Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (20 page)

Peter Mundy, on his return from Agra in 1633, took an even gloomier view. ‘In my opinion it will hardlie recover its former estate in 15, nay 20 yeares; I meane Gujarat.’ The extent of the disaster was now more apparent. ‘Women were seen to roast their children, men travelling in the waie were laid hold of to be eaten.’ Over a million had died and several times that number had fled. When he had left Surat there had been twenty-one English factors at work there. Now all but seven were dead and, of those, three more would be laid to rest immediately after his arrival. Seventeen out of twenty-one – it was probably about the average mortality throughout what had once been ‘in a manner [of speaking] the garden of the world’. Now, according to the captain of the
Mary,
it was ‘turned into a wilderness, having fewe or noe men left to manure their ground nor to labour in any profession.’

Soe that places here that have yielded 15 bayles of cloth in a day hardly now yield three in a month. Ahmadabad that likewise yielded 3,000 bayles of indigo yearly or more now hardly yields 300.

Quite suddenly the Surat trade, which was about to supersede that of Bantam in value, was at a standstill. Frantically the Company redirected ships and money to Masulipatnam and Gombroon. There too the famine had been felt but less severely. ‘The Coast’ profited at Surat’s expense and its factors were emboldened to attempt their first experiment in Bengal. But in Persia the death of Shah Abbas had introduced new uncertainties about the silk trade. Increasingly ships sailing between Surat and Gombroon carried only the freight of Indian merchants. The Surat factory slid into debt and when Methwold returned to India as its
President, outlying establishments at Broach, Baroda, Cambay and Ahmadabad were all withdrawn. Such then was the situation in 1633 when peace negotiations were opened with the Portuguese.

By 1635, when the Convention of Goa was actually signed, conditions had much improved and Methwold was quietly confident. ‘You shall find such a certain benefitt to result unto you’, he wrote to the directors of his peace negotiations, ‘that you shall now begin to valew your trade.’ A new factory had been opened at Lahribandar in Sind and another was planned at Basra, both former Portuguese preserves. For the first time an English ship had sailed to Macao on the coast of China ‘to experience the trade in those partes which hath ever beene desired’. And after thirty years of Portuguese molestation in the Tapti river, the factors at Surat could at last sail safely down to the anchorage at Swalley.

On 6 April 1636 Methwold preferred to drive along the well-trodden road to the north of the river. He had been to Swalley to supervise the lading of the 500-ton
Discovery
which for five years had been shuttling to Persia, Sind and Masulipatnam. At last he had accumulated a cargo of indigo and cottons with which she was to sail for England. Better still, he had just paid off the factory’s debts to various Indian brokers. His carriage, drawn by two white oxen, their horns tipped with gold, lurched through a landscape of verdant abundance. Buffalo wallowed in mulligatawny mud-pools, harvesters bent beneath haystack bundles. Beaming on this evidence of Gujarat’s revival, Methwold felt at one with the world, a sensation no doubt heightened by the goodly number of toasts customary on the departure of a homeward bound ship. It remained only for him to complete his London postbag and with this in mind he drove straight to the spacious English premises in the heart of the city.

Scarcely had he climbed from the coach when a whispered confidence shattered his
bonhomie.
Unthinkable stories had reached the bazaar: an English ship had supposedly been raiding Indian vessels near the Red Sea. To scotch such a dangerous rumour, Methwold sped to the house of Surat’s Governor. Admittance was granted; a welcome was not. ‘I found a sad assembly of dejected merchants, some looking through me with eyes sparkling with indignation, others half dead at the sense of their losses; and soe I satt a time with the generall silence until the Governor brake it.’ Where, the governor wanted to know, were the English ships and in particular what vessels were in the vicinity of Aden. For these were no rumours; he had voluminous depositions to prove them. Two ships, the
Taufiqui
of Surat and the
Mahmudi
of Diu, had been taken by
an English vessel, their officers had been brutally tortured, and their cargoes valued at £10,000 appropriated.

