Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (15 page)

They were fifteen days on the road and at Sana’a, ‘a citie somewhat bigger than Bristoll’, they were again paraded ignominiously through the streets. Then they were ‘clapt in waightie irons’ and consigned to prison.

The Pasha, like the Aga, claimed that he was only following orders. But it now emerged that the orders came from Istanbul and were in fact based on sound commercial considerations. In outbidding local merchants for the cargoes of Indian vessels reaching Mocha, the
Ascension’s
factors had unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of resentment. From Mecca, Cairo and Damascus had come complaints about the consequent dearth of Indian goods; additionally Mocha had been deprived of its customary import duties. Not so long ago the Arabs and the Turks had seen the bulk of their transit trade in spices diverted round the Cape by the Portuguese; now the remaining trickle of spices plus the valuable trade in Indian cottons and indigo were being threatened on their own doorstep by the English. English trade in the Red Sea was clearly detrimental to that of Arabia and Egypt; the English must therefore be discouraged from ever again entering the region.

Middleton took the point. While still fuming over the treacherous manner in which he had been treated, he had no answer to the Pasha’s logic and agreed that English ships would in future steer clear of the area. The way was now open for negotiations over the release of the hostages. In these Middleton relied heavily on the intercession of other merchants, especially the powerful Indian community. The Gujaratis had welcomed the English as trading partners and were not without blame in dislocating Arabian trade. They were also fearful of English retribution – and with good reason.

For by the time Middleton and his men had been authorized to trail back to Mocha, it was March and the season for the arrival of shipping from India. April saw the port fill with dhows from Cambay, Surat and Dabhol, from the Malabar coast, Socotra, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. They were met by enormous camel caravans from Damascus, Suez and Mecca. This was the ancient exchange on which the prosperity of Arabia had subsisted and which the advent of English shipping threatened. There was no chance of Middleton being allowed to open shop but there was every chance that if the bullish Englishman were to regain his ships he would come amongst the dhows to wreak vengeance. The Aga therefore prevaricated over actually dismissing the English and saw to it that their commander was closely guarded.

On 11 May Middleton smuggled a note out to his fleet. The Turks were feasting their Indian guests, his guards were drunk, and ‘God had put into my head a devise.’ The ‘devise’ was a plan of escape. He instructed his men to saunter, ever so casually, to two pre-arranged embarkation points and await a boat. He himself climbed into an empty water butt; the butt was then sealed and floated out to sea. After what, even by seventeenth-century standards, must have been a cramped voyage, he was taken in tow by a tender from the English fleet, ‘which being done, I forced out the heade of the caske and came aboord’. His men fared less well, half of them being taken before they could be embarked’. But Middleton was free and once back on the heavily armed
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he gave his anger full rein. ‘I sent the Aga word that if he did not send me all my people with those provisions of the ships which he detained…I would fire the [Indian] ships in the road and do my best to batter the towne about his eares.’ To show he meant business he blockaded the port, interposing his own ships between the dhows and the shore.

The Aga ‘began to sing a new song’ – but at the same tempo; he was still playing for time. It was 28 May before all the English were released and 2 July before a final settlement was reached about the cargo. Middleton still hankered after revenge and for a whole month more he lay in wait for a richly laden vessel that was expected from Suez. Both the Pasha and the Aga supposedly had shares in her. ‘Yett she escaped us in the night.’ On 9 August, to catch the last of the westerly monsoon, Middleton ordered his ships to sail for Surat. The Aga must have breathed a long Turkish sigh of relief. It seemed reasonable to suppose that he had seen the last of the English and the last of Sir Henry Middleton.

In India Middleton’s appraisal of the English position was inevitably coloured by his recent experiences at Mocha. He had hoped to find a factory at Surat, Hawkins in high favour at Agra, and the
Ascension’s
factors manfully extending English trade. In the event he found no factory and no factors. His letters ashore were answered by a ship’s carpenter (the well named Nicholas Bangham who had absconded from the
Hector
in 1607) who reported that Jourdain and his followers were even now straggling back from Agra and that a disgraced Hawkins with his family were not far behind. Worse still, Middleton could not even get ashore to
ascertain matters. A small armada of Portuguese frigates was blocking the mouth of the Tapti and both on land and sea Portuguese patrols lay in wait for his men. Under the circumstances trade seemed out of the question. Another rescue mission was the most he could hope to achieve. Accordingly he positioned his fleet alongside three Gujarati vessels that were anchored off the ‘bar’ and announced in a now familiar ultimatum that they ‘should not depart till I had all the Englishmen aboord of me’.

