The Honourable Company John Keay For Alexander and Anna Table of Contents Cover Page Title Page Preface PART ONE A QUIET TRADE 1600-1640 CHAPTER ONE Islands of Spicerie CHAPTER TWO This Frothy Nation CHAPTER THREE Pleasant and Fruitfull Lands CHAPTER FOUR Jarres and Brabbles CHAPTER FIVE The Keye of All India PART TWO FLUCTUATING FORTUNES 1640-1710 CHAPTER SIX These Frowning Times CHAPTER SEVEN A Seat of Power and Trade CHAPTER EIGHT Fierce Engageings CHAPTER NINE Renegades and Rivals CHAPTER TEN Eastern Approaches PART THREE A TERRITORIAL POWER 1710-1760 CHAPTER ELEVEN The Dark Age CHAPTER TWELVE Outposts of Effrontery CHAPTER THIRTEEN One Man’s Pirate CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Germ of an Army CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Famous Two Hundred Days PART FOUR A PARTING OF THE WAYS 1760-1820 CHAPTER SIXTEEN Looking Eastward to the Sea CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Transfer of Power CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Too Loyal, Too Faithful CHAPTER NINETEEN Tea Trade Versus Free Trade CHAPTER TWENTY Epilogue Bibliography Index Acknowledgement and Author’s Note About the Author Praise By the same author Copyright About the Publisher Preface A hundred years ago the high-minded rulers of British India regarded merchants as a lesser breed in the hierarchy of imperial pedigree To ‘gentlemen in trade’, as to servants, ladies, natives, dogs, the brass-studded doors of Bombay’s and Calcutta’s more exclusive clubs were closed Like social climbers raising the ladder behind them, the paragons of the Raj preferred to forget that but for the ‘gentlemen in trade’ of the East India Company there would have been no British India The Honourable Company was remembered, if at all, only as an anomalous administrative service; and that was indeed what it had become in the early nineteenth century But before that, for all of 200 years, its endeavours were seen as having been primarily commercial, often inglorious, and almost never ‘honourable’ Venal and disreputable, its servants were believed to have betrayed their race by begetting a half-caste tribe of AngloIndians, and their nation by corrupt government and extortionate trade From those 200 years just a few carefully selected incidents and personalities sufficed by way of introduction to the subsequent 150 years of glorious British dominion Occasionally greater attention might be paid to the Company’s last decades as an all-conquering force in Indian politics, but still the perspective remained the same: the Company was seen purely as the forerunner to the Raj Closer acquaintance reveals a different story The career of ‘the Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’ spans as much geography as it does history To follow its multifarious activities involves imposing a chronology extending from the reign of Elizabeth to that of Victoria upon a map extending from southern Africa to north-west America Heavy are the demands this makes on both writer and reader (And hence perhaps the dearth of narrative histories of the Company in this post-imperial age.) But the conclusion is inescapable The East India Company was as much about the East as about India Its Pacific legacies would be as lasting as those in the Indian Ocean; its most successful commercial venture was in China, not India Freed of its subservient function as the unworthy stock on which the mighty Raj would be grafted, the Company stands forth as a robust association of adventurers engaged in hazarding all in a series of preposterous gambles Some paid off; many did not but are no less memorable for it Bizarre locations, exotic produce, and recalcitrant personalities combine to induce a sense of romance which, however repugnant to the scholar, is in no way contrived It was thanks to the incorrigible pioneering of the Company’s servants that the British Empire acquired its peculiarly diffuse character But for the