Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (30 page)

But in wilfully confusing interlopers and pirates, and in claiming the right to waylay either wherever they threatened legitimate trade, the Company was setting a dangerous double precedent. Its actions, however legitimate, would come to look just as piratical as those they were supposed to be preventing. Thus in 1687 the captain of an interloping vessel taken in the Red Sea was killed in his cabin ‘because he would not surrender up his ship voluntarily’; such strong-arm tactics positively invited retaliation in kind. More ominously, by exercising its right to defend its monopoly, the Company appeared to be accepting some responsibility for suppressing the outrages committed by the likes of John Hand. That, at any rate, was how the Moghul governor of Surat saw the matter. What the Company regarded as its right he soon construed as its obligation and one which he could always enforce by once again holding the Surat factors to ransom. Unwittingly the Company had assumed the responsibility of protecting the Moghul’s shipping as well as its own just as the great age of Eastern piracy dawned.

In the short term, protecting the Moghul’s merchantmen was scarcely a priority. At Surat and Hughli the first muddled moves in Child’s undeclared war against the Moghul empire were just unfolding; it was the Company, not the pirates, who posed the most immediate threat to Indian shipping. In 1688 Alexander Hamilton counted fourteen Surat vessels corralled into Bombay harbour as prizes. In the following year their numbers were swollen by the fleet of provisioning vessels taken by Sir John Child as he fled from Surat. And more prizes were taken, some by Hamilton himself, during the course of the Bombay siege. They scarcely affected the course of the war, let alone beggared the Moghul as Child had predicted. But news of such juicy prize-taking spread far and fast. Arguably it was the ease with which the Company’s vessels in the Arabian Sea so quickly overwhelmed the Moghul marine which, more
than anything else, alerted the buccaneering fraternities of North America and the West Indies to the possibilities of the India trade.

Dr Chaudhuri’s invaluable statistics reveal that the value of the Company’s total annual imports, after their dizzy climb to £800,000 in 1684, plummeted to just £80,000 in 1691. Such was the price exacted first by the rivalry of the interlopers and then by the near cessation of trade at Surat and Bengal during the Moghul War (1686-9); Sir Josiah Child had much to answer for. But thereafter the trickle of trade, instead of assuming its earlier volume, languished, falling to a mere dribble of under £30,000 in both 1692 and 1695. The Company’s troubles were far from over.

At the time, though, Child and his fellow monopolists could not have been in more buoyant mood. In 1686 James II had issued the Company with a new charter which seemingly inured it to any further challenge from within and empowered it to meet any assault from without. For the charter confirmed all the powers and privileges granted by Charles II, including those of arresting and trying interlopers and of using troops and ships against native princes. It was only seven years since the directors had insisted that they were ‘averse to all kinds of war in India’.

It would [they had explained] be a very great imprudence for us at this distance, (being merchants and engaged in commerce) to contend with those great and mighty princes which might seem to obstruct our trade and ruin us.

Child, already a director, had been a signatory to this caution. Yet five years later, emboldened by the Company’s commercial success and impatient alike of the Moghul’s exactions and the interlopers’ challenge, he had begun to sound like a bullish imperialist.

If any natives fall upon you [he told the Surat factors], we would have you take the first and best opportunity you can to right us and yourselves without expecting further orders from England, for we are now in such a posture in India that we need not sneak or put up [with] palpable injuries from any nation whatsoever…

And now, in 1686, thanks to the new charter, he chose to construe the Company’s position as that ‘of a sovereign state in India.’ Exactly what this meant Child spelled out in uncompromising terms to the new President in Madras.

That which we promise ourselves in a most espetial manner from our new President and Council is that they will establish such a politie of civil and military power, and create and secure such a large revenue to maintain both at that place [Madras], as may be the foundation of a large, well grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come.

