Kitabı oku: «The Honourable Company», sayfa 7
ii
Like other commanders, Saris would attempt to justify his personal trade on the grounds that it was common practice. So it was and so, in spite of repeated proscriptions, it would remain. There were a few exceptions, a few men of extraordinary probity like ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ who never ventured a penny on their own account; but, as will be seen, they rarely made effective factors. It stood to reason that any man willing to gamble his life on a voyage to the Indies would think nothing of gambling his wages on a few diamonds or a sack of cloves.
Even the Dutch Company was finding it impossible to suppress the entrepreneurial spirit of its merchants. In 1609 two Dutchmen, lately returned from the East with a handsome profit of £600, offered to invest their nest egg in the London Company. From the uncertainty over their real identities it may be assumed that the V.O.C. had refused to re-employ them and that they were keen to cover their tracks. To the directors of the London Company they were ‘Peter Floris’ and ‘Lucas Antheuniss’ and their offer was in the nature of a rather intriguing proposal.
Evidently both men had served at Dutch establishments on the east, or Coromandel, coast of India. This was an area of considerable interest to the London Company as a principal source of those Indian cottons so beloved of the Javanese. Keeling had been instructed to call there on the Company’s Third Voyage (1607) but had failed to do so. Now Floris and Antheuniss were proposing to take up the challenge on the Company’s behalf and open trade not only on the Coromandel coast but also in the Gulf of Siam. They asked no wages, they would venture their own £600 towards the capital, and they would be happy with a share of the returns which they confidently predicted at 300 per cent.
After due consideration and some careful vetting of the Dutchmen’s characters, their proposal was accepted by the Court of Committees. A subscription book was opened and a single ship, the Globe of about 300 tons, was made ready. She sailed, the Company’s Seventh Voyage, in January 1611 (so three months ahead of Saris).
Apart from its casual inception the voyage of the Globe was unusual in that it afforded clear evidence of the Company’s interest in Asia’s internal carrying trade. The original proposal envisaged an absence of four years during which the ship would ply back and forth between the Coromandel coast, Bantam and Siam. In the event some of this shuttling had to be curtailed; but the Globe would still be away some four and a half years and for most of that time would be carrying, or awaiting, cargoes that were never intended for European consumption. The two Dutchmen knew the eastern markets and the trading seasons and they had done their sums carefully. While English commanders like Saris or the Middletons were making speculative calls and optimistic assessments at any port that would entertain them, Floris and Antheuniss had a definite plan of investment.
The total subscription for the voyage came to some £15,000 of which perhaps £7,000 was available as trading capital (after equipping and provisioning the ship). Most of this sum was in pieces of eight. By repeatedly investing them in Indian cottons and then reinvesting them in Thai and Chinese products, and eventually buying pepper and Chinese silks for the homeward voyage, they aimed to raise the value of their trading stock to over £45,000, thus giving the desired return of 300 per cent on the original £15,000. Other voyages of the period operated on a similar cumulative principle; but in this case because there was only one ship, because its commanders had a high stake in its success, and because they were in no position to engage in any political posturing, the bare commercial realities are more pronounced. It is significant that the Court of Committees when faced with such a juicy proposal allowed no reservations about the proposers’ nationality to cloud their judgement.
With all possible speed the Globe made straight for the Bay of Bengal. By late August 1611 its factors were ashore at Petapoli and Masulipatnam, ports within the independent kingdom of Golconda (later Hyderabad, now Andhra Pradesh) at which the Dutch were already established. Cottons suitable for the eastern market were ordered and monies advanced to the weavers and dyers. There was the usual wrangling over customs dues but by February they had acquired a good loading ‘without having made any penny in bad dettes or leaving any remnants behind us on shoare’. Profits on the sale of their few English exports had more than covered all duties and gifts, and ‘having yett a good monsoon to performe our voyage’ Floris was pleased to report that ‘our estate is att this present in verye good being’.
