The Holder of the World (16 page)

The two merchants, one a Telugu of the balija right-hand caste and the other an Armenian Christian, each bought seven shares of one thousand pagodas. Three shares of one hundred pagodas were bought by Thomas Tringham, who appears in their bookkeeping as Tomma Trinamma, perhaps as a protection. (Until Bugs Kilken lured me unwittingly into the pursuit of the Salem Bibi, Tomma Trinamma was thought by scholars to be the mistransliterated name for another Telugu merchant of the same right-hand caste as Kasey Chetty, and who, like Chetty, had moved from the golden kingdom of Roopconda after the Sunni Emperor Aurangzeb had defeated its Shia king. Thank you, Bugs.) The bookkeeper’s phonetic misrendering of Thomas Tringham is no more grotesque than the Company’s conversion of Kashi Chetty into Kasey. The remaining two shares, also of one hundred pagodas, were subscribed to by Rezabeebeh, wife or perhaps daughter of Catchick.

The Chief Factor recovered as soon as Thomas Tringham brought him word of the joint-stock association. To prove to himself that his recuperation was complete, he humiliated Tringham for lazy record keeping in front of the junior writers. The youngest writer noted duly that Samuel Higginbottham “was in sufficient repossession of his natural unkindnesse to heape a parcell of indignitye on all and sundrie.” Thomas Tringham was so disillusioned by this unprovoked malice that he disclosed nothing about his own small part and investment in the formation of Sookian’s and Chetty’s company. The Fort St. George Council commended Higginbottham for restoring “stabilitie and respecte to the English nation” and ordered him to procure through this new association twenty thousand pieces of Guinea cloth and twelve thousand pieces of salampore cloth without advancing credit to the merchants. Higginbottham, not to be outdone by the ghost of Cephus Prynne, promised to deliver on his own recognizance thirty thousand pieces of Guinea cloth and twenty thousand pieces of salampore and better-than-ever quality.

The catastrophe that the Marquis had predicted came very quickly. Sookian’s and Chetty’s weavers missed the date for delivery, forcing the Chief Factor into criminal alterations of dates in the factory accounts. When the two merchants finally did haul the goods to the factory for quality checks, the sorters discovered that only a third of the orders had been filled, and the balance made up with bales of ginghams and sailcloth dungaree.

In his rage—or perhaps in his desire to emulate the demonic furies of Cephus Prynne—Samuel Higginbottham is recorded as having seized a sloop belonging to Kasey Chetty and personally supervising its dismantlement. For years after, he talked of this as the one glorious moment in his long service to the Company. When Samuel Higginbottham died in Fort St. Sebastian, Martha Ruxton (who by then was Martha Ord Ruxton Yale Hartley, having long outlived Doctor John and stayed on) had a piece of that sloop’s mast and a scrap of one of its two sails buried with him. She also commissioned the stonecutter to etch a sloop on his headstone.

I have traced that sloop with my fingers. Mr. Abraham, my guide, saw it as a worthy mercantile symbol. “Higginbottham,” he says, telling me there are, with appropriate fracturing of the word after nearly three centuries of Tamilization, a number of place-names, streets, even families perhaps, carrying versions of that glorious name. Those who came out from England and died and left their bones in the English cemetery occupy a special place in Mr. Abraham’s litany of heroes. A corner of England forever goat trampled, vine tufted, sun beaten and salt encrusted.

It seems a fitting commemoration of impotence. I had to shoo a goat off the mast tip.

11

HANNAH LEGGE
might have lived out her life in India, in the new palace Gabriel was building in New Salem. Her bones might be resting in St. Mary’s Cemetery of Fort St. George. Wherever she stayed, I am convinced she would have changed history, for she was one of those extraordinary lives through which history runs a four-lane highway.

There is some evidence from his logbooks that Gabriel Legge intended to retire from piracy—the capture and hanging of Captain Kidd had a sobering effect; the increasing ferocity of Deccani wars between Hindus and Muslims put several delicate financial relationships in question, and the increasingly erratic behavior of both Chief Factor Higginbottham and Nawab Haider Beg made continued dealings a less stable prospect than when the association had been formed.

