Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (73 page)

In the event the Mission proved no more successful, and made itself no less ridiculous, than those previous interventions by the Court of St James led by Roe, Norris, and Lindsay. But as always, the government’s embarrassment was mitigated by the comforting thought that it was the Company which was to be saddled with the bill, in this case £80,000.

The Company had warned right from the start that such a mission might prove counter-productive. It therefore played a reluctant and minimal part in the affair and benefited from it not at all. In spite of a voluminous and often colourful documentation, the Mission scarcely merits attention in a history of the Company. Yet there surfaced in the long correspondence that preceded it a number of considerations that are highly relevant.

They included a recitation of the notorious handicaps to which all foreign trade at Canton was subject. The trading companies were still obliged to withdraw their entire establishments to Macao during the slack summer months; they were forbidden to bring any guns or any women up to Canton; there were strict rules about the conduct and domicile of ships’ crews while there; and there were heavy penalties for any merchants who strayed outside the waterfront ghetto where the foreign companies had their factories. To some extent the Company’s representatives, or supercargoes, had become resigned to these restrictions. After 1784 their tea purchases quickly came to exceed those of all the other foreign companies combined. Together with their long experience of Chinese methods, it gave them a certain status and leverage.

But it was very different for the country traders and the private agency houses, many of whom were only now establishing themselves in Canton. With no legal status, they either sheltered beneath whatever grudging protection the Company’s Select Committee of Supercargoes might afford them or, like Meares, they opted for Portuguese or some other bogus European accreditation. Either way the arrangement was not calculated to make them other than profoundly resentful of the so-called Select Committee.

Additionally all foreigners fretted at the capricious nature of the various fiscal impositions levied on their trade and at the Co-Hong system whereby a small cartel of Chinese merchants was alone licensed to trade with them. The Co-Hong system invited price fixing; it also concentrated the risk element so that while some Hong merchants accumulated massive fortunes, others ran up equally massive debts. Given rates of interest comparable with those offered by Mohammed Ali in Madras, foreigners – and in particular British country traders – were not averse to becoming their creditors. But whereas the Nawab’s debts were secured by an alliance with the Company and a powerful parliamentary interest, those of the Hongists were virtually unsecured. As a result, when in the 1770s a succession of Hongists defaulted, the creditors had had no redress other than to appeal to the British government. The Company was eventually persuaded to intercede on their behalf and secured a settlement that amounted to about twenty-five per cent of the sums claimed. But it is significant that the idea of an embassy to Peking first surfaced as a result of this appeal to London by the country traders.

It resurfaced in 1784 as a result of the
Lady Hughes
affair which highlighted another ancient grievance, that of Chinese jurisdictional claims over the foreign community. While firing a salute, the
Lady Hughes’s
gunner, an old and absent-minded tar, let off a round of shot which killed two Chinese in a passing sampan. The gunner then went into hiding; but, when the Chinese secured the person of the ship’s supercargo by way of hostage, the luckless culprit was found, handed over and, without so much as a hearing, judicially strangled. That a British sailor guilty of nothing worse than absent-mindedness should be subject to China’s summary ideas of justice provoked an outcry even in London. Calls for an appeal direct to the Emperor were renewed and, though opposed by the Court of Directors, won a favourable hearing from the Board of Control. For the
Lady Hughes
was a private ship; indeed it seems probable that had she been a Company ship, Chinese justice might, as on previous occasions, have proved more lenient. Once again the vulnerability of the private or country traders was represented to Dundas in vivid terms, and within a matter of months he decided to act. As a suitable person to confront the Emperor of China his choice initially fell on Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable Charles Cathcart.

The long delay between this decision in 1786 to send an embassy and its eventual arrival in China in 1793 is accounted for by Cathcart’s death
en route
in 1788 and by the subsequent difficulty of deciding on a
successor. By the time Macartney was appointed nothing much had changed in Anglo-Chinese relations; but it so happened that the interval coincided with a major assault on the Company’s commercial privileges that changed the emphasis of the mission and that was soon to prove fatal for the Company.