The first of his would-be passengers to arrive at Surat was Jourdain. With help from Mukarrab Khan, of whom he had a better opinion than did Hawkins, he donned disguise and slipped past the Portuguese land patrols. Then he hid in the fields for three days, swam across a muddy creek, and eventually gained the attention of one of the English fleet’s boats by scaling a sand dune and waving his unravelled turban. ‘The skiffe came near the shore and I waded into her.’ He had arrived in India as a castaway (from the
Ascension);
now he left in the same bedraggled state.

His news, however, was not all depressing. Mukarrab Khan was evidently keen to obtain whatever the new fleet carried in the way of novelties suitable for Jehangir and was therefore making tempting offers about trade. So was the governor of Surat and from him Jourdain had learnt of a safe inshore anchorage just north of the mouth of the Tapti. It was called, rather uninvitingly, Swalley Hole. On the second attempt Middleton found the spot and safely eased two of his ships over its mud ‘bar’. It was not exactly a port, just an unremarkable piece of Gujarati shoreline. But amidst the lush fields and marsh grasses there soon sprang up an instant bazaar. The English fleet badly needed fresh water, meat, vegetables, whatever the land could offer; the men hankered after exercise and alcohol, and the merchants revived their expectations of trade. Swalley became the first purely English addition to the map of India.

From November 1611 till February 1612 the fleet remained there. Portuguese troops continued to molest any who trod the twelve crosscountry miles to Surat but at Swalley itself the English were safe. So much so that goods were landed and some calicoes and indigo bought. When Mukarrab Khan himself came aboard and was visibly impressed by the ships’ strength and contents, it looked as if Middleton’s gloomy forebodings had been misplaced. A factory at Surat was again being mentioned, although it was unclear to what extent this depended on further gratifying Mukarrab Khan’s curiosity. Already he had been through Middleton’s lockers and successfully wheedled out of him his ‘perfumed
jerkin’, a beaver hat and a ‘spaniell dogge’. ‘Whatsoever he sawe there of mine that he tooke liking to, I gave him for nothing.’

There were a few tense exchanges about the price of Indian goods and the accuracy of Indian scales but well into January trade was still proceeding and Mukarrab Khan still smiling. Then the Hawkins
ménage
reached Surat and matters abruptly changed. Without so much as an explanation Mukarrab Khan denied ever having mentioned a factory and peremptorily ordered the English fleet to depart. Jourdain, for one, made the obvious connection; Hawkins ‘was the chiefest cause Mukarrab Khan made such haste for us to be gone’ and was ‘the cause that Sir Henrie had not settled a factory’. But this was surely just another attempt to discredit ‘the Captain’. It was Jehangir, under pressure from the Portuguese, who had dismissed Hawkins and it was almost certainly Jehangir who ordered Mukarrab Khan to get rid of the English fleet.

With Hawkins, Mrs Hawkins, Jourdain, most of the
Ascension’s
factors and officers, and any other Englishmen keen to see their homes again, the fleet finally sailed on 9 February. After four years the first English attempt to trade with the Moghul empire had come to nothing; and during four months Middleton had not so much as seen Surat. Ironically, just as he was leaving he received a letter ‘from one Peter Floris’ recently arrived at somewhere called Masulipatnam. His ‘estate’, Floris reported, was ‘in good being’. There at least trade had been established.

Middleton proceeded on down the west coast of India to Dabhol, the main port of the kingdom of Bijapur and a place of considerably more importance than the nearby Portuguese settlement at Bon Bahia (later Bombay). At Dabhol some broadcloth was sold while on board the
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an important conference took place. The question was whether the fleet should continue to Bantam or whether it should first return to the Red Sea. The monsoon winds favoured the Red Sea and so did Middleton. The others concurred ‘though for divers reasons’.

One was that the letter from Floris had spoken of another Company fleet already on its way there; they must be warned off. Another was the juicy prospect of interfering with that great spring concourse of Indian shipping at Mocha. Jourdain saw this simply as a means of ‘recompense of the wrong done us at Suratt’; and in conformity with this Indo-centric view, Middleton’s conduct has often been represented as a vengeful and unscrupulous act of piracy against the Moghul shipping.

