Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  The long delay between this decision in 1786 to send an embassy and its eventual arrival in China in 1793 is accounted for by Cathcart’s death en route in 1788 and by the subsequent difficulty of deciding on a successor. By the time Macartney was appointed nothing much had changed in Anglo-Chinese relations; but it so happened that the interval coincided with a major assault on the Company’s commercial privileges that changed the emphasis of the mission and that was soon to prove fatal for the Company.

  A two-pronged affair, the first prod in this assault had come with a renewal of those charges by British manufacturers that the Company was ignoring the national interest. Instead of importing textiles from India, it should, they argued, be exporting finished textiles from Lancashire and importing only the raw materials. The Company’s response was that India’s raw materials could not compete with those of, say, America and that Lancashire textiles could not compare with those of India. But this argument was losing its force. The quality of machine-made textiles was improving dramatically while the cost of shipping in raw cotton was being grossly inflated by the Company’s powerful shipping interest.

  This latter argument was taken up by the other prong of the attack, namely the private traders. Men like David Scot of Bombay had demonstrated that hold space on outward-bound Indiamen, if let at reasonable rates, could be put to profitable use by the private trader – in Scot’s case by shipping raw cotton from India to Canton. Back in London, Scot now urged that this co-operation between the Company and the private trader be extended. To handle the much increased tea imports, Indiamen were being built with a displacement of 1200 or more tons. Hold space was available not just between India and China but also on the earlier leg from London to India. Only the Company’s still jealously guarded monopoly of all British trade between Europe and the East prevented the private trader from taking up this hold space and filling it with British exports, argued Scot.

  The Company replied that, although it was at last making steady progress with the export of woollens to China, the demand for British manufactures in India was limited to the British communities. That was because the Company’s freight charges were ridiculously high, retorted the traders; that was because the Company in India was now more interested in revenue than trade, retorted the manufacturers. Dundas sympathized with both; and they were surely right. The Company was no longer primarily a commercial concern; its directors and shareholders were no longer obsessed with dividends (patronage was far more valuable); and its organization no longer fitted it for exploring commercial sidelines. But Dundas could also understand the Company’s anxiety to prevent an invasion of India by commercial interests outside its control. Who was to prevent an arms salesman, for instance, from peddling his wares round Tipu’s capital of Srirangapatnam?

  ‘Regulated monopoly’ was the answer according to Dundas and, in the 1793 renewal of the Company’s charter, clauses were incorporated which guaranteed 3000 tons of cargo at cheap freight rates between London and the East for the use of private traders. Like North’s earlier Regulating Act, ‘regulated monopoly’ satisfied none of the parties concerned and served only to encourage further demands. But it was as a result of all the lobbying by British manufacturers that the Macartney embassy partook of the character of a trade fair, encumbering itself with samples of just about everything that Britain could produce in the hope that they would appeal to the Chinese. And it was as a result of the pressure from private traders that great emphasis was laid on the desirability of Macartney securing a British commercial enclave on Chinese territory whence they could trade with the Chinese on equal terms with the Company.

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  The Macartney Mission’s catalogue of failures did not end with the Emperor’s indifference to the requests of what he called ‘the tribute bearing envoy from England’ nor with his mandarins’ disdain for the achievements of British science and industry. Macartney had also been entrusted with the task of renewing commercial contacts with Japan, realizing Dalrymple’s dream for a British settlement somewhere between the Dutch Archipelago and the Spanish Philippines, and reviving Hastings’s contacts with Vietnam. He had actually called at Tourane (Da Nang) on the way out. But Annam was still in political turmoil and Macartney decided that a commercial establishment there would be of advantage only if his China mission failed. He therefore postponed negotiations till he could call again on his return.

  This visit, like those to Japan, the Philippines, and the archipelago, never took place. For when his crestfallen Lordship returned to Canton from Peking it was to be greeted with the news that war with France had broken out again. The Paris of the Jacobins posed an even more alarming threat than the Versailles of the Bourbons; within a matter of months Holland would capitulate to the Revolutionaries and be fighting beside them as the Batavian Republic. It was no time for a diplomat and an aristocrat to go cruising in the archipelago.

  Macartney did, however, glean some unexpected and valuable intelligence about Dutch strength in the archipelago. This came courtesy of two small ‘cruisers’ which reached Macao while he was in China. Although the ships belonged to the Company’s Bombay Marine, the service which had borne the brunt of the war with the Angreys, it transpired that they actually hailed from the opposite direction, in fact from a Pacific paradise of whose bearings even the now venerable Dalrymple might have been uncertain.

  The ‘Pelew Islands’, now Palau, lie about 500 miles east of the Philippines and rather more than that north of New Guinea. Although of no known commercial value, it transpired that the Company had, rather surprisingly, acquired one of these islands. On it, according to the captains of the two cruisers, there now stood a proud edifice known as Fort Abercromby (after the then Governor of Bombay). And from it the two ships had managed to conduct a reconnaissance of the Dutch position in the eastern archipelago. No less intriguingly, they reported that the man responsible for this unlikely achievement was still there, having resigned the Company’s service and opted for a life of ease among the ‘Pelewese’.

