Kitabı oku: «The Honourable Company», sayfa 2

iii

Lancaster’s career well illustrates the momentous events which immediately preceded the foundation of the Company. Born at Basingstoke in the mid-1550s, he had somehow found his way to Portugal where he quickly amassed both wealth and experience as a merchant and soldier. Then in 1580 the Portuguese crown passed to Philip II of Spain. As a result of this dynastic union Spain’s enemies, notably England and Holland, became those of Portugal too. Lisbon was soon closed to English shipping and Lancaster, like other Englishmen, left in a hurry; it seems that he may well have lost property and rank by this unexpected turn of events. The union also cut off the supply of Portuguese spices to Spain’s enemies, thus giving the Dutch and English an incentive to go seek them at source; and it also freed English adventurers from the constraints of the traditional Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Portuguese ships and Portuguese trade routes were now fair game.

Coincidentally it was also in 1580 that Francis Drake returned from his voyage round the world. En route he had called at the clove-rich island of Ternate, one of the Moluccas, and at Java, and had had no difficulty in procuring a cargo. This was thought most encouraging; evidently the Portuguese in the East were neither as well established nor as vigilant as expected. In 1582 an English fleet was sent to renew contacts. It failed to find the Cape of Good Hope, let alone cross the Indian Ocean; this was less encouraging. But in 1587 Drake’s raids in the eastern Atlantic resulted in the capture of a Portuguese carrack, or galleon. The ease with which the giant vessel was overpowered showed, according to the contemporary chronicler Richard Hakluyt, that ‘carracks were no such bugs that they might be taken’; when its cargo was valued at over £100,000 Elizabethan seafarers took up bug hunting in earnest.

Lancaster may well have been serving under Drake at this time. Alternatively he may have been involved in the Levant Company, which, like the Muscovy Company, was another new London syndicate trading, in this case, with the Middle East; from its ranks would come many of the prime movers in the East India Company. At all events, by 1588 Lancaster had learnt something of navigation and had command of a Levant Company ship, the Edward Bonaventure.

In her, he like many others who would sail to the East put to sea to oppose the Invincible Armada. For a generation of English seamen the defeat of the Armada was a turning point. To them, and to all who cared to line the cliffs along the English Channel during the last week of July 1588, it demonstrated that the earlier successes of Drake and Raleigh were not just isolated flashes of brilliance-cum-effrontery; and that well armed, well manned, and cleverly sailed, the smaller English ships were more than a match for the great galleons and carracks. With national self-esteem fluttering at the masthead, the English were now ready to carry their challenge for maritime supremacy down the Atlantic and beyond. Often news of the Armada’s defeat would precede them. Sultan Ala-uddin of Aceh’s gracious reception of his unknown visitors would owe a good deal to rumours that these were the selfsame people who had repelled the most formidable navy either east or west had ever seen. And when the Sultan actually congratulated Lancaster on the affair, the Englishman visibly blushed with delight.

Three years after the Armada, Lancaster again commanded the Edward Bonaventure. She was one of three ‘tall ships’ and she was sailing south from Plymouth, heading at last for the Cape and the East Indies. This voyage, which lasted from 1591 to 1594, is generally regarded as a reconnaissance for those of the East India Company. A Dutch fleet sailed in its wake and the second spice race had begun. But whereas the Dutch voyage would prove a resounding success, that of the English proved the grimmest of odysseys and the most disastrous of investments; if anything it ought finally to have discredited the whole idea of pursuing eastern trade.

Even on the first leg down the African coast things had gone badly wrong. While the ships drifted from one Atlantic doldrum to another, so many of those aboard succumbed to scurvy that from the Cape one of the ships had to be sent home with fifty sick men aboard. In the event they were the lucky ones. The two remaining ships pushed on around the coast of Africa. Somewhere off Mozambique the flagship was lost with all hands in a storm which also killed some of the Bonaventure’s men. Lancaster repaired to the Comoro Islands where a further thirty of his followers were massacred by the natives. He continued on to Zanzibar and, by-passing India, eventually reached Penang and the Malay peninsula.