But this was not how Middleton saw it. He had no quarrel with the commanders of India’s Arabian Sea fleets and had in fact received much
kindness from them during his earlier tribulations in the Yemen. As he explained, by staying their ships ‘I thought we should do ourselves some right and them no wrong to cause them to barter with us, we to take their goods as they were worth and they ours in lieu thereof’. It would be trade under duress certainly, but not pillage; and the party to suffer most by it would not be the ships of the Moghul, but the officials of Mocha. For in Sir Henry’s opinion the decisive reason for sailing back to the Red Sea was ‘to take some revenge for the great and insufferable wrongs and injuries done me by the Turkes there’. He was thinking of his dead comrades, of those ‘waightie irons’ and of the ‘dirty dogge’s kennell’.

By April the fleet was in position across the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Indian dhows were being corralled into a holding area in the Bay of Assab. Here, on the Ethiopian coast, each vessel was ‘rommaged’. A selection was made of its most desirable commodities, and broadcloth put in their place. Middleton meanwhile wrote to the Aga of Mocha explaining his behaviour and inviting compensation if not capitulation. Dearly would he have loved to witness the Aga’s reaction. But his old adversary had, it transpired, been replaced; and the new incumbent claimed an unexpected ally in John Saris, commander of the Company’s Eighth Voyage amongst whose ships was the Japan-bound
Clove.

Armed with a magnificent specimen of Arabic calligraphy that was in fact a safe-conduct from the Sultan in Istanbul, Saris had seen fit to ignore a letter of caution left by Middleton at Socotra and had duly sailed into Mocha. A sumptuous reception from the new Aga and his entourage – Saris called them ‘his buggering boyes’ – left the newcomers in no doubt that their trade was welcome. Already the first bargains had been struck and an English deputation was about to pay a courtesy call on the Pasha at Sana’a.

Not surprisingly word of Middleton’s interference went down badly with the Aga and badly with Saris. The former abruptly broke off trade and accused Saris of abusing the Sultan’s protection. Saris himself saw what he called ‘Sir Henrie’s brabbles and jarres with the Turkes and the Cambayans [i.e. the people of Surat]’ as threatening the success of his own voyage throughout the Arabian Sea. On 15 April he went aboard the
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and demanded an explanation. Middleton stuck to his guns; he would take from the Indian ships ‘what he thought fitting and then’, according to Saris, ‘if I would, I might take the rest’. Saris replied that in that case he would sail away to windward and forestall him. ‘Whereat Sir Henrie swore most deeply that if I did take that course he
would sinke me and sett fire of all such ships as traded with me.’

The preoccupation with personal trade plus the system of separate accounting for each voyage meant that the common good of the Company received little consideration. It was every fleet for itself, and although Middleton and Saris eventually reached an agreement on the division of spoils, the bickering continued; mutineers on ‘Jack’ Saris’s ships looked to Middleton for redress; Middleton tried to deprive Saris of any cottons that might compete with his own cargo when they eventually reached Bantam. Jourdain and Hawkins looked on in disgust. The two commanders ‘used very grosse speeches not fitting to men of their ranke’ thought Jourdain, ‘and were so crosse the one to the other as if they had beene enymies’.

In all some fifteen Indian vessels were ‘rommaged’ including one of over 1000 tons. Their goods were generally valued at above cost price but then so was the English broadcloth given in exchange. In a letter to Jehangir Middleton described his proceedings and, by way of explanation, catalogued the English grievances, especially Hawkins’s losses on Mukarrab Khan’s account. Jehangir, it seems, was not much bothered. Whilst not exactly approving, he refused to take up the cause of his skippers and thought that they had been reasonably treated.

In August 1612, having effectively ended all hopes of trade both in the Red Sea and in Gujarat for the foreseeable future, the last English vessels departed. They sailed for the pepper ports of Sumatra and Java and were soon locked in further quarrels with one another. Most of Middleton’s men succumbed to that Bantam epidemic which Jourdain so graphically described. As the
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burnt and then rotted, Middleton’s own demise was credited simply to a broken heart. In the meantime Saris went on to Japan, Jourdain to the Moluccas, and Hawkins to England. ‘The Captain’ sailed on the
Hector,
the ship which five years before had deposited him at Surat; but he died before he reached home. That left Mrs Hawkins, the Armenian ‘mayden’, an English widow before she saw England. She was not, however, friendless. Gabriel Towerson, the indestructible Bantam factor, was the commander of the
Hector
and by the time he sailed back to the Indies Mrs Hawkins had become Mrs Towerson. She sailed with him, regained her numerous family in India, and, courtesy of the Amboina Massacre, would be a widow once again within the decade.