Authors: Tirthankar Roy
Lancaster, who had struck a cordial note with the king, sought permission to target-practice on the Portuguese. The king agreed, on condition that Lancaster would obtain for him a Portuguese girl after the battle. Within a few days, a Portuguese ship, unusually large at 900 tons in weight and filled with pepper and clove, was waylaid, bombarded and captured by the English. In one morning’s work, Lancaster had made his fortune, and made the voyage pay its capital many times over. The business of taking leave of the king finished with fanfare and goodwill. Sadly for the king, in this rough world of sailors and soldiers, no European girl had been found worthy of him. Lancaster headed now towards the Sunda Straits for Bantam in Western Java, and did obtain trading privileges from the Sultan of Bantam. Like many such promises made in this time, it meant little unless backed up by the constant presence of an armed fleet. The journey back to England almost ended in tragedy when the ships met with a cyclone off the Cape. Lancaster dismissed all suggestions of abandoning his badly damaged ship, and braved the wind.
The party returned in September 1603, to find that
the Queen had died in their absence. The pepper alone that the fleet had brought back was valued at more than a million pounds. The other goods added a mighty sum to the total. Lancaster returned a hero and the Company had as glorious a start as any merchant firm of the time could hope for.
Within a few months of the first voyage, the rival Michelbourne had pulled strings to have a voyage to China and Japan sanctioned by the court. The expedition was an ill-fated one. He had a brush with the Dutch and a series of violent skirmishes with the Japanese that saw his best crew, including Davis, die in battle. But he had set a trend, that of defying the Company’s charter of exclusive rights in the eastern waters. He had gone down in the history books as the first ‘interloper’.
Fifteen more expeditions set out for pepper in the next fifteen years. The enterprise of making voyages settled down to a stable and predictable pattern. The risks were reduced. Knowledge of trading opportunities increased, and trade rather than raid became the goal of these journeys. In the beginning the Company bought the ships that it needed. But the risk of damage or loss was so high that the risk-covered prices of ships became
unaffordable, and the Company began building ships in Deptford, a shipyard leased in for the purpose. With the knowledge that the ill fortunes of some of the voyages had owed to the small size of the ships, much larger ones were built. The very largest ship in a long time to come, the prosaic Trade’s Increase of 1000 tons, was built in 1609. The move did bring down the costs of ships per ton of cargo, but added much overhead costs to the operation. In the 1630s, the Company got rid of Deptford and started hiring ships, some of them continued to be built in the same shipyards under private ownership.
The pool of expert seamen from which the commanders could be recruited was larger than before. Unlike an earlier generation, for whom the potential gains from these voyages had been unknown, those who joined as crew in the 1610s saw the prospect of profits more clearly. There was steadily increasing enlistment into the crew. More of them tended to be proficient in Spanish, Dutch, Arabic and Portuguese, the languages of the sea. The older Atlantic merchant marine was the ‘nursery’ that supplied the Indian Ocean commanders of this generation. Some of the first generation voyagers, especially Lancaster, had joined the Company as directors, and their leadership enabled the Company to organize trips with more precise
economic aims rather than the opportunistic missions of an earlier era. The ships now had chaplains, surgeons, musical instruments, facilities for staging Shakespearian plays and a more disciplined crew. Above all, the whole enterprise was exceedingly profitable. The distributed profit on the first voyage was 300 per cent. Distributed profits in all of the East India voyages together exceeded 200 per cent every year until 1616.
Nevertheless, the first fifteen years were not smooth sailing. True, the internal constitution remained intact; the first governor, Thomas Smith, merchant and alderman, remained in office until 1621; and the Company succeeded in sending one expedition every year as specified in the charter. But it had to battle with three adversities. The first problem was capital. The business of spice carried risks. One bad expedition could bankrupt the Company. Fearing for their money, many of the Company’s shareholders did not fully pay up their capital, adopting a wait-and-watch policy on the current voyage. The Company had to go around with a begging bowl after every voyage in order to finance the next one. A second problem arose from fluctuations in demand for luxuries. There were not too many buyers available for the eastern spices at the prevailing exorbitant rates. When a few of them died in a plague epidemic, stocks built up to disastrous levels.
The third problem arose from what was known as the separate voyages system. Partly on account of the precarious finances, the shareholders divided into groups, and the lobbies and clubs among them individually funded voyages. The practice divided loyalty, for these financiers expected to have the first call upon the profits from a voyage that they had paid more money for. Apart from compromising the economic interests represented by the firm, the separate voyages weakened diplomatic efforts, which had to be undertaken by common consent and for a common purpose, and left the military enterprise to the temperaments of individual commanders of fleets. These features imparted a dangerous informality to the whole enterprise.
