Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (43 page)

In 1737 Lieutenant Clement Downing published a curious narrative called
A History of the Indian Wars.
It was curious because the Company’s Indian wars are not usually supposed to have started till after 1737. Downing, however, was referring not to the imminent exploits of Clive and Lawrence but to the confused and protracted hostilities waged by the Bombay Presidency against the Maratha navy during the first half of the eighteenth century. The same struggle forms the main subject matter of Colonel Biddulph’s
The Pirates of Malabar,
another curious title in that the Marathas were not from that section of India’s western seaboard usually described as the Malabar Coast; nor were they pirates.

Native pirates certainly existed. The Gujarati Sanganians against whom Hamilton had so distinguished himself qualified, as did the Muscat Arabs whose forays reached as far south as the real Malabar. But to describe as pirates all those local rulers on India’s west coast who maintained a squadron of fighting ships was a peculiarly English conceit. True the records abound with references to buccaneers with exotic names like ‘The Sow Raja’, ‘The Seedee’ and ‘The Kempsant’; but on closer inspection these same rogues turn out to be legitimate sovereigns and feudatories going about their usual business of defending a section of the coastline and policing the merchant traffic that used it. ‘The Kempsant’ was in fact the Khem Sawant Raja of Wadi, the Sidi the Moghuls’ naval contractor, and ‘The Sow Raja’ Satravati Shahu, the legitimate claimant to the Maratha throne. One man’s pirate is another man’s patriot; in Maratha eyes the worst offenders were undoubtedly those ships which flew the Company’s flag.

Pressed to define its legal position, the Company would no doubt have
invoked those turbulent times in Surat at the turn of the century when Moghul displeasure over the activities of Captain Kidd and his colleagues had obliged the European companies to accept some responsibility for the suppression of piracy. Thus the Dutch and the French had assumed the job of policing the Red Sea route out of Surat, while the English had taken on ‘the southern seas’, i.e. the route down the west coast. But this arrangement was intended principally to meet the now declining threat of European piracy, not Indian. The Moghuls had no better claim to the sovereignty of ‘the southern seas’ than the English; and anyway Moghul sovereignty was now a fiction.

Howsoever, the protracted hostilities between Bombay and its maritime neighbours – in which Downing actually took part – were unquestionably wars. They necessitated the formation of the Bombay Marine, later to become the Indian Navy; they witnessed a greater build-up of Company troops than had yet been necessary anywhere in the East; and they occasioned the first deployment of ships belonging to the King’s navy against an Asian enemy. Additionally these wars taught the English much about the shortcomings of their military arrangements and eventually presented them with some of their first martial heroes. If the weakness of the Company’s position on land would be first exposed and then rectified in the Carnatic, its weakness at sea would be similarly tested and then rectified in the struggles with the ‘Malabar Pirates’. For Bombay it was at times a life-and-death struggle bringing trade to a standstill. But out of it the city emerged from irrelevance as India’s premier port and ‘the grand storehouse of all the Arabian and Persian commerce’. According to Surgeon Edward Ives the island was, by 1754, ‘perhaps the most flourishing of any this day in the universe’.

It was also in these wars that the Anjengo widow Mrs Katherine Gyfford, née Cooke, had learnt to make the most of adversity. By the time of the Anjengo affair she was already a celebrity, twice widowed, once captured. Deservedly to her belongs the distinction of being the first Englishwoman to earn a place in the Company’s history.

It had all begun at Karwar in the year 1709 when the
Loyal Bliss,
outward bound for Bengal and carrying the family of Gerrard Cooke, a Fort William gunner, had put in for fresh supplies and water. Twelve days later the
Loyal Bliss
resumed her voyage minus Katherine, the eldest Cooke daughter. ‘A most beautiful lady not exceeding thirteen or fourteen years of age’, she was also a paragon of virtue for ‘to oblige her parents’ she had accepted an offer of marriage from John Harvey.
Harvey was chief of the Karwar factory; he was also ‘in years’ – so probably old enough to be her grandfather – and ‘deformed’.

Such sudden and suspect pairings were not uncommon. For bringing to India an English girl who was past puberty there was only one possible reason, to find a husband. In the Company’s settlements suitors swarmed round a fresh-faced beauty as thickly as mosquitoes. Had little Miss Cooke been twice as old and half as pretty, she would still have been eagerly courted; but the twelve-day conquest, and of such a senior factor, may be taken as testimony that her charms were indeed exceptional.

