Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  Even now, as Draper frantically assembled his armada in Madras, most of the local councillors, his erstwhile comrades-in-arms from the days of the siege, were more concerned for a vessel that had just left for Manila. On board her was £70,000 worth of their private trade and, according to Draper, ‘they were afraid that the venture would suffer by the loss of Manila and took any method in their power to discourage the attempt’.

  Faced with what he chose to construe as wilful sabotage, Draper was able to obtain from the Company only three small transports, 600 sepoys, and 300 European troops most of whom were deserters from the ranks of de Lally’s army. ‘Such banditti had never been seen since the time of Spartacus’, he observed. The Company did, however, provide him with a sufficient complement of civilians to form a Manila council and take over the administration and commerce of the place. They included Henry Brooke, lately of Negrais, presumably because of his experience of pioneering. Draper preferred to rely on the officers of his own (Royal) regiment, which seems now to have included some of those recently tamed Highlanders. They would be the backbone of the expedition and when he sailed from Madras at the end of July, he was still quietly optimistic. ‘Tho’ we cannot do all we wish,’ he wrote by way of valedictory, ‘we are determined to do all we can and try we will.’

  Six months later he was back, en route to England, with news of a wholly satisfactory outcome. Word of the war having been slow to reach the extremities of the Hispanic world, the fleet had sailed into Manila Bay unopposed. Unopposed the British troops had been landed at Ermita, just a mile from the fort (and today the heart of Manila’s nightlife), and against only token resistance the first battery had been set up. A week later the first breach was successfully stormed. British and Indian losses had been ‘trifling’ – barely thirty fatalities – and under the terms of surrender the Spanish were to pay an indemnity of £1 million. In addition, one of the Acapulco galleons, a gigantic vessel of some 2000 tons, had been taken. And finally Manila had reluctantly been handed over to the Company. ‘In short’, announced the jubilant Draper, ‘it is a lucky business.’

  Unfortunately the luck ran out with Draper’s early departure. The Company would hold Manila and claim sovereignty over the Philippines for only eighteen months. But that was long enough for some of the troops to mutiny, long enough for the Governor to fall out with his own council, with the military and the navy, and long enough for a Spanish-Filipino resistance so to harry the British that they scarcely dared venture outside the fort. It was with a sense of relief that in April 1764 the place was finally handed back to Spain in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Paris. All along the Company had been developing its own ideas about how best to support the China trade and re-establish its interests in the south-east Asian archipelago. They did not include the occupation of Manila and it was entirely appropriate that the man who eventually stepped in, when the Company’s governor had resigned in disgust, to hand back Manila was also the moving spirit behind these other initiatives. His name was Alexander Dalrymple.

  iv

  Dalrymple, from a distinguished Edinburgh family, had like Clive joined the Madras establishment as a writer in 1753. Headstrong in youth as he would become cantankerous in age, he devoted his early energies not to acquiring instant wealth or military acclaim but to studying maritime journals. In the siege of Madras he acquitted himself with distinction; but not without a streak of perversity he ignored the Company’s self-evident destiny in India and became obsessed with reviving its long-forgotten ambitions further east. Specifically he lit upon the idea, so doggedly pursued in the previous century by Saris, Adams, Cocks and Catchpole, of finding or founding a haven where the Company could establish direct trading links with the Chinese Empire.

  In so far as Company ships in ever increasing numbers had now been trading profitably at Canton for fifty years, this idea might have seemed redundant. In fact it was the greatly augmented value of the China trade which made it so attractive. Because the Company was becoming so financially dependent on its China trade some new expedient for securing it both from Chinese exactions and European interference had become an imperative.

  The origins in the previous century of a trade that promised well for the export of English woollens and the import of Chinese silks have already been mentioned. So have the unsuccessful attempts to push this trade at Taiwan, Amoy, Chusan and Pulo Condore as a result of which European trade with the Celestial Empire had since 1703 been confined to the Pearl River. Portuguese Macao, at the mouth, provided a holding area whence the Canton authorities were notified of new arrivals. When contracts for the sale and purchase of cargo had been agreed with the Canton merchants, the ship was measured by the Hoppo (customs officer), taxed accordingly, and allowed to proceed upriver to Whampoa, the main port. Meanwhile, a few miles further upstream, the foreigners had set up a temporary home and office in their allotted factory on the Canton waterfront.

