Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (35 page)

Even as he wrote, Captain Heath’s
Defence
was dropping anchor in sheltered waters at the mouth of the Pearl River. She was fifteen leagues east of Macao amid a scatter of well-wooded islands which included what is now Hong Kong. Previous attempts to trade at Canton had usually been made through the doubtful offices of the Portuguese at Macao; but Thomas Yale opted for the direct approach. With two other factors and an escort of eight he was rowed to the mainland and then conveyed, the factors in sedan chairs, the escort in wheelbarrows (‘much more convenient than our English ones but somewhat more noisy’) to Tungkun and thence by boat to the great city.

Describing what was probably the largest port at which Company ships had ever called, Alexander Hamilton would find the people of Canton ‘ingenious, industrious, civil, but too numerous’. He reckoned the population at well over a million and there was ‘no day in the year but shews 5000 sail of trading junks, besides small boats for other services, lying before the city’. The country was ‘as pleasant and profitable as any in the world, the crops abundant’. Chinese meat, however, was to be avoided. It was good, but you needed to know its provenance. Let the Captain explain.

The abominable sin of sodomy is tolerated here, and all over China, and so is buggery, which they use both with beasts and fowls, in so much that Europeans do not care to eat duck except what they bring up themselves, either from the egg or from small ducklings.

Thomas Yale and his companions were no doubt equally impressed by the metropolis, but they were not there long enough to ascertain such detail. On the day after their arrival they met the
Hoppo,
or Chinese customs officer, and were immediately promised the necessary chop, or permit, for bringing the ship upriver. This was most encouraging. But Yale was reckoning without his skipper. Heath, who seems to have been a capable navigator, always became exceedingly restless and apprehensive when in sight of land. Charnock had come to rue this failing; now it was Yale’s turn. For after landing the Canton party, Heath had weighed anchor, taken a long look at the main channel up to Canton and decided
against it. He was now somewhere off Macao. Yale and the
Hoppo
spent five days trying to find him.

It was ironical that, when at last an English ship had a chance to go up to Canton, she chose not to take it. But the Captain remained adamant; hence Yale was compelled to conduct the always lengthy negotiations over dues and contracts from Macao. Customs duties in China were usually paid by the Chinese merchants. In their stead the visiting trader paid a charge based on the size of his ship. This involved tedious and expensive measurement and could not even begin until orders had been placed for whatever goods the visitors intended to take away with them. With much bluff and more bribery Yale fought his way through the tangle of red tape and by March 1690 the ship was being loaded.

Meanwhile Captain Heath was waging a battle with the Macao customs over his personal trade and busily refitting for the return voyage. His requirements evidently included a mast, to collect which he took an armed detachment from the ship. The mast was lying ready on the shore but there was something wrong with the Captain’s paperwork. He needed, said the Chinese, some additional clearance. Heath would have none of it and proceeded to roll his mast into the water ‘when began ye fray’. Blows were exchanged as the mast was lashed to the longboat. The men pulled on the oars and the Chinese kept up a steady bombardment of rocks. ‘Fire,’ shouted the Captain in panic. The first shots came from the English and one Chinese was killed outright. The English now rowed for open water, cutting loose the precious mast and abandoning the ship’s doctor who came rushing down the beach with nine other members of the crew. The doctor ‘was miserably cut down in their sight’ and then thrown into a hut where, next day, he was reported to be still lying ‘on ye ground, chained in his gore most miserably with ye stinking dead corpse [of the Chinese casualty] laid by him and none suffered to come near or dress his wounds’.

Back aboard the
Defence
Yale was beside himself at this latest outrage. ‘The Captain…having performed what I always feared would be the conclusion of his folly, [had] ruined the public and private trade.’ To ride out the storm of protest and resolve the judicial complications of such an incident would take months; it would also eat into the profits. A factor was sent to ransom the doctor and the other prisoners. He reported that the Chinese would not begin to settle the matter for a sum less than three times that already paid in measurement dues. Yale refused and the ship immediately put to sea. Presumably the mast was recovered but of the
factor, the doctor, and the rest no more is heard. ‘We never had good success in any attempt made of that kind without our own express orders’, was the smug comment of the directors. It had been Madras’s affair; the Yales must take the blame. In 1692 Elihu was replaced as Governor of Fort St George but he was still in Madras winding up his multifarious affairs six years later.

