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What these figures represented in terms of an annual rate of return on investment is difficult to calculate. Each stock took many years to sort out, dividends – like subscriptions – being paid in instalments. Thus 95 per cent over as much as eight years represented no great improvement on standard rates of interest then prevailing. But 234 per cent over a similar period was a much more exciting prospect. The Third and Fifth voyages represent a turning point in the infant Company’s fortunes. David Middleton had demonstrated that the high-value trade in nutmegs, mace and cloves was not yet lost to the Company; Keeling’s fleet, as will be seen, had located a source of calicoes in India with which to pay for them; and thanks to better arrangements for re-export to European markets, even pepper was looking a more attractive prospect.
In the light of these encouraging developments, the Company secured in 1609 a new and more favourable charter from the King. Elizabeth’s original grant had given the Company a guaranteed monopoly of Eastern trade for only fifteen years. The new grant made it indefinite. It also redefined the monopoly to exclude interlopers like Sir Edward Michelborne (who with Royal encouragement had ravaged Dutch trade while supposedly endeavouring to open markets in China) and even any shipping that should chance to reach the East ‘indirectly’, that is via the Pacific or one of the polar ‘passages’. No less significantly, the new charter was seen as evidence of clear and unequivocal backing of the Company by His Majesty. His lead was followed by his government and court. Heading the list of subscribers under the new charter were the Lord Treasurer, the Lord High Admiral, and the Master of the King’s Horse. Henceforth the Company’s General Court would invariably include a large and influential group of courtiers and peers. Their interests might not always coincide with those of the committees (directors) but they endowed the Company’s stock with greater respectability and they provided access and insight into the corridors of power.
iii
To secure some concession in the way of access to the spice-producing islands, and to win redress for past wrongs, the government now took up the Company’s cause and entered into protracted negotiations with the Dutch States General. These negotiations would have some bearing on events in the East; but word of any agreement could take a year to reach the Moluccas and even then amity between the two governments was no guarantee of amity between the two Companies. All too often a dispatch from London would add only poignancy to the disasters that now unfolded.
In the Bandas Keeling and David Middleton had occasionally cleared their decks for action and had supposedly unmasked several Dutch plots to assassinate them. Whether or not their fears were justified there can be no doubting Middleton’s assertion that the Hollanders, seeing his cockleshell fleet beating round the islands, ‘grew starke madde’. ‘The Dutch envy is so great towards us,’ noted one of the Company’s Bantam factors, ‘that to take out one of our eyes they will lose both theire own.’ While the English stood by, pretending neutrality but in fact encouraging local resistance, the V.O.C. was incurring enormous costs and losing good men – in 1610 their garrison in Neira had been almost annihilated in a Bandanese ambush. Methodical and determined, the Dutch bitterly resented both Michelborne’s piracy and the Company’s opportunism. They saw no reason why, because of services rendered in Europe under a previous sovereign and in the previous century, the English – ‘a pernicious, haughty and incompatible nation’ – should now presume on preferential treatment from a Dutch trading company on the other side of the world.
‘The Hollanders say we go aboute to reape the fruits of their labours’, wrote John Jourdain as he renewed the arguments of his English predecessors during a visit to Ambon and Ceram in 1613. ‘It is rather the contrarye for that they seem to barre us of our libertie to trade in a free countrye, having manie times traded in these places, and nowe they seeke to defraud us of that we have so long sought for.’ The young Dutch commander who had just intercepted him was unimpressed. With vastly superior forces at his command, Jan Pieterson Coen forbade Jourdain any trade and declared that every bag of cloves that found its way into an English hold was a bag stolen from the Dutch nation. Jourdain, ‘a clever fellow’ according to Coen, stood his ground and unexpectedly invoked the principle of self-determination. He summoned an assembly of the local headmen and, knowing full well their answer, asked them in the presence of the Dutch whether they would trade with him.
To which wordes all the country people made a great shoute saying ‘we are willing to deal with the English’ [and] demanding the Hollanders what say they to itt. Whereunto they [the Dutch] were silent, answering neither yea nor naye.
Needless to say this impromptu referendum, conducted to the accompaniment of a pounding ‘suffe’ on some Ceramese promontory, did nothing to improve Jourdain’s chance of securing a cargo. He was ordered to sea and could retaliate only with a muttered threat to settle matters ‘when next we meete twixt Dover and Calais’. It also did nothing to endear him to Jan Pieterson Coen. As Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, Coen was destined to become his lifelong adversary. They would meet again, but not ‘twixt Dover and Calais’.
