Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  The Maratha admiral also knew better than to push his luck. He was well aware that the taking of two ships, including the Anne, the capture of their crews, and above all the plight of the delectable Mrs Chown was provoking Bombay no end. There was talk of a joint Anglo-Portuguese assault on Colaba; it was time to proffer the Maratha equivalent of an olive branch. If ‘an Englishman of credit’ would come to Colaba, wrote Kanhoji, he was ready to discuss terms.

  The Bombay Council hesitated. Knowing him to be ‘a man of ill principle’, it was out of the question to order one of its servants on such a risky mission. But happily gallantry was not entirely lacking in the Company’s ranks. Mindful of poor Mrs Chown, a young Scots lieutenant offered his services. With 30,000 rupees by way of ransom, the volunteer made his way to Colaba, found Kanhoji a man of his word, and duly returned with all the prisoners. According to Downing – who was not there and is no impartial chronicler – Mrs Chown had ‘most courageously withstood all Angria’s base usage and endured his insults beyond expectation’. By way of illustration Downing mentions that the young widow was discovered in such a state of undress that the Scots lieutenant, well named Mackintosh, ‘was obliged to wrap his clothes about her to cover her nakedness’. The whole experience does not, though, seem to have greatly disconcerted Mrs Chown. A few weeks later she duly gave birth to Chown’s son. The tide of sympathy persuaded the Bombay Council to grant her an allowance from Harvey’s estate; and within a few months she was remarried to the hot-headed young Gyfford. When the latter was posted, not to Karwar of unhappy memory, but to Anjengo, she no doubt heaved a becoming sigh of relief. A new husband, a new home, a new life, she must have thought.

  The ransoming of the Colaba prisoners was part of a wider non-aggression pact signed between Kanhoji and the Company in 1713. Under its terms the Marathas agreed not to molest ships belonging to the Company and not to interfere with any shipping in Bombay harbour. In return the Company undertook to see that only ships ‘what belong to subjects of the English nation’ should fly the Company’s colours. Peace of a sort was restored. But it was this latter definition of English shipping which would provide a new bone of contention. Just as in Bengal the Company’s servants persistently abused the privileges of the 1717 farman by granting custom-free passes (dastak) to anyone, English or Indian, who would pay for them, so in Bombay they abused the agreement with Kanhoji by interpreting the term ‘English shipping’ as denoting not ownership of the vessel but ownership of its cargo. Thus any vessel, whether owned by the Company, a private English trader or an Indian trader, was deemed a Company ship if it carried a consignment belonging to the English or any of those living under their protection.

  Needless to say, this was not how Kanhoji understood the matter. In 1716 recriminations flew between the ‘pirate’ and Bombay over the capture of four Indian vessels which supposedly carried English-owned cargoes. In 1717 the richly laden Success belonging to the Company’s Indian broker at Surat was taken and another ship, belonging to the Company itself, was relieved of part of its cargo. Again Kanhoji seemed willing to discuss reparations; but Bombay under Charles Boone, its new and vigorous Governor, was not. Boone had made the suppression of ‘piracy’ his personal crusade; £50,000 a year was being spent on building up the Bombay Marine; the Company’s own fleet of ‘grabs’ and ‘gallivats’ was coming off the stocks at Surat and elsewhere; and Bombay itself was being readied for war with the construction of the first city wall. Repeated requests for troops were sent to Madras and Calcutta, and from England as many as 500 recruits arrived in Bombay in a single year.

  ‘Let the bottom [i.e. the vessel] be whose it will’, wrote Boone to Kanhoji in protest at the latest prize-taking, ‘the money lent on it is worth more than the ship and the goods are English, you well know.’ But Kanhoji could not accept this logic. Today the English governor might be chartering only a single ship ‘but tomorrow Your Excellency will say that you have a mind to freight fifty or a hundred ships of Surat merchants. If so, what occasion have they to take the pass (dastak) that they formerly took of me?’ And whence, then, was the Maratha admiral to derive his revenue? But the Bombay Council was unmoved and in 1718 Boone resolved to hit back hard. When one of Kanhoji’s ‘gallivats’ was taken while peacefully going about its business in Bombay harbour, it was the end of the truce. ‘From this day forward’, wrote the Maratha, ‘what God gives, I shall take.’ It was no idle threat.