In April 1612 they called at Bantam and landed part of their Indian cargo plus a factor who was to sell the cottons and buy pepper whenever the markets were favourable. The Globe then sailed north and thereafter matters went less smoothly. The plan had been for a quick turn-round in Siam so that the ship could catch the south-east monsoon back to India at the end of the year. This proved over-optimistic, and the Globe was to remain in the Gulf of Siam until the autumn of the following year, 1613.
Floris and Antheuniss had miscalculated on three counts. The first was the attitude of their countrymen. At both Patani and Ayuthia, the two Siamese cities at which the Globe attempted to trade, Dutch factories were already in existence. Not without reason would Coen complain that the English fed off Dutch enterprise. Relations between the two nations were rapidly deteriorating and, as in Japan, the Dutch did their utmost to flood the local markets. They also agreed to exorbitant customs dues and other restrictions that might discourage their would-be competitors. Floris was frankly nonplussed. Four years earlier he had seen ‘such a vente [sale]’ at Patani that ‘it seemed the whole world had not clothings enough to provyde this place as was needful’. Now it was so ‘overcloyed’ that instead of a 400 per cent profit ‘I cannot at this present make 5 per cento’. He would happily have abandoned the Siamese trade altogether were it not for the fact that his remaining stock of Indian cottons had been specially ordered for the Siamese market and would not sell elsewhere.
But if disposing of his cargo presented difficulties so did the purchase of a new lading. Siam turned out to be in a state of turmoil, with war threatening on several fronts and internal trade at a standstill. When a factor was sent north to Chieng Mai in search of those forest products – skins, dyes and resins – for which the country was famous, he was captured by the Burmese and not heard of for four years. Yet somehow Floris must employ his capital during the long sojourn in Siam. He therefore dispatched another factor with a cargo for Japan (he knew of Adams’s existence but not yet of Saris’s arrival) and yet another for Macassar. Neither of these ventures brought a speedy return so that when in the spring Chinese junks began to appear at Patani and Ayuthia he had no cash with which to buy their silks and porcelains.
To make matters still worse he was having acute problems with his men. The captain of the Globe, Anthony Hippon, had died as soon as the ship reached Patani. Of the three men who in turn took his place, two proved to be dangerous drunkards, the third turned mutineer, and all were professionally incompetent. To the crime of fisticuffs on deck they added that of private trade ashore. Floris and Antheuniss, if anyone, might have been disposed to overlook this matter were it not that the crew’s trade was competing directly with that of the Company. The men were habitually underselling their chief factors by ‘up to 50 per cento’.
With his estate now far from ‘in verie good being’, the methodical Floris dreamt up contingency plans and reworked his figures. The case looked nigh on hopeless when in January 1613 help came from an unexpected quarter. In Ayuthia, the capital, the king of Siam, anxious to encourage English competition with the Dutch, bought a substantial part of the Globe’s cargo. Then, following suit, in Patani the local Sultana advanced Floris the cash he needed to buy Chinese goods. Suddenly they were in business again.
The Sultana, or ‘queen’, of Patani made a deep impression on Floris. ‘A comely oulde woman nowe about three score yeares…she was tall of person and full of majestie.’ She was also ‘a good sport’, thought nothing of hunting wild buffalo in the forest, and was a great patron of the arts. Her dance troupe was the best Floris had ever seen; and when by request the Dutch and English obliged her with a few steps in their national idioms ‘the oulde Queen was much rejoyced’. With perhaps a republican’s sneaking respect for monarchy, Floris was moved to uncharacteristic adulation ‘having in all the Indies not scene any lyke her’.
Leaving Antheuniss in charge of the factory at Ayuthia, Floris sailed back to India at the end of 1613. By now the Globe was leaking badly and with the prospect of the long voyage to England ahead of her, he resolved to beach and repair her in an estuary near Masulipatnam. In the meantime the factors were busy selling their Thai and Chinese goods to Golconda’s merchants and buying more Indian cottons. When another Company vessel arrived to continue the Coromandel-Siam trade, Floris finally abandoned the idea of a return visit to Patani and Ayuthia. With the cottons he was now ordering at Masulipatnam, plus the Bantam pepper he had still to collect, he reckoned that he already had a cargo that would sell in London for the desired £45,000.