Calling at Butung, where Middleton had left a lone British factor who was now happily married to an island siren and reluctant ever to move (although truly grateful for a new supply of linen), and then at Macassar where he established a factory among ‘the kindest people in all the Indies’, Jourdain repaired to Bantam and the unenviable job of Chief Factor for the next four years. Towerson was gone (he was now commanding the Hector on her fifth and last voyage to the East) and there were more Englishmen in Bantam. But not much else was changed.
As he entered the oily waters of Bantam’s sheltered anchorage Jourdain looked for a resounding welcome from the Trades Increase of the Sixth Voyage. At 1200 tons far and away the biggest ship in the Company’s fleet, she had been launched with great ceremony by James I and was now on her maiden voyage with Sir Henry Middleton in command. It had not been a happy voyage. As will appear, the choleric Sir Henry had spent part of it in an Arab dog-kennel and, far from increasing trade, his flagship had seemingly hastened the demise of British commerce in India.
Spying her enormous bulk now lying off Bantam, Jourdain fired a salvo. There came no reply. Then ‘we hailed them but could have no answer, neither could we perceive any man stirring’. The Company’s flagship had in fact become a grounded and gutted hulk; her commander was dead, her crew decimated, and her hull was now serving as a hospice for the terminally sick. Instead of a rumbustious homecoming Jourdain was received by four factors, ‘all of them like ghosts of men fraighted’, who came aboard from a native prabu.
I demanded for the General [Middleton] and all the rest of our friends in particular; but I could not name any man of note but was dead, to the number of 140 persons; and the rest remaining were all sick, these four being the strongest of them and they scarce able to go on their legges.
To malaria and dysentery were now added the perils of ‘our people dangerously disordering themselves with drinke and whores ashoare’. But a worse disorder stemmed from the system of separate voyages, which meant that there were now three separate English factories in Bantam, each with its residue of competing, quarrelling and dying factors and each a prime target for the town’s busy ‘pickers, thievers and fire raisers’. In search of a peaceful solution Jourdain visited each establishment. At one he was greeted by a fevered factor ‘who came running forth like a madman asking for the bilboes [shackles]’ and at the next by another tottering invalid who tried to run him through with a sword. ‘If he had been strong he might have slaine me.’
Just preserving some order among his own people taxed Jourdain’s considerable abilities, never mind the Dutch threat. In 1614 no shipping at all could be spared for the Moluccas but in 1615 a vessel was sent to Ceram and a pinnace to the Bandas. Both fared badly, their crews being captured and briefly imprisoned by the Dutch. A factor was again left on the Banda island of Ai and he was still there a year later when a much larger British fleet meekly withdrew at the first threat of a Dutch attack.
By now there had been regular visits to Run and Ai for ten years, and for at least six years there had been a permanent British representative on the islands. It could be argued that two isolated spice gardens, together totalling little more than three square miles, were scarcely worth an armed confrontation between two of the world’s strongest maritime nations. But that, according to Jourdain, was not the point. Principle was at stake. The Dutch based their claims on prior occupation and on the dubious treaties they had signed with the islanders. But in the case of Ai and Run the English could claim to have been first on the scene; and if documentary evidence were needed, it would be found.
In 1616 the Dutch prepared for another attack on Ai. On behalf of the Company, Captain Castleton agreed not to interfere so long as an English factor was allowed to continue on the island and so long as Run was recognized as being outside the Dutch sphere of monopoly. The Dutch commander agreed to these terms in writing. All that remained was to secure the consent of the Run islanders. It was not hard to come by. When the Dutch duly overran Ai, the headmen of both islands voluntarily and indeed eagerly pressed their little nutmeg seedling on Richard Hunt, the English factor. It was a token, he understood, that they formally made over their ‘cattel and countrie for the use of the English nation’. In due course it was ratified in an impressive document declaring King James I ‘by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’. Henceforth the status of Run and Ai would involve more than commercial concessions and the rights of a trading company. The issue of national sovereignty was involved and the rights of the English Crown would have to be taken into account.
Escaping from Ai in the company of its loyal chiefs, Hunt made his way back to Bantam. There the outwitted Dutch showed what they thought of his treaty and his wilting nutmeg tree. Hunt was immediately waylaid in the street by a mob of Hollanders, beaten up, ‘hailed through the durte by the haire of the head’, and clamped in irons ‘in the hotte sun without hatt’. Jourdain retaliated by seizing a Dutch merchant and giving him the same treatment. Although the prisoners were eventually exchanged, English and Dutch now fought openly in the city’s lanes and Jourdain determined to strike back in the Bandas.
