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August 6 - August 10, 2020
This harrying and scavenging off the earlier and richer Iberian empires that then controlled South and Central America was licensed by the Crown and was essentially a form of Elizabethan state-sanctioned organised crime controlled by the oligarchs of Whitehall and Charing Cross.
The Company’s potential investors knew that this group of mariners and adventurers, whatever their talents as freebooters, had to date shown little success in the more demanding skills of long-distance trade or in the art of planting and patiently sustaining viable colonies.
Even the two most experienced mariners and Eastern explorers in London, both of whom were present in the Founders’ Hall, had arrived back from their travels with little more than wonderful tales to show for their efforts, and with neither crews nor cargoes intact.
Ralph Fitch was the first. In 1583 he had set out from Falmouth on the Tyger. Sent to the East to buy spices by Auditor Smythe’s new Levant Company, Fitch had gone overland from the Levantine coast via Aleppo, but had only got as far as Hormuz before he was arrested as a spy by the Portuguese. From there he was sent in chains to Goa where they threatened to subject him to the strappado – the Inquisition’s answer to bungee jumping, where a man was dropped from a height attached to a rope.
On his return to London three years later, he regaled the city with his traveller’s tales and became such a celebrity that his ship was mentioned by Shakespeare in Macbeth: ‘her husband is to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger’. But while Fitch brought back many enticing details of the pepper trade, he had arrived home with no actual pepper.
Sir James Lancaster’s 1591 voyage into the Indian Ocean was the first English attempt to reach the East via the Cape. Both its funding, and its armed shipping, was provided by Auditor Smythe and his Levant Company. But in the event, only one of Lancaster’s four ships, the Edward Bonaventure, made it back from the Indies, and that on a skeleton crew.
On the way he had been stuck in the doldrums, ravaged by scurvy, lost three ships and seen almost all his fellow crew members speared to death by angry islanders.
In contrast to these ragged buccaneers, their more sophisticated Portuguese and Spanish rivals had been busy for over a century establishing profitable and cosmopolitan empires that ranged across the globe – empires whose massive imports of New World gold had turned Spain into the richest country in Europe, and given Portugal control of the seas and spices of the East, so bringing it in a close second place.
By August, following this ‘successe of the viage performed by the Dutche nation’, English merchants had begun discussing the possibilities of setting up a company to make similar voyages to buy spices not, as before, from Middle Eastern middlemen, who trebled the price as their commission, but instead direct from the producers, half the way around the world, in the East Indies.
The final straw was when the Dutch sent a delegation to London to try to buy up English shipping for further voyages eastwards. This was too much for the pride of Elizabethan London.
Fully one-quarter of the subscribers to the voyage, and seven of the original fifteen directors of the enterprise, were the Levant Company grandees. They feared, with reason, that the Dutch had ruined their existing investment in the spice trade, and they provided not only one-third of the subscription, but also many of the ships and the offices where the initial meetings took place.
For, unlike the Levant Company, which had a fixed board of fifty-three tightly knit subscribers, the EIC was from the very first conceived as a joint stock corporation, open to all investors. Smythe and his associates had decided that, because of the huge expenses and high risks involved, ‘a trade so far remote cannot be managed but by a joint and united stock’.
The idea of a joint stock company was one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations. The spark of the idea sprang from the flint of the medieval craft guilds, where merchants and manufacturers could pool their resources to undertake ventures none could afford to make individually. But the crucial difference in a joint stock company was that the latter could bring in passive investors who had the cash to subscribe to a project but were not themselves involved in the running of it.
the Muscovy Company, or to give it its full and glorious title, The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown.
Although the Muscovy Company directors soon came to the conclusion that the northern route did not exist, in the process of looking for it they discovered, and successfully traded along, a direct overland route with Persia via Russia.