Neither here nor anywhere else was any attempt made to open honest trade; it was easier to plunder Portuguese ships and easier still to waylay Burmese and Indian vessels which paid for, but rarely enjoyed, Portuguese protection. No doubt Lancaster was under pressure from his decimated and prize-hungry crew. Ever a considerate commander, he openly discussed his plans with his officers and showed unusual solicitude for his men. Thus it was their representations which eventually forced him to head for home, and which, when provisions ran low in the Atlantic, persuaded him to visit the West Indies. There the Bonaventure plus her ill-gotten cargo was finally lost, and the remnant of her crew shipwrecked. Out of 198 men who had rounded the Cape only twenty-five would ever make it back to England; two out of three ships had been lost; and the only cargo to reach home was that boatload of scurvy victims.

Lancaster was among the survivors. Within a few months of his return he was sailing to Brazil in command of a much more successful expedition which managed to storm Pernambuco (Recife) and to get away with so much loot, including the contents of another carrack laden with spices, that additional ships had to be chartered to carry it all home. Undoubtedly no Englishman had more experience of outwitting the Portuguese or of navigation in the Indian Ocean. Lancaster was the obvious choice as commander of the first East India Company fleet.

He had, however, done nothing to persuade merchants and investors that expeditions in search of eastern trade were worthwhile. It was the Dutch with a succession of rewarding voyages to the East Indies in the late 1590s who showed what could be achieved. They too had first hoped to find a north-eastern passage to the Indies, had been duly disappointed, and in 1595 had tried their luck with a small fleet sent round the Cape of Good Hope. A Dutch agency, or ‘factory’, had been established at Bantam in western Java, and the fleet returned home laden with spices. In rapid succession new Dutch syndicates were formed; by 1598 several fleets totalling some eleven vessels were sailing for the Indies. It was one of these which established the Dutch presence at Neira, the nutmeg capital of the Banda Islands. By the end of the century the Dutch had opened further factories in the Moluccas and on the Indian peninsula and had begun trading with Sumatra, Sri Lanka, and the coast of China.

Here was an object lesson in what could be achieved by concerted endeavour and it was not lost on London’s merchants. In particular the members of the Muscovy and Levant Companies, men already accustomed to take a world view of trade, organized into powerful and exclusive syndicates with access to capital and influence, yet independent of both court and government, rose to the challenge. The Levant Company’s hopes of tapping into the overland trade in spices and other eastern commodities through agencies in Persian and Turkish territory were clearly doomed now that the Dutch had shown that they could drive a highly profitable trade direct with the Spice Islands. Imitation remained the only sincere form of competition and it is a measure of the English success that within a decade the Levant Company, instead of importing spices from the Middle East, would be exporting them from London to the Middle East.

The final straw came with the news that the Dutch were now seeking to augment their eastern fleets by purchasing English shipping. Arguing that the national interest was at stake, in July 1599 – just two months after ships of the second Dutch fleet began returning with packed holds – a petition was ready for Queen Elizabeth’s perusal.

For a critical year Her Majesty stalled. Peace negotiations with Spain were at a sensitive stage and it was rightly thought that they would be prejudiced by any English commitment to contest the spice trade. The petitioners responded by producing a list of all the ‘islands, cities, townes, places, castels and fortresses’ occupied by the Portuguese plus another list, even longer, of all those they did not occupy. Their argument, which would later become all too familiar as the interloper’s apologia, was simply that if the Portuguese had no interest in these other ‘places’ – which included such significant markets as Siam, Bengal, Japan, Cambodia and ‘the most mighty and wealthy empire of China’ – then there could be no harm in ‘other princes or people of the world repairing unto them’. There was no need for a direct confrontation with the Portuguese and, as will be seen, the English would go out of their way to develop and explore all of them. On the other hand Her Majesty knew her swashbuckling subjects well enough not to suppose that they would ever willingly forgo a laden carrack. It was not therefore until negotiations with Spain faltered that a new petition was invited and the Royal Charter at last granted.

