Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company Read online

  With matters of protocol at Surat still unresolved, Roe proceeded inland with a growing list of complaints to lay before the Emperor plus the terms of a rather one-sided treaty of trade and friendship which he hoped to persuade the Emperor to sign. His sobriety and high principles created a favourable impression. Jehangir ‘had never used any ambassadour with so much respect’, he reported. Aloof to the point of priggishness he shunned any imperial camaraderie that might prejudice his own dignity and proved more than a match for the Portuguese representatives. But during three long and weary years at court he failed to secure the desired treaty, he further alienated most of the Company’s factors, and he very nearly sabotaged the one encouraging development of the period. When his term of office ended he was generously applauded by both King and Company but it is significant that a successor was never sought and indeed Roe himself advised against it. ‘My qualitye either begets you enemies or suffers unworthily’, he told the directors; a consul on 1000 rupees a year ‘will serve you better than ten ambassadours’. Jehangir opposed any treaty that would impose limitations on his autocratic behaviour, and his court was no place for a selfless public servant; ‘no conversation,’ moaned Roe, ‘…no such entertainment as my qualitye requireth’.

  In matters of trade the Ambassador’s commission forbade him to interfere with the English factors. Although he eventually prevailed on the Company to change this, and although he frequently expressed his commercial opinons with much cogency, they were neither consistent nor convincing. The man who is often credited with having established the Company’s affairs in India on a sound commercial basis in fact condemned what he called ‘the errour of factories’, advised against opening trade with Bengal and Sind (although he had at first favoured both and, from Masulipatnam, Antheuniss was strongly urging the case of Bengal) and took the gloomiest possible view of future prospects. Because English exports, other than bullion, were not in great demand in India, the trade ‘must fall to the ground by the weakness of its own legs’. ‘I hope not in success but I would not the failing were on my part’. At one point he was all for abandoning Surat as the main English port, at another he was asking for permission to build a fort there. Yet, in an oft quoted and supposedly prophetic passage, he strongly advised against fortified settlements. ‘If he [Prince Kurram, the future Shah Jehan] would offer me ten I would not accept one…for without controversy it is an errour to affect garrisons and land warrs in India’. He was thinking of the Portuguese whose ‘many rich residences and territoryes’ were the ‘beggering’ of their trade. ‘Lett this be received as a rule, that if you will profitt, seek it at sea and in quiett trade.’

  This quiet maritime trade was, however, to include gratuitous assaults on both Moghul and Portuguese shipping ‘for the offensive is both the nobler and safer part’. ‘We must chasten these people…’ Goa should be blockaded and ‘if the Mogul’s shipps be taken but once in four years there shall come more clear gayne without loss of honour than will advance in seven years by trade’.

  Roe was aware that his own influence at Court had as much to do with English naval prowess as with his supposed ‘qualitye’. In 1616 a fleet from England had again fallen in with a Portuguese carrack off the east African coast. ‘She was a ship of exceeding great bulk and burthen, our Charles though a ship of 1000 tons looking like a pinnace when she was beside her.’ Within an hour of the cannonade beginning Benjamin Joseph, commander of the English fleet, was slain. Again the Portuguese fought gallantly, hanging out a lantern at night so that the English could not accuse them of flight. Next day Captain Pepwell of the Globe, Floris’s old ship, was struck by ‘a great shot in his halfe deck’. His master lost an arm and ‘another had his head shot away’. But the carrack was dismasted and rather than surrender, was run aground on one of the Comoro islands. There she was set on fire to prevent the English extracting her cargo. ‘This is the greatest disaster and disgrace that has ever befallen them’, gloated Roe when he heard the news, ‘for they never lost…any such vessel as this which was esteemed invincible; and without supplies they [i.e. the Portuguese at Goa] perish utterly.’

  In the same year William Keeling, while making his supervisory tour of the East, violated another Portuguese preserve by entering the Malabar ports. At Calicut he signed a treaty with the ruler, at Cranganore he left a small factory, and at Quilon he captured a Portuguese vessel. But the Dutch also had an eye on the Malabar trade and it would be some time before it figured prominently in English ambitions. The real trial of strength with the Portuguese was to take place a thousand miles away off the coast of Persia.

  iv

  Under the great Shah Abbas, Persia had achieved the distinction of being the one Eastern country to reverse the west-east tide of commercial endeavour by actively canvassing its exports, particularly raw silk, in Europe. As the sequel would show, the value of this trade was not inconsiderable. Yet Persia was slow to figure in the reckonings of the London Company.

