Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  In other respects there was little to choose between St Helena and Sumatra. Governor Pyke, having ruled the former with a rod of iron for five long years, was deemed just the man to re-establish the Benkulen factory in 1721. His stint on the West Coast again lasted five years and he then returned to St Helena for a further seven years. In shuttling between these two equatorial outposts he was not alone. Hardship ratings as well as the logic of shipping dictated that the only appropriate corrective, short of the gallows, for a St Helenan miscreant was to be exiled to Benkulen and for a Sumatran offender to be exiled to St Helena.

  Only Gombroon (Bandar Abbas) on the Persian coast enjoyed a less fashionable reputation. Mocha in the Red Sea had prospered with the increasing demand for coffee but Gombroon, in spite of that share of the customs dues won by Weddell after the siege of Hormuz, remained a place of negligible trade and less enchantment. A sailor’s adage of the period had it that ‘only an inch of deal stands between Gombroon and Hell’. ‘You cannot get excited about Gombroon’, wrote James Douglas, the Bombay historian. ‘It would be difficult to select a place less known or less calculated to awaken an interest of any kind in the reader.’ Point taken.

  Excluding the China trade, that leaves just the Company’s scattered trading stations on India’s west coast. Collected in a haphazard fashion during the previous century and originally adminstered from Surat, these now comprised three settlements, Karwar, Tellicherry, and Anjengo, each controlled from Bombay and each roughly equidistant from the other in a chain that stretched down the coast to its southernmost tip. As with Benkulen, pepper was the mainstay of all three and, as with Benkulen, all were ‘run at a loss for the private benefit of their chiefs and factors as country traders’ (H. Furber). As the first landfalls on the Indian coast for shipping from England, they were also important communications centres whence news from Europe could be dispatched by runner or coastal craft to Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. It was this prior access to information often of considerable commercial value which made for the popularity of a Malabar posting.

  In 1717 by order of the Bombay Council, Anjengo, the most southerly, was entrusted to the Governor’s favourite, one William Gyfford, who accompanied by his young and attractive bride duly took up residence in the little seaside fort nestling amongst the palm fronds between Quilon and Trivandrum in what is now the state of Kerala. Elsewhere the English were celebrating the news of Farrukhsiyar’s farman, but in Anjengo the Company’s ‘Magna Carta’ was an irrelevance. Moghul rule had never extended to the extreme south and even when, at the turn of the century, Aurangzeb had pushed his authority on the east coast as far down as Madras, on the west coast around Bombay the Marathas had already reclaimed a vast Hindu patrimony. Thus isolated from the ebb and the flow of Moghul-Maratha rivalry, the lush coastline of Kerala was still divided into a patchwork of minor Principalities and trading centres with a political and commercial profile more like that of the south-east Asian archipelago than India.

  Anjengo had been acquired in 1693 by arrangement with the local rani, or queen, at nearby Attingal. She is said to have fallen in love with a ‘beautiful’ young English emissary who, although rejecting the chance of a royal wedding, ‘satisfied her so well’ that she could scarcely refuse his countrymen anything. As is the way with lovers, she later regretted her generosity and especially the grant of Anjengo. But by 1717 she had passed away and been succeeded, as was customary among the matrilineal Nair caste, by a new queen. At first Gyfford, like his predecessors, was sorely torn between the political temptation of meddling with the peculiarities of Nair sovereignty and the commercial imperative of monopolizing the pepper trade for his personal gain. Two years of intrigue, strife and precious little trade seemed to cure him of the first; and in 1721, ‘flushed with the hopes of having peace and pepper’, he conceived the idea of making amends by leading a grand deputation to the royal court in Attingal.