Naturally these prophetic words receive a good deal of attention in British imperial histories wherein Child is revealed as an empire-builder with rugged qualities to match his visionary ideals. Perhaps, though, they are also noteworthy as examples of Child’s dismal judgement or of his incorrigible bravado. For, within eighteen months of this letter being written, Charnock and Heath had abandoned Bengal, Bombay was under siege as was the Surat factory, and worst of all James II, the Company’s champion and benefactor, was a powerless exile in France. The English factors in Bombay, as they pledged their loyalty to William of Orange on the very day that the Moghul siege of the settlement was lifted, must have marvelled how no sooner was one crisis averted than another loomed. Their Dutch rivals were already advising the Moghul authorities that England had succumbed to an invasion from Holland. And in London the Convention Parliament was about to take a long hard look at the whole question of the Company’s charter.

Since the failure of Papillon’s attempts at reform, criticism of the Company had found expression mainly in anonymous pamphlets. Some of these condemned the India trade as a whole for flooding the home market with imported textiles; others condemned the Company for monopolizing this trade and a clique of its directors for monopolizing the Company. It was said that fourteen shareholders had acquired a third of the entire stock and that one in particular held a seventh of the total. Bestriding the Company’s finances as he did its direction, this man was Sir Josiah Child.

Allegations that Child had bought and bribed his way into both the Company’s direction and the royal favour are hard to substantiate; but for later critics of the Company, like Lord Macaulay, lack of evidence was no obstacle. ‘All who could help or hurt at Court, ministers, mistresses, priests, were kept in good humour by presents of shawls, silks, birds’ nest and attar of roses, bulses of diamonds, and bags of guineas.’ The Macaulay embroidery may be fanciful but the coat fits. Child’s relationships with John Child at Surat and Job Charnock in Bengal invite suspicion
while his manipulation of the Company’s share values won him recognition as ‘the original of stock-jobbing’. In dealings which would have merited prosecution in a later age he floated rumours of shipping losses in order to depress stocks, then bought heavily at the discounted price and sold out when the price had recovered. Domineering, unscrupulous and arrogant, he is sometimes seen as possessing the energy and influence which alone preserved the Company during its years of crisis. Alternatively these same traits may be regarded – as they were by the pamphleteers – as an unbearable provocation and as the root cause of the Company’s misfortunes.

The new Parliament was of the latter opinion. And with its Whig sympathies and its distaste for all those on whom the Catholic James had showered his favours, it soon found an unlikely but emotive issue with which to discredit Child and the Company. Compared with the excitements at Bombay and Calcutta, news from the Company’s first and half-forgotten settlement at St Helena had rarely troubled the directors’ slumbers. So long as the Dutch were kept at bay (preferably the Cape’s Table Bay) and so long as St Helena always had enough green vegetables and fresh fruit for scorbutic English crews, the Company had been content to ignore it. Yet for its first inhabitants, originally destined for the Banda island of Run, and for their successors – both Madagascan slaves and English paupers – life in the South Atlantic had been far from congenial.

Originally they had worked their smallholdings for an annual quit rent consisting of a bunch of bananas, a pint of peas, a pound of potatoes and a pound of ‘cassava bread’. But in the changed climate of the 1670s the Company had decided against this Cromwellian commonwealth of market gardeners and in favour of a plantation economy in which the erstwhile smallholders became feudal serfs obliged to work the land and supply recruits for the garrison. The change prompted a series of rebellions and a series of ferocious reprisals. In 1683 two apprentices had the tips of their right ears clipped, pot-hooks riveted round their necks, the letter R branded on their foreheads (R for Rogue, P was for Pirate; piratical rogues could end up with both) and were then handed over for a week-long programme of floggings, ‘viz. 21 lashes on Friday, 21 on Monday, and on Thursday 6 in town, 6 on top of the hill, 6 at half-way tree, and 6 more on arriving at home’. To merit this calvary the crime had been merely that of breaking and entering.

For the discourtesy of rebellion the punishments were more summary.
In 1684 the Governor turned his guns on a crowd who presumed to ask for the release of one unjustly imprisoned; seventeen protesters were either killed outright or wounded; the rest were rounded up and nineteen condemned to death. When the widow of one was impertinent enough to suggest that her man had been murdered she was given twenty-one lashes, ducked three times at the yard-arm and thrown into prison.