Between Gabriel Legge’s sixteenth and seventeenth voyages, Samuel Higginbottham unintentionally incited a riot that ended with Nawab Haider Beg assigning exclusive blame to the English East India Company and dispensing justice by cutting off the nose of the young factor Thomas Tringham with solemn ceremony in a public place.

Eventually, because everything in history (as Venn keeps telling me) is as tightly woven as a Kashmiri shawl, Higginbottham’s riot changed the course of history.

The riot had its origin in one fateful glance that the Chief Factor cast out his bay-facing office window on an amber-gold, honey-sweet late September afternoon. A Coromandel-built two-master with a decked poop was being rowed ashore by a dozen
firangi
sailors in scarlet tricornered hats and silver-braided blue coats. Seated on a throne under a gaudy roundel, being fanned with peacock feathers by servants, was Gabriel Legge, the pirate resplendent in Norwich grays and gold braid. On the beach an escort of forty lance bearers and four
firangi
musicians and an equipage curtained with red silk and valanced with brocade and lace waited to transport Pirate Legge to the fort, factory and his New Salem palace.

Higginbottham at once dispatched young Tringham and the factory’s dubash, or interpreter, to Nawab Haider Beg’s gold-domed palace. The dubash was a man capable of simultaneous guiltless loyalties to the English Company’s friends and foes. Knowing that, Tringham had been sent along to rally the focus of the interpreter’s promiscuous affections. Dubash Ali, who also went by the names Oliver and Ortencio, was a handsome black-haired, green-eyed, peach-skinned consumptive of thirty. Many stories circulated about his provenance; he was a Baluchi whom a Dutch slaver had bought and abused; he was an Arab seaman for Pirate Avery and had jumped ship on the Malabar Coast; he was a Spanish don’s son whom Moors had captured and hauled eastward. The one constancy in Ali’s life was concupiscence.

In the letter to the Nawab, after he had stated his name, nationality, profession, and made the required Mughal epistolary self-deprecation of describing himself as His Highness the Nawab’s least worthy servant, Higginbottham demanded that the Nawab cast out of the great state of Roopconda all interlopers, namely Gabriel Legge and his diabolic cohort of brigands and pirates who owed allegiance to none other than Lucifer, and who, if not restrained, would soon seize Emperor Aurangzeb with gory force and lay Hindustan waste.

Perhaps in Leadenhall Street—but certainly not in Fort St. Sebastian—there existed a Company officer capable of appreciating the rich ironies, even the grim humor, of Higginbottham’s dilemma. He might even have called it theatrical, operatic, this clash of competing, profit-driven opportunists. Haider Beg was no less an underling than Higginbottham, serving as he did at the sufferance of Emperor Aurangzeb, although he exercised untrammeled authority over a broader area. The Nawab knew that a significant, and potentially vast, portion of his wealth derived from playing off the European powers against one another, and in further encouraging the breakup of European concessions into smaller and smaller, and ever more efficient and ruthless, competitors. Assuming, of course, that in their single-minded pursuit of profit they did not forget their nominal obedience to Mughal authority. He was more than willing, on occasion, to inflict that sharp blade of remembrance when the European authorities allowed their underlings to drift.

A summary of Nawab Haider Beg’s response is entered in the Fort St. Sebastian diaries. The Nawab’s letter, too, begins with the usual courtesies and invocations. In the name of Allah, who is most kind and most merciful, Haider Beg assures Higginbottham, Englishman, valued friend, fortune’s favorite, esteemed Chief Factor, that his concern for the Emperor’s well-being has been received. However, out of his affection for this Englishman and his great respect for His Royal Highness William, monarch of sovereign England, he has stopped the epistle’s farther passage; his fear is that the Englishman’s generous concerns could be cunningly misrepresented by English-hating or less tolerant courtiers as the English Company’s arrogant refusal to pay the Emperor and the Nawab their modest and much-deserved increase in tariff and customs duties.