Company there would have been not only no British India but also no global British Empire PART ONE A QUIET TRADE 1600-1640 CHAPTER ONE Islands of Spicerie THE VOYAGES OF JAMES LANCASTER Every overseas empire had to begin somewhere A flag had to be raised, territory claimed, and settlement attempted In the dimly perceived conduct of a small band of bedraggled pioneers, stiff with scurvy and with sand in their hose, it may be difficult to determine to what extent these various criteria were met There might, for instance, be a case for locating the genesis of the British Empire in the West Indies, Virginia, or New England But there is a less obvious and much stronger candidate The seed from which grew the most extensive empire the world has ever seen was sown on Pulo Run in the Banda Islands at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago As the island of Runnymede is to British constitutional history, so the island of Run is to British imperial history How in 1603 Run’s first English visitors ever lit upon such an absurdly remote destination is cause for wonder To locate the island a map of no ordinary dimensions is needed For to show Pulo Run at anything like scale and also include, say, Darwin and Jakarta means pasting together a sheet of room size – and still Run is just an elongated speck On the ground it measures two miles by half a mile, takes an hour to walk round and a day for a really exhaustive exploration This reveals a modest population, no buildings of note, and no source of fresh water There are, though, a lot of trees amongst which the botanist will recognize Myristica fragrans Dark of foliage, willow-size, and carefully tended, it is more commonly known as the nutmeg tree For the nutmegs (i.e the kernels inside the stones of the tree’s peachlike fruit) and for the mace (the membrane which surrounds the stone) those first visitors in 1603 would willingly have sailed round the world several times Nowhere else on the globe did the trees flourish and so nowhere else was their fruit so cheap In the minuscule Banda Islands of Run, Ai, Lonthor and Neira ten pounds of nutmeg cost less than half a penny and ten pounds of mace less than five pence Yet in Europe the same quantities could be sold for respectively £1.60 and £16, a tidy appreciation of approximately 32,000 per cent Not without pride would James I come to be styled ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway [Pulo Ai] and Puloroon [Pulo Run]’ The last named, thought one of its visitors, could be as valuable to His Majesty as Scotland True, the island never quite lived up to expectations Indeed it would become a fraught and expensive liability But as it happened, the importance of Run for the East India Company and so for the British Empire lay not in its scented groves of nutmeg but in one particular nutmeg seedling A peculiarity of the Banda islands at the beginning of the seventeenth century was that thanks to their isolation they owed allegiance to no one Moreover, the Bandanese recognized no supreme sultan of their own Instead authority rested with village councils presided over by orang kaya or headmen In the best tradition of south-east Asian adat (consensus), each village or island was in fact a self-governing and fairly democratic republic They could withhold or dispose of their sovereignty as they saw fit; and whereas the inhabitants of neighbouring Neira and Lonthor had already been bullied into accepting a large measure of Dutch control, those of outlying Ai and Run had managed to preserve their independence intact By 1616 Run and Ai valued their contacts with the English and, when menaced by the Dutch, voted to pledge their allegiance to the men who flew the cross of St George They did this by swearing an oath and by presenting their new suzerains with a nutmeg seedling rooted in a ball of Run’s yellowish soil As well as the symbolism, it was an act of profound trust Seedlings were closely guarded, and