  These factories had no resident staff, the supercargoes and their subordinates coming and going with each year’s shipping. It was thus impossible to manipulate the market or to explore its commercial origins. Competition between the various European companies was ferocious if fair; and for all its faults, the system was well regulated. But it was heavily weighted in favour of the Chinese and, when Europe’s demand for Chinese produce suddenly began to soar, this weighting gave to the seller an irresistible leverage.

  Responsible for this phenomenal expansion in demand was the Englishman’s newly acquired thirst for tea. Tea, of the most expensive green variety, had first been imported as a medicine and digestif in the 1660s. Samuel Pepys approved of it and by 1685 the directors were requesting further supplies ‘to make presents therein to our great friends at Court’. By the 1690s small quantities were reaching London each year through Madras’s private trade with Canton and through the Dutch at Batavia. The price fell from 50 shillings a pound to around 16 shillings, but it was still mostly green tea for novelty consumption by the beau-monde.

  The first quantum leap in demand came in the 1720s and has been linked to a like expansion in the import of sugar from the West Indies. By concentrating on the cheaper bohea tea, prices fell to around 7 shillings a pound and tea entered mass reckoning as an agreeable way of imbibing sugar. The 200,000 pounds sold by the Company in 1720 was up to an average of over one million pounds a year by the end of the decade; and, with occasional lapses, it continued to rise. In 1760 it was just under three million and by 1770 nine million. Meanwhile the price of bohea had fallen to 3 shillings a pound and instead of an average of five Company ships a year visiting Canton, the usual total was now over fifteen. Imports of Chinese porcelain complemented the vogue, providing the merchant with the necessary ballast, or kintledge, for his vessel and the consumer with the socially desirable crocks in which to brew and drink his beverage.

  But these figures tell only half the story. The number of Company vessels calling at Canton was matched by a growing number of privately owned vessels operating out of Madras, Calcutta and Bombay; and, in a new twist to the interloping theme, the quantity of tea imported by the Company was matched by a like quantity imported into Europe by rival trading companies and then smuggled across the Channel.

  In effect tea revolutionized the Company’s trade in the eighteenth century in the same way that cottons had in the seventeenth. As a result, by 1770 it was the single most important item in the Company’s portfolio and the value of the China trade had come to rival that of all its Indian settlements combined. In India, of course, the Company now to some extent dictated its terms of trade; but even as it assumed political power in India, the balance of its commerce swung decisively towards China where it enjoyed no more security and leverage than it had in Surat under the Moghul governors.

  Chinese exactions increased in proportion to the growth of trade. In the 1720s the Co-Hong, a cartel of the leading Canton merchants operating a price-fixing monopoly, made its first appearance. The Company responded by ending the co
mpetitive tendering of its supercargoes and organizing them into a united council. But failing concerted action with all the other European trading companies, the Hong merchants continued to enjoy the advantage. Also in the 1720s an ad valorem tax of ten per cent on all imports and exports was levied and to the measurement dues was added a fixed charge of 1950 taels (about £650). It should be said that these impositions scarcely equalled those being levied on imports of China tea by the home government; by 1750, these exceeded 100 per cent of the cost price (and hence all that smuggling). But it was one thing to enrich the British treasury, a service to which the directors were wont to point with pride, and quite another to subsidize a foreign power – a power, moreover, which consistently treated merchants with utter disdain, depriving them of their firearms and confining them to what the French scholar Louis Dermigny nicely calls un lazaret commercial.

  Often and loudly did the foreigners protest, but since they were permitted to seek redress only from those local mandarins who stood to gain most by the exactions, it was to no avail. The alternative, of course, was to hold back their ships or, better still, to threaten to send them and their trade elsewhere. Both these ploys were tried in the 1750s as part of a bold new initiative in which the name of one James Flint is prominent.