Hoping to settle all these problems at once, the Company declared itself a joint-stock concern in 1612. The prodigious sum of £429,000 was raised as capital. The threat of bankruptcy was substantially reduced. Orders henceforth were issued only in the names of the high officials, governor and deputy governor. Above all, it placed the political aspect of the business upon a firmer footing.
If these measures settled problems at home, the trading enterprise was beginning to run into a formidable obstacle overseas. Nearly all of the early voyages were induced by the lure of spices from Southeast Asia. In
the Southeast Asian trade, the Portuguese challenge was primarily naval, and could be overcome with military means. But the Dutch, who were already entrenched in trade and were a more organized enemy, proved more difficult to handle.
The Dutch East India Company had followed the English one by two years. It was a slightly different entity from the English Company. It was initially a shipping cartel. Ship-owning merchants decided to pool capital, and form a unified management, partly because they felt threatened by similar moves made by their English counterparts. Company formation occurred in the Dutch republic in a somewhat different way from the process in England. The power of the royalty was relatively weak after the Dutch Provinces joined together; consequently, major mercantile decisions took place independent of the court. Between 1595 and 1599, merchants of Amsterdam and Rotterdam had fitted every ship they could lay their hands on and sent these off in search of spices. Unlike the English who travelled along the Cape route made dangerous by the Portuguese, some of the Dutch ships took the safer but longer route via the Strait of Magellan to reach South Pacific. The Company found it hard to engage with and overcome Dutch resistance in the western Pacific. It began, therefore, to think of a more indirect strategy of procuring the spices.
All the rival Western European powers trying to procure Indonesian spices understood the critical role of India in making the spice trade possible. The commodity that sold best in Southeast Asia was Indian cotton cloth. Further, spice-laden ships needed to call in at Indian ports to restock food and repair ships. It was, therefore, essential to establish a partnership between India and the trading stations further east. For the English, Bantam needed a partner in India. Surat was the obvious choice for its strategic location and existing reputation as the leading entrepôt in the subcontinent. The difficulty was that Surat was firmly a part of the Mughal empire.
FROM THE VERY inception of the Company, the directors understood the strategic need to establish contact with what they called the Court of the Grand Mogul. Trade and its protection against all adversaries were essential to the success of the whole enterprise and this could not be ensured only by armed engagement. The Dutch, the early comers, adopted mainly military means, with a dose of judicious bribing, to establish a foothold in India. The English began in the same fashion, but went further than the Dutch in establishing diplomatic relations with Indian rulers.
A year before the Company was incorporated, a mission sponsored by the court and headed by a merchant, John
Mildenhall, came to Agra. Mildenhall travelled over land, arriving there in 1603. He was courteously received, and was offered a formal but useless license to trade. The Portuguese and the Jesuits in Akbar’s court conspired to scuttle his mission. In the bargain, Mildenhall learnt Persian, and when he returned to England in 1608, was appointed by the Levant Company to represent them in Persia. His last years ended in controversy. For some time, the Company lost contact with him and suspected him to be a Persian spy. During this time, he married a Persian woman and had two children by her. The Company agents caught up with him again in Punjab. He died in Ajmer, declaring a Frenchman, from whom he had extracted a promise to marry his daughter, the executor of his estate. The prospective son-in-law promptly burned all of Mildenhall’s account books, destroying any evidence that could redeem his reputation or otherwise.
In August 1608 a fleet commanded by the merchant and sea captain William Hawkins, possibly the same Hawkins who as a boy had accompanied Drake in 1577 to the Atlantic, reached Surat, hoping to make contact with the Mughal governor. The Portuguese tried to stop him, even though England and Portugal were at that moment at peace. When Hawkins finally managed to establish links with the governor Makarrab Khan,
much of his resources were dissipated in making gifts, without any serious purpose being achieved. Since the governor’s writ did not run very far from the borders of the town, Hawkins took the desperate decision to travel to Agra over land. He gathered a retinue of Pathan horsemen, dressed up as an Afghan nobleman, and reached Agra in 1609.
Unknown to the party, Emperor Jahangir had kept himself informed of its progress. An audience was quickly arranged, and was immediately successful. The emperor listened patiently to a translation of the letter from the English king James I, received the mandatory assortment of gifts, commented on his guest’s good looks, and was delighted to find that they shared a knowledge of Arabic, in which they conversed from then on. The English were issued a license to build a factory at Surat. So eager was Jahangir to display his affection for his new found friend that he was not satisfied with granting him a mere license. He conferred on Hawkins the title of 400-horse mansabdar (an entitlement to command soldiers), and found for him an Armenian girl to marry.
Hawkins’ letters to his superiors during his stay in Agra painted the picture of an alcoholic despot suffering from violent mood swings. Whether Jahangir came to know about these missives or Makarrab Khan and the
Portuguese poisoned his mind, he tired of Hawkins as quickly as he had grown fond of him. Although an English factory in name continued in Surat, Hawkins himself had to leave in 1611 on a ship bound for Bantam.
