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Wherever English shipping called, the argument for free trade would be vigorously rehearsed. It was quite simple. In His ‘infinite and unsearchable wisdom’, according to the text of Queen Elizabeth’s standard letter of introduction to eastern princes, God had so ordained matters that no nation was self-sufficient and that ‘out of the abundance of ffruit which some region[s] enjoyeth, the necessitie or wante of others should be supplied’. Thus ‘severall and ffar remote countries’ should have ‘traffique’ with one another and ‘by their interchange of commodities’ should become friends. ‘The Spaniard and the Portingal’, on the other hand, prohibited multilateral exchange and insisted on exclusive trading rights. Such rights, if granted, would be interpreted as tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty. Any prince, warned the Queen’s letter – she could not be more precise because these letters were unaddressed and it was up to whoever delivered them to fill in the name of the local potentate – any prince who traded with only one European nation must expect a degree of political subordination to that nation.
The first prince to receive one of these unconventional and unsolicited royal circulars was most impressed; the sentiments could have been his own. Ala-uddin Shah was Sultan of Aceh, an important city-state on the north-western tip of Sumatra; the date was June 1602; and the bearer of the letter was James Lancaster, commander of the East India Company’s first fleet.
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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.
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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.
In the event the pinnace assigned to the Moluccas was back in Bantam after two months, supposedly defeated by adverse winds. But if it had failed to reach the clove-producing islands of Ternate and Tidore, it is clear from the report of the Dutch admiral at Banda Neira that in March 1603 it had somehow found its way to Pulo Run in the nutmeg-scented Bandas. The English had lost the spice race – but only just and not irrevocably. John Middleton, Lancaster’s second in command, would have been the obvious man to have taken up the challenge of finding more places like Pulo Run where neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese had established monopolies. But he now died, the first of many to succumb to Bantam’s lethal combination of enteric amoebae and malarial mosquitoes. Instead it would be his two brothers, Henry and David, who would open up the Moluccas. Both were now serving under Lancaster; and both would eventually join brother John in an eastern grave.
On 20 February 1603, with another ‘great peale of ordnance’, the fleet at last ‘set sayle to the sea toward England’. Steering straight across the Indian Ocean they crossed the Tropic of Capricorn in mid-March and were off the coast of southern Africa by the end of April. There a storm whipped up such seas ‘that in the reason of man no ship was able to live in them’. Somehow they survived, but on 3 May came ‘another very sore storme’ which so buffeted the Red Dragon that it caused its rudder to shear off. The rudder sank without trace and there was no replacement.
This struck a present fear into the hearts of all men so that the best of us and most experienced knew not what to do. And specially, seeing ourselves in such a tempestuous sea and so stormy a place so that I think there be few worse in all the world. Now our ship drove up and down in the sea like a wreck so that sometimes we were within three or four leagues of the Cape Buena Esperanza [Good Hope], then cometh a contrary wind and drove us almost to forty degrees to the southwards into the hail and snow and sleetie cold weather. And this was another great misery to us that pinched exceeding sore so that our case was miserable and very desperate.
All this time the Hector kept company with the Red Dragon, standing by to take off survivors when it became necessary. A lull in the storms prompted an attempt to improvise a new rudder by using the mizzen mast as a sweep. It failed and the weather again worsened. This time the men were all for abandoning ship. But their commander stood firm and to quell any further ideas of desertion, sent orders to the Hector to leave them immediately and head for England. He also enclosed a note to his employers advising them of his situation and prospects. He would try, he said, to save his ship. He thought there was a good chance and that was why he was risking his life and the lives of his crew. ‘But I cannot tell where you should look for me if you send out any pinnace to meete me.’ Rudderless and undermanned, he might end up anywhere. ‘I live’, he explained, ‘at the devotion of the wind and seas.’
Next day the Hector was seen to be still keeping her station a couple of miles away and carrying little sail. Observing this flagrant disregard of orders Lancaster was clearly moved. ‘These men regard no commission’, he muttered in a celebrated aside which, like his ‘devotion to the wind and seas’, would be remembered long after names and dates and places were forgotten. Of such sentiments myths are made and to an enterprise as ambitious and enduring as the East India Company myths would matter.
With the help of the Hector’s crew a second attempt was made to rig a makeshift rudder. This time it held; so did the weather. On 16 June, after nearly four months out of sight of land, the two ships approached St Helena ‘at the sight whereof there was no small rejoicing among us’. Three weeks of resting, refitting, and replenishing their provisions with the island’s then plentiful stocks of wild goat were followed by an uneventful voyage back to England. They anchored in the Downs on 11 September 1603 ‘for which thanked be Almightie God who hath delivered us from infinite perils and dangers in this long and tedious navigation’.