A two-pronged affair, the first prod in this assault had come with a renewal of those charges by British manufacturers that the Company was ignoring the national interest. Instead of importing textiles from India, it should, they argued, be exporting finished textiles from Lancashire and importing only the raw materials. The Company’s response was that India’s raw materials could not compete with those of, say, America and that Lancashire textiles could not compare with those of India. But this argument was losing its force. The quality of machine-made textiles was improving dramatically while the cost of shipping in raw cotton was being grossly inflated by the Company’s powerful shipping interest.

This latter argument was taken up by the other prong of the attack, namely the private traders. Men like David Scot of Bombay had demonstrated that hold space on outward-bound Indiamen, if let at reasonable rates, could be put to profitable use by the private trader – in Scot’s case by shipping raw cotton from India to Canton. Back in London, Scot now urged that this co-operation between the Company and the private trader be extended. To handle the much increased tea imports, Indiamen were being built with a displacement of 1200 or more tons. Hold space was available not just between India and China but also on the earlier leg from London to India. Only the Company’s still jealously guarded monopoly of all British trade between Europe and the East prevented the private trader from taking up this hold space and filling it with British exports, argued Scot.

The Company replied that, although it was at last making steady progress with the export of woollens to China, the demand for British manufactures in India was limited to the British communities. That was because the Company’s freight charges were ridiculously high, retorted the traders; that was because the Company in India was now more interested in revenue than trade, retorted the manufacturers. Dundas sympathized with both; and they were surely right. The Company was no longer primarily a commercial concern; its directors and shareholders were no longer obsessed with dividends (patronage was far more valuable); and its organization no longer fitted it for exploring commercial sidelines. But Dundas could also understand the Company’s anxiety to
prevent an invasion of India by commercial interests outside its control. Who was to prevent an arms salesman, for instance, from peddling his wares round Tipu’s capital of Srirangapatnam?

‘Regulated monopoly’ was the answer according to Dundas and, in the 1793 renewal of the Company’s charter, clauses were incorporated which guaranteed 3000 tons of cargo at cheap freight rates between London and the East for the use of private traders. Like North’s earlier Regulating Act, ‘regulated monopoly’ satisfied none of the parties concerned and served only to encourage further demands. But it was as a result of all the lobbying by British manufacturers that the Macartney embassy partook of the character of a trade fair, encumbering itself with samples of just about everything that Britain could produce in the hope that they would appeal to the Chinese. And it was as a result of the pressure from private traders that great emphasis was laid on the desirability of Macartney securing a British commercial enclave on Chinese territory whence they could trade with the Chinese on equal terms with the Company.

The Macartney Mission’s catalogue of failures did not end with the Emperor’s indifference to the requests of what he called ‘the tribute bearing envoy from England’ nor with his mandarins’ disdain for the achievements of British science and industry. Macartney had also been entrusted with the task of renewing commercial contacts with Japan, realizing Dalrymple’s dream for a British settlement somewhere between the Dutch Archipelago and the Spanish Philippines, and reviving Hastings’s contacts with Vietnam. He had actually called at Tourane (Da Nang) on the way out. But Annam was still in political turmoil and Macartney decided that a commercial establishment there would be of advantage only if his China mission failed. He therefore postponed negotiations till he could call again on his return.

This visit, like those to Japan, the Philippines, and the archipelago, never took place. For when his crestfallen Lordship returned to Canton from Peking it was to be greeted with the news that war with France had broken out again. The Paris of the Jacobins posed an even more alarming threat than the Versailles of the Bourbons; within a matter of months Holland would capitulate to the Revolutionaries and be fighting beside them as the Batavian Republic. It was no time for a diplomat and an aristocrat to go cruising in the archipelago.