  Bearing gifts in pale imitation of the Surman embassy, he assembled most of the Anjengo establishment, numbering over a hundred, paddled up river and then processed through the coconut groves, flags aloft, to the beat of a drum and the tinkle of ‘country music’. ‘The details of what followed are imperfectly recorded and much is left to conjecture’, writes Colonel John Biddulph (whose own exploits on the wrong side of the Himalayas would, five generations later, also leave much to conjecture). One of rather few Victorian officers to write sympathetically about the Company’s ‘Dark Age’, Biddulph examined the Anjengo affair in some detail and concluded that Gyfford was inveigled into the ambush less by the Nairs’ cunning than by his own conceit. Surrounded, disarmed and hopelessly outnumbered, he dashed off a note to those left at Anjengo which ended with a wonderfully absurd ‘Take care and don’t frighten the women; we are in no great danger’. Minutes later the massacre began. Gyfford himself had his tongue cut out, the tongue was then nailed to his chest, and he then nailed to a log and sent floating down the river. The rest of the deputation were simply dismembered; just twenty horribly mangled survivors made it back to the fort.

  There the young Mrs Gyfford and Anjengo’s two other Englishwomen were quickly bundled aboard a native longboat. Four weeks later they came ashore in Madras, dishevelled and destitute. Their plight excited great sympathy and even wrung from the Fort St George council a small compensatory allowance. There was, however, some doubt whether Mrs Gyfford would accept charity. Although barely twenty-six years old she had had the presence of mind to come away from Anjengo with the factory records and a useful sum of money which she claimed as belonging to her late husband. She knew better than to let grief get the better of business and she had every intention of extracting more than charity from her husband’s employers. For, as will appear, she had been widowed before.

  Meanwhile back at Anjengo a long and occasionally heroic siege had ensued. The defendants, down to about thirty-five in number, were marooned on the sand spit where stood their stout but roofless fort. They had access to the sea and received occasional supplies and reinforcements. But it was six months before the relief expedition arrived from Bombay, raised the siege, chastised the Nairs and restored the pepper trade. Such was the cost of condiments, such still the value of the spice trade.

  Three hundred miles up the Malabar coast, Tellicherry had requested military assistance from Madras in 1714 and, according to one visitor, was continuously at war with the local Nairs from at least 1703. ‘This war and fortifications has taken double the money to maintain them that the Company’s investments came to.’ The writer was none other than the garrulous Captain Alexander Hamilton whose more than thirty years before the eastern mast had taken him to just about every port between the Cape and Canton. On his last visit to Tellicherry in 1723 the factors were still hard at war with their neighbours.

  Karwar, midway between Tellicherry and Bombay, the Captain knew even better. For here, in 1717, he had found himself in the unlikely role of commodore of a fleet of Company warships. How a private trader, renowned for his outspoken criticism of the Company and cordially detested by its factors from Gombroon to Canton, came by the command of its Bombay fleet is something of a mystery. Earlier in the year Hamilton’s ship, en route from the Persian Gulf, had been assailed by a fleet of Gujarati pirates. Belying his years, the Captain had shown great courage and resourcefulness in disengaging from them and it was presumably news of this action which commended him to the Bombay Council as a doughty commander. He was promptly engaged at eighty rupees a month and sent off with a small squadron to chastise the Raja of Karwar, then besieging the Company’s factory.

  The expedition was not a great success and within six months Hamilton had resigned his commission and resumed the free and easy life of a. private trader. For the trouble at Karwar, as at Tellicherry and Anjengo, he blamed the Company’s local chief who ‘pretended to be Lord of the Manor’, appropriating the profits of the pepper trade to his personal account and antagonizing the Raja with an assortment of contentious claims. Hamilton would have n
one of it, and was so thoroughly disgusted by the whole affair that his account of the expedition and of its negotiations gives no hint that the author was in fact its commander and chief negotiator.

  The disasters at Anjengo and Benkulen, and the near disasters at Karwar and Tellicherry, could be largely ascribed to the inconsistencies of Company policy when left in the hands of ambitious and vindictive men who put personal advantage first. Private trade as conducted by the Company’s employees was certainly no crime and not necessarily an evil. It attracted into the Company’s service a brand of extraordinarily resourceful and rugged individuals; it relieved the Company of the need to remunerate them properly, and it contributed as much to the growth of British commercial predominance in the East as the Company’s own trade. But, particularly in the remoter settlements, it also bred a contempt for the Company’s cumbrous and moralizing ways and a devotion to ruthless opportunism. Closer supervision would have helped but was scarcely practical when it could take three to four months to get an approval from Bombay or Madras and at least a year from London. Only war, or some similar danger perceived as common to the whole English community, could effect a closing of ranks, a burying of hatchets.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  One Man’s Pirate