  The choice of Flint as the man to bid defiance to the Celestial Emperor was eccentric, to say the least. As a small boy, probably an orphan, he had been shipped out to Macao with the idea that a language impenetrable to any adult European might be learnt by one of tender years. That was in 1736. In 1739 he was in Bombay and Madras whence he was sent back to China to continue his ‘endeavours to make myself acquainted with the Mandareen’. Somehow or other he was apprenticed to Chinese merchants with whom he travelled inland, becoming the first Englishman to master not only Mandarin but also the language of Fukien (Fujian). He lived and dressed as a Chinese and must by now have completely forgotten the land of his birth. But his loyalty to the Company, who occasionally relieved his penury, remained strong and in 1746 he reappeared as official linguist to all the Canton supercargoes on an allowance of 90 taels (£30) per ship. This would have made a respectable salary and Flint, or sometimes the more sinicized ‘Flink’, was obviously considered a great asset.

  Smarting under the treatment received at Canton, in 1755 the directors ordered one of their ships to attempt to open trade at Ningpo (near the modern Shanghai); and by way of preparing the ground, they sent on ahead their senior supercargo accompanied by Flint as interpreter. The Ningpo mandarins were taken by surprise but ‘received us very graciously, not at all like the Hoppo of Canton’, reported Flint. Pending reference to higher authorities the ship was allowed to trade on most reasonable terms as were the two vessels sent in the following year. In 1757 Flint returned to Ningpo expecting to take up residence prior to opening a factory. Unfortunately the Canton authorities had other ideas. Their complaints to the emperor had resulted in a decree forbidding European trade anywhere but in the Pearl River.

  Nothing if not desperate, the Company resolved on a final throw, sending Flint back to Ningpo in 1759 with a long list of complaints which, if he was refused admission, he was to deliver in Peking itself. No Englishman had yet got within a thousand miles of the Forbidden City. Even official embassies laden with largesse, led by aristocratic scions, and accompanied by well-armed guards, would, come their day, find it hard going. Flint, a solitary pigtailed Englishman with no official credentials and the most presumptuous of communications, had no hope; he would be lucky to get away with his life.

  And so it proved; but not before the unlikely emissary had seemingly pulled off the coup of the decade. Sailing in a small snow, a two-masted vessel of about 100 tons, he was duly turned away from Ningpo where such was now the panic among the heavily censured authorities that they would not even allow him to purchase supplies. He managed, however, to drop off a copy of his petition and then, shadowed by war junks, continued north along the coast. 10 July found the optimistically named Success entering the Tientsin (Tianjin) river. Here he was forbidden to sail any further by a local mandarin who turned out to be a man he had once met in Canton. As this man’s guest he was permitted to proceed to Tientsin, twenty miles up-river and only 100 from the Forbidden City.

  The mandarin now concocted an elaborate story whereby Flint, supposedly ‘drove ashore by stress of weather’, might be exonerated for his act of trespass. But Flint would have none of it. ‘I told him that it could not be so, for if they would not make a proper representation to the Emperor, I would go as far as the foot of the Great Wall, and he [the mandarin] must take care of himself for I should acquaint them of my having been here.’

  This was bold talk from a mere ‘linguist’ but it had its effect. The mandarin proposed a new scheme whereby they should distribute copies of the English petition to so many officials that ‘they for fear of each other will not think to keep it from the Emperor’. It might, though, mean ostracism for the mandarin who therefore requested a hefty recompense. Realizing that the Canton officials ‘would now be quite up and there would be no bearing them hereafter’, Flint agreed and the plan went ahead.

  It worked brilliantly. The petition reached the ear of the Emperor, the Canton Hoppo was immediately recalled, and by September two top-level commissioners, accompanied by Flint, were heading for Canton to inves. tigate. Their findings were sympathetic. Punishment was promised to the offending mandarins and redress to the aggrieved Europeans. But no concessions were made for trading rights anywhere but Canton, and the commissioners showed an unhealthy curiosity about the identity of the man who had helped Flint to draft the original petition. Evidently the presumption of addressing an appeal direct to the Emperor was considered every bit as much a crime as the infringements it detailed.