Whether the voyage had been a failure commercially as well as diplomatically is not revealed. Naturally factors tended to magnify the difficulties with which they had to contend; moreover they were unlikely to reveal the profits of their private trade and were often in no position to gauge those of the Company. Presumably the China trade, especially to Amoy, continued to show a return. It certainly attracted ships and when the New Company commenced operations, Canton was high on its list of priorities. Where the Old Company had stirred up such animosity, it was hoped that the New might find a favourable reception.

Thus in 1699 the New Company’s
Macclesfield,
a fast sailing ‘galley’ of modest size, sailed from London to Macao in under six months. So keen was the
Hoppo
to encourage her trade that the measurement dues, modest enough for a ship of this size, were twice reduced and in September 1700 she moored in Canton’s Whampoa harbour. She was probably the first company ship to join the great concourse described by Hamilton although it is significant that she found already there a ship belonging to Abdul Ghafar, the Surat tycoon, and one from Madras.

As supercargo the
Macclesfield
carried Robert Douglas, brother-in-law of Thomas Pitt and one of the Old Company’s erstwhile factors in Bengal; he was supported by a Mr Biggs who had been on the
Defence.
Together they had a fund of experience and a better idea of what to expect than any of their predecessors. The Chinese refusal to allow resident factors meant that the-factory system as developed in Java and India could not apply. The ship itself was the factory and each vessel must have its resident banker-cum-entrepreneur in the shape of the supercargo. Moreover they must be prepared for long delays, prevarication from the mandarins, and collusion from the merchants. On the other hand, the Chinese usually respected any contract once it had been duly signed and they might even honour penalty clauses. It was all a question of knowing the ropes and at last the English were beginning to feel their way.

Writing to Pitt after the
Macclesfield’s
return to England, Douglas nevertheless portrayed his sojourn at Canton as fraught with severe difficulties. Having made such good speed on the outward voyage he had
been detained by the Chinese for nearly a year, thus ‘missing the monsoon [winds]’ and being obliged to while away six months on an exploratory cruise up the coast. His English goods had been returned to him unsold ‘contrary to all justice after they had kept them five or six months’. And the arrival of ‘a great ship from Manila’ had deprived him of much of the silk he had ordered. ‘Notwithstanding all my complaints to the mandarins and all the endeavours I could use, yet I was necessitate to put up [with] all these injuries and a great many more to get in what was due to us.’ At Chusan, to which place Douglas had removed in a further effort to sell his English cloth, it was the same story, and after such a catalogue of woe one might assume that the venture was a dismal failure. In reality, as he confided at the end of his letter to Pitt, after all charges had been deducted he was confident of doubling the value of his original stock ‘which is more than our Company expected and more than any ship from India or China had done this year’. It was much the most successful venture ever to China, and from the voyage of the
Macclesfield
dates the regular English trade with Canton which would one day become the most profitable in the East India Company’s portfolio.

Whereas in India the competition provided by the New Company served merely as an obstruction, in China it stimulated activity. Douglas was the first to sail north past Amoy to Chusan at the mouth of the Yangtse. His object was to reach Ningpo, an important centre for the sale of Nanking silk, and hopefully to find in colder climes a better market for English woollens. Access to Ningpo was refused, but while at Chusan he was joined by Allen Catchpole, another of Job Charnock’s disillusioned Bengal factors who had then joined Thomas Pitt as an interloper but was now rejoicing in the role of the New Company’s Agent – and, of course, Consul-General – for China and the Far East.

Catchpole remained at Chusan throughout 1701 in which year five New Company ships called at the port. Unlike Sir Nicholas Waite and the other Consuls-General in India he seems to have been a conscientious administrator. But to all the usual impediments to trade with China was added the complication of how and where he was to base himself. The Chinese were adamant that the Consul-General could not reside on Chinese soil. They were highly suspicious of what they took to be some species of English mandarin and in early 1702 they ordered him back to sea. Thereafter he shuttled between Batavia, Bandjarmasin in Borneo where the New Company had also established itself, and back to Chusan. It was a most unsatisfactory arrangement and on Catchpole’s strong
recommendation his employers at last sanctioned the establishment of a fortified settlement on neutral territory. The place which had caught their Agent’s eye was Pulo Condore, an island later infamous as a penal settlement off the coast of south Vietnam. More than 1000 miles from Canton, let alone Chusan, it was nevertheless astride the main sea route up the South China Sea and it was the best that was available. With his council of senior factors, a small garrison and plenty of carpenters, Catchpole went ashore in April 1703.