CHAPTER TWO This Frothy Nation (#ulink_02f5ddaa-2015-57c8-8072-2a820d0d795b)
THE SPICE RACE
So Lancaster’s fleet had reached the East Indies and returned without losing a single ship. It was no small achievement. Valuable experience of the eastern seas had been acquired and something had been learnt of the complexities and potential of the eastern carrying trade. More tangibly a factory with adequate trading capital had been left at Bantam while in London nearly 500 tons of peppercorns were soon being laboriously transferred from the Red Dragon to the Company’s warehouse. A handsome profit was expected and the Company’s future looked promising. Lancaster had earned the nation’s gratitude. James I, who had succeeded Elizabeth earlier in the year, rose to the occasion by rewarding him with a knighthood.
But though a success, the Company’s first voyage had been no sensation. For one thing it had failed to make direct contact with the clove islands, thus giving the Dutch two more crucial years in which to make good their claim to succeed to the Portuguese monopoly. Then there was the question of economics. Already there were those who failed to see how exchanging precious bullion for an inessential condiment like pepper could possibly be in the national interest; they likened the Company to the gullible native of Central America who supposedly congratulated himself on acquiring pretty beads and funny toys in exchange for boring old gold and silver; their numbers would swell with every voyage. But to a benign commander like Lancaster it was the loss of 182 men, two-fifths of his entire following, that rankled. Here was a less equivocal drain on the nation’s resources and one which even lemon juice had failed to staunch.
In the hard-nosed estimation of his fellow directors an even greater source of anxiety was the unfortunate effect that discharging a million pounds of pepper was having on the London market. A dip in prices was anticipated, but it so happened that in late 1603 the King too had come by a large stock of pepper, probably the contents of a captured carrack. His Majesty, as always, had a pressing need for cash and consequently placed an embargo on the Company’s sales until his own stocks had been sold. Naturally the directors protested. A dividend was immediately declared in kind – that is, pepper – and the London market was soon awash with the stuff. Prices halved. Some underwriters would complain that they were still burdened with stocks from the first voyage ‘six or seven years after’.
Had the Company been the brave new venture in joint-stock ownership which it later became, this would not greatly have mattered. After all, the whole point of a company operating on a stock jointly subscribed by its members is that this working capital should be long term, transcending individual ventures and so less vulnerable to the hiccups of the market. But in fact the 218 petitioners who in 1600 had become the Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies had subscribed for only one voyage. The majority now wanted their money back; they were not amused when instead they were told that for every £250 they had subscribed, £200 must be reinvested in a second voyage.
From the start the Company’s stock had appealed to two very different types of investor. On the one hand there was the shareholder interested primarily in a quick and substantial return on his investment. He might be anything from a tradesman to a courtier and, as the Company grew, he might entertain ulterior expectations of influence and patronage within it; but he had no obvious interest in the specifics of its trade. On the other hand there were those who perceived some collateral advantage in the trade itself. This group consisted of wealthy and influential City merchants with extensive commercial and financial interests outside the Company. Such interests might coincide with the Company’s upstream requirements, like the supply of bullion and broadcloth for export, of ships and provisions, of sources of finance, or with its downstream requirements like the sale, re-export and distribution of eastern produce.
At the risk of further over-simplification, these two types of investor may be roughly identified with the Company’s two institutional bodies, the General Court (later the Court of Proprietors) and the Court of Committees. The General Court comprised all those with voting rights, the qualification for which in the early seventeenth century was a minimum holding of, usually, £200. It therefore represented the generality of investors amongst whom those interested primarily in profits and dividends predominated. It was also, of course, the supreme authority within the Company. But, several hundred strong, it necessarily met infrequently and had little to do with the day-to-day running of the business.
Under the terms of the original charter this was left to the Court of Committees consisting of the Governor, Deputy-Governor and twenty-four ‘committees’, or directors, all of whom were elected by the General Court. The Court of Committees was the Company’s executive, making policy decisions which had to be ratified by the General Court as well as directing all operations. For specific and recurrent functions like purchasing bullion, timber, provisions, etc., handling correspondence with overseas factors, and managing the Company’s sales it divided into a host of influential sub-committees. Both these and the Court of Committees met frequently. Naturally their work demanded managerial and commercial experience, and so naturally the ‘committees’ were predominantly City merchants.