Another Company mission to India happened by accident. The real objective of this expedition, the sixth fleet sent out by the Company, was to establish trading rights and a foothold in Aden, then under the charge of a governor of the Ottomans. The mission ended in a battle, and the commander Henry Middleton found himself a hostage of the Aga. Upon his escape, he recovered near Dabhol and Surat, to the annoyance of the Portuguese. His stay on the coast, however, did not lead to anything further, for Middleton was bent upon revenge and returned to Aden. Disagreements in his ranks saw these moves fail too. Not one to give up, he made a trip to Bantam to pick up Hawkins to join hands with him. Unfortunately, Hawkins died on the voyage of an epidemic disease that swept through the ship. Middleton died in 1611 in the knowledge of a mission blighted by ill luck and bad judgement.
As for Hawkins’s widow, she returned to England, remarried a mariner, possibly the famous Gabriel Towerson who was executed by the Dutch in Amboyna in 1623, and was last seen in Surat haranguing the English for a suitable pension.
Two further voyages to Surat were hardly more consequential in meeting the main aims of the English. Thomas Best, a forty-year-old sea captain with experience of commanding ships to Russia and the Levant, was appointed head of the tenth fleet in December 1611. Three weeks after anchoring at Surat, Best was attacked by a strong Portuguese force. The two battles that ensued saw Best score a complete victory, and earned him the Mughal emperor’s permission to allow the English right to trade.
On the second occasion, Nicholas Downton, who had earlier commanded the disastrous sixth fleet, was chosen to command a voyage in 1614, which went to Surat to secure a trading operation there. A fleet led by the viceroy of Goa, Jeronimo de Azevedo, arrived to drive out the English. The English were vastly outnumbered, but proved to be better gunners. Having lost 500 of his men, whereas the English lost only five, Don Jeronimo gave up the fight and returned to Goa. This battle more or less marked the end of Portuguese power on the western seaboard. The relationship between the Mughal agents and the Portuguese had already soured, and the outcome of these battles, keenly followed from the shore, was welcomed by the former. Downton received the now customary letter from Agra
promising unrestricted freedom to trade. His own health, however, had suffered and he died soon after in Bantam.
By 1612, a small band of English traders were manning an English trading outpost in Surat. Thomas Kerridge, the first chief of the outpost, stated in his reports that sword-blades, knives, broadcloth, lead and quicksilver found a ready market in Surat. In turn he was buying indigo, medicinal substances, cotton yarn, especially calico, the plain white cotton cloth that found ready market in Southeast Asia. Kerridge instructed his principals to send English bulldogs, which made an excellent gift for the Indian kings. Earlier, in 1609 or 1610, one Mr Aldworth of the factory journeyed by road to Ahmedabad, passing on his way Boroatch (Bharuch) and Bothra (Vadodara). He had reported that excellent and cheap calicoes and indigo were to be found in these interior towns, but that in order to procure these goods on a sustained basis it would be necessary to have a permanent diplomatic mission stationed in Agra, a lot of ready cash, and a strong military backing.
The Surat team knew that a mere imperial edict did not mean very much in practical terms. On each occasion when the English fleet had left Surat, those who remained behind were obstructed by numerous local orders, to be lifted only on payment of money to the governor and his courtiers. What Best and Downton
did achieve was a reputation in the Mughal court for English mastery over the seas, which to the Mughals was very critical as they did not have a navy of their own. With this reputation behind them, the Company shifted its diplomatic tactics and sought to establish a direct link between the English monarchy and the Mughal emperor, which would then give it the legitimacy to deal with the Mughal court as equals. But their experiences had also shown that setting up a viable trade mission in India was beyond the capability of mariners. The job needed a seasoned diplomat. It fell upon Thomas Roe to carry it out.
Roe (1581–1644) came from a landowning family of Essex. Having completed his matriculation in Oxford (at the age of twelve!), Roe spent the next five years as a student in the Middle Temple, a finishing school for future court officers, and joined court service at age twenty. He rose quickly in position, and was entrusted with several daring as well as delicate tasks, including an expedition to seek the fabled El Dorado, the gold-laden city lost in the forests of the Andes, and sorting out Princess Elizabeth’s dire finances. His reputation as a courageous and honest officer stayed with him
throughout. When in October 1614 the king invited Roe to go to India as ambassador, he did not hesitate in accepting a job that was going to be no less difficult than looking for El Dorado.