  This legendary figure was Captain John McCluer who had previously been engaged in making surveys of the coasts of Persia and western India. Dalrymple, as the Company’s Hydrographer, had thought highly of his work and may well have stimulated his interest in more distant shores. Certainly he was a natural choice for the Pelew expedition which, on instructions from London, had been dispatched by the Bombay government in 1790. Officially the mission was supposed to be conveying to the King of Pelew the belated thanks of the Company for having assisted the crew of a ship wrecked on the Islands some seven years earlier. Several survivors from that wreck were now sailing back to Pelew with McCluer; but not alas Prince Lee Boo, the King’s son, who had come away with them and had even reached London, only to die there of smallpox.

  It soon became apparent, however, that there was more to the mission than a courtesy call. After leaving Benkulen the ships closely inspected the southern coast of Java and then explored so many ‘islands and places to the eastward’ that it was five months before they made the Pelews. There the old Pelew hands had, as one of them put it, ‘the unspeakable pleasure of once more being embraced by the benevolent [King] Abba Thulle’; meanwhile his thoroughly delightful subjects overwhelmed the newcomers with their gentle favours. To the Grenadiers’ March played on fife and drum, McCluer trudged ashore over the coral sands to present an assortment of hardware and piece goods plus some brahminee cattle. A scene enacted so many times during the Company’s history can seldom have been so rapturously received. The crowd was ‘struck with amazement’, the King ‘perfectly at a loss for utterance or how to express his gratitude to the English rupacks as he styled the Hon Company’. In return, McCluer was invested with ‘the Order of the Bone’ and an island was ceded as ‘Englishmen’s land’.

  As Fort Abercromby took shape, the troops joined the King in several canoe-borne assaults on the neighbouring atolls while McCluer sailed off to continue his probing of the archipelago. Clearly the Company had de
duced that however jealous the Dutch might be of British incursions from Benkulen and Penang, they were totally unprepared for any Pacific-based initiative. While making a survey of New Guinea, McCluer innocently called on the Dutch Governor of the Moluccas in Ambon (Amboina). McCluer’s were ‘the first English ships that had visited that island for a century’, observed the hospitable Governor. Actually it was nearer two centuries; and had he had a better grasp of history, the Governor would have realized that it was not a good omen. Only five years would elapse before the British were back – and back with a vengeance.

  Concluding the New Guinea survey McCluer’s party coasted along the northern shores of New Holland (Australia) and visited Dutch Timor where they were again ‘most hospitably received’. Then they worked their way back to Benkulen for supplies, and finally returned to the Pelews by way of the Sulu Sea. It was now 1793, three years since they had left Bombay, and the reconnaissance was complete. But like many a Company servant before him, McCluer was reluctant to relinquish his island paradise. Very properly he therefore resigned his command, made over all his surveys and papers, and bade God-speed to the two cruisers as they sailed for Macao and a meeting with the Macartney Mission. ‘It is nothing but the zeal for my country that prompts me to follow this resolution’, explained McCluer, adding only slightly more plausibly, ‘I hope to succeed in the plan I have formed, which may benefit my country and the world in general, by enlightening the minds of the noble islanders’.

  Quite what this plan was is not clear, although suspicions would be aroused. After fifteen months alone in the Pelews, McCluer again took to the ocean, now in a six-oared longboat. He failed to reach Ternate in the north Moluccas, where he was presumably bent on more reconnaissance, but eventually fetched up in Macao. For the entire voyage of some 1600 miles he and his Pelewese crew had subsisted on coconuts and water. Not surprisingly McCluer was far from well. But evidently he had not tired of his islands for in Macao he sold the longboat for something more substantial and then sailed back.

  In the following year, 1795, he turned up in Benkulen. This time he was accompanied by a large party of mainly female Pelewese, some of whom he put aboard a vessel bound for Bombay while with the rest he sailed for Calcutta. He was never heard of again. The assumption was that ‘his craft foundered in the Bay of Bengal’ (C. R. Low). ‘Should I fail in the attempt [to “enlighten” the Pelewese?],’ he had declared when bidding farewell to his original companions, ‘it is only the loss of an individual who attempted to do good to his fellow-creatures.’ As for the Pelewese damsels sent to Bombay, they ‘being without friends,’ according to Low, ‘were for many years maintained by Lieutenant Snook’ who had been part of the original expedition. To his ‘singular charity and for-getfulness of self’ the ladies owed their eventual return to the islands by way of Macao in 1798.

  The year 1798 was also the fourth year of what, with Napoleon landing in Egypt, could now be called the Napoleonic Wars. As usual hostilities in the East had opened with the capture of the French settlements in India – now something of a formality; for Pondicherry it was the fourth surrender in as many decades. In the Indian Ocean the main threat still emanated from the French base in Mauritius; but before this could be attacked Holland, or rather the ‘Batavian Republic’, declared for its fellow republic in France, thus making all the Dutch possessions in the East potential French bases. As during the previous War of American Independence, this threat to British trade in the East could best be met by indulging in the long-cherished opportunity of gobbling up the Dutch settlements.