  When the commissioners departed, Flint was summoned to appear before the Canton viceroy. Fearing for his fate, all the Company’s supercargoes went with him. At the palace they were surrounded by soldiers, deprived of their swords, hustled into the august presence, and thrown down when they refused to perform the kowtow. Flint was sentenced to three years’ detention at Macao after which he was to be exiled from China forever; the unfortunate Chinese who had helped him to draft the original petition was strangled. And needless to say, most of the exactions against which it complained continued in force and were in fact embodied in a new imperial decree.

  In London the directors would protest vigorously, sending their own emissary, a certain Captain Skottowe (who was to be known as ‘Mr’ Skottowe and represented as the brother of His Majesty’s Under-Secretary of State) to complain to the Viceroy and secure Flint’s release. He failed. The luckless Flint served out his sentence and trade remained at the mercy of the Canton Hoppo. The supercargoes did eventually obtain permission to reside in their Canton factories throughout the year and in the 1770s the Co-Hong was partially abolished. But though tea sales topped new heights, no further attempt to take grievances to Peking was launched until the missions of Cathcart in 1788 and of Lord Macartney in 1793.

  v

  While Flint and Skottowe tried the direct approach, Alexander Dalrymple had seized upon the stalemate at Canton to explore alternative arrangements for circumventing the Co-Hong’s monopoly. As something of an authority on the maritime history of the Company in eastern waters, young Dalrymple numbered among his many nautical acquaintances a Captain William Wilson of the Indiaman Pitt. In September 1758 the Pitt had arrived at Madras just in time to land Draper and his regiment to man the walls against de Lally but too late to continue its voyage to Canton, winds in the South China Sea being unfavourable after the end of September.

  Commodore James had recently brought the news of the outbreak of the Seven Years War from Bombay to Bengal by sailing south of the Equator and entering the Bay of Bengal from the east. Wilson wondered whether a similar plan, a wide arc through the Indonesian archipelago and into the Pacific, would enable him to outflank the adverse winds of the South China Sea. He consulted Dalrympl
e, who although as yet no sailor, dug out the terse but revealing log of John Saris. Saris had made his epic voyage from Bantam to Hirado during the winter months, albeit 145 years previously, by sailing first for the Moluccas then north across the Pacific to a landfall at Okinawa. Clearly it was possible, and with the blessing of President Pigot, Wilson had ventured forth having bought a snow to lead the way in uncharted waters.

  This latter vessel was in fact the Success which, on arrival at Canton, was taken over by the Company’s supercargoes for Flint’s voyage to Tientsin. Indeed in the following year it was in company with Wilson in the Pitt that Flint sailed out of the Pearl River heading for Ningpo. Wilson, on the other hand, was about to repeat his discovery of what was called the Eastern Passage by returning to Madras the same way. Leading through the Moluccas, past the tip of New Guinea, and east of the Philippines, this route was a long way round. But it meant that Canton could be reached at all seasons of the year, and that the China trade was no longer at the mercy of whoever happened to have a fleet in the Malacca or Sunda Straits. It also meant that British shipping had again a legitimate reason for claiming free navigation in the Dutch archipelago plus a less legitimate one for again coveting its island trade.

  Meanwhile Madras had been besieged and relieved, and with no word as yet from Canton about the Pitt, Dalrymple had himself set off in search of the Eastern Passage. Such, at any rate, was the object of his voyage as detailed to the directors by President Pigot. It was soon, however, apparent that the ‘secret service’ on which Dalrymple was engaged involved more than just navigation. It was in fact the first of a series of voyages designed not just to secure the China trade but, if possible, to relocate it. Imbued with the ideas of Saris and his generation, Dalrymple was convinced that the China trade would be less vulnerable and more profitable if conducted from a Hoppo-less off-shore entrepot served by the junks that sailed each year from all the China ports. And from his studies of the charts and histories of the region he thought he knew just the place. It had to be outside the Spanish possessions in the Philippines and the Dutch in the Indies – and ideally in between the two; and it had to be astride the main routes from China to the Spice Islands. In effect there was only one such place, the archipelago of the Sulu Sea between Borneo and Mindanao.