Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (24 page)

He sailed with Grantham but, before leaving India, the ship called again at Surat to ensure that Child ‘do ratify, sign and confirm’ the agreement ‘in as large and ample a manner and form as is usual in law’. Child obliged – he had little choice – but not without registering his disapproval. Spluttering with rage he addressed the Company.

Kegwin, the notorious naughty rascal, is on board the
Charles II,
as impudent as hell, glorying in his roguery, being secure under Sir Thomas’ [Grantham’s] protection…We cannot but see that he will get out of our hands, but indeed it’s ten thousand pities he should escape the halter, being the very false rascal without whom the revolt on Bombay would not have been.

Curiously, aboard the
Charles II
there was also a real ‘monster’. Purchased by Grantham in India, this poor creature must have been suffering from some extreme form of goitre for, we are told, ‘he had the perfect shape of a child [no pun intended, I think] growing out of his chest as an excrescency, all but the head’. Perhaps this curiosity was intended for the King. His Majesty was keen on exotic species and was endlessly badgering the Company for birds and deer for his Birdcage Walk menagerie. In the previous year he had written off for ‘one Male and two Female Blacks’. They were for purposes of pageantry rather than experimental genetics ‘but they must be Dwarfs and of the least size that you can procure’. The King, however, was not amused by Grantham’s ‘monster’ who, although baptized, passed the rest of his days being ‘exposed to the sight of the people for profit’.

In Child’s book, such a fate would have been too good for Kegwin; that ‘naughty rascal’ had escaped his clutches, but there remained the greybearded Gary whom Child considered ‘a great encourager of the rebels’ and therefore another ‘very naughty man’. In spite of the general pardon and a personal commendation from Grantham, Gary became a marked man. At last, in 1689, a trumped up charge of treason was brought against him. At the time Bombay was being besieged by the Moghul fleet; Gary’s plantation had been ravaged and his house gutted. Not surprisingly the ‘mercurial’ old man decided it was time to move on. He retired, probably to Goa, reflecting surely that the colony he had handed over to the Company twenty-five years before was this time done for.

In 1687, two years after Kegwin’s rebellion, orders had come from the Company in London that Bombay was to supersede Surat as their headquarters on the west coast of India. Accordingly John Child, now a baronet and with authority over all the Company’s establishments in India, was to move to Bombay Castle. Bombay would become the Presidency, Surat a mere Agency. ‘Though our business is only trade and security, not conquest,’ explained the directors, ‘yet we dare not trade boldly or leave great stocks where we have not the security of a fort’. This harder line was echoed in instructions to Madras ‘of which we claim the sovereignty, and will maintain and defend against all persons, and govern by our laws without any appeal to any prince or potentate whatsoever’. And it was also at this juncture that the need for a fortified settlement in Bengal was being urged.

The Portuguese had always accepted that trade depended on an assertion of sovereignty and the military expenditure to support it. Now new rivals, the French, were fortifying Pondicherry and in 1672 had stormed and occupied San Thomé just down the beach from Madras. But it was still the Dutch whom the English feared most and, just as imitation of their endeavours had proved the sincerest form of competition in Lancaster’s day, so now it was the Dutch example which the directors urged. Their new Chairman (or Governor), Sir Josiah Child, ordered Madras to form a municipal corporation on the Dutch model and adopted many Dutch terms; thus apprentice factors were now called ‘writers’ after the Dutch ‘shcruyvers’. When in 1682 the British were driven out of Bantam Child suggested that, if the lesson of Dutch supremacy was thereby learnt, it would be ample compensation. And that lesson was that to trade simply as merchants was a recipe for disaster. Prosperity and permanence depended on the Company operating in the East as a sovereign power with secure bases, adequate firepower, and efficient government.

This was, of course, a complete reversal of those axioms propounded, after much wavering, by Sir Thomas Roe in the 1620s (‘…if you will profitt, seek it at sea and in a quiett trade; for without controversy it is an errour to effect garrisons and land warrs in India’). One explanation for this abrupt change to a more assertive stance is that it simply reflected the spirit of the age and the reality of the Company’s power. Since Cromwell’s charter trade had grown prodigiously; the Company was now the largest and wealthiest corporation in the English-speaking world; and while so closely allied with the Crown through those hefty
donations to the royal exchequer it was inevitable that it would espouse the maritime and commercial ‘imperialism’ of its royal patrons. Sir Thomas Grantham, before he sailed east to deal with Kegwin, had put down a revolt in Virginia; and Sir Josiah Child was himself involved in a plantation in Jamaica. The success of settlements in the New World was suggesting a pattern of expansion and a form of overseas authority which might, with modifications, be applied in the Old.