Roe’s mission took full four years to come to a conclusion. During these years, Roe followed the camp of Jahangir from Ajmer to Mandu, falling in and out and back in favour with the emperor. These swings partly depended on the quality of the presents made to the emperor. English mastiffs, Irish greyhounds and red wine delighted him. In a match arranged in an enclosed courtyard, the mastiffs attacked an elephant so fiercely that the highly impressed monarch appointed a team of servants to feed them with silver spoons and fan the flies away from them. But many of the routine presents like cloths, pictures and boxes, which the English considered worthy of a king, bored him. Roe’s mission was made difficult by the switching sympathies of Prince Khurram (later Shah Jahan) from the English to the Portuguese. The prime minister Asaf Khan was also in two minds over granting special favours to the English. Communication was another serious impediment to worthwhile dialogue with the Mughals. Roe communicated with the courtiers in a very indirect fashion through a Portuguese Jesuit priest who translated his Latin into Persian. Neither language was native to
the speakers. All along, the Dutch, who had already been settled in the eastern port Masulipatnam, tried to frustrate the English efforts at diplomacy.
If Roe succeeded, it was primarily because he was different from his predecessors in the imperial court. He was not a merchant-mariner. He was an officer of the king, and his appearance, bearing and education made this amply clear. Through gentle persuasion, firmness in his dealings with Khurram, and a steadily improving equation with Jahangir and Asaf Khan, Roe succeeded in obtaining a license to trade from the emperor.
In theory Roe got nothing more substantial than the usual promises that Best and Downton had received before. Roe’s intention, by contrast, was to bring the emperor to a more permanent commitment, and it appears that his strategy to that effect was to make the contract as complete and binding as possible. A detailed and precise set of instructions and clauses added legitimacy to the contract, made the seriousness of purpose more evident to the local British officers, and divided responsibilities for implementation of the contract between the two parties. The document that Roe prepared for Jahangir to sign upon was less than ideal for this purpose, but it was still the first authentic contractual agreement ever drawn up concerning private
commerce by a sovereign of India. In the Indian scenario, it was nothing short of a new paradigm. It was a treaty between two sovereigns rather than a one-sided grant of royal favour as the previous orders had been.
By 1610, the Dutch and the English were the powers on the rise in the Indian Ocean. Competition between these two armed rivals threatened to break out in violence on numerous occasions. If they did not after all engage in a fight to the finish, that restraint owed partly to their shared dislike for the Portuguese, and partly from a sense that whoever won a decisive engagement would emerge the absolute master of the seas, and no one wanted to take the risk. They came to blows many times in the seventeenth century, but a debilitating conflict was avoided.
When Roe’s mission ended, the Dutch were securely positioned in Java. The Dutch and the English were friends in Europe, but in southeast Asia, Dutch ships intimidated and drove off English ships whenever possible, retaining a substantial control over the spice trade. The two fleets were so evenly matched in power that a proposal to merge the two Companies to form a huge monopoly did not surprise anyone. The proposal
came from the Dutch side in 1615, but fell through after the English investigators realized that the Dutch ran their enterprise with massive doses of borrowed money.
The next seven or eight years went by in this curious combination of cautious friendship in Europe and bickering in Southeast Asia. Matters came to a head with the execution of Towerson, an agent of the English Company, along with nine Englishmen and a few Japanese mariners by the Dutch in 1623 for plotting to storm the fort in Amboyna. No more than a case of trade rivalry that went out of control, the episode became known in England as ‘the massacre of Amboyna’ and evoked a sharp reaction to the treachery of the Dutch. The two parties agreed upon a truce only from shared fear of the Portuguese. But the alliance was far from a happy one. ‘All in all,’ the Dutch governor-general explained, ‘a disagreeable wife is bestowed on us.’
In West Asia, on the other hand, a conflict was brewing between the Portuguese and the English over trading rights in the Persian empire. Hormuz was the principal entrepôt on the mouth of the Persian Gulf, where caravan trade met maritime trade. Persia provided
valuable silks to Europe. It was also a source for horses, for which there was an insatiable demand among Indian kings. In effect, it was the first item in the trading chain that spanned Persia, India and Indonesia. Horses bought in Persia were traded for cotton in India which in turn was exchanged for spices in Indonesia. The catch in this arrangement was that Hormuz and the Gulf were dominated by the Portuguese.
The English in the Gulf pursued a strategy of diplomacy backed by military power not unlike the one that succeeded in India. Robert Sherley (or Shirley) was initially employed by the British to establish communication with Shah Abbas of Persia. Sherley was a mariner of aristocratic antecedents who had settled in the Persian capital and married the daughter of a Circassian nobleman. In 1608, he was appointed by the Shah as the ambassador to the court of James I, where he caused a sensation by arriving with his Circassian wife with the regalia and fanfare befitting a Persian courtier. In 1615, he was sent as ambassador to Portugal and Spain. The precise purpose of these missions is not known, and how well Sherley met the aims cannot be adjudged. In any case, when he returned to Persia in 1620, he was summarily dismissed from Persian royal service and died soon after. His role in facilitating the interests of the Company in Persia though not insignificant, was indirect at best.