destroyed rather than surrendered Who knew what effect the naturalization elsewhere of a misappropriated seedling might have on the Bandanese monopoly? The recipients of this gratifying presentation were, like all the other doubleted Englishmen who had so far reached Run, employees of the East India Company But therein lay a problem For in this, its infancy, the Company was not empowered to hold overseas territories Its royal charter made no mention of them, only of trading rights and maritime conduct It was therefore on behalf of the Crown that Run’s allegiance had to be accepted And when, after an epic blockade of the island lasting four years, the Company would eventually decide that it had had enough of Run, it was in fact the British sovereign who stood out in favour of his exotic windfall and Sierra Leone, 74 Sikkim, 424 Silk trade, 52, 61, 102-3, 104, 127, 149, 151, 197, 212 Sind, 101, 103, 108 Singapore, 211, 333, 355, 361, 448-9, 453-4 Singhora, 199, 203 Siraj-ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal, 300-19, 322, 395 Sivaji, 142, 257 Skottowe, Captain, 352 Smith, Adam, 451 Smith, Bombardier, 277, 279 Smith, George, 420 Smythe, Alderman Sir Thomas, 26, 27-8, 60, 90, 111, 114 Snook, Lieutenant, 442 Socotra, 75, 82, 88 Southby, Captain, 337, 338 Spain, 6-8, 13, 344-7, 435 Spanish Armada, 11, 96 Spanish Succession, War of, 274 Speedwell, 211 Spencer, John, 372-3 Spice Islands, 13, 33-4, 50, 53, 354, 357; see also Moluccas, Bandas etc Spice trade, 5-8, 10, 13, 47, 49-50, 53, 74, 84 Sri Lanka, 13, 276 Srirangam, 290, 292 Srirangapatnam, 412, 414 Stackhouse, John, 236-7 Strahan, Seaman, 307-8 Strange, James, 432-3, 434 Stuart, General James, 417-18, 420 Success, 259, 351, 353 Suffren, Admiral de, 414, 416 Sulawesi (Celebes), 36 Sulivan, Lawrence, 345, 366-9, 371-3, 379-81, 387-8, 390, 396, 399 Sulu Sea, 354-6, 444 Sumatra, 13, 16, 20, 173, 211, 246-51; 447; see also Aceh, Benkulen etc Sumbawa, 354 Sun, 123 Sunda Straits, 20, 447 Supreme Court of Justice, Calcutta, 385-6, 388 Surat, 73-80, 85-7, 94, 97-8, 100, 111, 115-18, 126, 132, 134, 138, 141-4, 176, 184, 186-8, 189-92, 212, 228, 402 Surat, 211 Surat, Treaty of, 403, 405 Surman, John, 225-9, 231, 312 Susan, 15, 18, 20, 29, 32 Sutanati, 156, 158, 160, 165; see also Calcutta Sutherland, Dame Lucy, 368, 381, 385, 389 Suvarnadrug, 264, 265-7 Swalley Hole, 86-7, 94, 96, 116, 117, 184, 188 Swan, 43-4 Syriam, 333, 334, 335, 338 Ta’iz, 83 Tanjore (Thanjavur), 287-8, 340, 409-10 Tapti River, 76, 77, 86, 95, 117 Tartar, 357 Tashilunpo, 423, 424 Tatta, 108 Tanfiqui, 117-18 Taylor, John, 107 Tea trade, 348-50, 358, 380, 384, 386, 391, 430, 451-2, 454-6 Tecu, 46 Tellicherry, 251, 253, 254, 284, 344 Ternate, 10, 33-4, 36, 47, 443 Terrible Bomb, 260 Thailand, see Siam Thana Fort, 403 Thomas, 64 Throgmorton, Kellum, 45 Tibet, 423-5 Tidore, 33-4, 36 Tientsin (Tianjin) River, 351 Tiger, 313-14 Timor, 357, 441, 443 Tipu Sultan of Mysore, 411, 412, 416-17 Tokyo, see Yedo Tongking, 197, 425, 427-8 Tourane (Da Nang), 354, 425-6, 429, 430, 439 Towerson, Gabriel, 30-2, 36, 41, 48-50, 53, 89, 90, 126 Trades Increase, 41-2, 55, 81-9 Tranquebar, 276 Trichy, 289-90, 339, 340 Trinconomalee, 266, 343, 414, 442 Trivandrum, 251 Trivitore (Tiruvottiyur), 241-3, 290 Trully, Robert, 96 Tucker, Thomas, 79 Tulaji, Angrey, 265-9 Turner, Captain Samuel, 424 Ulubari, 158 Union, 211 Union, Instrument of, 212, 213 United East India Company, see Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie Utrecht, Treaty of, 237-8 Vancouver Island, 432, 433-4 Vansittart, Henry, 369-72, 381-2 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, 31-2, 37-8, 40-1, 42-51, 60, 62-4, 94, 131, 141, 187, 195, 197-8, 440-4, 448-9 Victoria, 337 Vietnam, see Cochin China, Annam, Tongking Voyages: Lancaster’s 1st, 11-12 Company’s 1st, 14-23, 24, 28 Company’s 2nd, 28-34 Company’s 3rd, 36-7, 39, 73-7 Company’s 5th, 37-9 Company’s 6th, 41, 81-9 Company’s 7th, 61-4 Company’s 8th, 54-60, 