  First, though, it was Boone who took the offensive with a raid on the Maratha fleet as it was being laid up for the monsoon in a sheltered inlet behind Gheriah (Vijayadrug), the most impressive of Kanhoji’s strongholds. So formidable were the rocky cliffs of Gheriah that an English historian would liken the place to Gibraltar. Not to be outdone, an Indian historian (writing in the first heady days of India’s independence) describes Boone’s surprise attack as ‘Pearl Harbor two centuries before its time’. There was, though, one difference. In spite of a motley armada and some 4000 troops, Boone’s raid was a total failure.

  Downing, whose claim to have taken part has since been discredited, reports that the considerable firepower of the Company’s ships made little impression on the fort, whose rocks were too slippery for a landing and whose walls were too high for the scaling ladders. ‘We soon found that the place was impregnable.’ A simple boom across the river prevented the Company’s fireships, including one hopefully named the Terrible Bomb, from reaching the Maratha navy; and when a landing party was sent to deal with this obstacle it first blundered into a swamp and was then raked by fire from the fort. The only mystery was why the Marathas did not take greater advantage of the situation. Downing’s explanation, though scarcely consoling, probably contained much truth. ‘I question’. he wrote, ‘whether there were a hundred men in the castle during the siege.’ After four days the ‘siege’ was lifted and the Company’s armada returned to Bombay.

  Undismayed, Boone used the closed season of the 1718 monsoon to plan a second assault, this time on Khanderi, an island only ten miles down the coast from Bombay itself. Again the fleet was packed with more than enough troops to carry the place, again a landing was effected, and again through sheer incompetence aborted. When Kanhoji himself appeared on the scene at the head of his fleet and threatened Bombay, the Company’s ships quickly scuttled back to the protection of the big guns of Bombay castle.

  ‘This ill-success was a great trouble to the President [Boone]’ noted Downing. In 1719 no new attack was mounted and there was even talk of peace. But as Kanhoji’s confidence had grown, so had Boone’s bulldog spirit. ‘He now did all in his power to suppress this notorious pyrate’, building in addition to more ships ‘a great and mighty floating machine’. Called The Phram, this contraption seems to have been half raft, half castle, ‘pretty flat’ with a draft of only six feet, and a single mast and topsail. But what impressed Downing was the thickness of its sides ‘made by the nicest composition cannon-proof’ and its twelve monstrous guns each of which fired a forty-eight pound cannon-ball. (Twenty-four pounders were the largest guns then favoured by the Bombay Marine.) ‘It must of course prove of great service to us against any of those castles which we could approach near enough to cannonade.’

  With just such a demonstration in mind, Boone launched a second assault on Gheriah in 1721. As in 1718 the landing parties effected nothing. But great were the expectations of The Phram. It was manoeuvred into position, the massive gun carriages were wheeled to the ports, the charges laid and the fuses lit: With an almighty splash the great shells fell into the sea rather less than a stone’s throw from the vessel. Someone had miscalculated the angle of fire; either the carriages were too high or the ports too low. The Phram was withdrawn for modification.

  By the time it was ready for further trials, word had got round the fleet that those armour-plated sides were not much use either; once again insufficient allowance had been made for the elevation of the ‘Indian Gibraltar’. If The Phram discharged its guns from a distance, its murderous miss
iles were more of a danger to the waiting landing parties than to the fort, but if it moved into a more effective range the guns of the fort could lob their own shells onto its flat and crowded decks. Both expedients were tried and, amidst heavy casualties, both failed. It was thought that two of Kanhoji’s ‘grabs’ had caught fire as a result of a separate bombardment and with this very doubtful claim to ‘victory’ the English fleet withdrew.

  Meanwhile more merchant shipping was falling into Maratha hands. The trade of beleaguered Bombay was suffering and in a bid to end piracy once and for all the Company’s directors in London applied for the assistance of the Royal Navy. With great ceremony a squadron was duly dispatched to the Indian Ocean in 1721, ostensibly to root out those Anglo-American buccaneers still operating out of Madagascar but additionally, and perhaps primarily, to take on Kanhoji Angrey. By now it was painfully obvious that the Company’s ‘sentinels’ made indifferent storm-troopers even when primed with copious liquor and fired by the promise of cash bonuses. Similarly their counting-house masters made dismal admirals. It was time for the professionals to try their hand.