Amongst the names of the 218 petitioners who celebrated New Year’s Eve 1600 as ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ was that of James Lancaster. He probably helped to draft the original petition and he was certainly one of the Company’s first ‘committees’ (directors). He also had a hand in drafting that standard royal letter, a copy of which he would present at Aceh. But already there were those at Court, like the Lord Treasurer and the Earl of Essex, who saw the new company as a rich mine of patronage and who were all for working it, notably by leaning on the directors to appoint Sir Edward Michelborne as commander of the first fleet. The directors stood firm; their choice was Master James Lancaster and by way of explanation they insisted on being allowed ‘to sort out theire business with men of their own qualitye’. Indeed, lest suspicions of jobbery scare off any of their investors, they resolved ‘not to employ any gentleman in any place of charge’. They approved of Lancaster’s democratic style of leadership and, more to the point, they vigorously resented any Court interference. But as the Company’s annalist would gloomily note, here was evidence that even before the Company had been fully constituted ‘that influence which in the sequel will be found to be equally adverse to the prosperity of their trade and the probity of their directors had its commencement’. Michelborne, incidentally, instead of being the Company’s first commander, would become its rival as the first interloper.

iv

After frantic preparations Lancaster sailed from Woolwich with four ships in February 1601. The Red Dragon, his flagship, had been bought from the Earl of Cumberland who was at this time the only titled member of the Company. The vessel partook of his Lordship’s ‘quality’. She was of 600 tons, had been built for privateering in the West Indies, and like most subsequent ‘East Indiamen’ was as much warship as cargo carrier with thirty-eight guns plus space, if not accommodation, for 200 men. To maintain her complement at 200 Lancaster, mindful of past disasters, prescribed lemon juice for all ranks. Three spoonfuls per man were administered every morning as they sailed into the scurvy latitudes of the south Atlantic. The dosage seemed to work. During the six months that it took to reach the Cape the men of the Red Dragon remained in rude health.

It was not so in the rest of the fleet. The Hector, the Susan and the Ascension were somewhat smaller ships and had all been active in the Levant trade. Each carried about 100 men, the total for the whole fleet being 480. Of these, 105 were dead by the time they reached the Cape. So weak were those that remained that men from the Red Dragon had to be sent to assist in bringing the other ships into Table Bay.

Then known as Saldania, Table Bay proved a good spot to recuperate. Sails were taken ashore and a tented rest camp prepared. Good water, fresh fruit and the mellow winter climate saw the sickly men quickly recover and provided ‘a royal refreshing’ for all. Meanwhile Lancaster renewed his acquaintance – he had stopped here in 1591 – with the ‘Saldanians’. ‘Of a tawny colour, of reasonable stature, swift of foot, and much given to pick and steal’, the Africans were as yet shy of European visitors and were easily kept at a distance. Additionally there was a problem of communication. The natives ‘spoke through the throat’ and ‘clocked with their tongues in such sort that in…seven weeks…the sharpest wit amongst us could not learn one word of their language’. Lancaster, rising to the occasion in a way that no gentleman would have contemplated, spoke to them ‘in cattel’s language’. Thus, wishing to buy sheep, he said ‘baah’ and ‘for oxen and kine “moath”, which language the people understood very well without any interpreter’. Soon droves of livestock were converging on the camp and changing hands at rates which the English found frankly laughable. A piece of old iron, rowlock-size, bought a sheep, and two pieces bought an ox ‘full as bigge as ours and very fat’. With 1000 sheep and 42 oxen – plus wine, olive oil and meal removed from a small Portuguese supply ship which had fallen into English hands – the fleet left Table Bay as well provisioned as it had Woolwich.

As an alternative to Saldania future voyages would often make for one of Madagascar’s sheltered bays. Lancaster’s fleet passed along the east coast of the island and on Christmas Day 1601 put into the bay of Antongil to load water, rice and fruit and to replenish stocks of lemon juice. Here they also assembled a small pinnace of about eighteen tons which they had brought from London in kit form. Of lesser draught, it would be used for sounding in coastal waters and as a tender for bringing cargoes out to the main fleet.