  In dire financial straits exacerbated by a virtual cessation of trade during the previous war, the once glorious V.O.C. (Dutch East India Company) was on its last legs. Its possessions were poorly defended, its servants divided in their loyalties; for apart from the uncertainty engendered by the first moves towards its dissolution, there had been an appeal from William of Orange, the exiled Stadholder, that the V.O.C. surrender to the British rather than co-operate with the French. In quick succession, therefore, the Royal Navy assisted by the Bombay Marine secured Table Bay and the Cape, Trinconomalee and Sri Lanka, all the Dutch possessions in India, and the strategically vital port of Malacca commanding the Straits of that name. Thence, acting on the information supplied by McCluer and giving a wide berth to the main concentration of Dutch forces on Java, Admiral Peter Rainier sailed for the Eastern Archipelago.

  By the end of February 1796, his squadron was off Ambon and, according to Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, ‘ready to avenge the massacre which took place there in 1623’. But Fort Victoria, where so very long ago Gabriel Towerson and his colleagues had spent their last gruesome days, lay too close to the shore to offer any kind of resistance; the whole town surrendered after just two days. ‘Having thus cornered the bulk of the world’s supply of cloves’, Rainier headed for Banda and the nutmegs. Here the Dutch governor quietly capitulated in accordance with the Stadholder’s instructions and on the understanding that his salary would continue to be paid. The 85,000 pounds of nutmeg, 20,000 of mace, and 66,000 rix-dollars, when added to the cloves and spoils of Ambon, more than paid for the expedition and provided Rainier and his officers with the best prize pay-out of the war. Of McCluer’s targets there remained only Timor, which was taken in the following year, and then, something of an afterthought, Ternate, now the main depot for the clove crop of the north Moluccas. Here the Dutch fortifications proved a greater challenge and it was not until 1801 that Captain Hayes, also a Bombay marine surveyor who had extended McCluer’s surveys right down to Tasmania, successfully stormed Fort Orange.

  So after 170 years the Company was back in the spice business. Unfortunately the trade now counted for little in the global economy. An intriguing French adventurer, once a missionary in Vietnam, latterly an administrator in Mauritius, who went by the gloriously apt name of Pierre Poivre, had already spirited away seedlings of the clove and nutmeg. They were now yielding good crops in Madagascar and Réunion whence their seedlings would in turn be carried to Zanzibar. The Honourable Company installed its own Governor in Ambon and also exported seedlings which led to further spice plantations at Benkulen and Penang. Meanwhile the ubiquitous British country traders were encouraged to uplift the produce of the Moluccas and carry it to Canton where it made a useful contribution to the Anglo-Chinese balance of payments.

  This happy state of affairs lasted only five years. By the Peace of Amiens in 1802 all the Dutch possessions in the East Indies – though not Sri Lanka or the Cape which became Crown colonies – were returned to Holland. Reluctantly Governor Farquhar, whose authorization of the attack on Ternate had just been condemned as ‘a splendid but most injudicious conquest’, hauled down the flag in Ambon and sailed west. But only as far as the Sulu Sea. Here, keeping a wary eye on the notorious Sulu pirates as he threaded the scatter of islands between the Philippines and Borneo, Farquhar quietly slipped over the coral bar and into the azure waters of Balambangan harbour. Strange cattle, the progeny of those abandoned by the 1773 settlement, scavenged along the shoreline; exuberant vegetation festooned the old palisades. Thanks to the always assertive policies of Richard Wellesley, the current Governor-General of India (who was also Lord Mornington and the brother of Arthur Wellesley), Dalrymple’s dream was to live again.

  If anything Robert Farquhar was even more sanguine about Balambangan’s prospects than Dalrymple. With seedlings brought from Ambon, spice groves were planted. Chinese settlers were shipped in. Dalrymple’s treaties with the Sultan of Sulu and with the neighbouring chiefs of Borneo were re-examined and his concessions reclaimed. As a free port at the fulcrum of the Eastern trade routes, Balambangan was projected as the most lucrative entrepôt in global trade and ‘the foundation of one of the richest empires of the Eastern world’. And so it might have been. But a gloriously arbitrary destiny seems to preside over human geography. Less than a year later Farquhar was transferred to Penang and in 1805, with his initiative countermanded by the Court of Directors, We
llesley ordered the withdrawal of the settlement. Once again Balambangan disappeared off the map.

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  Farquhar’s extravagant claims for Balambangan echoed not only those of Dalrymple but also those advanced by Francis Light for his foundation at Pulo Penang. Renamed Prince of Wales Island with the British settlement known as Georgetown and its inevitable stronghold as Fort Cornwallis, Penang’s future nevertheless hung in the balance for nearly twenty years. For to doubts about whether it would ever be other than a financial millstone like Benkulen were added serious political complications with the Sultan of Kedah. The Sultan’s understanding of the terms under which he had ceded Penang in 1786 included a commitment by the Company to assist him against his enemies, and in particular against the King of Siam who claimed tributary rights over Kedah. Light agreed and argued the case vigorously. But the Company, with nothing but dismal memories of Siam and its sovereigns, positively refused to give any such commitment, thus rendering the whole cession of dubious legality.