  Commodore Matthews in charge of the Royal squadron reached Bombay in 1722 to a welcome soon noted for its acrimony. In a rerun of the quarrels between the Old Company and Ambassador William Norris – the last occasion on which Royal ships had visited India – Matthews claimed precedence by virtue of his commission and was soon planning a series of voyages designed to ensure for himself a handsome share of the Company’s profits. He seemed bent on discrediting the Company and, worse still, he completely repudiated the Company’s contention that any ship carrying an English consignment was entitled to fly English colours, thus in effect supporting Kanhoji’s case. Governor Boone, however, was resolved on one last, all-out offensive. His term of office was drawing to a close; he had just engineered an offensive alliance against the Maratha admiral with the Portuguese; and he desperately needed Matthews’s cooperation. Swallowing his pride, he deferred to the Commodore and set about planning the downfall of Colaba.

  Unlike previous attacks, that on Colaba was waged from the land, an odd choice given the importance attached to the presence of Matthews’s squadron. With a combined strength of 6,500 plus an artillery train, the Anglo-Portuguese forces surrounded Kanhoji’s stronghold while the English fleet prevented any relief reaching it from the sea. In spite of the unexpected appearance of a Maratha detachment of horse and foot, the arrangements were more than adequate for the task in hand.

  But once again the affair was woefully mismanaged. Without waiting to set up their batteries, and leaving the Portuguese to deal with the Maratha detachment, the English charged the fortress. The gates held, the English ladders were too short, and casualties were heavy. Meanwhile the Portuguese had been routed by the Marathas who now threatened to cut off the English attackers. A chaotic retreat ensued. Had the Marathas followed up their advantage it would have been the worst ever defeat for English arms in India. Matthews’s squadron had contributed nothing except 200 marines lent to the land forces; compared to the conduct of the Company’s reluctant sentinels, their bravery had been conspicuous.

  Immediately after this fourth failure Boone sailed for home while Matthews took his squadron on a trading venture to Surat and Bengal. Ever open to anything that might discredit the Company, in Calcutta the Commodore was approached by a distraught but still pretty widow who was being detained in India pending payment of £9000 from her late husband’s estate. Matthews listened to her long and heart-rending story with interest; and convinced that no one who heard it could fail to condemn the Company’s ingratitude, he promptly took the young lady under his wing and into his cabin. She was, of course, none other than Mrs Katherine Gyfford, previously Harvey and Chown, née Cooke, lately of Karwar, Colaba, and Anjengo. Together the Commodore and the widow sailed back to Bombay, where old acquaintances were duly scandalized by Mrs Gyfford’s new liaison, and then to England. Years of litigation over the tangled affairs of Anjengo followed, their outcome unknown. But evidently Mrs Gyfford returned to India for she died in Madras in 1745.

  ii

  Following the abortive assault on Colaba, the Portuguese made their peace with Kanhoji thus irrevocably souring their relations with the English. When a Maratha army occupied Portuguese Bassein no help was forthcoming from the Company in adjacent Bombay, and thereafter the Portuguese ceased to be a force to reckon with on the west coast. Much the same could be said of the Sidi; and, although the Dutch and even the French took an occasional swipe at the ‘Angrian pirate’, it was left to the English to bear the brunt of his attacks. Clearly Kanhoji’s strongholds were impervious to anything the Company could throw against them; the most that could be expected of the Bombay Marine was retaliation for individual acts of ‘piracy’. Thus in 1723 the sinking of a Company ‘grab’ and the disabling of another were matched by the capture of a Maratha vessel. This tit for tat produced a curious exchange of letters between Bombay and Colaba in which the ‘pirate’ showed himself a genial and persuasive correspondent; his offer of terms was rejected but prisoners were swopped and for the next five years both sides did their utmost to avoid hostilities.

  The lull ended with Kanhoji’s death in 1729. An ensuing contest between his numerous progeny should have played into the Company’s hands but whilst one Angrey faction, based at Colaba, did prove more amenable, the other, based at Gheriah, began a new reign of terror. In 1730 two of the Company’s latest ‘grabs’ were engaged, both badly mauled and one captured. Two years later a large Indiaman, the Ockham, managed to beat off an attack, but in 1735 the Derby put up such a feeble resistance that she was taken intact to Suvarnadrug, another of the Angrey’s ‘impregnable’ bolt-holes. Coming straight from England the Derby was laden with ammunition and naval stores plus the treasure that was to have been Bombay’s trading capital for the year. Its loss was probably the heaviest the Company ever had to bear from ‘Angrian pirates’.