Macartney did, however, glean some unexpected and valuable intelligence about Dutch strength in the archipelago. This came courtesy of two small ‘cruisers’ which reached Macao while he was in China. Although the ships belonged to the Company’s Bombay Marine, the service which had borne the brunt of the war with the Angreys, it transpired that they actually hailed from the opposite direction, in fact from a Pacific paradise of whose bearings even the now venerable Dalrymple might have been uncertain.

The ‘Pelew Islands’, now Palau, lie about 500 miles east of the Philippines and rather more than that north of New Guinea. Although of no known commercial value, it transpired that the Company had, rather surprisingly, acquired one of these islands. On it, according to the captains of the two cruisers, there now stood a proud edifice known as Fort Abercromby (after the then Governor of Bombay). And from it the two ships had managed to conduct a reconnaissance of the Dutch position in the eastern archipelago. No less intriguingly, they reported that the man responsible for this unlikely achievement was still there, having resigned the Company’s service and opted for a life of ease among the ‘Pelewese’.

This legendary figure was Captain John McCluer who had previously been engaged in making surveys of the coasts of Persia and western India. Dalrymple, as the Company’s Hydrographer, had thought highly of his work and may well have stimulated his interest in more distant shores. Certainly he was a natural choice for the Pelew expedition which, on instructions from London, had been dispatched by the Bombay government in 1790. Officially the mission was supposed to be conveying to the King of Pelew the belated thanks of the Company for having assisted the crew of a ship wrecked on the Islands some seven years earlier. Several survivors from that wreck were now sailing back to Pelew with McCluer; but not alas Prince Lee Boo, the King’s son, who had come away with them and had even reached London, only to die there of smallpox.

It soon became apparent, however, that there was more to the mission than a courtesy call. After leaving Benkulen the ships closely inspected the southern coast of Java and then explored so many ‘islands and places to the eastward’ that it was five months before they made the Pelews. There the old Pelew hands had, as one of them put it, ‘the unspeakable pleasure of once more being embraced by the benevolent [King] Abba Thulle’; meanwhile his thoroughly delightful subjects overwhelmed the newcomers with their gentle favours. To the Grenadiers’ March played
on fife and drum, McCluer trudged ashore over the coral sands to present an assortment of hardware and piece goods plus some brahminee cattle. A scene enacted so many times during the Company’s history can seldom have been so rapturously received. The crowd was ‘struck with amazement’, the King ‘perfectly at a loss for utterance or how to express his gratitude to the English
rupacks
as he styled the Hon Company’. In return, McCluer was invested with ‘the Order of the Bone’ and an island was ceded as ‘Englishmen’s land’.

As Fort Abercromby took shape, the troops joined the King in several canoe-borne assaults on the neighbouring atolls while McCluer sailed off to continue his probing of the archipelago. Clearly the Company had deduced that however jealous the Dutch might be of British incursions from Benkulen and Penang, they were totally unprepared for any Pacific-based initiative. While making a survey of New Guinea, McCluer innocently called on the Dutch Governor of the Moluccas in Ambon (Amboina). McCluer’s were ‘the first English ships that had visited that island for a century’, observed the hospitable Governor. Actually it was nearer two centuries; and had he had a better grasp of history, the Governor would have realized that it was not a good omen. Only five years would elapse before the British were back – and back with a vengeance.

Concluding the New Guinea survey McCluer’s party coasted along the northern shores of New Holland (Australia) and visited Dutch Timor where they were again ‘most hospitably received’. Then they worked their way back to Benkulen for supplies, and finally returned to the Pelews by way of the Sulu Sea. It was now 1793, three years since they had left Bombay, and the reconnaissance was complete. But like many a Company servant before him, McCluer was reluctant to relinquish his island paradise. Very properly he therefore resigned his command, made over all his surveys and papers, and bade God-speed to the two cruisers as they sailed for Macao and a meeting with the Macartney Mission. ‘It is nothing but the zeal for my country that prompts me to follow this resolution’, explained McCluer, adding only slightly more plausibly, ‘I hope to succeed in the plan I have formed, which may benefit my country and the world in general, by enlightening the minds of the noble islanders’.