It was a petition from four of this woman’s bereaved companions, ‘the mournful daughters of St Helena’ as they were called, which in 1689 eventually found its way to Westminster and the sympathetic ear of the Convention Parliament. There, without overlong debate, the House of Commons condemned the proceedings, ordered the punishment of the St Helena ‘butchers’, and – scarcely pausing for breath – set up a committee to enquire into the whole question of the East India trade. Fulfilling Thomas Pitt’s expectations of eight years ago, the committee recommended a new Company which was to be established by Parliament rather than by the Crown. The interlopers scented victory at last; a group of them promptly subscribed £180,000. But the House was then dissolved with the matter still unsettled.

Before renewing their challenge the interlopers thus had ample time to summon old friends, like Papillon, and organize themselves afresh. Meeting regularly in the rebuilt hall of the Skinners’ Company in Dowgate, the embryonic ‘New Company’, sometimes called the ‘Dowgate Adventurers’, was ready for the fray when in 1691 Child, from the ‘Old Company’s’ headquarters in Leadenhall Street (a brickbat’s throw from Dowgate), proclaimed victory in his war against the Moghul.

Even by Sir Josiah’s own bragging standards, this talk of triumph in India was the grossest of misrepresentations; and it was duly exposed as such when the humiliating terms of Aurangzeb’s new
farman
became known. With some reason the Company was now seen as having brought dishonour on the nation; Dowgate rejoiced, Leadenhall Street squirmed, and Parliament was again called on to intervene. Child was unrepentant; for the new House, unlike its predecessor, was more Tory than Whig and so likely to be more amenable. It quickly accepted the idea of a joint stock company under royal charter and resolved that the charter should stay with the Old Company. But there were to be two provisos. The stock was to be considerably increased so that the Dowgate Adventurers could buy into the Company; and no individual holdings were to exceed
£5000, thereby preventing the likes of Child from simply buying up the new stock.

To this not unreasonable compromise Child and his colleagues objected. There could be no question of admitting the Dowgate men, even by the back door; it was to be all or nothing. Nothing, retorted the House, as the bill was dropped and a petition was sent to King William recommending the dissolution of the old Company and the creation of a new one.

Once again Child’s incorrigible optimism was undented. ‘For the venue’, in Sir William Hunter’s neat phrasing, ‘was now transferred from Parliament, in whose management he was a novice, to the Court, in whose corruption he was a practiced hand.’ The King came up with a compromise solution very similar to that already proposed by Parliament. Once again Child rejected it. Then, in March 1693, with the King about to depart for the war in France, Child seized his moment. Bribes totalling £80,000, twenty times the normal level, passed quickly through the Company’s books and into ministerial pockets; wilfully, according to Hunter, Child forfeited the existing charter on a technicality, applied for a new one, and before Parliament could reassemble was duly gratified by the well-primed gentlemen of the Privy Council.

In his
History of British India
Hunter illumines the cut and thrust, or more often the feint and posture, of these highly intricate manoeuvres with a masterly commentary. Sadly it was the last chapter he ever wrote. The task of making sense of Child’s antics may have over-taxed him. Indeed he was unable to revise this section of what, had it been completed, would surely have been the most authoritative work on the 300 years of British involvement in India. As a result we have no ready-made explanation of why Child should have bullied and bribed to such an extent all for a new charter which was little different from those earlier proposed by the Commons and by King William. Perhaps it was sufficient that he had outsmarted Parliament and that under the new charter he and his cronies retained control.

But not for the first time Child had also overreached himself. Despairing of redress, interlopers were again putting to sea with Thomas Pitt, MP, well to the fore; in 1693 he returned to Bengal and another welcome from the Nawab. Goldsborough, the Company agent at Calcutta, threatened a second Moghul War; the Nawab paid no heed. Meanwhile Child in London vowed to hound the interlopers through the courts. But, when a second Sandys was arraigned, the House of Commons intervened
and, with Papillon as chairman, a committee of the whole House declared that the India trade was open to all. Suddenly interlopers like Pitt in Bengal found that they were bona fide traders. The Dowgate Adventurers took new heart.