But almost immediately orders came from the court of the Privy Council suspending both the formation of the Company and the preparations for the voyage. The peace negotiations with Spain which had followed the death of King Philip II in 1598 were progressing, and their lordships, ‘thinking it more beneficiall … to enterteyne a peace, than that the same should be hindered’ by a quarrel, made the decision that the adventurers should ‘proceade noe further in this matter for this yere’.
It was only when the Spanish peace talks foundered in the summer of 1600 that the Privy Council had a change of heart and felt confident enough to stress the universal freedom of the seas and the right of all nations to send ships wherever they wished.
This turned out to offer far wider powers than the petitioners had perhaps expected or even hoped for. As well as freedom from all customs duties for their first six voyages, it gave them a British monopoly for fifteen years over ‘trade to the East Indies’, a vaguely defined area that was soon taken to encompass all trade and traffic between the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan, as well as granting semi-sovereign privileges to rule territories and raise armies. The wording was sufficiently ambiguous to allow future generations of EIC officials to use it to claim jurisdiction over
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In the intervening year, the merchant adventurers had not been idle. They had been to Deptford to ‘view severall shippes’, one of which, the May Flowre, was later famous for a voyage heading in the opposite direction.
Given that time was of the essence, a barrel of beer a day was authorised ‘for the better holding together of the workemen from running from ther worke to drinke’.
only two months after the formal granting of their charter, on 13 February 1601, the refitted Red Dragon slipped its Woolwich moorings and glided through the cold February Thames fog, followed closely by its three smaller escorts, the Hector, the Susan and the Ascension.
The voyage got off to an almost comically bad start. As they were leaving the Thames estuary, the wind dropped and for two months the fleet stood humiliatingly becalmed in the Channel, within sight of Dover.
Wishing to indicate to the waiting tribesmen that he wanted to buy meat, Lancaster, showing a linguistic aptitude that would come to distinguish English imperialism, ‘spake to them in cattel’s language … moath [‘moo’] for kine and oxen, and baah for sheep’.
This time Lancaster had brought back all four of his vessels, intact and fully loaded. He was carrying no less than 900 tons of pepper, cinnamon and cloves, much of it taken from the Portuguese carrack, which along with more spices bought in Acheh made the voyage an impressive 300 per cent profit.
this was small fry compared with what the Dutch were already achieving on the other side of the Channel. For in March 1602, while Lancaster was still in the Moluccas, the different Dutch East India Companies had all agreed to amalgamate and the Dutch East India Company, the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), had received its state monopoly to trade with the East. When the Amsterdam accountants had totted up all the subscriptions, it was found that the VOC had raised almost ten times the capital base of the English EIC, and was immediately in a position to offer investors a 3,600 per cent
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For all the initial excitement at the Founders’ Hall, the merchants had raised only a relatively paltry £68,373 capital, as opposed to the Dutch who had by then pulled together a magnificent £550,000* for their rival venture.
The result of this inadequate funding was a small company with small fleets, and no permanent capital of its own, merely individual subscriptions for individual voyages.
the offer of ten shillings for a plot of 100 fertile acres in Virginia was a far more attractive option than £120** for ten volatile shares in East India stock.
Many more voyages set off throughout the early seventeenth century, mostly generating modest profits, but from the first the EIC was unable to prevail against better armed, better financed and more skilfully sailed fleets of Dutch East Indiamen.
In 1623, the English factory (trading station) at Amboina in the Moluccas was attacked by the Dutch VOC troops and ten Englishmen were tortured and killed. This opened several decades of conflict between England and Holland in which, despite occasional successes, the English consistently came off worse.
At one point a Dutch fleet even sailed up the Thames and attacked Sheerness, destroying the ships in Chatham and Rochester dockyards.
After several more bruising encounters, the EIC directors decided they had little option but to leave the lucrative Spice Islands and their aromatic spice trade to the Dutch and focus instead on less competitive but potentially more promising sectors of the trade of Asia: fine cotton textiles, indigo and chintzes. The source of all three of these luxuries was India.