  Interest was first kindled when in 1611 a Persian ambassador presented himself to King James at Hampton Court. Oddly the Shah’s emissary turned out to be an Englishman. Sir Robert Sherley, one of two Catholic brothers who had entered the Shah’s service during the reign of Elizabeth, was also extremely plausible. To end Persia’s dependence on the good will of her Turkish neighbour he sought a contract for the export of raw silk direct from a Persian port to Europe. There was, though, a catch. Payment must be made in bullion and, as well as Turkish resentment, the successful contractor would have to cope with the Portuguese who from their fortress at Hormuz controlled the Persian coast. On the whole the Company, scarcely able to finance its existing trade, felt obliged to decline. But the directors did undertake to provide a passage home for the ambassador, his glamorous Circassian wife and their considerable entourage, plus King James’s ambassador to the Shah, his wife and their entourage. Thus, in 1613, the first Company vessel to sail for Persia was carrying mainly passengers.

  After calling at Dhofar in Oman the Expedition somehow managed to overshoot Persia and first attempted to land its distinguished company at Gwadar in ‘the rugged and mouldy land’ of Baluchistan. This was almost a disaster. Far from being loyal Persian subjects as the Sherleys imagined, the Baluchis were in fact at war with the Shah and had every intention of massacring both ambassadors. Fortunately the mistake was discovered in time and the Expedition put back to sea. The next port was Lahribandar in Sind, near the modern Karachi. Here the party was put ashore amid considerable protest. Sir Thomas Powell, the English ambassador, died immediately and was soon followed by his wife, who died in childbirth. Their infant son (probably the first entirely English child to be born in India) survived his parents by only a few days. But the Sherleys fared better; after a visit to Jehangir at Agra, they eventually regained Isfahan, the Persian capital.

  It was word of Sherley’s influence there, plus the encouraging reports of an overland traveller called Steel, which alerted the English factors at Surat to the possibilities of the Persian trade. With large stocks of unsaleable broadcloth on their hands they first sent Steel back to Persia to assess the tweed market. Then, in 1616, they dispatched the first vessel to the Persian port of Jask. Sherley had secured from the Shah the necessary farman and the factors were thus willing to take up an initiative that had been scorned by the Company in London.

  It was also being scorned by Sir Thomas Roe. In 1615 he had declared Jask the ideal place for selling cloth and buying silk; and in 1618 he would rightly see the Persian silk trade as ‘the best of all India’. But in 1616, because the initiative was coming from the factors, he told them the venture was ‘against all reason’ and ‘at extreme peril and chardge’. Far from deterring the factors this only encouraged them. The James landed her cargo at Jask, the chief factor was well received by Shah Abbas, and factories were opened at Shiraz and Isfahan. Roe continued to try and discredit the venture but in 1618 the first consignment of raw silk reached Surat and eventually London. It sold for three times
its cost price. The factors were vindicated.

  In the following year the whole Surat fleet went on to Jask and in 1620 Andrew Shilling, he who had just annexed the Cape, also took his four ships into Persian waters. But by now the Portuguese had bestirred themselves. Ruy Freire de Andrade, ‘the Pride of Portugal’, had been dispatched from Lisbon and was awaiting the English fleet off Jask with four ships and numerous frigates. ‘In a word’, recalled one of Shilling’s men, ‘the drums and trumpets summoned us and we went chearfully to the business.’

  Persia’s rugged and uncompromising coastline was little suited to wily English tactics. For two days the opposing fleets slogged it out with a murderous exchange of shot and ball, fireworks and bullets. On the second day, ‘while we were wrapt in smoake and sweating in blood’ Shilling was hit. He died in what the English chose to regard as the hour of victory; for ‘not to receive a supper as hot as their dinner’ the Portuguese ships ‘cut their cables and drove with the tide’. The English, who were practically out of ammunition, did not give chase.