While the ‘pinis’ was being ‘sheathed’, as the anonymous chronicler charmingly puts it – he means the pinnace was being clad with an outer shell of local timber – men again began dying. From the Red Dragon were lost the master’s mate, the preacher, the surgeon and ‘tenne other common men’. Similar losses were reported from the rest of the fleet. ‘Those that died here died most of the flux [dysentery] which, in our opinion, came with the waters which we drancke.’ This was not, however, the case with Captain Brand of the Ascension, who had the unusual misfortune of being shot by the guns of his own ship. In sombre mood he was being rowed ashore to attend the funeral of the Red Dragon’s mate when the Ascension’s gunner let fly with the usual three-gun salute for a deceased officer. Unfortunately the gunner, ‘being not so careful as he should have beene’, had forgotten that his guns were loaded and that the Captain was within range. One ball scored a direct hit and ‘slew the Captain and the boatswain’s mate starke dead; so that they that went to see the funeral of another were both buried themselves’.

This indiscriminate firing of a few ‘pieces’, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, would account for a good many lives. So much so that in London the directors would be moved to protest that it was quite unnecessary to salute every port, every passing vessel, every visitor, every imaginable anniversary. Yet if anything the practice grew and there was probably more powder expended in ceremonial than in battle. To Lancaster and subsequent commanders it was self-evident that the morale and efficiency of their crews demanded the firing of frequent practice salvoes.

Leaving Madagascar in early March the fleet stood out into the Indian Ocean. Its next landfall was at the Nicobar Islands off Sumatra. Here the decks were cleared for action, Lancaster again anticipating prize-taking as much as trade. On 5 June, sixteen months after leaving the Thames, they finally anchored off Aceh.

Here we found sixteen or eighteen sail of shippes of diverse nations – Gujeratis, some of Bengal, some of Calicut [south India] called Malibaris, some of Pegu [Burma] and some of Patani [Thailand] which came to trade here.

To the Muslims of Indonesia Aceh is still ‘The Gateway to Mecca’. Here pilgrims embark for the baj to Arabia and here Arab and Indian traders first brought the teachings of Islam to the Archipelago. Like Venice in the eastern Mediterranean, Aceh traditionally controlled the western approaches to the busy trading world of south-east Asia. It was a cosmopolitan sea power and much of its population was of Arab and Indian descent. By 1602 its concourse of shipping could probably not compare with that at the rival Portuguese establishment of Malacca on the other side of the Straits. It must, nevertheless, have seemed to Lancaster and his men that they had at last, and in every sense, arrived. Ala-uddin Shah was reportedly anxious to meet them and in due course sent ‘sixe greate ellifants with many trumpets, drums and streamers’ to convey the English to his court. The Queen’s letter, suitably addressed by the fleet’s calligrapher, travelled in front, wrapped in silk and reposing in a ewer of gold which was housed in a sumptuous howdah on the biggest elephant of all.

Like most of his contemporaries, Lancaster was easily impressed by oriental magnificence and willingly prostrated himself before Ala-uddin Shah ‘after the manner of the country’. Newcomers in need of a patron and trading partner could do worse than cultivate the Acehnese. They controlled much of Sumatra’s pepper output and had repeatedly contested command of the Malacca straits with the Portuguese. They had also, two years previously, felt no compunction about murdering an objectionable Dutch commander and imprisoning his colleagues.

But that reputation for Islamic fanaticism which would lead a later writer to describe Acehnese hospitality as ‘equivalent to an abduction’ was not yet in evidence. Lancaster found himself confronted with nothing more daunting than an enormous Sumatran banquet which was served on platters of gold while the Sultan sat apart toasting his guests in arrack so fiery that ‘a little will serve to bringe one asleepe’. Belying the myth of the hard-drinking sea-dog, Lancaster diluted his drink and was thus still awake to witness the arrival of a bespangled all-female gamelan orchestra complete with willowy dancers. ‘The king’s damosels’, explained the fleet’s chronicler with obvious pride, ‘are not usually scene of any but such as the king will greatly honour.’

And greatly honoured the English were. Cockfights and other gruesome royal entertainments – buffalo fights, tiger fights, elephant fights – followed. Doubtless there was also a chance to sample the Acehnese speciality of a sub-aqua cocktail party. This usually took place in a nearby river, the guests being seated on submerged stools with water up to their armpits while servants paddled between them with an assortment of spicy delicacies and quantities of that fiery arrack. In 1613 one such party attended by British visitors lasted four hours. Next day two of the partygoers died; their condition was diagnosed as ‘a surfeit taken by immeasurable drunkenness’.