Such men were usually senior members of one of the City’s livery companies and leading figures in some line of business that was relevant to the Company’s. Thus Alderman Sir Thomas Smythe, the Company’s first governor, was also involved in the Levant Company, previously the main importer of Eastern produce, in the Muscovy Company and in settlement projects in North America. On and off he held the governorship until 1621. Three years later Sir Morris Abbot, also of the Levant Company and also a founder member of the East India Company, succeeded. Abbot, originally of the Mercers’ Company, operated a large export business in cloth, indigo and spices. Retiring in 1638 to become Lord Mayor of London, he was succeeded first by Sir Christopher Clitherow and then by Sir Henry Garraway, both leading City merchants and both themselves ex-Lord Mayors. Other directors had financial interests in Europe’s capitals whence the supply of rials for export must be obtained and whither the Company was now looking to re-export its Eastern imports. In other words these City interests saw English participation in Eastern trade in an international context and attached more importance to its ramifications in terms of borrowing, shipping and commercial requirements than they did to the profit or loss on a single cargo. They took a longer view of the Company’s prospects and a broader view of its role in the national economy.
The potential for conflict between the Company’s management and the majority of its shareholders stemmed also from a flaw in its structure. The organization of the Company is usually characterized as a half way stage in the evolution of the medieval guild into today’s public limited company. It is also regarded as the most sophisticated example of an Elizabethan chartered company; and certainly it was significantly different from most of its Tudor predecessors. An organization such as the Levant Company was more like a regulatory body, licensing and governing the commercial activities of its members who formed individual syndicates to raise capital and trade on their own account. The Levant Company was not itself an operational concern and in this respect resembled the guilds of old.
In contrast the East India Company was both regulatory body and sole operator. In recognition of the national importance that attached to its activities and of their long term, high risk nature which must involve considerable overheads – shipping, factories – it was accepted that the Company, and the Company alone, must itself conduct all business. From this it followed that raising capital must also be on a corporate basis. And thus, as the directors put it, ‘the trade of the Indias being so far remote from hence [it] cannot be traded but in a joint and united stock.’ Theoretically this opened the Company’s membership to any who were willing to subscribe and indeed, initially, subscription was the commonest avenue of induction into the Company. This remained the case during the boom years of 1610-20 and the bust years of mid century. But later it would work the other way. Come the Restoration, when profits became more dependable and stock less terminable, the privilege of subscribing to new stock was effectively restricted to existing shareholders.
Perhaps the most significant point about the Company’s organization is not where it stood in the evolutionary chain of commercial institutions but the extent to which this organization itself evolved. For though indeed a self-declared joint stock company, it began operations more like a regulated company. One third of those who first petitioned for a charter were, like Sir Thomas Smythe, members of the regulated Levant Company. They included its treasurer, its governor, and two of its founders. Initially the two organizations shared the same secretary and even used the same correspondence book. The Court of Committees and its numerous sub-groups met in Sir Thomas Smythe’s house, which doubled as the Company’s headquarters until Smythe’s retirement in 1621. Even by then the Company’s permanent London staff consisted only of the secretary, a beadle, a book-keeper-cum-accountant, a cashier, a solicitor and a ‘ship’s husband’ (who organized the provisioning, loading and unloading of fleets). Almost an offshoot of the Levant Company then, the East India Company was expected to operate with the minimal staff and informal arrangements typical of a regulatory body.
Consistent with such traditional thinking the Company had begun life with no fixed capital, the idea being simply to raise a separate stock for each voyage; hence the expectation by investors in the First Voyage of a speedy pay-out. Since a willingness to invest in further voyages depended on the success of previous ones, this ad hoc system bred uncertainty and delay; and because in uncertain times new subscriptions were often hard to realize, it also put an additional strain on relations between the directors and the majority of shareholders.
The normal procedure for raising a new subscription began with the Court of Committees recommending a new voyage to the General Court. If the idea was approved, a target figure was set and a subscription book was opened. It was first taken round by the Company’s beadle; then, assuming the target figure was not already reached, it was taken up by the Committees who privately urged its merits on those susceptible to pressure. Such arm-twisting usually proved effective, but there was still the problem of actually collecting the subscribed sums. They were called in by instalments as and when expenditure was required. But late payment frequently necessitated heavy borrowing, and non-payment obliged the Committees to petition the Privy Council for injunctions against the defaulters.