This bald statement of the tragedy roused Methwold’s ‘sad assembly’ from their silent dejection. They ‘mouthed at once a general invective at me and the whole English nation which continewed some time with such a confusion as I knew not to whom to addresse myself until they had runne themselves out of breath.’ He then begged for ‘suspension of soe much choller’ until the complainants’ ships should arrive. He was quite sure there had been a mistake. It must have been a Dutch ship or perhaps a French privateer masquerading under English colours. He was so sure of it that he willingly agreed to deposit a sum equivalent to the supposed loss until such time as the matter was cleared up.

This did not satisfy the Governor. There were, after all, precedents for English assaults on Indian shipping to the Red Sea. Middleton had tried it and in 1618 Sir Thomas Roe had prevailed on the reluctant factors to reopen trade with Mocha so that, amongst other things, ‘the Mogul’s shippes’ might again be ‘taken once in every four yeares’. In 1623 Rastell had actually put this plan into practice; to win redress for various grievances, eight Indian vessels were waylaid and held hostage until the Surat authorities capitulated. Rastell and his colleagues had got away with it but not before a few chastening days in irons where, in Rastell’s copious words, they had become ‘the shameful subjects of daily threats, revilings, scorns, and disdainful derisions of whole rabbles of people whose vengeful eyes never glutted themselves to behold the spectacle of our miseries’.

Something similar now awaited Methwold. For two days he was closely guarded at the English factory then, along with his principal assistants, transferred to an airless dungeon where ‘we found ourselves almost eaten up with chinches, a vermine well-known to swarme about nasty rooms’. At last the unhappy
Taufiqui
sailed into port. Her skipper was absolutely positive his attackers were English; one of them ‘wore a gold ring in his ear’ – and no doubt a red bandana round his head – and was called Simon. Methwold was still unconvinced. But this Simon had thoughtfully issued the
Taufiqui
with a certificate of having been robbed (presumably to be shown to any other would-be pirates). It was this document, written in English, which finally convinced Methwold that he had been mistaken and that there was indeed an English ship in the area carrying the royal commission and yet engaging in piracy. He was almost too embarrassed to spell out the enormity of it.

Admittedly it was not the first such scare. A trickle of ships, some with a royal commission, some without, had ventured to infringe the Company’s monopoly ever since Michelborne’s voyage in 1602. But it was much the most serious. For it transpired that the
Roebuck,
the offender in question, was financed by a man in the employ of Sir William Courteen, one of the richest merchant adventurers of the age. And even as Methwold lay mouldering in his Surat dungeon, Courteen was dispatching another and a far more formidable fleet to challenge and embarrass the Company.

Over the years the Governor and Company of London Merchants trading to the East Indies had stirred up a good deal of controversy. A recurrent criticism, already noticed, was that the Company must be impoverishing the nation since it exported treasures and imported only luxury consumer items. In the case of Indian cottons these were manufactured goods which must be killing off English manufactures. Sir Thomas Roe was one of many who sympathized with this point of view which was why he took such a gloomy view of the Surat trade. It was also one of his reasons for the reopening of the Mocha trade, Mocha being the one place in Asia where spices and cottons could be sold for specie.

But in 1620 Thomas Mun, a director of the Company, met these and other objections in his
Discourse of Trade unto the East Indies.
Mun argued convincingly that there was nothing inherently wrong with exporting precious metals provided that the value of such exports was less than the value of the imported goods. ‘For let noe man doubt that money doth attend merchandise, for money is the price of wares and wares are the proper use of money, so that coherence is inseparable.’

This in itself was a considerable advance on the economic theories of the day. But, more important, he drew attention to the idea that the nation’s wealth could never be assessed purely in terms of one particular exchange. The trade of specie for spices and cottons, he argued, was but a small segment in a much larger and more complex trading cycle. It began with the importation of silver rials from Europe (originally, of course, from Mexico). The rials were invested in eastern trade and eventually came back in the form of cottons and pepper, most of which was then re-exported to Europe (and America and Africa). The re-export trade, although not handled by the Company itself, was particularly important since it was this which completed the trading cycle by financing
the purchase of more rials. Hence, declared Mun, ‘the East India Company alone is the meanes to bring more treasure unto this realme than all the other trades of this kingdome being put together’. Home consumption accounted for only a small percentage of the Company’s imports. Moreover, without the Company’s pepper it would be necessary to import expensive Dutch pepper and without India’s cottons it would be necessary to import expensive continental linens.