  Next year John Weddell in command of five ships and as many pinnaces came well prepared. Ruy Freire was known to have received reinforcements and Weddell confidently expected another trial of strength. He was not however expecting to end Portugal’s 100 years of domination in Persian waters and was neither prepared nor authorized for any such offensive.

  Just as in south-east Asia Portuguese power hinged on command of the Malacca Straits so in south-west Asia it hinged on command of the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf. On the island of Hormuz their main fortress was seen as the western bastion of their empire. If the world were an egg, Hormuz, according to the proverb, was its yolk. The fortress was thought to be impregnable and likely to outlast even Malacca. But this had not deterred the Shah. Stung into action by a series of Portuguese raids designed to induce him to dismiss the English, he had dispatched to the Straits in 1621 a formidable army. Given that Hormuz was an island, a navy might have been more effective but the Persians possessed no such force. Thus when Weddell sailed into sight at the end of the year, stalemate had been reached. The Persians were besieging a fort on the nearby island of Qishm (Kishm) whence the Hormuz garrison usually obtained its water and provisions. But Portuguese ships still controlled the seaways and Hormuz itself looked as impregnable as ever.

  Naturally Weddell was never so welcome. The Persians hailed his timely arrival as evidence of divine intervention and quickly explained what was expected of him. Though often dubbed ‘the stormy petrel’ of the Company’s commanders, Weddell hesitated. There was some doubt about whether morally the English should side with a heathen prince against fellow Christians, albeit of the most detested persuasion; there was good reason to suppose that a skipper’s right to defend himself on the high seas did not extend to taking the offensive against a land base belonging to a nation with whom England was supposedly on good terms; and there was the absolute certainty that what the Surat President (or Chief Factor) chose to call ‘this airye enterprise’ would be censured by their employers on the grounds of cost, risk and delay.

  Yet this was all by the by. The Persians were offering attractive incentives – like a contribution to costs, a share of the plunder, increased trading rights, customs exemption, and half the proceeds from the customs of the nearby port of Gombroon (Bandar Abbas, Bandar Khomeini) – and they were backing them with some unthinkable threats. Unless the English co-operated they could expect to leave without a cargo and without a trading future in Persia.

  Under the circumstances and after much heart searching and persuasion, Weddell declared that he had no choice. Accordingly on 23 January 1622 ‘it was resolved to invite our enymies to a banquet of fire flying bullits’. The Portuguese refused to relinquish the safety of Hormuz’s batteries so the English went into Qishm. Guns were landed and on 1 February ‘the Pertian general and wee hand in hand’ took possession of Qishm fort. It was probably the first time that the cross of St George had flown beside the Shah’s ensign. Ruy Freire was among the prisoners and was duly sent to Surat. But the English too had lost a valued Captain. ‘The man who we shall find the greatest miss of’, wrote Weddell, ‘is Mr Baffin who was killed outright with a muskit on shoare.’ Apparently he ‘gave three leaps and died immediately.’ In a grave of Persian sand the Arctic explorer was laid to rest.

  The Persian troops were now ferried across to Hormuz and on 9 February the main siege began. Mining and tunnelling to great effect the Persians breached the walls; but more Portuguese poured out than Persians in. For two months, while the English concentrated on battering the enemy’s ships to extinction, the issue remained in doubt. Without hope of relief the Portuguese yet defended valiantly. In the end it was disease as much as destruction that gradually undermined their position. A second breach was repaired but, knowing a third must prove fatal, on 23 April the garrison surrendered and Albuquerque’s fortress fell to the allies. It was indeed St George’s Day.

  Subsequent squabbles somewhat obscured the achievement. Weddell and his men would be held responsible for the general pillage that took place and would be suspected of having made off with much of the booty. Moreover, the Company’s complaints about the cost of the operation would be doubly compounded, first by the Lord High Admiral demanding a £10,000 share of the supposed proceeds and then by the King demanding a similar sum for ignoring the inevitable diplomatic protests from Lisbon. But on the credit side, English prestige throughout the East now soared. ‘If you may have possession of Ormuz’, wrote President Fursland from Bantam, ‘Your Worships may reckon that you have gotten the keye of all India.’ He had just presided over the English withdrawal from the Spice Islands, Japan and Siam. Success at Hormuz and the vitality of the Persian trade was a greater compensation than anything that had been achieved within the realm of the Moghul; it would be ‘a bridle to our faithless neighbours the Dutch and keepe all Moores in awe of us’. Without doubt the capture of Hormuz was the most sensational proof yet afforded of the Company’s naval might in Asia.