88-9 Company’s 10th, 91 Company’s 12th, 94-8 Wadia Lowji, 266 Waite, Sir Nicholas, 183-4, 188-92, 196, 212-13 Walsh, John, 375 Wandiwash, Battle of, 343 Ward, Ned, 219 Wargaum (Wadgaon) Convention, 406, 407, 413 Watson, Admiral Charles, 266-70, 293-5, 297, 305-17, 319-20 Watts, William, 299, 300, 306, 312, 315, 320 Weddell, John, 104-7, 121-4, 205, 251 Welden, Richard, 50 Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, 400, 414, 445, 447 Wellesley, Richard, Lord Mornington, 444, 445 Weltden, Captain Anthony, 202-4, 223, 334 Westminster, Peace of, 126 Whampoa, 208, 348, 455 White, George, 200, 201, 202, 203 White, Samuel, 200-3, 223, 334 Whitehall, Treaty of, 131 Wilkins, Charles, 422 William III, King, 178, 181, 190 Wilson, C R., 220 Wilson, Captain William, 353 Winter, Sir Edward, 196 Witherington, Captain, 301, 302 Woodruff, Philip, 397-8 Woollen trade, (broadcloth, tweed etc.) 52, 53, 58-9, 74, 81, 98, 358-9, 423, 438 Yale, Elihu, 164, 165, 199-200, 202, 203, 205, 208 Yale, Thomas, 199-200, 205-7 Yedo, 57-8, 64 Yemen, 81-5, 88-9 Yule, Sir Henry, 161 Zanzibar, 12, 75, 443 Ziau-ud-Din, 222-3, 226-7, 244 Zwaarte Leeuw, 45, 64 Acknowledgement and Author’s Note It would take more than one lifetime to compile a history of the East India Company from its voluminous records I have referred to them only occasionally Books like this necessarily depend on other books But wherever possible I have based the narrative on reprints, selections, extracts and calendars of the original records Happily the Company has been well served in this respect My main debt is therefore to those scholars and archivists, mostly long deceased, who laboured to elucidate different aspects of the Company’s history by reproducing, abbreviating, or summarizing original materials Their names will be found amongst the authors listed in the bibliography I should, however, like to single out the works of Sir William Foster, Sir George Forrest, Sir Henry Yule, Sir William Hunter, Dr J Long, Dr C R Wilson, Professor H H Dodwell, Colonel H D Love, and Dr S C Hill It is customary to offer some explanation for adopting a particular system of rendering foreign words into English Since no system informs my choice of spellings I must pass on this Familiarity and common usage have prevailed over consistency The same goes for proper names In the case of place names I have tried to use those designations or spellings in use now, giving the contemporary version in brackets But this does not always work Sometimes the current names seem less appropriate than those of 200 years ago Thus I have stuck with Gombroon rather than have to choose between Bandar Abbas and Bandar Khomeini; with Macassar, which looks like making a comeback, rather than Ujung Pandang; and with Trichy and Tanjore because their currency seems to have survived the polysyllabic reformation of south Indian names There are many other such inconsistencies for which I accept full responsibility The five years spent on this book have been a gross indulgence I thank Carol O’Brien at HarperCollins for raising no objection to its being twice the proposed length and taking twice the allotted time Being so long busy about the Company could also have placed a strain on personal relationships Yet Julia has never baulked at having a hardback rodent for a husband and has in fact encouraged his ferreting with insight, good cheer, and love My debt to her defies acknowledgement About the Author JOHN KEAY was educated at Ampleforth College, York and Magdalen College, Oxford As an author and broadcaster specialising in Asian history and current affairs, he has been treading the trail of the East India Company since the 1960s His other books include Into India, When Men and Mountains Meet, Eccentric Travellers, Explorers Extraordinary, India Discovered, India: A History and The Great Arc Married with four children, he lives in the Scottish Highlands with his wife Julia They are the joint editors of the Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author Praise From the reviews of The Honourable Company: ‘What a marvellous story is that of the East India Company!