Prosperous times would, of course, make for more amicable relations; from 1609-16 the subscription books would fill readily enough. But in 1601-3, while the fate of the First Voyage was still unknown, the General Court had refused to hear of a new venture round the Cape. Even when Lancaster returned and a second voyage was at last approved, the new subscription brought in only £11,000 against the £60,000 subscribed for the First Voyage. It was in this crisis that the Court of Committees insisted that investors in the First Voyage support the Second to the tune of £200 for every £250 previously subscribed. It was not a popular move and it would appear that it was strongly resisted. For whereas the First Voyage had exported freight, mostly silver, to the value of over £28,000, the Second carried only £12,000. Assuming that, as with subsequent stocks, up to two thirds of the total subscription went on fixed costs and shipping (including provisioning, manning, armaments, etc) and little more than one third on exports, the sum actually realized cannot have exceeded £40,000.
In this fraught climate Henry Middleton, brother of Lancaster’s second in command and captain of the Susan on her return voyage, received his orders as commander of the Second Voyage. Not surprisingly he was instructed to make the Spice Islands his priority and to bring back cloves, nutmegs, mace, cinnamon, raw silk – anything rather than pepper. He was also to avoid ‘refreshing’ at Table Bay, presumably because of Lancaster’s near-disaster off the stormy Cape, and to forgo taking any Portuguese prizes, peace negotiations with Spain-Portugal being near a happy conclusion. Far from capitalizing on the successes of Lancaster’s voyage, Middleton was in effect to make good Lancaster’s failures. With the same four ships, a similar complement and a similar mix of cargo and bullion, he sailed from Gravesend on 25 March 1604.
Four months later the long bluff of Table Mountain hove above the horizon. Already sixty of the Red Dragon’s men were down with scurvy including Middleton. ‘Perusing their pitiful complaint and looking out his cabin door where did attend a swarme of lame and weake diseased cripples’ he decided to ignore orders and succumb to the temptation of fresh fruit and red meat. They spent nearly five weeks in Table Bay. The sick recovered and Middleton began to exhibit that spirited conduct which would characterize his later career. He organized a rather amateurish ambush of the Saldanian herdsmen and very nearly came to grief in an epic struggle with a mother whale. Thence, without stopping at Madagascar, the fleet made straight for Bantam, arriving, once again crewed by ‘diseased cripples’, on 22 December 1604.
‘They had hardlie fiftie sound men in theire foure ships’ noted Edmund Scot who came aboard from the Bantam factory. His ‘extraordinarie great joye’ at the prospect of relief after nearly two years marooned in Java quickly evaporated. Middleton was again on the sick list and, as Scot knew only too well, Bantam was no place for convalescence. Here, unlike at the Cape, the sick died and the healthy sickened. An equatorial haze hung over the mud flats and marshes which passed for a coastline and across which the tide oozed its way towards the city’s brimming sewers. During the four hot months men longed for the drenching rains and during the eight wet months they longed for the unbearable heat. Neither was remotely agreeable and even the nights brought no relief. Sweat seeped from ever-open pores, soaking bedding and clothing alike and blistering the skin with prickly heat. This did not deter the mosquitoes which rose in clouds from the marshes and sought out the palest flesh on offer. Malaria was unavoidable; so was dysentery. Typhoid came and went – only to be replaced by cholera. Within a matter of decades Bantam would be abandoned to the undergrowth and insects which to this day smother its unhappy ruins.
To men who had already spent nine months at sea it can have been little comfort to be told that their only hope of survival lay in again putting to sea as quickly as their business permitted. Yet Scot’s account of life at Bantam left them no choice. He had been one of eight factors left behind by Lancaster. Now he was one of two. (The other survivor, Gabriel Towerson, must have been blessed with a constitution of concrete for he would outlast all his contemporaries only to succumb, twenty years later, to the cruellest cut of all.) Times had been hard in Bantam. The factory, a compound consisting of a timber warehouse with adjoining living quarters surrounded by a high palisade of stakes, had been in a state of siege for most of the two years, Scot’s visit to the Red Dragon being only his second outing since the previous summer. ‘My feare was so great’, he explained, ‘because I thought all would be burnt before I could come back againe.’ Indeed there had been so many attempts to set the place on fire that he had become quite paranoid on the subject.
Oh this worde fire! Had it been spoken in English, Malay, Javan or Chinese, although I had been sound asleep, yet I should have leapt out of my bedde, the which I had done sometimes when our men on watch had but whispered to one another of fire; insomuch that I was forced to warn them not to talke of fire in the night except they had great occasion.