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In October 1616 Nathaniel Courthope, who had previously served in one of the Company’s speculative agencies on the Borneo coast, was despatched to the Bandas with the Swan and the Defence, both of 400 tons. His instructions were simple: occupy the island of Run and hold it – indefinitely. After purchasing such provisions as Macassar had to offer, he arrived on 23 December. The islanders again proclaimed their loyalty to King James while Courthope’s men ‘spread St. George upon the island and shot off most of our ordnance’. Christmas Day brought the first snooping Dutch vessel. Courthope hastily landed guns to command the only anchorage and thus began his long, anxious and soon forgotten resistance.
A variety of exotic fruits grew on Run but most of its 700 acres were down to nutmeg trees. Rice had to be imported, and to drink there was only such rain water as could be collected. The ships were therefore essential for any long-term defence; yet the ships were the first to go. In January the master of the Swan, ‘obstinately contrarying’ Courthope’s orders, took his vessel over to the largest of the Banda islands in search of fresh water. He was promptly captured. Five of his men were killed and the rest were clamped in irons and stowed aboard Dutch vessels. Two months later the Defence broke – or was cut – from her moorings and also came into Dutch possession. Using these ships and their crews as bargaining counters the Dutch commander opened negotiations; if Courthope would relinquish Run he would return both prizes and prisoners. Many of the prisoners also wrote urging compliance. They were being wretchedly treated and, worse still for men on the make, they had been robbed of all they possessed. ‘If I lose any more by your [Courthope’s] arrogance’, wrote the master of the Swan from his captivity, ‘our lives and blouds shall rest upon your head.’
Courthope refused to budge. He would not withdraw because to do so would be an act of treason to his king and a betrayal of the good people of Run. Instead he dispatched a prahu to Bantam urgently requesting assistance. It would be the first of many such pleas to go unanswered. Though Dutch ships repeatedly tested his defences, the year 1617 wore away with no sign of relief.
On 12 March 1618 the islands were shaken by a major earthquake. This triggered the volcano of Gunung Api, which for some years had been ominously grumbling as if to protest at the European presence. It erupted with unprecedented fury, showering the Dutch forts on neighbouring Neira with scorching debris. Two weeks later Courthope spied ‘two of our ships coming from the westwards with the last of the westerly winds’. Excitement mounted. The guns were primed for a mighty welcome and the English lined the rocks. But the first shot came not from the approaching ships but from the east. Four Dutch vessels, beating into the wind, were manoeuvring to cut off the English fleet. Their range was greater, the English ships lying low in the water under the weight of their provisions for the besieged. As the sun went down the issue was still unresolved. But then the wind changed. The Dutchmen’s sails filled and they bore down on the English. By eight o’clock it was all over; next day saw the Dutch ships trailing the English colours from their sterns as they escorted their prizes to the fort of Neira.
Courthope believed that had the relief force arrived even a day earlier all would have been well. The winds were seasonal, blowing hard from the west from December till March and from the east from March onwards. The master of one of the captured vessels agreed. ‘For what cannot now be’ he blamed the factors in Bantam where Jourdain’s departure for England had heralded more quarrelling and indecision. They had ‘so carelessly kept these ships there so long, unto the 8th of Januarie last, before they sent them away from thence which hath brought upon us all this miserie’.
Shackled and incarcerated in the Dutch fort the new prisoners were indeed in some misery. According to the deposition of one of them ‘they kept twelve of us in a dungeon where they pisst and shatt upon our heads and in this manner we lay until we were broken out from top to toe like lepers, having nothing to eate but durtie rice and stinking raine water’. ‘But God will provide for his servants’, declared Kellum Throgmorton, another prisoner, ‘though He give these Horse-turds leave to domineere a while.’
To Courthope it now seemed certain that the Horse-turds must descend on Run any minute.
I have but thirtie-eight men to withstand their force and tyranny, our wants extreame: Neither have we victuals nor drinke but only rice and water. They have at present here eight ships and two gallies, and to my knowledge all fitted to come against us. I look daily and howerly for them.
In fact a Dutch attack would be positively welcome. ‘I wish it’, he wrote, ‘being not so much able to stand out as willing to make them pay deare.’ In eighteen months he had received not a word from his superiors in Bantam. He could only assume his original orders still stood and in April 1618 sent two more desperate appeals, advising of the capture of the relief fleet and begging for provisions and reinforcements.
Forwarded via Butung and Macassar these letters reached Bantam in the late summer. Soon after, Jourdain returned to Bantam for a second term as Chief Factor and found himself in the happy position of having more ships in the Java Sea than the Dutch. It was a God-given opportunity to hit back once again. In December the richly-laden Zwaarte Leeuw was captured off Bantam. Coen retaliated by setting fire to a new English factory in Jakarta. Provocation had at last become war. In a full-blooded battle off Jakarta both fleets proclaimed victory but neither followed it up. Coen retired – or ‘fled’ – to refit at Ambon and, after an inconclusive siege of Jakarta, the British, instead of heading for the Bandas, repaired – or ‘retreated’ – to the east coast of India.