In between these social diversions the Sultan, with the help of Lancaster’s translator, studied Queen Elizabeth’s standard letter. After assurances that Her Majesty’s sentiments on free trade ‘came from the heart’ he graciously acceded to most of its requests. The English were granted a house in Aceh, royal protection, full trading rights, and exemption from customs duties. All that remained was to load the fleet with Sumatra’s famous black pepper and head for home.

But here a problem arose. The previous year’s crop, it was said, had failed – either that or it had just failed to reach Aceh. As would become apparent in future years, Aceh’s importance was political and strategic but not commercial. The main pepper-growing areas and the main pepper ports were hundreds of miles down the Sumatran coast in the Minangkabau forests. To Priaman, one of the Minangkabau ports on the south coast of the island, Lancaster now despatched the Susan while with the remainder of the fleet plus a Dutch vessel he sallied forth into the Malacca straits to take by force what he had so far failed to secure by trade.

In return for the promise of ‘a faire Portugal maiden’ Ala-uddin Shah connived at this move to the extent of detaining a Portuguese emissary who might have alerted his fellow countrymen. With surprise on their side Lancaster’s ships fanned out across the straits. Almost immediately they trapped and overpowered an enormous Portuguese carrack. She was so laden with Indian piece goods, mostly white calicoes and the famous batiks or ‘pintadoes’ of southern India, that it took six days to unload her.

As yet Indian cottons could not be expected to command much sale amongst fustian-clad Englishmen but they were extremely popular in south-east Asia and were more acceptable as barter for spices than any other commodity. Lancaster carried £20,000 of bullion, mostly in Spanish rials or ‘pieces of eight’, plus some £6000 worth of English exports. But, as he readily appreciated, these Indian cottons more than doubled the value of his stock. Somewhat clumsily he had set a precedent, which would soon become an imperative, of exploiting the existing carrying trade of Asia. He was under no illusions as to its importance. Thanks to an action that had lasted perhaps two hours the success of the Company’s first voyage was assured. Mightily relieved, he confided to his diarist ‘that he was much bound to God that hath eased me of a very heavy care and that he could not be thankful enough to Him for this blessing’.

For He [God] hath not only supplied my necessity to lade these ships I have, but hath given me as much as will lade as many more ships if I had them to lade. So that now my care is not for money but rather where I shall leave these goods…in safety till the returne of ships out of England.

Here was one good reason to establish a ‘factory’ or trading establishment though not, in view of the pepper shortage, in Aceh. Instead he would proceed to Bantam in Java where pepper was supposedly plentiful and the Dutch were already well established.

First, though, he returned to pay his respects to Ala-uddin Shah. Some choice items from the prize had already been set aside for the Sultan. They did not include ‘a faire Portugal maiden’ because Lancaster had seen fit to release all his captives and because Ala-uddin Shah already had wives aplenty. In respect of their own subjects the Sultans of Aceh brooked no refusals in their exercise of the droit de seigneur. ‘If the husband be unwilling to part with her’, noted an English visitor, ‘then he [the Sultan] presently commands her husband’s pricke to be cut off.’

Yet for harem exotics there was always a steady demand. Ala-uddin’s successor would go one better by lodging a request with the Company for two English maidens. By way of incentive he added that, if either bore him a son, the child would be designated his heir. Rather surprisingly the directors of the Company would take him seriously. There could, of course, be no question of condoning bigamy by sending two girls; but one was a possibility and it so happened that ‘a gentleman of honourable parentage’ had a daughter with just the right qualifications, she being ‘of excellent parts for musicke, her needle, and good discourse, also very beautiful and personable’. So keen was the gentleman of honourable parentage to part with this paragon that when theological counsel raised certain objections to marriage with a Muslim, he was ready with a long and closely argued paper rich in scriptural citations which the directors adjudged ‘very pregnant and good’. Happily it was not quite good enough; for the matter was then referred to King James who, as with other contentious issues, determinedly ignored it.