Mun evaded the vexed question of English woollens and he said nothing about another common objection: that if the trade was so valuable and extensive how could it be in the national interest to make it the exclusive monopoly of one commercial organization? After all, those whose criticisms of the Company’s trade derived from viewing it as an isolated and distinct activity could hardly have done so had the Company not enjoyed a monopoly of it. Both the monopoly and their line of criticism were in fact based on traditional commercial logic.

But the Company could of course advance other and excellent reasons for its monopoly. It was how both the Dutch and the Portuguese operated; without it, investors would shy away, the concerted and continuous activity necessary for such a long term and expensive adventure would be impossible, and the management of factories, of purchasing, and of local relations would be chaotic. Furthermore, it appeared that a monopoly was the arrangement favoured by the Crown. In a good year the Company’s imports were yielding some £20,000 per annum in customs duties. Together with other exactions (like the £10,000 demanded by James I for ignoring diplomatic protests over the capture of Hormuz) they made the Company an important source of revenue to the embattled monarchy.

But if the Crown looked to the Company, so did the Company look to the Crown. The periodical need for a revision or confirmation of its charter, plus diplomatic and political support in its differences with the Dutch and the Portuguese, rendered it dependent on royal support. So did the need for various financial concessions like the authority to import Spanish rials. Although not a state venture like the V.O.C., the Company never enjoyed all the freedoms usually associated with a private sector enterprise. It could, and often did, threaten to cease operations when, as in the aftermath of Amboina, royal support seemed in doubt. But such a threat would have been difficult to put into practice and neither Crown nor Company relished the idea of seeing hard-won markets abandoned to continental rivals.

So the monopoly had advantages for both parties and James I seemed
generally to have accepted its logic; after remonstrations and
douceurs,
he had usually discountenanced those who infringed it. And perhaps Charles I intended to follow his example. The commission he had granted to the adventurers in the
Roebuck
made no mention of trade, their licence being only to ‘range the seas all the world over…[and] to make prize of all such treasures, merchandise, goods and commodities which they shall be able to take of infidels or anye other prince, potentate or state not in league or amitie with us beyond the line equinoctiall’. In other words it was purely an invitation to piracy and, however scandalous and provocative, was not intended to test the Company’s trading monopoly. When, after ships of the Company had eventually run the
Roebuck
to ground, protests were lodged in London, Charles I was persuaded to disown the miscreants and to write a letter of apology to Shah Jehan.

And there the matter might have ended had the sudden news of Methwold’s treaty with the Portuguese not appeared to throw a whole new light on Eastern trade. Methwold, a cautious man, had spoken of ‘certaine benefitt’. But Charles I was easily persuaded that it was in fact a sensational breakthrough. With no further danger of Portuguese attack and with entry to all of Portugal’s cherished markets, the English had the chance of doubling their trading empire. What more natural than that the king should accede to the suggestion of a second, separate, trading empire? And that a second trading empire justified a second chartered company? Behind the idea was once again the ambitious Courteen; but this time Courteen’s influence and cash were nicely matched by the reputation and experience of others in his consortium. For the new association’s first fleet was to be commanded by Captain Weddell, the victor of Hormuz, and staffed by a bunch of the ablest factors of whom nearly all had lately served the London Company.

Dissatisfaction amongst the Company’s employees was nothing new. It had been well expressed by George Ball while President at Bantam in 1618.

At home men are famous for doing nothing [wrote Ball]; here they are infamous for their honest endeavours. At home is respect and reward; abroad disrespect and heart-breaking. At home is augmentation of wages; abroad nothing so much as grief, cares and displeasure. At home is safety; abroad the best is bondage. And in a word at home all things are as a man might wish, and here nothing answerable to merit.