  All Company ships were of course armed but, heavily laden, they were easily outmanoeuvred by the native ‘gallivats’. To avoid an English broadside the Maratha oarsmen approached from astern, often towing the larger ‘grabs’ whose prow guns directed their fire at the English rigging. Having thus disabled their prey – and hopefully ensnared its gunners in a tangle of rope and canvas – the Maratha vessels closed in from all sides for the boarding. There was only one way to defeat such tactics and that was by ensuring that other Company ships were always on hand to offer covering fire. Henceforth the system of convoys was more rigorously enforced and during the late 1730s it seemed to be paying off.

  Thus in December 1739 the Harrington, Captain Robert Jenkins, Bombay bound from China, called in at Tellicherry to pick up her convoy before entering the danger zone of the Konkan. A week later the fleet, now of four ships, was assailed by fifteen ‘Angrian’ vessels of which six were frigate-size ‘grabs’. The engagement lasted two days but so well did the English ships support one another that eventually the enemy ‘found to their cost that our metal was too heavy for them’. Captain Jenkins was especially commended. Already something of a celebrity in that the British government was even then engaged in a war with Spain that was named after his ear, he was presented with 300 guineas by the Company’s directors and made Commodore of the Marine by the Bombay Council. Sadly he died two years later ‘of a fever and a flux’, another victim of Bombay’s ‘unveryhealthfulness’. The famous ear, originally severed by the Spanish in the West Indies, bottled by its owner, and produced to great effect in the House of Commons in 1738, was buried with him. It was said that he had become more attached to it off than when it was on; he never went anywhere without it.

  Lacking such a talisman and such an inspirational commander, the Princess Augusta from Benkulen was taken in 1742 and, ignoring smaller losses, the Restoration, flagship of the Bombay Marine, in 1749. Both were the work of Tulaji Angrey who had just succeeded his brother Sambhaji in command of the south Konkan. In so far as he had also been disowned b
y the Peshwa, now the main focus of Maratha loyalty, the Company’s insistence on his piratical status for once had some substance. As if to live up to it, Tulaji’s fleet harried the western seaboard as never before. Another squadron of the Royal Navy was summoned from Madras to escort the Bombay convoys. Tulaji hung about their flanks picking off stragglers; on one occasion he boldly engaged a flotilla of no less than thirty-six vessels.

  Happily, though, and not before time, an end to this galling struggle was in sight. By 1750 events in the Carnatic, including the loss and restitution of Madras and the extraordinary exploits of Clive, had long since upstaged the ‘Angrian’ wars; and with the Company now transformed into the most effective military and territorial power on the Indian peninsula, it was only a matter of time before arrangements could be made to deal with ‘pirates’.

  Tulaji, unlike Kanhoji, could expect no support from his Maratha suzerain whose envoys he had sent back with their noses out of joint – literally – plus a message that if the Peshwa wanted to talk he must address himself to what Surgeon Ives delicately describes as ‘Tulaji’s pr—te p-rts’. Indeed by 1754 Tulaji was actually at war with the Peshwa. An Anglo-Maratha alliance was the natural outcome and accordingly, as soon as peace was restored in the Carnatic, a joint offensive was planned against Suvarnadrug and Gheriah. There could, of course, be no question of storming such ‘impregnable’ strongholds. Siege tactics were the answer. The English fleet would blockade them from the sea and the Maratha army invest them from the land. Eventually the ‘pirates’ would be forced to treat.

  In command of the Bombay Marine at the time was Commodore William James. Like Jenkins, and in marked contrast to the assorted factors and merchants who had mismanaged Boone’s operations, James had been recruited into the Company’s service after seeing action in the West Indies. He was a highly experienced and professional sailor and he commanded a frigate, the Protector, specially built in England, whose forty-gun firepower and lack of hold space made her a true warship. Additionally the locally built ‘grabs’, fireships and even ‘Phrams’ had lately been much improved. For in 1738 the great Parsee shipbuilder, Lowji Wadia, had been persuaded to remove his business from Surat to Bombay. There he set up the first shipyard and provided the Bombay Marine with extensive dry dock and refitting facilities. James may have commanded fewer vessels than many of his predecessors but all were built for war rather than trade, well officered and amply supplied with powder and shot.