Sometimes it was just the danger of those general conflagrations that raged in all the wood-built cities of the tropics whenever a dry wind blew. At other times it was more personal. In the dead of night a shower of flaming arrows would come arcing over the stockade or a gang of Javanese arsonists would rush the gate. Once some Chinese managed to tunnel under the fence, across the compound, and up under the floor of the warehouse. Here their attempt to burn a hole through the floorboards went disastrously wrong. There was an almighty blaze and although the thieves got away with nothing, precious bundles of calicoes were destroyed. The stench of burnt pepper hung about for days.
Hearing their story Middleton must have found it hard not to sympathize with the beleaguered Bantam factors. In the suffocating heat of their West Javan hell-hole they fought their fires and buried their dead, filled their ledgers and said their prayers, all with a clear conscience and three cheers for the Company. Yet they were no innocents abroad and, if one may judge by their penal code, their ideas of civilized conduct fell short of those of their Javanese hosts. In an otherwise beguiling narrative Scot cheerily announces the capture of the Chinese tunnellers. Instantly the Honourable Factors of the Worshipful Company turn demon torturers. Out come the pincers and the bone screws. The smell of burnt pepper gives way to that of burnt flesh. They collect white ants to tip over open wounds and at last despatch their victims with a brutality worthy of Tyburn. ‘Now a worde or two concerning the Dutch shipping,’ continues Scot’s breezy narrative, ‘and shortly after into fyre and troubles againe.’
At the root of these troubles lay the failure of the Javanese to distinguish between Dutchmen and Englishmen. The former, now organized into the United East Indian Company (V.O.C.) with Bantam as its eastern headquarters, were a formidable presence. Their fleets shuttling between the Moluccas and Europe regularly disgorged into the city unruly mobs of red-faced sex-starved sailors while their merchants became increasingly high-handed in their dealings with the local authorities. The Dutch were deservedly unpopular and this unpopularity rubbed off on to the English. Hence, thought Scot, the endless fires and raids.
But at this stage there could be no question of denouncing the Dutch. Their presence was actually some comfort to the English. ‘Though we were mortal enemies in our trade’, wrote Scot, ‘yet in other matters we were friends and would have lived and died for one another.’ In Europe the English had championed the cause of Dutch independence; there was no shame in Englishmen now accepting a measure of Dutch protection in the East. All that was needed was some way of showing the Javanese that there was a difference. A solution of dazzling simplicity was proposed by Gabriel Towerson. They would mount a parade. Mastering his ‘fear of being counted fantasticall’ Scot agreed and, as 17 November approached, ‘the which we held to be our coronation day’, the factors and their servants ‘suited ourselves in new apparel of silk and made us all scarves of red and white taffeta (being our country’s colours) and a flag with the redde cross through the middle’.
Our day being come, we set up our banner of St George upon the top of our house and with drum and shot we marched up and down within our grounde; being but fourteen in number, we could march but single one after another, plying our shot and casting ourselves in rings and S’s.
The commotion duly attracted a goodly audience to whom it was explained that they were celebrating their Queen’s coronation (‘for at that time we knew no other but that Queen Elizabeth was still lyving’). In the afternoon Scot took a calculated risk and dismissed his whole company with instructions to roam the town. ‘Their redde and white scarves and hatbands made such a shew that the inhabitants of these parts had never seen the like.’ And to every enquiry as to why ‘the Englishmen at the other factory’ were not also celebrating, it was emphatically pointed out that ‘they were no Englishmen but Hollanders and that they had no king but the land was ruled by governors’.
Ever after that day we were known from the Hollanders; and manie times the children in the streets would runne after us crying ‘Oran Engrees bayck, Oran Hollanda jahad’ which is ‘The English are good, the Hollanders are nought’.
Vigilance was necessary but Scot and Towerson were no longer held responsible for the riotous conduct of every drunken Dutchman. They were free to sell their calicoes and, blissfully unaware of trends in the London market, to amass substantial stocks of pepper.
These stocks, and the need to withdraw from Bantam as quickly as possible, soon persuaded Middleton to ignore the Company’s instructions once again. Within two months the Hector and the Susan were loaded with pepper and sent to England. Even this speedy turnaround proved too slow for most of the sick, the Hector losing its captain, its master and its master’s mate not to mention ‘common men’. Matters stood no better on the Susan and after recruiting local seamen both ships were still woefully undermanned. They left Bantam on 4 March 1605. What happened thereafter is unrecorded. We know only that the Susan with a crew of forty-seven was never seen again; and that of the Hector’s crew of fifty-three only fourteen reached the Cape, where they were discovered ineffectually trying to beach their ship to save her cargo.