India then had a population of 150 million – about a fifth of the world’s total – and was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing;
in many ways it was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the world’s leader in manufactured textiles. Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving – chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffetas – of Indian origin.
the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’ due to Indian cloth imports.
Between 1586 and 1605, European silver flowed into the Mughal heartland at the astonishing rate of 18 metric tons a year, for as William Hawkins observed, ‘all nations bring coyne and carry away commodities for the same’.
the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since.
By the early seventeenth century, Europeans had become used to easy military victories over the other peoples of the world.
On one island alone, Lontor, 800 inhabitants were enslaved and forcibly deported to work on new Dutch spice plantations in Java; forty-seven chiefs were tortured and executed.
When, in 1632, the Emperor discovered that the Portuguese had been building unauthorised fortifications and ‘dwellings of the utmost splendour and strength’ in Hughli in Bengal, as well as flouting Mughal rules by making forced conversions to Christianity, he commanded that the Portuguese settlement should be attacked and the Portuguese expelled. The city fell to the Mughal armies within days and the attempts of the inhabitants to escape down the Ganges were thwarted by a boom ingeniously thrown across the river.
It took Hawkins a year to reach Agra, which he managed to do dressed as an Afghan nobleman. Here he was briefly entertained by the Emperor, with whom he conversed in Turkish, before Jahangir lost interest in the semi-educated sea dog and sent him back home with the gift of an Armenian Christian wife.
In 1615 Roe finally arrived in Ajmer, bringing presents of ‘hunting dogges’ – English mastiffs and Irish greyhounds – an English state coach, some Mannerist paintings, an English virginal and many crates of red wine for which he had heard Jahangir had a fondness; but Roe nevertheless had a series of difficult interviews with the Emperor.
Jahangir was, after all, an enormously sensitive, curious and intelligent man: observant of the world around him and a keen collector of its curiosities, from Venetian swords and globes to Safavid silks, jade pebbles and even narwhal teeth.
Roe would try to steer the talk towards commerce and diplomacy and the firmans (imperial orders) he wanted confirming ‘his favour for an English factory’ at Surat and ‘to establish a firm and secure Trade and residence for my countrymen’ in ‘constant love and pease’; but Jahangir would assure him such workaday matters could wait, and instead counter with questions about the distant, foggy island Roe came from, the strange things that went on there and the art which it produced.
Roe could on occasion be dismissively critical of Mughal rule – ‘religions infinite, laws none’ – but he was, despite himself, thoroughly dazzled.
Jahangir made a point of demonstrating to Roe that his artists could copy it so well that Roe could not tell copy from original. The English state coach was also admired, but Jahangir had the slightly tatty Tudor interior trim immediately upgraded with Mughal cloth of gold and then again showed off the skills of the Mughal kar-khana by having the entire coach perfectly copied, in little over a week, so his beloved Empress, Nur Jahan, could have a coach of her own.
When Roe eventually returned to England, after three weary years at court, he had obtained permission from Jahangir to build a factory (trading station) in Surat, an agreement ‘for our reception and continuation in his domynyons’ and a couple of imperial firmans, limited in scope and content, but useful to flash at obstructive Mughal officials.
As for James I, in his jewelled and egret-plumed hat and silver-white Jacobean doublet, he is relegated to the bottom left corner of the frame, below Jahangir’s feet and only just above Bichitr’s own self-portrait.
For all the reams written by Roe on Jahangir, the latter did not bother to mention Roe once in his voluminous diaries. These awkward, artless northern traders and supplicants would have to wait a century more before the Mughals deigned to take any real interest in them.
Over the next 200 years it would slowly learn to operate skilfully within the Mughal system and to do so in the Mughal idiom, with its officials learning good Persian, the correct court etiquette, the art of bribing the right officials and, in time, outmanoeuvring all their rivals – Portuguese, Dutch and French – for imperial favour.