The island measured twelve miles by four. It boasted a few villages, some useful timber and a couple of anchorages. Catchpole catalogued every one of its vegetable productions and evidently regarded it as some sort of paradise. But it was really no great improvement on all those other islands – Run, Anjediva, Hijili, Mergui – which seem to have dotted the Company’s history. Perhaps a few square miles bounded by water exercised some special attraction for an insular race. Catchpole, of course, maintained that it had enormous commercial potential. ‘I do faithfully assure your Honours’, he told the New Company’s directors, ‘that I have no fear of vessels in great numbers coming hither with all sorts of goods, so soon as they hear we are settled here and govern as in your Honours other factories.’ Thomas Pitt, now Governor at Madras and no friend of the New Company, fully concurred; he reckoned Pulo Condore ‘the best design that the English have taken in these parts for many years’.

But from Company historians Pulo Condore would get a bad press. This was the common fate of all inglorious episodes and Pulo Condore was one of the worst. For, just three years after its foundation, Catchpole and nearly all the other Englishmen on the island were massacred. It may be that the Vietnamese were behind this crime; there was talk of some misunderstanding over the terms of the lease and there was a suggestion that the Company’s treasure proved too great a temptation. But the perpetrators were in fact the Bugis mercenaries who had been recruited in Borneo as a garrison for the new settlement. Hamilton reports that after three years’ service they were due to be relieved and that the English had reneged on this agreement. It took very little to make the Bugis mutiny. Scattered from their home in Macassar by the Dutch they were notorious both as pirates and mercenaries; a similar instance of Bugis soldiery running amok had occurred in Siam in the 1680s.

No attempt was made to reoccupy the island after this débâcle and so it never really got a fair trial. Hamilton thought it ‘a bad choice of place
for a colony’ and Lockyer, the Madras vicar, ‘a wrong notion’. The trade of ‘a little wild island’ could never even defray the cost of its garrison. Witness, wrote Lockyer, Bombay; its Governor (he was referring to Waite) ‘has left no stone unturned to promote it, yet I am very well satisfied it is beyond the Company’s strength or his art [allowance must be made for sarcasm] to make it a mart of great business; it is improved to the utmost and lies as well for trade as Condore’. Catchpole would probably have settled for this comparison even with the Bombay of 1700.

As it was, his eccentric dream of conducting the China trade from some off-shore, English-run emporium would have to wait. Bandjarmasin in Borneo was briefly projected as just such a base but it too was overrun by Bugis mercenaries in 1707. Six years later the Governor of Benkulen, a place on the west coast of Sumatra which after the loss of Bantam was the Old Company’s only outpost in the Indonesian archipelago, was canvassing the merits of his own settlement. He admitted that the idea might seem ‘chimericall’ and would be ‘a work of time’; but it was in fact one of his successors at Benkulen, albeit a century later, who eventually realized Catchpole’s dream. His name was Thomas Stamford Raffles, his ‘little wild island’ Singapore.

Of the few vessels which called at Pulo Condore during its short lifetime one was called the
Union.
This was confusing since the Old Company had just commissioned a ship of the same name. It was also significant. The Company’s shipping lists often betrayed its expectations. All those
Speedwells, Hopewells, Trades Increases, Returns
and
Expeditions
represented the hardy perennials. Then there were names suggestive of a particular phase in the Company’s trade like the
Clove
and the
Peppercorn,
or the
Surat,
the
Mocha,
and the
Bombay Castle.
Latterly the Siamese venture had produced the
Siam Trader
and even the
Falcon,
while the China trade inspired the
China Merchant
and the
Chusan.
Now, embodying an idea that was becoming increasingly attractive to all concerned in the East India trade, both Companies boasted a
Union.