Meanwhile Middleton, with the Red Dragon and the Ascension, was at last exploring the Moluccas. His first port of call was Ambon (Amboina), a well populated island off the coast of Ceram with some clove plantations and much to recommend it as the key to the Spice Islands. On the south shore of a deep inlet which nearly severs the island, the Portuguese had erected an impressive fortress whence troops could be dispatched north to the clove kingdoms of Ternate and Tidore or south to the nutmeg isles of Banda. But the Dutch were also aware of its importance and were already planning the replacement of this Portuguese garrison with one of their own. A large fleet had assembled at Bantam for precisely this purpose. To win time for Middleton, the breezy Scot arranged a send-off party at which the Dutch consumed so much ‘likker’ that they were sick for a week. Middleton therefore got there first. On 10 February he concluded an agreement with the Portuguese to load his ships with cloves but on 11 February five Dutch ships entered port and proceeded to pound the Portuguese into surrender. Not wishing to get involved, the English withdrew from Ambon. Thus, inauspiciously, the Company’s direct involvement with the Spice Islands began at the very fort where – within a couple of decades – it was to end so catastrophically.
Anxious to stay ahead of the Dutch fleet the Ascension was now sent post-haste to the Bandas. There Captain Colthurst renewed contacts with the remote outposts of Run and Ai, and secured a good cargo of nutmegs. When the Dutch ships eventually anchored beneath the smoking mass of Gunung Api, relations were strained but not openly hostile. Indeed the two commanders dined amicably together; if they could share the same chicken pie they could surely share the nutmeg harvest.
Middleton in the Red Dragon was also successful up to a point. Sailing north for the twin volcanoes of Ternate and Tidore he unwittingly entered another war zone in which the Dutch were allied with the Sultan of Ternate against the Portuguese and the Sultan of Tidore. To Middleton, a choleric commander with no head for niceties, it was all Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Even supposing it had been self-evident which party it was politic to support he had neither the authority nor the ships to engage in hostilities. For what it was worth he did exploit the situation, accepting a load of cloves at Tidore and the promise of permission to settle a factory at Ternate. But once it was clear that he had no intention of lending either side his active support, he was no longer welcome.
With the English looking on, the Dutch at last stormed Tidore. Middleton was permitted to negotiate the Portuguese surrender and then, on the suspicion that he had supplied the Portuguese with arms, was peremptorily ordered away. It was Dutch policy, he was informed, to allow no other nation to trade with their island subjects. Middleton left in a black rage. ‘If this frothy nation [he meant the Dutch] may have the trade of the Indies to themselves (which is the thing they hope for) their pride and insolencie will be intollerable.’ He headed back to Bantam, was there joined by the Ascension, and reached the Cape in time to save the Hector from being beached by her depleted crew. Together the three ships returned to England in May 1606.
To Middleton, who would prove anything but battle-shy, and to most of those Englishmen who followed him to the Moluccas, the Company’s insistence on ‘a quiet trafficke’ would seem dangerously naive. The Portuguese had boasted of their Estado da India. From strongly fortified havens they had policed the sea lanes and overawed the coastlines. Now the Dutch, although less bothered with the sea lanes, were pursuing a no less ruthless policy of acquisition in respect of the spice-producing islands. As befitted an emergent nation sensitive about foreign rule, they gave their eastern adventures a gloss of international respectability by signing treaties of protection with the islanders. But the treaties were often exacted under duress and enforced by brutal reprisals against any dissenters. The forts supposedly built to protect the islands against the ‘Portingall’ were as often used to subdue the islanders. And any trade that the islanders held with other than the Dutch was regarded as treason.
By contrast the English Company would build no forts east of Sumatra and would rarely land any guns. It deployed no troops in the East Indies and its objectives there would remain purely commercial. Unlike the Portuguese, the English were not as yet conscious of fulfilling some Christian destiny and unlike the Dutch they were not proudly investing in their nation’s future. However patriotically inclined, they served the Company not the King, and put profits – their own as well as the Company’s – before power.
Every man in the Company’s employ, whether factor or deckhand, expected a financial reward commensurate with the risks he faced; and since salaries were notoriously miserly, he devoted most of his energies to realizing it through private speculation. The Court of Committees took every possible precaution against this infringement by exacting a bond, often for as much as £500, from their factors and by taking great care in their initial selection. Applicants, besides being of blameless character, were expected to have some particular aptitude ‘in navigation and calicoes’ like Nathaniel Courthope, or ‘in Merchant account and arithmetic’ like John Clark. Others spoke Turkish, Portuguese, Arabic or some other relevant language. Many, and nearly all the more senior factors, had some previous experience of working overseas either with the Levant Company or the Merchant Adventurers. In such regulated companies individual merchants were often involved in the syndicate they served or at least received some form of commission from it. They expected to share in any corporate profits and the East India Company at first acknowledged this fact by remunerating their appointees with a small amount of stock in the voyage to which they were attached.