…And John Keay tells it well, humanely and spicily, as well as all we need about organisation, background, etc…Mr Keay gives us the spectrum, the trade with China and Japan, the Arabian Gulf, the East Indies, India, the lot.’ A L ROWSE, Contemporary Review ‘Splendid, tumultuous narrative history…The sotry is so colourful, at least in its early stages, that it can be read as a bumper book of Indian adventure.’ ANTHONY QUINTON, The Times ‘A tale worth retelling in detail, when it is done with as much as flair and imagination as this.’ GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE, Guardian ‘A gem of a book on a vast and complex adventure of British trading, maritime and colonial history…highly recommended not only for scholars but to all those interested in an important segment of British and human history.’ Catholic Herald ‘Full of delicious anecdotes…fascinating reading.’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, The Spectator By the same author INTO INDIA WHEN MEN AND MOUNTAINS MEET THE GILGIT GAME ECCENTRIC TRAVELLERS EXPLORERS EXTRAORDINARY HIGHLAND DROVE THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY’S HISTORY OF WORLD EXPLORATION INDIA DISCOVERED THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF SCOTLAND (WITH JULIA KEAY) INDONESIA: FROM SABANG TO MERAUKE LAST POST: EMPIRE’S END INDIA: A HISTORY THE GREAT ARC Copyright HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk This paperback edition 1993 FIRST EDITION First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1991 Copyright © John Keay 1991 John Keay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and 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United Kingdom HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 77-85 Fulham Palace Road London, W6 8JB, UK http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk United States HarperCollins Publishers Inc 10 East 53rd Street New York, NY 10022 http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com Table of Contents Cover Page Title Page Preface PART ONE A QUIET TRADE 1600-1640 CHAPTER ONE Islands of Spicerie CHAPTER TWO This Frothy Nation CHAPTER THREE Pleasant and Fruitfull Lands CHAPTER FOUR Jarres and Brabbles CHAPTER FIVE The Keye of All India PART TWO FLUCTUATING FORTUNES 1640-1710 CHAPTER SIX These Frowning Times CHAPTER SEVEN A Seat of Power and Trade CHAPTER EIGHT Fierce Engageings CHAPTER NINE Renegades and Rivals CHAPTER TEN Eastern Approaches PART THREE A TERRITORIAL POWER 1710-1760 CHAPTER ELEVEN The Dark Age CHAPTER TWELVE Outposts of Effrontery CHAPTER THIRTEEN One Man’s Pirate CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Germ of an Army CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Famous Two Hundred Days PART FOUR A PARTING OF THE WAYS 1760-1820 CHAPTER SIXTEEN Looking Eastward to the Sea CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Transfer of Power CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Too Loyal, Too Faithful CHAPTER NINETEEN Tea Trade Versus Free Trade CHAPTER TWENTY Epilogue Bibliography Index Acknowledgement and Author’s Note About the Author Praise By the same author Copyright About the Publisher ... lands lay in the way Hence the search for the Spice Islands threw up the discovery of America, of the Pacific archipelagos, of sub-Saharan Africa, and of the Indian and southeast Asian coastlines... somewhere as important as Sri Lanka, although always the main producer of cinnamon bark, did not qualify and neither did the main pepper-producing areas of Sumatra and of India s Malabar coast The real... post-imperial age.) But the conclusion is inescapable The East India Company was as much about the East as about India Its Pacific legacies would be as lasting as those in the Indian Ocean; its