But of more direct bearing on the Company’s thinking was the unpredictable trading climate that now prevailed at the Moghul ports of Surat and Hughli (Bengal) as a result of political insecurity and the competition posed by interlopers. Under Aurangzeb (1658-1707) the Moghul Empire passed slowly through its zenith. Even as it achieved its greatest geographical extent it was assailed by enemies from within, foremost of whom were the Marathas, a warrior caste from the mountains just east of Bombay. Under the leadership of the great Sivaji, Maratha cavalry raided deep into the Deccan and Maratha fleets ranged along the west coast. In 1664 these ‘Seevagees’, as the English called them, swooped on the rich province of Gujarat and made for the great port of Surat. Panic gripped the city and business came to a standstill. Encountering little resistance Sivaji’s men overran the metropolis and ‘plundered it for forty days together’. Only the Governor’s castle and the English factory held out. Indeed so successful was the resistance offered by President Oxenden and so staunch his loyalty to the Moghuls that Aurangzeb conferred on him a robe of honour and partially remitted the year’s customs dues. Equally grateful, the Company awarded him a gold medal and £200 in gold.

Six years later Sivaji gave a repeat performance. Once again the citizens of Surat fled, again the city was plundered and burnt, and again the English staged a stout defence. More expressions of imperial gratitude followed. But they scarcely made up for the loss of trade and Aungier was soon seeking a non-interference pact with the Marathas. The wars raged on. Surat, haunted by rumours of further raids, was itself fortified. But the Emperor evidently had no more faith in the new walls than did the Company. He removed his treasure; the Company diverted more shipping to Bombay. Yet even in Bombay the Company was commercially disadvantaged, for what trade there was remained a hostage to events on the mainland. While trying to keep on good terms with Sivaji, the Company was obliged to permit the Moghul fleet to ride out the monsoon at anchor off Bombay. In 1679 the Moghul and Maratha fleets
clashed in the harbour itself. The punctilious neutrality observed by the English endeared them to no one.

Meanwhile in distant Bengal relations between the Company’s abrasive factors and the Moghul’s most powerful Governor reached breaking point. In 1686 a fleet was despatched from England with, as will be seen, the absurd intention of ‘entering into a war with the Mogull’. This extraordinary turn of events also influenced the decision to downgrade the Company’s presence at Surat. Sir John Child supported the resort to arms and as Admiral and Captain-General of the Company’s forces was nominally in charge of operations. But Surat was a long way from Bengal and he seems to have imagined that the west coast trade would be allowed to continue regardless of events in the Bay of Bengal. No doubt he reasoned that any move against the Company at Surat could, as in the days of Sir Henry Middleton, be countered by blockading the port or raiding Moghul shipping on the vital Red Sea route.

This deterrent, however, failed simply because no one could believe that Child could be quite so naive. In November 1686, six months before he finally withdrew to Bombay, the Bengal factors were under the impression that he was already safely ensconced in Bombay castle and ‘possessed of a good store of their (the Moghuls’) rich shipps…news of which will mightily delight us’. Similarly the Moghul Governor of Surat assumed that Child was taking the offensive. He therefore went out of his way to molest the English and embarrass their trade. For, as Hamilton asked, ‘by what rule of policy could Sir Josiah [Child] or Sir John Child think to rob, murder and destroy the Mogul’s subjects in one part of his dominions, and the Company to enforce a free trade in the other parts? Or how could they expect that he [the Moghul] would stand neuter?’ Finally even the merchants of Surat, normally well disposed towards the Company, assumed that Child was engaged in hostilities. Thus, when in 1686 one of their ships was indeed waylaid coming from the Red Sea, they held the English responsible. In reality the culprits were ‘two Danish pirates’; but that only emerged later. At the time it was not unreasonable for Surat’s Governor to freeze the Company’s assets nor for Surat’s merchants to shun further dealings with the English.