With the easterly winds of April Coen returned to the fray. Off the Malay peninsula his ships surprised two English vessels. Both were worsted and in the course of the surrender negotiations the English commander was killed by a single shot from a Dutch marksman. Such a flagrant disregard of a flag of truce was a serious matter, but in this case the culprit, far from being punished, would be rewarded. For the man he had shot was John Jourdain.
Jourdain died in July 1619. From then on the English position rapidly worsened. In August the Star was captured in the Straits of Sunda and in October the Red Dragon, the Bear, the Expedition and the Rose were surprised while loading pepper at the Sumatran port of Tecu. When finally the main fleet arrived back from India in March 1620 it was intercepted by the news that in Europe the Anglo-Dutch negotiations had at last been concluded and that far from being enemies the two Companies were now allies. In fact the agreement had been signed in July 1619. The English losses had all occurred after the hostilities were officially over. This was neither consolation nor compensation; the agreement would soon prove to be unworkable and the losses irreparable.
And what of Courthope and his hard-pressed band on Run? They had not been entirely forgotten. In June 1618 they had repulsed a Dutch attack and in January 1619 they had welcomed a small pinnace sent from Bantam with instructions to ‘proceed in your resolution’ and a promise that the whole English fleet would soon be coming to their rescue. In the event, of course, the fleet withdrew to India. Another year, Courthope’s third on Run, slipped slowly by. The activities of Jourdain and the English fleet did have the effect of diverting Dutch attention and for once he was able to raise his head above Run’s makeshift parapets. Encouragement was sent – and support promised – to pockets of Bandanese resistance on the other islands and in return came provisions and protestations of loyalty to the English crown. ‘Had the English ships come as promised I verilie thinke there would not at the end of this monsoon have beene left one Hollander enemie to us.’ But the ships did not come and although basic provisions were now reaching him, he had no money to pay for them. Even the islanders ‘had spent their gold and estates, beggaring themselves…in expectation of the English forces’. ‘We have rubbed off the skinne alreadie’, reported Courthope, ‘and if we rub any longer, we shall rub to the bone. I pray you looke to it etc.’
By now he must have known every nutmeg tree on the island. In June, three and a half years after he had begun his heroic resistance, he wrote again to Bantam demanding, in the name of all that Englishmen held dear, some means of redeeming his pledges to the Bandanese. ‘Except some such course be taken’, he advised, ‘you shall see me before you heare any further from me.’ Needless to say, no word of the peace, signed eighteen months before, had yet reached him. No word ever would.
On 20 October 1620, for reasons that remain obscure, he broke cover for the first time and rowed over to the neighbouring island of Lonthor. On the way back his prahu with twenty-one men aboard was surprised by two Dutch vessels. ‘Not so much able to stand out as willing to make them pay deare’, the English fought back and Courthope was shot in the chest. He had always maintained that English commanders were too faint-hearted and had criticized the manner in which ships were surrendered while yet afloat and amply crewed. War was war, declared or not, and three and a half years had done nothing to alter his views. True to form, he therefore refused to surrender, preferring to roll overboard and swim for it. ‘What became of him I know not’, wrote Robert Hayes, his second in command. In fact the Dutch recovered his body and ‘buried him so stately and honestly as ever we could’; it was, they said, ‘only fitting for such a man’.
Thus ended the protracted defiance of Nathaniel Courthope. Here surely was another episode to savour, another saga of truly heroic proportions. Yet Courthope’s is not a name to conjure with; Run features on no roll of honour; and the English affair with the Banda Islands was speedily forgotten. For, conducted with spirit, it ended with ignominy. Two months after Courthope’s death Hayes intercepted letters to the Dutch containing news of the peace treaty. He could hardly bring himself to tell the islanders and when he did so they rightly saw it as a betrayal. By the summer of 1621 Dutch troops were swarming all over Run and the Bandanese were either fleeing for their lives or being systematically deported. Later critics would call it genocide. The Dutch claimed they were acting in the interests of both Companies. This did not prevent them from treating their English allies with hostility and even brutality. The latter complained, protested, denounced, but could do nothing. As so often before, they had neither the authority nor the ships to interfere.