In the event it did rather better. Thanks to a growing expertise in the re-exporting of pepper to Europe, London prices had started to climb. Pepper was still being offered to subscribers to each voyage as a dividend in kind; but what in 1603 had been an unwelcome expedient to offset a market glut had now become a prized privilege. The Company itself took no part in the re-export trade; on the advice of the directors the General Court, i.e. the shareholders, set a price and then the same shareholders could bid to the value of their shareholding for stocks. This practice continued until the 1620s; for shareholders with the right commercial connections in Europe it could mean a profit comparable with that on the original voyage.
There is some confusion about the exact profit of the Seventh Voyage but it certainly showed a return of 318 per cent and possibly 400 per cent. The Globe had eventually reached London in August 1615. Sadly Floris never lived to enjoy the fortune that awaited him. He was taken ashore on a stretcher and died in London three weeks later.
Antheuniss continued the good work alone. At about the time of his partner’s death he was transferring from Ayuthia to Masulipatnam. The Siamese trade was scarcely buoyant but this was mainly due to the infrequency of English shipping. Indeed more news and more ships were reaching Siam from Japan than from Bantam. Most years ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ managed to send Adams or one of his other factors in a variety of junks either to Ayuthia, Patani or Cambodia (where Antheuniss had posted a small agency).
In 1617 even this lifeline slackened. The Dutch negotiated new and more favourable terms with the Siamese and began to show those monopolistic tendencies that were making life impossible for the English in the Spice Islands. Then in 1618 came news of the capture of the Zwaarte Leeuw at Bantam. The Companies were now at war and the English in Siam isolated. It was while trying to redress this situation that Jourdain, in 1619, was surprised off Patani and killed by that marksman’s bullet.
iii
In Japan Cocks was also complaining bitterly about the dearth of English shipping. The Hosiander in 1614 and the Thomas and Advice in 1615 called at Hirado but thereafter ‘by the indirect dealinges and unlooked for proceedings of the Hollander’ four years passed without sight of an English sail. Cocks withdrew his factors from Osaka and Yedo as trade ground from a crawl to a halt. The Dutch had put a price upon his greying head, ‘50 Rials to any man that could kill me and 30 Rials for each other Englishman they could kill’. Pitched battles took place at the gates of the English factory and only Japanese protection saved them.
By March 1620 Cocks was at his wits’ end. He could now see no hope of ever interesting the Japanese in broadcloth and even Siamese hides were not selling. The Dutch were waylaying his men at every opportunity. The Shogun had curtailed the original trading privileges. And what support was he getting? Two of his factors were permanently sick and Adams was now behaving like a naturalized Hollander. ‘I cannot chuse but note it down’, whispered Cocks to his diary, ‘that both I myself and all the rest of our nation doe see that he (I mean Will Adams) is much more frend to the Dutch than to the Englishmen which are his own countreymen, God forgeve hym.’ An English ship had at last entered Hirado but it turned out that her crew was Dutch; she had been taken in the Spice Islands. More disgrace.
The last straw was that the President at Bantam was querying his accounts. ‘He never gave me roast beef but beat me with the spit’, moaned Cocks in a letter to the Company in London. ‘I beseeke Your Worships to pardon me if I be too forward of tongue herein’, he rambled on, ‘but my griefe is that I lie in a place of much losse and expence to Your Worships and no benefit to myself but loss of tyme in my ould age, although God knoweth my care and paines is as much as if benefite did come thereby.’