  BOMBAY AND THE ANGREYS

  In 1737 Lieutenant Clement Downing published a curious narrative called A History of the Indian Wars. It was curious because the Company’s Indian wars are not usually supposed to have started till after 1737. Downing, however, was referring not to the imminent exploits of Clive and Lawrence but to the confused and protracted hostilities waged by the Bombay Presidency against the Maratha navy during the first half of the eighteenth century. The same struggle forms the main subject matter of Colonel Biddulph’s The Pirates of Malabar, another curious title in that the Marathas were not from that section of India’s western seaboard usually described as the Malabar Coast; nor were they pirates.

  Native pirates certainly existed. The Gujarati Sanganians against whom Hamilton had so distinguished himself qualified, as did the Muscat Arabs whose forays reached as far south as the real Malabar. But to describe as pirates all those local rulers on India’s west coast who maintained a squadron of fighting ships was a peculiarly English conceit. True the records abound with references to buccaneers with exotic names like ‘The Sow Raja’, ‘The Seedee’ and ‘The Kempsant’; but on closer inspection these same rogues turn out to be legitimate sovereigns and feudatories going about their usual business of defending a section of the coastline and policing the merchant traffic that used it. ‘The Kempsant’ was in fact the Khem Sawant Raja of Wadi, the Sidi the Moghuls’ naval contractor, and ‘The Sow Raja’ Satravati Shahu, the legitimate claimant to the Maratha throne. One man’s pirate is another man’s patriot; in Maratha eyes the worst offenders were undoubtedly those ships which flew the Company’s flag.

  Pressed to define its legal position, the Company would no doubt have invoked those turbulent times in Surat at the turn of the century when Moghul displeasure over the activities of Captain Kidd and his colleagues had obliged the European companies to accept some responsibility for the suppression of piracy. Thus the Dutch and the French had assumed the job of policing the Red Sea route out of Surat, while the English had taken on ‘the southern seas’, i.e. the route down the west coast. But this arrangement was intended principally to meet the now declining threat of European piracy, not Indian. The Moghuls had no better claim to the sovereignty of ‘the southern seas’ than the English; and anyway Moghul sovereignty was now a fiction.

  Howsoever, the protracted hostilities between Bombay and its maritime neighbours – in which Downing actually took part – were unquestionably wars. They necessitated the formation of the Bombay Marine, later to become the Indian Navy; they witnessed a greater build-up of Company troops than had yet been necessary anywhere in the East; and they occasioned the first deployment of ships belonging to the King’s navy against an Asian enemy. Additionally these wars taught the English much about the shortcomings of their military arrangements and eventually presented them with some of their first martial heroes. If the weakness of the Company’s position on land would be first exposed and then rectified in the Carnatic, its weakness at sea would be similarly tested and then rectified in the struggles with the ‘Malabar Pirates’. For Bombay it was at times a life-and-death struggle bringing trade to a standstill. But out of it the city emerged from irrelevance as India’s premier port and ‘the grand storehouse of all the Arabian and Persian commerce’. According to Surgeon Edward Ives the island was, by 1754, ‘perhaps the most flourishing of any this day in the universe’.

  It was also in these wars that the Anjengo widow Mrs Katherine Gyfford, née Cooke, had learnt to make the most of adversity. By the time of the Anjengo affair she was already a celebrity, twice widowed, once captured. Deservedly to her belongs the distinction of being the first Englishwoman to earn a place in the Company’s history.

  It had all begun at Karwar in the year 1709 when the Loyal Bliss, outward bound for Bengal and carrying the family of Gerrard Cooke, a Fort William gunner, had put in for fresh supplies and water. Twelve days later the Loyal Bliss resumed her voyage minus Katherine, the eldest Cooke daughter. ‘A most beautiful lady not exceeding thirteen or fourteen years of age’, she was also a paragon of virtue for ‘to oblige her parents’ she had accepted an offer of marriage from John Harvey. Harvey was chief of the Karwar factory; he was also ‘in years’ – so probably old enough to be her grandfather – and ‘deformed’.