After all, new money is needed. The Emperor, defender of Islam, protector of the Holy Word, is waging an expensive war against that flea of an infidel, that idolatrous Jadav Singh. The Nawab and the Emperor understand the English as fellow monotheists, civilized members of the great fraternity of empire builders. Imagine the alternative, business contracts written in sand by monkey-worshiping savages. He therefore directs the English Company to arrange for the immediate settlement of its debts and to increase its bullion investment in Roopconda and so outbid all competitors, namely the Hon. Marquis de Mussy, who is a spirited practitioner of the art of free trade.

Young Tringham and Ali-Oliver-Ortencio ferried this correspondence over hillocks and through jungles, crossed rivers in flimsy barks, waited out highwaymen in hollowed tree trunks and moist caves. (The series of miniatures chronicling the dangerous day-and-night journey is in private collections.) Tringham carried the Chief Factor’s letters to the Nawab in a taffeta-lined leather pouch stamped with a tiny gilt knight spearing a tinier dragon. Instead of flames, the dragon breathed out a curvaceous grace of floral trellises. The Nawab always slipped his responses in silk or brocade cases made especially for the portaging of proclamations. During their journey, while Tringham slept, the dexterous dubash extracted the precious letters from their pouches or cases without fissuring the official seals, copied them on his garments with an invisible unguent, then sold the copy to either the Marquis or to the Compagnie Royale de France for a brace of Madagascar slaves to pleasure his jaded flesh.

Higginbottham wrote more letters, to the new Governor, Thomas Pitt, at Fort St. George, and to the Directors in Leadenhall Street. Each letter was more urgent than the last, but each response seemed cooler, less committed. He could not wait the months necessary for the Directors to receive his complaints and then the many more months for him to receive their response.

These letters took over his life. The factors were demoted unofficially to writers and enrolled in his epistolary campaign. He was an early victim of primitive communications, and to give him credit, his letters to Leadenhall reveal the insights of a man born two hundred years too early. Communications create trade, he argues, not the other way around. He sketched in plans for an overland route to England, or at least to the frontiers of Europe, that could cut two months off the Cape route to England, where horses and camels might be pressed into service, where diplomatic links might guarantee safe passage of documents even through hostile territories. But he was a man born to frustration. An ineffectual, embittered visionary, lacking Cephus Prynne’s sordid force of character.

The India trade, wrote the Directors in response, has achieved on the English market an enviable level of acceptance. In fact, so successful is the integration of India cloth, the double calicoes, the lighter flannels, the new dyes and colors and stripes, that the spinning mills of Norwich have registered their complaints to the King and the House of Lords. The reexport of East India fabric to the West Indies and America has practically closed the traditional mills; the cotton stockings of India are held in such esteem that the English manufacturing may never recover. Tradesmen need only advertise “India silk!” to have their doors assaulted by frantic buyers.

Higginbottham read the reports with mounting excitement. It was unimaginable that rising demand would not be met with augmented supply. This child of free enterprise then learned the bitter lesson of political reality: expanded export from the factories of India was problematic. At the time of imported cloth’s maximum popularity, voluntary curbs were being proposed. Thus, the prudent course, Higginbottham was told by the Fort St. George Council, would be to starve supply to guarantee a bloated price. No further communication on this subject was contemplated.

In the first year of the new century, blocked in the expansion of his trade, the destruction of Gabriel Legge became his life’s end. Legge did not have to answer to Leadenhall Street. Legge and the Marquis were thick as thieves—no surprise there—with the suppliers and artisans, with their fellow defectors from the French and Portuguese factories, and even enjoyed a favored status with the Nawab himself. It seemed that a man who played the cards that were dealt him, who met all his quotas and returned decent value, who tried to rein in the rapacious tendencies of his underlings, was not sufficiently treasured by Pitt or London.

And then, in October 1700, his only helpmeet, Sarah, out for a stroll with Martha in the Ruxtons’ garden, one minute was sharing delicious gossip that she had just heard about the notorious traitor, Gabriel Legge, and his bibi, and the next instant was bitten by a rabid flying fox. She died within two weeks, spitting out her pitiful hydrophobic curses those last days and nights, lashed to a string bed in a distant corner of the courtyard.