Of course, even Japanese clouds had silver linings. His sweet potatoes were doing well and he had acquired some much prized goldfish. They came from China and of the China trade in general he still had high hopes. Yet even these were destined for a setback. Late in 1620 there reached Hirado an English ship bearing news of the Anglo-Dutch agreement. To the amazement of their Japanese hosts, Dutch and English buried the hatchet and immediately took it up again against the Portuguese. Well placed to savage Portuguese shipping carrying China goods from Macao to the Philippines, both the Dutch and English companies were soon doing a brisk trade in Chinese silks without the expense of a Chinese factory. For perhaps the first time in its history the English house at Hirado was busily and profitably engaged.
It was not to last. As elsewhere the Anglo-Dutch alliance was resented by both parties. The Dutch complained of English indifference and the English of Dutch extravagance. When in 1622 it was officially terminated, Cocks felt that he was again on the verge of a breakthrough in his China negotiations. He therefore ignored orders from Bantam to withdraw from Japan, much to the fury of his superiors. In April 1623 Bantam tried again to winkle him out. This time a ship was sent with orders to remove the whole Hirado factory and to bid its inmates ‘to fulfil our said order as you will answer the contrary at your perils’. The same letter accused Cocks of having squandered vast sums on his China contacts ‘who hath too long deluded you through your own stupidity’ and of having ‘made what construction you pleased of our previous commission for coming from thence’. ‘We do now reiterate our commission [to depart]’, ended the letter, ‘lest, having read it in the former part hereof, you should forget it before you come to the end.’
Poor ‘honest Mr Cocks’, this was not the gratitude he had looked for. Reluctantly he gathered in his debts, sold off his stock, and found homes for his pigeons and his goldfish. ‘On December 22 many of the townsfolk came with their wives and families to take leave of the Factors, some weeping at their departure.’ Adams had died in 1620 but there were now other Englishmen who were leaving behind much loved wives and mystified children. Even the Dutch seemed to regret the passing of their old sparring partners. To save face, Cocks claimed that it was just a temporary withdrawal. But he knew otherwise. Disgraced and disgruntled, he died on the voyage home.
As part of the same retrenching policy the factories at Ayuthia and Patani were also closed. As in the Spice Islands, the English bid for a commercial role in the Far East had proved to be an historical cul-de-sac. Yet the experience was not forgotten. The Company would never abandon its interest in either the Far East or the archipelago. In ten years’ time English ships would again be trying to force open the China trade; and plans to reopen the Hirado factory were resurrected at least once a decade throughout the seventeenth century. In 1673 an English vessel would actually call at Nagasaki but be refused trading rights. It was said that the house at Hirado was still being kept vacant pending an English return and the same was found to be true of the Ayuthia factory to which, in 1659, a party of Company factors would repair after being driven out of Cambodia. As a result of their favourable reception, Ayuthia would reopen for another fraught but colourful interlude.
In what may seem like a catalogue of defeats and retreats, of commercial bravado undermined by political reticence, there was, though, one outstanding exception: the factory established at Masulipatnam survived and continued to supply the eastern market and to look for new maritime outlets. Antheuniss had arrived back there in 1616. He did not send any factors inland, not even apparently to the court of Golconda (Hyderabad); but he did try to trade with Burma. From native merchants he learnt that Thomas Samuel, the man he had sent from Ayuthia to Chieng Mai in 1613 only to be captured by the Burmese, had been taken to Pegu (north-east of Rangoon). There he had died but it was reliably reported that the king was holding his merchandise pending the arrival of a claimant.
In 1617 claimants in the shape of two Masulipatnam factors duly landed on Burmese soil. They had come in an Indian ship and with only sufficient goods ‘to make tryall of the trade’ This was a disappointment to the Burmese king who had high expectations of English shipping. His visitors, though well received, soon found themselves in the altogether novel position of being so welcome that they were detained. ‘We beseech you,’ they wrote to Masulipatnam, ‘to pitie our poor distressed estate and not to let us be left in a heathen country slaves to a tyrannous king.’ For, they went on, ‘we are like lost sheepe and still in feare of being brought to the slaughter’. It sounded much like a cry of ‘Wolf’ and indeed it was. A year later news reached Masulipatnam that the two men had in fact sold all their stock and were now borrowing heavily on the expectation of a well-laden English ship coming to relieve them. When, in 1620, no such vessel materialized, the king had ‘to enforce them to depart’. Very sensibly he withheld Samuel’s stock until they were already afloat ‘lest their ryot should consume all’. When eventually brought to book by their superiors ‘they could give no other account [for their expenditure] but that most was lost at play and the rest profusely spent’.