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On the face of it the Anglo-Dutch agreement of 1619 had given the English all they wanted. With at last a guaranteed share of the spice trade they quickly established factories at Ambon, Ternate, and Banda Neira, and they removed their headquarters from Bantam to Batavia (Jakarta). Officially, though, the agreement was a ‘Treaty of Defence’ which bound both signatories to contributing ships, men and money to the defence of the Indies. Military expenditure had never appealed to the London Company and it was highly suspicious of this clause. It had in fact only signed the treaty under pressure from the government. To the Dutch, however, this commitment on defence was the treaty’s saving grace. As they cheerfully mounted a series of expensive campaigns, like that against the Bandanese, they put the English in the embarrassing position of being party to objectionable policies which they could neither moderate nor afford. And when English ships and cash failed to materialize, the Dutch had every reason to make life and business for the English factors more difficult than ever.
Surveying the position at the end of 1622 the Chief Factor – or President as he then was – at Batavia decided that enough was enough. In January he discussed the dissolution of all the new factories with Coen and by 9 February the order had evidently gone out. Sadly it was once again too late to avert a tragic postscript to the English involvement in the spice trade.
On that same night, while pacing the low parapets of the gloomy Dutch fort at Ambon, a Japanese mercenary in Dutch employ fell into conversation with a Hollander on guard duty. ‘Amongst other talke’, the Japanese asked the Dutchman some pertinent questions about the disposition of the fort’s defences. He was promptly arrested and under torture confessed that he and several other Japanese had been planning a mutiny. Tortured again he implicated the English.
In charge of the English factory on Ambon was none other than Gabriel Towerson who twenty-two years earlier had sailed with Lancaster and been left at Bantam with Scot. Under him were about fourteen other Englishmen – factors, servants, a tailor and a surgeon-cum-barber. On 15 February all were invited to the fort and, suspecting nothing, all attended. They were immediately arrested and imprisoned, some being held in the fort’s dungeons, others aboard ships riding nearby. Next day, and for the whole of the following week, each in turn was tortured.
Remembering how Towerson himself had treated the arsonists at Bantam, the ordeals that he and his men now underwent at the hands of the Dutch fiscal (judge) were not perhaps exceptional. It was indeed a brutal age. On the other hand the subsequent outrage in England, and the embarrassment in Holland, belie the idea that what happened at Ambon was acceptable. Typically the prisoner was spread-eagled on a vertical rack that was in fact a door frame. A cylindrical sleeve of material was then slipped over his head and tightly secured at the neck with a tourniquet.
That done, they poured the water softly upon his head untill the cloth was full up to the mouth and nostrils and somewhat higher; so that he could not draw breath but must withal suck in the water; which still being poured in softly, forced all his inward partes [and] came out of his nose, eares and eyes; and often as it were stifling him, at length took his breath away and brought him to a swoone or fainting.
The prisoner was then freed and encouraged to vomit. Then the treatment began again. After thus being topped up three or four times ‘his body was swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead’.
Some got off lightly. As soon as they confessed to whatever role in the plot they were supposed to have played, and as soon as they had implicated Towerson and the other factors, they were returned to their cells. Others proved extremely hard to break. Clark, one of the factors, survived four water sessions and then was subjected to lighted candles being played on the soles of his feet ‘untill the fat dropt and put out the candles’. He still refused to co-operate. The candles were relit and applied to his armpits ‘until his innards might evidently be seene’. ‘Thus wearied and overcome by torment’, he confessed.
So eventually did they all with the possible exception of Towerson whose fate was unknown. He was, however, alive for at the end of the week he was brought forth to hear his men denounce him. Confronted by their commander, ‘that honest and godly man’, according to one of them, ‘who harboured no ill will to anyone, much lesse attempt any such business as this’, most retracted. ‘They fell upon their knees before him praying for God’s sake to forgive them.’
On 25 February they were sentenced; ten were to die; so were nine Japanese and one Portuguese. They were returned to their cells to settle their affairs and say their prayers. In signing (or ‘firming’) a payment release for some small consignment of piece goods, Towerson wrote his last words.
Firmed by the firme of mee, Gabriel Towerson, now appointed to dye, guiltless of anything that can be laid to my charge. God forgive them their guilt and receive me to his mercy, Amen.
Others scribbled on the fly-leaves of their prayer books. ‘Having no better meanes to make my innocence knowne, I have writ this in this book, hoping some good Englishman will see it.’ ‘As I mean, and hope, to have pardon for my sins, I knowe no more than the child unborn of this business.’ ‘I was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I desire this book may come that my friends may knowe of my innocency.’ With the merchant’s instinct to turn every situation to some profit, one of the factors shouted as they were led off to execution, ‘If I be guilty, let me never partake of thye heavenly joyes, O Lord’. ‘Amen for me’, cried each in turn, ‘amen for me, good Lord.’ Assuredly no crime had been committed by the condemned. They died like martyrs and indeed the account of their sufferings reads much like a piece of Tudor martyrology. It was another massacre of innocents, and hence, ever after, it would be remembered and glorified as ‘The Amboina Massacre’.