In 1609 this was replaced with a system of fixed salaries ranging from £5 to £200 per year. There were also allowances for outfit and for a small quantity of private trade goods. But neither the stick of censure nor the carrot of concessions made much difference. Entrusted with vast stocks, surrounded by tempting opportunities, and a world away from the day of reckoning, the Company’s overseas factors followed their entrepreneurial instincts to the full. At the top of the scale a Bantam factor might become a very rich man indeed. Judging from the Company’s records the squabbling in Bantam over the personal estates of those who succumbed to the climate was almost as bitter as the actions brought against those who returned home to enjoy their fortunes. Even the conscientious Scot would be involved in lengthy recriminations with his employers.
Yet the majority of the Company’s shareholders subscribed to no loftier principles. Their expectations of a quick and handsome profit were tempered only by their acute anxiety to keep the expenses of eastern trade to a minimum. With each voyage representing a separate investment on which the profits were of interest only to its subscribers, there was little incentive for ensuring long-term profitability. And it was the same overseas where factors from different voyages would soon be openly competing for trade. Under these circumstances, to secure a loading of, say, cloves, while the Hollanders’ back was turned was thought wonderfully clever. It was as good as Drake singeing the King of Spain’s beard. The English positively relished their role of underdogs.
ii
‘They had privie trade with the island people by night and by day were jovial and frolicke with the Spaniards’, wrote the Reverend Samuel Purchas, not without relish, of the next English vessel to visit the Moluccas. The ship, the Consent, at 150 tons little more than a pinnace, was even less capable of asserting an English presence than the Red Dragon. David Middleton, the third of the brothers and now commander of the Consent, was aware of the problem. In an unofficial capacity he had accompanied his brother Henry aboard the Red Dragon and had been back in England a mere nine months before being assigned to the Company’s Third Voyage (1607). Nothing if not impatient he left ahead of the rest of the fleet and never in fact joined it. With a healthy crew and favourable winds he saw no reason to delay – which was just as well, the Third Voyage proving the slowest on record. By the time it reached the Moluccas the Consent would be back in England.
Putting into Table Bay and St Augustine’s Bay (Madagascar) the youngest Middleton took just eight months from Tilbury to Bantam. There the indestructible Towerson had taken over as chief factor, Scot having returned with Henry Middleton. ‘We found the merchants in verie good health and all things in order’, noted David Middleton. Unlike his brother, he would invariably find things in order and he would make a point of leaving them so.
Continuing east he reached Tidore in early January 1608 and again found a pleasant surprise. The Portuguese had received assistance from their Spanish allies in the Philippines and had thus managed to evict the Dutch and their Ternate friends. Not that this made the English any more welcome. Again they were expected ‘to do, or seeme to doe, some piece of service’ – like sailing against the Dutch – ‘which our Captain absolutely refused, being against his commission’. Trading rights were therefore withdrawn and hence that necessity for ‘privie trade by night’. By the time they were ordered to sea the Consent had obtained perhaps half a loading of cloves.
She sailed south-west for one of Sulawesi’s (Celebes) many tentacles and there established excellent relations with the rulers of Butung and Kabaena. These two islands, though densely forested, produced no spices. However, like Macassar on Sulawesi’s next tentacle, they were of considerable importance as free ports and safe harbours in the native trade of the Archipelago. At Butung, or ‘Button’, where the king threw a series of memorable parties, Middleton found a Javanese vessel laden with cloves which her skipper readily sold to the English. Evidently such local craft stood a much better chance of sneaking spices past the Dutch than did an English vessel. Moreover, with Sulawesi dominated by Malays and Bugis, the most formidable seafarers and warriors in the whole archipelago, there was no danger of the Dutch coming in hot pursuit. Here then was a weak spot at which the Dutch monopoly might be dented without inviting hostilities. Middleton resolved to return to Butung, and the Company would soon be posting a factor to Macassar.
On 2 May 1608, with a three-gun salute to the jolly king of ‘Button’, the Consent, now fully laden, sailed for Bantam and home. She reached England in six months, another notably fast voyage, and her cargo of cloves, purchased for less than £3000, sold for £36,000. Three months later, in command of the much larger Expedition, David Middleton was again sailing for Butung.