Lancaster was no less diplomatic in the matter of the missing Portuguese maiden. He told Ala-uddin ‘that there was none so worthy that merited to be so presented’, at which, we are told, the Sultan smiled. A fulsome reply to the Queen’s letter plus suitable gifts were now handed over and, having at last got the measure of his guests, Ala-uddin bade them farewell by singing a hymn for their prosperity. Lancaster and his followers replied with a lusty rendering of the psalm of David and on 9 November 1602 the fleet sailed out of Aceh. Two days later the Ascension, being near enough laden with all that Aceh had been able to provide in the way of pepper and spices, was despatched for home. She reached London to a joyous welcome in June 1603 after a voyage remarkable only for the fact that she called at St Helena, thus inaugurating the Company’s long association with that island, and that she fell in with a pair of ‘marmaides’. They were definitely mermaids because ‘their hinde parts were divided into two legges’ and according to the ship’s naturalist they were probably husband and wife ‘because the moste of one of their heads was longer than the other’. ‘They say they are signes of bad weather’, he added, ‘and so we found it.’

Meanwhile the Red Dragon and the Hector had met up with the Susan at Priaman and found her lading almost completed. She sailed for home a few days later and arrived soon after the Ascension. Continuing to coast along the forest-fringed beaches of Sumatra, the main fleet passed the then dormant Krakatoa, entered the Sunda straits between Sumatra and Java, and ‘with a great peale of ordnance such as had never been rung there before’ anchored off Bantam in time for Christmas.

The Portuguese had never really troubled themselves with Java and Sumatra. Their preoccupation had been with the Spice Islands and their pepper requirements had been more than met by the tangled vines of Kerala’s forests. It was thus unsurprising that first the Dutch and now the English would choose Java as their main base in the East Indies. With its enormous population, its rich soil, and its wealthy courts, Java represented a domestic market second only to India and China. Additionally the twin north-coast ports of Bantam and Jakarta attracted maritime trade from all over the archipelago. They were also visited by an annual fleet of magnificent junks, laden with silks and porcelain, from China, and they were home for thriving communities of Chinese financiers and middlemen. Once again Lancaster was reminded that commercial activity in the East had long since spawned a vast and sophisticated network in which the export of spices to Europe was still a marginal sideline.

The Sultan of Bantam turned out to be a mere child of ten years. Government was exercised by a council of nobles headed by a Regent, a state of affairs destined to last long after the Sultan came of age. Lancaster, having sorted out the protocol, applied for trading rights, protection, and permission to establish a factory, all of which were granted. ‘We traded there peacably’, wrote the diarist, ‘although the Javians are reckoned amongst the greatest pickers and theeves in the world.’ So it would prove; but after a few marauders were cut down in the act of breaking into the Company’s premises, business proceeded briskly. ‘Within five weekes much more was sold in goods [mostly Indian cottons] than would have laden our two ships.’ The surplus stock was entrusted to senior factors, or merchants, who were to be left at Bantam to buy and sell in readiness for the next fleet from England. Thus was established the first English factory in the East. In no sense, of course, did this modest agency represent a colonial nucleus or a political toehold. It was simply an expedient which by spreading the Company’s trading activities throughout the year eliminated those market factors which would otherwise inflate the price of spices and deflate the price of piece goods every time an English ship entered port. In theory it also reduced the turn-round time for shipping by ensuring that a cargo was always ready for loading.

As well as the factors left at Bantam, another small group was dispatched to establish a similar factory in the Moluccas. The latter sailed from Bantam in a forty-ton pinnace (which must have been commandeered or chartered since it was considerably larger than that assembled in Madagascar) in early 1603. Such satellite voyages were a necessary feature of European trade throughout the East and especially in the archipelago. The fleets of ‘tall ships’ plying between Europe and India represented only the main trunk of the spice trade. Its twigs and branches were an infinitely complex web of subsidiary voyages in small pinnaces and galleys, in Malay prahus and Chinese junks, often commanded but rarely crewed by Europeans, by which the produce and intelligence of remote parts and shallow waters were delivered to the factories and the fleets. The factory system necessitated this involvement in what was really another aspect of the carrying trade. But to the Company’s directors in London this branch of their servants’ activities, with all its bizarre and colourful ramifications, would ever be a subject for misunderstanding and suspicion. The ‘country trade’, as it was called, invariably confounded the auditors but enriched the adventurers.