 dozen and a half of wine [mostly very expensive Claret], 24 dozen and a half of Burton Ale and pale beer, 2 pipes and 42 gallon of Madeira wine, 6 Flasks of Shiraz [Persian wine], 274 bottles of toddy, 3 Leaguers and 3 Quarters of Batavia arrack, and 164 gallons of Goa [toddy]’.
It is a wonder to us that any of you live six months, and that there are not more quarrellings and duellings amongst you, if half these liquors were guzzled down…We will not have our wine spent but at meals. If you will have it at other times, pay for it yourselves.
Alas, and unknown to the directors in London, their West Coast factors were already ‘paying for it’. This revealing letter only survives in the Madras records because it was never forwarded to Benkulen; for by the time it reached Madras, Benkulen was no longer a Company settlement.
Not that Madras was as yet aware of the disaster. In 1718 there had been more evidence of the pepper crisis with one ship being sent away from Benkulen empty and another dispatched home only half laden. There had also been accusations of perfidious treatment of the natives and rumours of a general uprising. But Collet in Madras was more preoccupied with a bitter power struggle among the English in Sumatra which threatened to undo all his good works there. After barely six months in office, his highly commended successor had been implicated in a sensational fraud and sent to England to answer for it. The man deputed to investigate the matter, who evidently had the confidence of the directors but not of Collet, took over the governorship only to be himself arraigned for a series of misdemeanours and sent a prisoner to Madras. Thomas Cooke, the new inquisitor and one of Collet’s subordinates, succeeded.
Benkulen had thus had four governors in two years. It was indicative of the West Coast’s plight and, since each renounced his predecessor’s commitments, it did nothing for peaceful relations with the local sultans. Besides crimes against the Company, one of the partisan factors stood accused of murdering two Malays, having first removed their fingers joint by joint. Such ‘provoking conduct’ had apparently resulted in a state of undeclared war, for another factor is accused of incompetence in suppressing a revolt and there is mention of much wanton destruction in the pepper plantations.
But Collet had full confidence in Cooke, his new appointee, and had already congratulated him on having restored order. He was thus happily pursuing the charges against Cooke’s predecessor when the first news from the archipelago reached Madras in 1719. It consisted of a slim and soiled package delivered by a Dutch vessel that had happened to call at Moco-Moco, one of Benkulen’s remote outstations. The covering letter read as follows.
To the Governor or Chief of any English Factory or Commander of a Ship.
Sir,
The occasion of this is to signify the great importance of the accompanying packet, directed to Fort St George, to acquaint the President of the bad state of affairs on the West Coast of Sumatria [sic]. Fort Marlborough being quite destroyed accidentally by fire, the Governor [Cooke], his Council and all the Europeans left the place about two months past and embarked on board ship Masulipatnam, whom we have not heard of since; so that we are left destitute, standing in need of everything for support, and what is worse, the natives are at war, besides but little gunpowder to defend this factory. Pray expedite the packet that some relief may be sent us. Having no ship or any other vessel, therefore we must all of necessity perish if not succoured in a little time. I salute you with my respects and am, Sir, Your distressed Brother, William Ballett.
Moco-Moco Factory June 4 1719
This letter does not appear in the Madras records which are strangely reticent about the whole disaster; presumably President Collet was too embarrassed by his protégé’s failure. But by the Bengal Council, never averse to point up its rivals’ shortcomings, it was copied in full together with further particulars gleaned from Cooke and his fellow survivors when they eventually reached India by way of Dutch Batavia (Jakarta). From these it appears that the burning of Benkulen was no accident. The place was first cut off by a mass revolt of the natives; in taking to their boats about thirty of the English were either mas
sacred or drowned; the whole settlement was then fired. It was as complete a fiasco as Pulo Condore. Happily Ballett and his ‘distressed’ colleagues at Moco-Moco were speedily relieved; but it was over two years before the English returned to Benkulen and then only after firm commitments from the sultans and a directive from London that Madras never again interfere in the appointment of governors.
iii
One reason why the Company persisted with loss-making establishments like Benkulen was its reluctance to write off a substantial investment or to relinquish hard-won privileges. Additionally there was every likelihood that, if it withdrew, its rivals – interlopers, Dutch, or French – would quickly move in. And as the danger of European wars engrossing eastern waters became an imminent certainty, such places began to assume a military and logistical importance that overshadowed all else.
The classic case was St Helena. With the Dutch now firmly established at the Cape, and with the French laying claim to the nearby islands of Réunion (Île de Bourbon) and Mauritius (Île de Dauphine or Île de France), St Helena became the English Company’s only safe haven, watering place, and larder on the direct route between India and England. The island had no commercial value and, though the directors periodically demanded that it achieve self-sufficiency, it remained a financial burden and an administrative liability. In terms of climate it could only be an improvement on Benkulen but this advantage was offset by a baneful influence not unknown in other Company settlements but here found in an extreme form. ‘There seems to have been something about St Helena’, explains the island’s annalist, ‘some sort of spell, which had a disastrous effect upon clergymen.’ Almost without exception those sent to minister to the island’s spiritual needs contrived to scandalize their congregation and infuriate their superiors; many were clearly mad, most alcoholic.