The job of winding up the factory’s affairs fell to Richard Welden who for more than a decade had been the lone factor left on Butung by David Middleton. Transferred to the Bandas, where he had also had to pick up the pieces, he now shrugged off Dutch attempts to implicate him and sailed over to Ambon to collect the survivors and enquire into the circumstances. Thence he proceeded to Batavia, where complaints were duly lodged and duly rejected, and then on to England.
He arrived in the summer of 1624. Word of the massacre had preceded him via Holland but now ‘this crying business of Amboina’ provoked a major furore. Some wanted to take the next Dutch ship that entered the English Channel and see the culprits ‘hung up upon the cliffs of Dover’. Protests were lodged in Holland. Reluctantly James I agreed to reprisals. But nothing was actually done and in 1625 a Dutch fleet from the East was allowed to sail quietly past Dover in full view of the Royal Navy. This was too much for the East India Company. Suspecting the then Governor, Sir Morris Abbot, of being too easily duped by royal promises, subscribers withheld their payments and pressured the directors into announcing that due to Government inaction they must finally ‘give over the trade of the Indies’.
In reality they had already done so. Closure of the factories in the Spice Islands and a withdrawal from Batavia – temporary but soon to be permanent – signalled a long hiatus in English ambitions to participate in the spice trade. At Macassar a small English establishment buying cloves from native prabus would survive until 1667; and Bantam would linger on until the 1680s as a source of pepper. But perhaps the disillusionment of the English is best seen in the unlikely outcome of diplomatic wrangles over the status of Run. For, frequently revived, English claims to the islet were actually recognized after Cromwell’s Dutch War and in 1665 the place was officially handed over. Vindication at last. A fort and colony were planned and several ships revisited the island. Yet never, it would appear, was it actually reoccupied. Depopulated and denuded of its nutmeg trees, it may well have been worthless.
To the likes of Nathaniel Courthope, turning in his sandy grave on a neighbouring atoll, the neglect of Pulo Run must have seemed like a terrible betrayal. Yet, after a lapse of forty years, his refusal to concede to the Dutch yielded that substantial dividend on the other side of the world at the mouth of the Hudson river. Just as improbably, more than 150 years later, servants of the same Honourable Company that Courthope had served so devotedly would revive his hopes of the spice trade and again load nutmegs at the Bandas and pace the parapets of Ambon’s unhappy fort.
CHAPTER THREE Pleasant and Fruitfull Lands (#ulink_2de5064b-6b28-5d12-9bcf-dedcfd436316)
JAPAN, SIAM, AND THE COAST
History is not short of reasons why the East India Company was founded. Some have already been noticed: the expected profits from the spice trade, the growth of English sea power in the Armada period, the about-turn in Anglo-Portuguese relations following the dynastic union of Spain and Portugal, and the encouragement afforded by the first Dutch voyages to the East. Another and an older reason of which much was made in contemporary debate was the need to find new markets for England’s staple export of woollen cloth. Ever since the 1570s and the sack of Antwerp, the traditional entrepot for English cloth, the search for new markets and new distributive systems had been a national priority. The Muscovy (Russia), Eastland (Baltic), and Levant Companies were all export-orientated and the various attempts to find a north-west passage were partly inspired by expectations of discovering potential buyers for English woollens shivering somewhere in the northern hemisphere.
The East India Company, it is true, was different. Right from the start its directors insisted on their ships carrying more bullion than broadcloth. They had no illusions about clothing the spice islanders in tweed; the Company was determinedly import-orientated and much criticized for it. But to counter this criticism, to assuage national expectations about woollen exports, and to find some alternative to bullion as a purchasing agent, the directors urged early diversification of the Company’s trading activities. Factors were encouraged to report on the patterns of existing trade in the East and, in the case of Bantam, they quickly discovered the south-east Asian archipelago’s insatiable demand for both Indian cottons and Chinese silks. In a perfect world, of course, the Indians and the Chinese would have been crying out for tweeds and thus a triangular trade, boosting English exports and involving no transfer of bullion, would have been established.
Unfortunately no such simple solution would emerge; but between 1607 and 1611 departing fleets were instructed to conduct commercial reconnaissances in the Indian Ocean en route to Bantam and indeed in the South China Sea beyond Bantam. These remarkable voyages would have far-reaching consequences. They gave the Company a multi-national complexion which would never fade. And they provided an alternative direction for the Company’s activities once expectations of the spice trade dimmed.