It was also not unreasonable under the circumstances that the Moghul authorities should accommodate anyone with a grievance against the Company. Captain Hamilton, who was evidently on the scene at the time, makes much of the role played by two senior ex-factors, Messrs Petit and Boucher (or Bourchier), who, like him, were regarded by the Company
as interlopers. Both had been dismissed by John Child when they refused to pay him a commission on their private trade. (Coming from Hamilton the accusation is suspect but even the impartial Reverend Ovington put Child’s personal fortune at a staggering £100,000.) Subsequently the two men had frustrated Child’s attempts to arrest them and, while Petit ‘bought a ship to go a trading in Persia’, Boucher repaired to the Moghul court and secured a trading licence.

The Company’s anxiety about interlopers and pirates was now little short of paranoid. Suppressing Kegwin’s rebellion had been as much about suppressing the interlopers he welcomed to Bombay as about the rights and wrongs of Company rule. And in Bengal the decision to take on the Moghul empire had as much to do with its Governor entertaining interlopers as with its exactions on the Company’s trade. Thus the defiance of Petit and Boucher may, as Hamilton suggests, have preyed more upon the vindictive John Child than did the political crisis. Certainly they figured prominently, along with the Danish pirates, in the list of grievances which he drew up soon after reaching Bombay in 1687. The list was sent to the Governor of Surat. Receiving no satisfaction, Child at last took the offensive. Moghul shipping was boarded wherever it was encountered and in mid 1688 Hamilton counted fourteen prizes lying in Bombay harbour.

Wholly predictably, the Moghul governor in Surat retaliated by imprisoning those factors left behind by Child. In the hope of freeing them Child returned to Surat towards the end of 1688 and was soon announcing that the city’s governor had agreed to his terms. Overjoyed, the Company voted him an unusually generous 1000 guineas by way of thanks. But it was premature. The governor promptly rearrested the factors and paraded them through the streets in irons. With a price on his head Child scuttled back to Bombay.

On the way he fell in with a fleet of barges carrying corn to Sidi Yakub, commander of a formidable fleet that was operating against the Marathas as the Moghul’s navy. This was enough for Child. He ordered that the barges be taken. His senior captain protested that taking these provisions would practically oblige the Sidi to attack Bombay. Child scoffed at the very idea and accused the captain of cowardice. If Sidi Yakub came anywhere near Bombay he would ‘blow him off with the wind of his bum’.

On the night of 14 February 1689 the Sidi’s force of 20,000 men entered Bombay harbour and landed unopposed. The only gun to be
fired was that which gave the alarm; and since most of the English lived outside the Castle, the only response was a frantic stampede as ‘the poor ladies, both black and white, ran half naked to the fort and only carried their children with them’. The garrison was unprepared, the fortifications neglected; Child had failed to take even the most elementary precautions. ‘Better skilled at his pen than his sword,’ writes the Reverend Ovington, ‘the merchant was unfit for that great post [of General] and grown unwieldy with too much honour.’

Next day the enemy took the lesser Bombay forts of Mazagaon and Mahim, still without a shot being fired. Advancing on Bombay Castle, the Sidi erected batteries which ‘bombarded our fort with massy stones’ that ‘disturbed the garrison very much’. Forays by the English proved ineffectual. ‘Buoyed up with a strong opinion of their own valour and of the Indians’ pusillanimity…they promised themselves victory in the most dubious engagements.’ But ‘our men being good runners’, the casualties were outnumbered by desertions. Even detested interlopers like Hamilton had to be pressed into service. And so ‘we passed the months from April till September very ill’. An appeal to the Marathas produced 3000 ‘Seevagees’. They fought well and probably saved the Castle; but feeding them put a terrible strain on the provisions.

By August only the Castle itself and about half a mile to the south of it remained in the Company’s hands. Their warehouse had been ransacked and burnt and they were running low on both powder and ammunition. But the end of the monsoon gave Hamilton and others a chance to put to sea in the few small ships that remained to them. They had ‘pretty good success’ taking several prizes and so relieving the food shortage. As always the Company was more formidable afloat than ashore. But given the Sidi’s superior numbers and Child’s now obvious incompetence, a military solution looked more unlikely than ever. In December, cap in hand, a delegation of two Bombay factors was sent to the Moghul court to seek what terms they could. As in Bengal, so on the west coast, the war with the Moghul had proved an unmitigated disaster.