Happily they were not long lavished on the repulsive Harvey. Within a couple of years the child-bride was a child-widow and Within a couple of months the child-widow had remarried. This time the lucky suitor was a young factor newly arrived in Karwar called Thomas Chown. Harvey had left an estate large enough to enable the sixteen-year-old to choose a more attractive partner; but as was ever the case, Harvey’s personal affairs were hopelessly confused with those of his office. The Company was therefore laying claim to his estate and the Chowns determined to contest the matter. With Katherine already ‘heavy with child’ (presumably Chown’s), they sailed for Bombay in November 1712.

As was usual in waters infested with ‘pirates’, their ketch, the
Anne,
sailed in convoy with two other vessels. A day out from Karwar the small fleet was attacked by four Maratha ‘grabs’
(ghurabs
or square-rigged frigates). Chown was immediately hit in the shoulder by a cannon ball; he bled to death in his wife’s arms. The
Anne
and her consorts were then boarded and the twice-widowed Katherine consigned to captivity in the Maratha stronghold of Colaba, about fifty miles down the coast from Bombay. It must have been with some trepidation that she learnt that she was the first European female to be a prisoner of the dreaded Kanhoji Angrey, otherwise ‘Connajee’ or ‘Angria’, the man destined to be the scourge of the Company for twenty years and the founder of a naval power that would last for half a century.

Like Sivaji, the founder of Maratha power on land, Kanhoji was a product of his environment. Issuing from the cliff-top forts and secluded valleys of their homeland in the Western Ghats, Sivaji’s mounted raiders had exploited the tactical advantages of speed and mobility to probe deep into the Moghul empire, even to Surat. Similar tactics were suggested by the Maratha seaboard. Stretching roughly from Bombay to Goa and known as the Konkan – as opposed to the Malabar Coast further south – this reach of India’s interminable coastline is
quite unlike any other. Instead of the dunes and sand bars of the Coromandel or the palm-fringed strands of Malabar, here rocky promontories and hidden coves relieve the monotony. Numerous rivers spill down from the ghats to provide sheltered anchorages. Islands screen their estuaries. And wherever cliff or headland commands a narrows, a rock-ramparted stronghold crowns the horizon. Such a place was Colaba, a promontory at low tide, an island at high. Like the coasts of Brittany or Cornwall, that of the Konkan was made for sea rovers.

Kanhoji, though, was no more a pirate than ‘The Seedee’ or ‘The Sow Raja’. By 1712 he had already been appointed
Surkhail,
or Grand Admiral, of the Maratha fleet and Viceroy of the Konkan. These titles the English in Bombay chose, of course, to ignore just as they disdained to apply for Kanhoji’s
dastak,
or passes, when sailing through what the Marathas claimed as their territorial waters. Within such a loose organization as the Maratha confederacy the source of authority and legitimacy was often hard to identify; and this was especially true at a time when several claimants to Sivaji’s throne were in the field. More to the point, though, Kanhoji’s pretensions were not yet backed by great naval might. To the British, mindful of Bombay’s last siege, the Sidi as a feudatory of the Moghul appeared the more formidable neighbour.

But Kanhoji Angrey was already building up his navy and reinforcing his strongholds. In 1707 he had made peace with the Sidi, the better to press his claims against the English. In the same year a Company frigate had been attacked and sunk, and in further such raids his fast sailing fleet of rakish ‘grabs’ assisted by the smaller, many-oared ‘gallivats’ had invariably worsted the Company’s vessels in in-shore waters.

The Maratha admiral also knew better than to push his luck. He was well aware that the taking of two ships, including the
Anne,
the capture of their crews, and above all the plight of the delectable Mrs Chown was provoking Bombay no end. There was talk of a joint Anglo-Portuguese assault on Colaba; it was time to proffer the Maratha equivalent of an olive branch. If ‘an Englishman of credit’ would come to Colaba, wrote Kanhoji, he was ready to discuss terms.

The Bombay Council hesitated. Knowing him to be ‘a man of ill principle’, it was out of the question to order one of its servants on such a risky mission. But happily gallantry was not entirely lacking in the Company’s ranks. Mindful of poor Mrs Chown, a young Scots lieutenant offered his services. With 30,000 rupees by way of ransom, the volunteer made his way to Colaba, found Kanhoji a man of his word, and duly
returned with all the prisoners. According to Downing – who was not there and is no impartial chronicler – Mrs Chown had ‘most courageously withstood all Angria’s base usage and endured his insults beyond expectation’. By way of illustration Downing mentions that the young widow was discovered in such a state of undress that the Scots lieutenant, well named Mackintosh, ‘was obliged to wrap his clothes about her to cover her nakedness’. The whole experience does not, though, seem to have greatly disconcerted Mrs Chown. A few weeks later she duly gave birth to Chown’s son. The tide of sympathy persuaded the Bombay Council to grant her an allowance from Harvey’s estate; and within a few months she was remarried to the hot-headed young Gyfford. When the latter was posted, not to Karwar of unhappy memory, but to Anjengo, she no doubt heaved a becoming sigh of relief. A new husband, a new home, a new life, she must have thought.