The man who had the job of enquiring into these irregularities was William Methwold, who had succeeded to the charge of the Masulipatnam factory in 1618. Destined for a long and distinguished career in the Company, he remained on the Coromandel coast till 1622 and thus piloted it through the crisis years in Anglo-Dutch relations. Under the terms of the 1619 agreement, or Treaty of Defence, the English company obtained the right to establish a factory at the Dutch base of Pulicat. This accorded well with Methwold’s wishes. Masulipatnam he found ‘unwalled, ill-built and worse situated’; the exactions of its governor siphoned off the profits; and the local chintzes were not those in greatest demand in Java. Better by far were the ‘pintadoes’ (batiks produced by applying the wax with a pen), which were a speciality of the Tamil country for which Pulicat was the principal outlet. The place was also well walled, having been fortified against the Portuguese, and it was beyond the reach of Golconda’s venal officials in a pocket of south India still ruled by a Hindu dynasty.
But once established at Pulicat the English found that, as at Ambon, they were at a serious disadvantage. For they were expected to contribute to the expense of the Dutch fortress yet not permitted to settle within the security of its walls. Far from being any protection, the place was a distinct menace and trade suffered accordingly. In 1626 the English finally withdrew to the village of Armagon and there, for the first time on Indian soil, landed guns and constructed some basic fortifications. The disturbed state of the country, where there was no strong authority as in Golconda, plus the hostility of the Dutch, seemed to justify this departure from usual practice. In London the Company was unconvinced and repeatedly refused authorization for improving these defences.
During the course of the 1630s the headquarters of the Coromandel factors shifted from Masulipatnam to Armagon and back again to Masulipatnam. Famine, the Dutch, and wars between Golconda and its neighbours all contributed to the uncertain climate. But in 1633-4 the first English factors were sent north to Bengal and obtained permission from the Moghul Governor of Orissa to establish agencies at Harihapur and Balasore (Baleshwar) to the west of the mouth of the Hughli river. Thenceforth Bengal supplied the Coromandel factories with rice, sugar and a few items of trade, especially raw silk and muslins.
Of greater significance at the time was a short voyage made by Francis Day, the agent at Armagon. In 1639 he sailed down the Coromandel coast calling at San Thomé, the Portuguese fort, and then at a fishing village three miles north of San Thomé where he successfully negotiated with the local naik, or ruler, for a building plot. The plot was of about one square mile and on it he proposed to build a fort to which the Armagon agency should remove. The name of the village, he was told, was Madraspatnam. Precisely why these few acres of surf-swept beach, dune and lagoon should so have attracted Mr Day is hard to explain. To all appearances they were as exposed, featureless and uninviting to shipping as the rest of India’s east coast but with the added disadvantage of being only a few minutes’ march from the Portuguese establishment.
Day, though, had his reasons of which the most convincing must be that he had a ‘mistris’ at San Thomé. According to common report he was ‘so enamoured of her’ and so anxious that their ‘interviews’ might be ‘more frequent and uninterrupted’ that his selection of Madras (the ‘patnam’ was soon dropped) was a foregone conclusion. Certainly he had been to call at San Thomé on previous occasions and certainly his passionate advocacy of the new site now went rather beyond the call of duty. He wagered his salary for the whole of his period of service in the Company that cottons would there prove fifteen per cent cheaper than at Armagon; he threatened to resign if his plan was not accepted; and he volunteered to meet all interest charges on money raised to build the fort out of his own pocket. This latter undertaking only became necessary when it transpired that the wording of the naik’s grant was misleading. It seemed to say that the naik himself would pay for the new fort and under this happy impression the Coromandel factors voted to remove there. In fact it could be read as meaning that the English would pay for the fort, a more reasonable construction but one which came to light only when the English had already deserted Armagon and were encamped on the new site. Probably Day was not alone in wanting to force the Company’s hand. When he eventually reneged on his offer to defray the interest charges, he again met with no opposition from his colleagues.