Given the desirability of starting any trade cycle with an outgoing fleet laden with broadcloth, those countries with a cooler climate were of particular interest. Judging by Dutch experience, China was exceedingly difficult to penetrate but in 1608 John Saris (or sometimes ‘Sayers’), serving as a factor under Towerson at Bantam, submitted a report on all those eastern lands with which the Dutch were trading and singled out as especially promising the islands of Japan. There and there alone he foresaw substantial sales for ‘broad-cloathes’ and he put them at the top of his list of ‘requestable commodities’.
This information was soon after confirmed from a most unlikely source, namely an Englishman who was already resident in Japan; indeed he had been there since 1600. William Adams had apparently sailed through the Straits of Magellan as pilot of a Dutch fleet and had eventually come ashore, one of only six men on his ship still able to walk, on the island of Kyushu. The ship had been confiscated but Adams had since done extremely well for himself. He was now in high favour with the Shogun as a marine architect and had been handsomely rewarded with a salary and an estate. He had also acquired a Japanese wife and family. But he had not forgotten his home in Rochester in Kent, nor his English wife to whom he somehow managed to write, nor his countrymen. He was at their service, and his story seemed to confirm that in Japan not only was woollen cloth in demand but also that ‘there is here much silver and gold [which would] serve their turnes in other places where need requireth in the East Indies’. The Dutch, he said, already recognized Japan as ‘an Indies of money’, so much so that ‘they need not now bring silver out of Holland’.
Such news was music to English ears. Broadcloth to Japan, Japanese silver to Java and the Spice Islands, and pepper and spices back to England – it was the perfect trading cycle. In 1611 John Saris, just back from his first five years in the East, was given command of a new fleet (the Company’s Eighth Voyage) and instructed, after numerous other commissions, to take the Clove and proceed from Bantam ‘with all possible speede for Japan’. There he was to consult with Adams, assess the commercial climate and, if favourable, establish an English factory.
The first part of his voyage, a veritable Odyssey if ever there was one, will be noticed later. By the time he left Bantam for Japan in January 1613 he had sailed right round the Indian Ocean and had been at sea for most of the past twenty-one months. He had also earned for himself the reputation of an able but harsh commander whose men had more than once been on the point of mutiny. Specifically they had complained of their rations, which were more inadequate and monotonous than usual and which Saris refused to supplement with those local delicacies that more considerate commanders made a point of procuring. Aware that such complaints would reach the ears of his employers, he now adopted the unusual practice of filling his journal with catering details. ‘Two meales rice and honey, sack and biskett’, ‘1 meale beefe and dumplings, 1 meale wheate’; it was hardly mouth-watering. But as the Clove sailed east for the Moluccas and then north into unknown seas, only the weather and the menu afforded his diary any variety at all.
For a chart he used the book of maps and sailing directions prepared by the Dutch cartographer, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. During five years as secretary to the Archbishop of Goa (the Portuguese headquarters in India) van Linschoten had quietly compiled a dossier on the eastern sea routes which he then smuggled back to Europe, an achievement which may constitute the most momentous piece of commercial and maritime espionage ever. Published in Holland in 1595-6, Linschoten’s works were the inspiration for the first Dutch voyages to the East and, translated into English in 1598, they played no small part in the East India Company’s designs on the spice trade. The book of maps was required reading for every Dutch and English navigator, and Saris for one found it invaluable and ‘verie true’.
On 3 June, seven long weeks after leaving the Moluccas, the Clove came within sight of an island which Saris identified as part of Linschoten’s ‘Dos Reys Magos’. It may well have been Okinawa and to men who had now spent over two years sailing half way round the world in a ship not much bigger than a railway carriage this first glimpse of Japanese soil and journey’s end was not without excitement. ‘It seemed’, as well it might, ‘a most pleasant and fruitfull lande as anye we have scene since we came out of England’, wrote Saris. A sudden squall prevented their landing but other islands took its place and a week later they learned from a fishing fleet that they were off Nagasaki. The Portugese had trading rights at Nagasaki and had long since converted many of its people to Catholicism. As yet the English preferred the company of coreligionists, so the Clove made for Hirado, an island just off the west coast of Kyushu where the Dutch had established themselves four years earlier.
Unlike in the Spice Islands, in Japan there was of course no question of Europeans dictating their own terms. Here foreigners prospered or languished at the Shogun’s pleasure; they came as petitioners and they stayed on sufferance. A martial and self-sufficient state, Japan was ruled by warlords who tolerated Europeans only so long as they were an irrelevance. Hirado buzzed with rumours of distant campaigns and sacked cities while the Europeans doled out presents and paraded their wares in an atmosphere of friendship tinged with menace. Saris and his seventy-odd followers were in for a number of surprises.