The ransoming of the Colaba prisoners was part of a wider non-aggression pact signed between Kanhoji and the Company in 1713. Under its terms the Marathas agreed not to molest ships belonging to the Company and not to interfere with any shipping in Bombay harbour. In return the Company undertook to see that only ships ‘what belong to subjects of the English nation’ should fly the Company’s colours. Peace of a sort was restored. But it was this latter definition of English shipping which would provide a new bone of contention. Just as in Bengal the Company’s servants persistently abused the privileges of the 1717
farman
by granting custom-free passes
(dastak)
to anyone, English or Indian, who would pay for them, so in Bombay they abused the agreement with Kanhoji by interpreting the term ‘English shipping’ as denoting not ownership of the vessel but ownership of its cargo. Thus any vessel, whether owned by the Company, a private English trader or an Indian trader, was deemed a Company ship if it carried a consignment belonging to the English or any of those living under their protection.

Needless to say, this was not how Kanhoji understood the matter. In 1716 recriminations flew between the ‘pirate’ and Bombay over the capture of four Indian vessels which supposedly carried English-owned cargoes. In 1717 the richly laden
Success
belonging to the Company’s Indian broker at Surat was taken and another ship, belonging to the Company itself, was relieved of part of its cargo. Again Kanhoji seemed willing to discuss reparations; but Bombay under Charles Boone, its new and vigorous Governor, was not. Boone had made the suppression of ‘piracy’ his personal crusade; £50,000 a year was being spent on building up the
Bombay Marine; the Company’s own fleet of ‘grabs’ and ‘gallivats’ was coming off the stocks at Surat and elsewhere; and Bombay itself was being readied for war with the construction of the first city wall. Repeated requests for troops were sent to Madras and Calcutta, and from England as many as 500 recruits arrived in Bombay in a single year.

‘Let the bottom [i.e. the vessel] be whose it will’, wrote Boone to Kanhoji in protest at the latest prize-taking, ‘the money lent on it is worth more than the ship and the goods are English, you well know.’ But Kanhoji could not accept this logic. Today the English governor might be chartering only a single ship ‘but tomorrow Your Excellency will say that you have a mind to freight fifty or a hundred ships of Surat merchants. If so, what occasion have they to take the pass
(dastak)
that they formerly took of me?’ And whence, then, was the Maratha admiral to derive his revenue? But the Bombay Council was unmoved and in 1718 Boone resolved to hit back hard. When one of Kanhoji’s ‘gallivats’ was taken while peacefully going about its business in Bombay harbour, it was the end of the truce. ‘From this day forward’, wrote the Maratha, ‘what God gives, I shall take.’ It was no idle threat.

First, though, it was Boone who took the offensive with a raid on the Maratha fleet as it was being laid up for the monsoon in a sheltered inlet behind Gheriah (Vijayadrug), the most impressive of Kanhoji’s strongholds. So formidable were the rocky cliffs of Gheriah that an English historian would liken the place to Gibraltar. Not to be outdone, an Indian historian (writing in the first heady days of India’s independence) describes Boone’s surprise attack as ‘Pearl Harbor two centuries before its time’. There was, though, one difference. In spite of a motley armada and some 4000 troops, Boone’s raid was a total failure.

Downing, whose claim to have taken part has since been discredited, reports that the considerable firepower of the Company’s ships made little impression on the fort, whose rocks were too slippery for a landing and whose walls were too high for the scaling ladders. ‘We soon found that the place was impregnable.’ A simple boom across the river prevented the Company’s fireships, including one hopefully named the
Terrible Bomb,
from reaching the Maratha navy; and when a landing party was sent to deal with this obstacle it first blundered into a swamp and was then raked by fire from the fort. The only mystery was why the Marathas did not take greater advantage of the situation. Downing’s explanation, though scarcely consoling, probably contained much truth. ‘I question’. he wrote, ‘whether there were a hundred men in the castle during the
siege.’ After four days the ‘siege’ was lifted and the Company’s armada returned to Bombay.