It was in February 1640 that the English landed at their new base. Soon the first of the fort’s bastions was rising above the flat sandscape. Fort St George, as it was to be called, was an elementary castle, square, with four corner bastions and curtain walls of about 100 yards long. It took fourteen years to complete and the Court of Directors in London baulked at every penny of the £3000 it cost. But if not immediately realized, ‘the growing hopes of a new, nimble and most cheape plantation’ continued to grow. By the end of the first year some 300-400 cloth weavers and finishers had set up home outside the fort, a motley collection of merchants, servants, publicans, money-lenders, gardeners, soldiers and prostitutes had decamped there from San Thomé, and the English factors were busy turning beach into real estate.
But Madras was to prosper against the odds. ‘The most incommodious place I ever saw’ was how Alexander Hamilton would describe it towards the end of the century. He was a sea-captain and to seamen it would ever remain a place of hideous danger. In 1640, while Day and his men were encamped round their first bastion, the ships which had transported them from Armagon were overtaken by a typhoon. In so exposed an anchorage they stood little chance. One ran aground and ‘sodainly spleet to peeces’ while the other, after an epic struggle, was also beached and then found to be past repair. Hair-raising stories of crossing the ‘bar’ – that continuous reef of sand running parallel to the beach and near which no large vessel dared venture – became part of the Madras experience. Men and merchandise, pets, wives and furniture, had all to be transhipped over it in lighters and catamarans of minimal draft while a pounding surf tossed them like a salad. Thrills and spills were commonplace, disasters fairly regular. Scarcely a decade would pass without at least one fleet being pounded to ‘peeces’ in Madras roads.
In 1656 ‘a common country boate’ carrying the captains of three departing East India ships, plus most of the local factors who had come to see them off, grounded on the bar and immediately capsized. It was an open boat but with a decked poop on which most of the Englishmen were reclining ‘verie merrie in discourse’ as they ‘solemnised the day in valedictory ceremonies’. As the ship struck they were all washed overboard; three were drowned. The whole thing happened so suddenly that others in the bottom of the boat simply rolled over with her. ‘Suddenly we found ourselves tumbled together in the water among chests, cases of liquor and other such lumber and with a score of sheep that we were carrying aboard.’ The writer, three other Englishmen, and some twenty native seamen were still in the boat although now under it ‘as within a dish swimming with the bottome upwards and the keele in the zenith’.
‘It was thare as dark as in the earth’s centre.’ But amazingly a pocket of air had been trapped with them. By sitting on the thwarts in water up to their necks, twenty-four men and several sheep, gulping like goldfish, survived. ‘And in this condition we lived two hours.’ They prayed of course, they debated their chances of survival, and they thought much about Jonah in the whale. They also stripped off their clothes in case they should have to swim for it.
In fine [or to cut a long story short], the boate running ashore upon the sand, and whyles the water was still as high as our necks, with our feet we digged a pitt in the sand near the boate’s side, in doing whereof the current helped us; and then sinking down into the water and diveing, krept out under the side of the boate one by one.
They emerged to find themselves 180 paces from the shore. The water, though only waist deep, was running with such a ferocious undertow that sixteen of the survivors were immediately sucked out of their depths and drowned.
Captaine Lucas and I held each other by the armes and (naked) waded through the current, suckering each other in perilous stips; for if either had but lost his footing, the violent torrent was so great that we should neaver have rise more in this world.
At last being gott out of the water as naked as Adam, we had a mile and a halfe to run to the towne, with the hot sand scalding our feet, and the sun scorching over our heads, which caused all the skin of our bodies to peel off although we ran a pace; and the first Christian whom we met was a good Dutchman who lent me his hatt and his slippers.