MAYBE IT WAS
Sarah’s sudden death that unhinged him. He saw himself as St. George, the Company’s knight-errant dispatched to destroy the reptilian Legge. Letters were no longer sufficient. He needed to slay the enemy.

On Guy Fawkes Day, he sent Thomas Tringham and the dubash to New Salem with an ox-cart load of fireworks as a conciliatory gift for Gabriel Legge. Tringham was to deliver the fireworks to Legge himself and was not to trust any servants. Only the reliably treacherous dubash was taken into Higginbottham’s confidence: the fireworks were really disguised explosives. The dubash was to deliver the crates of fireworks to Legge’s new warehouse and then, before leaving, ignite one charge, and flee before the reaction sent the waterfront complex higher than the circling buzzards, and Legge and the Marquis with it.

Some men are poor conspirators, others simply unlucky. The dubash was impatient to collect his reward, and Higginbottham was fated to a life forever unfulfilled and unhappy. On the afternoon of the fifth of November, 1700, the distraught widower Samuel Higginbottham had expected Gabriel Legge, the rich entrepreneur, to be working as assiduously in his warehouse by the wharf as the Chief Factor did in the Fort St. Sebastian office of the Company. The fireworks were meant to do grave damage to Legge’s bales of cloth waiting to be shipped. But it so happened that on Guy Fawkes Day, Gabriel was visiting Zeb-un-nissa, his black bibi, in her hovel in the
qsba’
s most crowded alley. The dubash had heard stories of Legge’s capacity to prolong his pleasures; he set fire to the explosive-packed cart, without waiting for the pirate to bid goodnight to his bibi.

It was she who had put on her fine cream-colored silks—gift of Gabriel on the occasion of their first son’s birth—and visited Gabriel’s home, to test the fortifications of servant defense and white wife against her, and found them laughably weak.

The ox cart blew up half the alley. Shops and huts blazed. Men, women and children sprouted wings of flame. Their screams and curses were heard, soon enough, in every village, every factory, every home in Roopconda state. The Hindu Raja, Jadav Singh, meditating on the roof of Devgad, his hill-fort, heard the cries and pledged revenge. Nawab Haider Beg, distracted in midpleasure with an acrobatic Abyssinian slave, dreamed up deserving new chastisements.

Whole villages of dyers, washers, bleachers, rope makers, sail riggers, boat builders and repairers, fishermen and ferrymen converged on Zeb-un-nissa’s burning alley and rioted. They rioted against the Nawab’s avaricious tax collection, against the poor wages promised and not always paid by
firangi
traders, against the acceptance of hunger and disenchantment. For three days, the rioters sacked, ravaged, pillaged. They trussed Thomas Tringham with rough ropes of hemp and transported him, kick by kick, to the magistrate’s doorstep. He pleaded his innocence, in the most perfect Persian any Mughal had heard from an Englishman, his red hair flaming with sincerity. Poor Tringham claimed to have discovered his true calling in the Nawab’s Roopconda: he wished to learn languages, to study Islam, to teach Persian and Telugu to the unappreciative factors of the Company. Falling on the Nawab’s and the Great Mughal’s infinite mercy, he would resign his commission in the Company and join the service of the court, acting as its official dubash to the English.

So impressed were they with his eloquence that the death sentence was commuted and extended to dubash Ali instead. He was stoned to death.

The Nawab’s mercy came at a price for Thomas Tringham. The magistrate, on the Nawab’s personal orders, chose to teach the
firangis
a lesson for having incited a revolt against taxes. In the past, when the English, the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese trading companies had sinned against the Nawab, he had been content to whip or shoe beat or impale the companies’ Indian servants. This time, the Nawab eschewed all such mercy. Thomas Tringham was tied to a post in New Salem’s gutted marketplace; his nose was sliced off with a sword, and the bleeding, fainting noseless factor was hoisted backward on a washerman’s donkey and paraded through thirty villages.