  The Portuguese took their loss to heart. In Lisbon the commander of the Hormuz garrison was tried in his absence and hanged in effigy. Fleets from Goa attempted to blockade Gombroon, the port to which the English had removed from Jask, and in 1625 they precipitated another titanic engagement. It was ‘thought to be one of the greatest that ever was fought’ according to Weddell who again commanded the English contingent and who was not given to exaggeration. But this time he had a new ally. The Dutch had duly noted English successes in the Arabian Sea and had opened their own factory at Surat. They still regarded the Portuguese as their natural foe and, by that Treaty of Defence which proved so disastrous for the English in the Archipelago, they were officially in alliance with the Company. Thus Weddell’s four ships were now joined by a Dutch fleet of similar size.

  In all sixteen vessels plus a host of frigates and pinnaces were involved. The battle raged for three days and a final reckoning seemed to give victory to the allies; to their sixty dead it was claimed that the Portuguese had lost nearly 500. But this must have been an exaggeration for six months later the same Portuguese fleet was back in Persian waters and taking its revenge. It fell on the ill-starred Lion, a ship of about 400 tons crewed, if John Taylor, ‘the water-poet’, is to be believed, entirely by heroes. At their first attempt the Portuguese detached the Lion from her fleet, partially fired her, then boarded her and took her in tow. The English prepared to blow her up, but ‘God in his wisdome stayed us by putting it into the mind of some of our men to let fall an anchor’.

  Which being done (the tide running very strong) brought our ship to so strong a bitter [i.e. halt] that the fast which the Portugals had upon us brake, whose unexpected suddaine departure from us left 50 or 60 of their men upon our poope, who still maintained their fire in such sort that we were forced to blow them up, which blast tore all the sterne of our ship to peeces from the middle decke upwards.

  Miraculously the Lion, charred, battered and hal
f demolished, was still afloat. She limped into Gombroon, discharged her cargo, and was promptly assailed by another Portuguese squadron. This time there was no escape. Forty-two men died as they finally blew up the ship, twenty-six were captured and beheaded, and of the rest all except ten had fallen in battle. ‘Thus was this good ship and men unfortunately and lamentably lost’, writes Taylor with admirable restraint, ‘yet as much courage and manly resolution as possibly could bee was performed by the English, nor can it bee imagined how more industry and truer valour could have been shewed.’

  Nothing fuelled English resolve like a magnificent disaster. When word reached Surat that the Portuguese had ‘got into a hole called Bombay’ to refit, Weddell’s Anglo-Dutch fleet stormed down the coast. They were too late; the enemy had fled leaving only the town for the English to avenge themselves on. Thus, in October 1626, the first English to visit Bombay came as raiders. Warehouse, friary, fort and mansions were put to the torch along with two new frigates ‘not yett from the stocks’. A wild notion that this ‘excellent harbour’ with its ‘pleasant fruitfull soil’ might be worth occupying was scouted but firmly rejected as far too provocative.

  Hostilities with the Portuguese rumbled on. The eventual peace which was signed at Goa in 1635 by William Methwold, now President at Surat, should have changed the whole balance of maritime power in the East. That was how the Dutch and the Moghul emperor saw it and they bitterly opposed it. It opened to the English Goa itself, the Portuguese settlements on the Malabar coast, and numerous other ports from Basra in Iraq to Tatta in Sind and Macao off the Chinese mainland. It would also last indefinitely, thus ironically enabling the Portuguese settlements in India to survive even the British Raj. But at the time its possible advantages were not paramount. The main point was that neither the Portuguese nor the English could afford to go on quarrelling. Thanks mainly to the Dutch in the East and the Spanish at home, the Portuguese empire was in an advanced state of decline. (In 1641 Malacca itself would fall to the Dutch.) And as for the English, the London Company was now approaching what may be regarded as the nadir of its eastern commerce.