Off Bantam he narrowly missed making the acquaintance of Captain Keeling, commander of the Third Voyage. This was the dilatory fleet, now at last homeward bound, with which David Middleton was supposed to have sailed on the previous voyage. ‘He passed us in the night,’ reported Keeling who must by now have been having serious doubts about the chimerical Middleton, ‘else we should surely have seene him.’
As usual Middleton was crowding on the sail. He spent just ten days at Bantam and by the New Year of 1610 was again bearing down on Butung. Its king had promised to lay in stocks of cloves, nutmegs and mace, and he had been as good as his word. But as he now explained amidst convulsions of grief, the whole lot had just been burnt along with his palace and ‘sundry of his wives and women’. The jolly king was anything but jolly and was now committed to a war with one of his neighbours. There could be no guarantee of a cargo here; Middleton therefore determined to try his luck elsewhere.
From the Bandas the news was not good. Keeling had been there and had left word of his reception with the factors at Bantam who had duly informed Middleton. Evidently the Dutch were losing patience with both the Bandanese and the English. One of their fleets numbering no less than thirteen ships had anchored off Neira and proceeded to land troops, erect forts, and cajole the bemused Bandanese into signing away the bulk of their produce exclusively to the V.O.C. Keeling in high dudgeon had been forced to withdraw to the outermost islands of Ai and Run. ‘Sixtie-two men against a thousand or more could not perform much’, he explained. He had defiantly left representatives on Ai and Run, but basically the English were relegated to their usual role of spectators as the Dutch doggedly pursued their monopolistic ambitions.
On the whole Middleton preferred not to try the Bandas. But in the event he had no choice; the usual alternative of a foray to Tidore for cloves was precluded by adverse winds. He therefore resolved on one last bid to establish the Company’s right to a share of the nutmeg market. Feigning that sublime confidence that was his hallmark, he approached the Dutch shipping at Neira ‘with flagge and ensigne [flying] and at each yard arm a pennant in as comely a manner as we could devise’. The Dutch were unmoved. There was no trade here but for ships of the V.O.C. They rejected his argument that ‘it were not good’ for nations that were friends in Europe to be ‘enemies among the heathen people’, they refused his offer of a bribe, and they were unimpressed by a sight of his royal commission. More words were exchanged, ‘some sharpe, some sweete’ according to Middleton, yet all to no avail. He was ordered back to sea. Complying in all but spirit, he gave the fortress at Ambon a wide berth and set up base a day’s sailing from the Bandas on the little-frequented island of Ceram.
For if the Dutch were anxious to see him off, the Bandanese were no less anxious to have him trade with them. In particular the outlying islands of Run and Ai were still resisting the ‘frothy’ Hollanders and saw the English as their natural allies. Middleton, ‘knowing well that in troubled waters it is good fishing’, set about frustrating the Dutch blockade by improvising a bizarre fleet to ply back and forth between the Bandas and the Expedition in her safe haven on Ceram. There was the Hopewell, his pinnace, which alone made nine trips, and the Middleton, a chartered junk which jauntily sailed amongst the Dutchmen. Then there was the Diligence, a resurrected barque which did her best, and finally a six-oared skiff which came to grief in a typhoon off the coast of Ceram.
Amongst the skiff’s castaways was Middleton himself. Washed ashore, he managed to evade Ceram’s supposed cannibals as he made his way back to base. He must have been almost there when, attempting to swim an alligator-infested river, he was swept out to sea and battered on the rocks ‘till neere hand drowned’; for ‘every suffe washed mee into the sea againe’. He was eventually hauled to safety clinging to a long pole. ‘After resting a reasonable space’, he declared himself fit ‘to the amazement of all my company.’
Six months of such scrapes, and as many near disasters at the hands of the Dutch, found the Expedition crammed with spices and a sufficient surplus to fill the Middleton and another still larger junk. Leaving men on Ai to complete the lading of the latter, Middleton sailed for Bantam and home, reaching London in the summer of 1611. His two voyages, the Company’s Third (which included Keeling’s ships) and Fifth, were financed by the same subscribers. In effect, as with the First and Second Voyages, investors in the Third had been obliged to reinvest in the Fifth. But confidence in the trade, which had reached such a low ebb at the end of the Second Voyage that ‘most of the members were inclined to wind up their affairs and drop the business’, was now reviving. For whereas the combined profit on the first two voyages had come to 95 per cent, that on the Third and Fifth was put at 234 per cent.