  Such sudden and suspect pairings were not uncommon. For bringing to India an English girl who was past puberty there was only one possible reason, to find a husband. In the Company’s settlements suitors swarmed round a fresh-faced beauty as thickly as mosquitoes. Had little Miss Cooke been twice as old and half as pretty, she would still have been eagerly courted; but the twelve-day conquest, and of such a senior factor, may be taken as testimony that her charms were indeed exceptional.

  Happily they were not long lavished on the repulsive Harvey. Within a couple of years the child-bride was a child-widow and Within a couple of months the child-widow had remarried. This time the lucky suitor was a young factor newly arrived in Karwar called Thomas Chown. Harvey had left an estate large enough to enable the sixteen-year-old to choose a more attractive partner; but as was ever the case, Harvey’s personal affairs were hopelessly confused with those of his office. The Company was therefore laying claim to his estate and the Chowns determined to contest the matter. With Katherine already ‘heavy with child’ (presumably Chown’s), they sailed for Bombay in November 1712.

  As was usual in waters infested with ‘pirates’, their ketch, the Anne, sailed in convoy with two other vessels. A day out from Karwar the small fleet was attacked by four Maratha ‘grabs’ (ghurabs or square-rigged frigates). Chown was immediately hit in the shoulder by a cannon ball; he bled to death in his wife’s arms. The Anne and her consorts were then boarded and the twice-widowed Katherine consigned to captivity in the Maratha stronghold of Colaba, about fifty miles down the coast from Bombay. It must have been with some trepidation that she learnt that she was the first European female to be a prisoner of the dreaded Kanhoji Angrey, otherwise ‘Connajee’ or ‘Angria’, the man destined to be the scourge of the Company for twenty years and the founder of a naval power that would last for half a century.

  Like Sivaji, the founder of Maratha power on land, Kanhoji was a product of his environment. Issuing from the cliff-top forts and secluded valleys of their homeland in the Western Ghats, Sivaji’s mounted raiders had exploited the tactical advantages of speed and mobility to probe deep into the Moghul empire, even to Surat. Similar tactics were suggested by the Maratha seaboard. Stretching roughly from Bombay to Goa and known as the Konkan – as opposed to the Malabar Coast further south – this reach of India’s interminable coastline is quite unlike any other. Instead of the dunes and sand bars of the Coromandel or the palm-fringed strands of Malaba
r, here rocky promontories and hidden coves relieve the monotony. Numerous rivers spill down from the ghats to provide sheltered anchorages. Islands screen their estuaries. And wherever cliff or headland commands a narrows, a rock-ramparted stronghold crowns the horizon. Such a place was Colaba, a promontory at low tide, an island at high. Like the coasts of Brittany or Cornwall, that of the Konkan was made for sea rovers.

  Kanhoji, though, was no more a pirate than ‘The Seedee’ or ‘The Sow Raja’. By 1712 he had already been appointed Surkhail, or Grand Admiral, of the Maratha fleet and Viceroy of the Konkan. These titles the English in Bombay chose, of course, to ignore just as they disdained to apply for Kanhoji’s dastak, or passes, when sailing through what the Marathas claimed as their territorial waters. Within such a loose organization as the Maratha confederacy the source of authority and legitimacy was often hard to identify; and this was especially true at a time when several claimants to Sivaji’s throne were in the field. More to the point, though, Kanhoji’s pretensions were not yet backed by great naval might. To the British, mindful of Bombay’s last siege, the Sidi as a feudatory of the Moghul appeared the more formidable neighbour.

  But Kanhoji Angrey was already building up his navy and reinforcing his strongholds. In 1707 he had made peace with the Sidi, the better to press his claims against the English. In the same year a Company frigate had been attacked and sunk, and in further such raids his fast sailing fleet of rakish ‘grabs’ assisted by the smaller, many-oared ‘gallivats’ had invariably worsted the Company’s vessels in in-shore waters.