As the Clove dropped anchor some forty boats ‘some with tenne, some with fifteen oars a side’ raced forth to meet them. From one the ‘king’ (governor) of Hirado and his grandson came aboard. They were dressed in silk with long swords by their sides and ‘the forepartes of their heads were shaven to the crowne, and the rest of their hair, which was very long, was gathered together and bound up in a knot behind’. The ‘king’ was about seventy. Both seemed friendly and saluted Saris ‘after their manner which is this’:
First…they put off their shoes (stockings they weare none), and then clapping their right hand with their left, they put them downe towards their knees, and so wagging or moving of their hands a little to and fro, they stooping steppe with small steps sideling from the party saluted, and crie ‘Augh, Augh’.
Sadly Saris fails to mention whether he returned this salute. ‘I led them into my cabbin where I had prepared a banquet for them and a good consorte of musicke.’ Saris was fond of music and had managed to purloin a viol, flute and tabor from the Trades Increase, Henry Middleton’s ill-starred flagship that was now rotting at Bantam. Being ‘much delighted’ with the madrigals, the ‘king’ next day returned the compliment, coming aboard with four female musicians. Although ‘somewhat bashfull’ they soon recognized Saris as a connoisseur and ‘became frolicke’. ‘They were well faced, headed and footed, clear skinned and white but wanting colour which they amended by arte.’ Their hair was long and tied up ‘in a comely fashion’ and he could not but notice that beneath gowns of silk their legs were bare.
Between these official exchanges the ship became overrun with such a multitude of visitors that it was impossible to move on deck. All, ‘boath men and women’, had produce to sell and services to offer. It was the sort of landfall sailors dreamt of and soon the entire crew would be absconding ashore. Not that Saris himself was setting much of an example. Singling out ‘divers of the better sort of women’ he enticed them into his cabin ‘where a picture of Venus hung, most lasciviously sett out’. Pin-ups and pornography were destined to cause him some embarrassment, but in this instance they were simply misunderstood. For ‘with showes of great devotion’ the ladies ‘fell down and worshipped the picture [mistaking it] for Our Ladye…whereby we perceaved them to be of the Portingall-made papists’.
Tainting pleasure with business, Saris wrote to summon Adams, rented a house and store-room, and began to unload his cargo. Trade was far from brisk. His journal for the period, while less exercised over the catering, is taken up with a succession of disciplinary actions. The gunner’s mate, one Christopher Evans, was the worst offender, habitually staying ashore without leave and refusing to come even when summoned. ‘In most lewd fashion’ he persisted in ‘spending his time in most base bawdy places.’
For which cause I gave order to sett him in the bilbowes [stocks] where, before the boatswain and most of the company, he did most deepelye swear to be the destruction of Jack Saris, for so it pleased him to call me.
Fearing Evans quite capable of breaking loose and making good his threat, Saris ordered a double guard. He still broke loose and when, a month later, he was dragged reluctantly from a Hirado whorehouse, he had to be chained to the masthead, ‘the bilbowes by one of his crew having been throwne overboard’. Other commanders might have sentenced him to the lash or the near fatal ordeal of being dragged underneath the ship’s keel. Perhaps Saris, usually far from lenient, had a sneaking admiration for the incorrigible Evans whose best defence had been ‘to stand boldly in it that he was a man and would have a woman if he could get her’.
On 29 July the long-awaited Adams at last made his appearance. Saris ordered a nine-gun salute and ‘received him in the best manner I could for his better grace’. But Adams seemed not to notice. He was more inscrutable than the Japanese. He evinced no discernible pleasure at meeting some of his long lost countrymen, and when quizzed about trading prospects, became infuriatingly vague. ‘He said it [trade] was not always alike, but sometimes better and sometimes worse, yet doubted not that we should doe as well as others and saying he would doe his best.’ He then talked, with some enthusiasm, about the delights of Japan and prepared to take his leave. This was not at all what Saris had in mind. Rooms in the house were ready for him and Mr Cocks, Saris’s senior merchant, was looking forward to showing him round the town. ‘Praying him to remember that I was alone and that I should be glad to enjoy his most acceptable company which I had long expected’, Saris prevailed on him to stay for dinner. But there was no moving him in the matter of accommodation. He had hoisted his colours – ‘a St George made of coarse cloth’ – over a run-down house on the other side of town and there he would stay, refusing entry to his fellow countrymen and not even permitting them to walk home with him, ‘which unto us was very strange’. The men of the Clove, ‘thinking that he thought them not good enoffe to walk with him’, concluded that Adams was already ‘a naturalised Japanner’.
Dealing with such a man was never going to be easy; but in fairness to Adams it may be noted that he had far more to lose than Saris and could ill afford to identify himself too closely with the truculent crew of the Clove. As an intermediary and patron he would prove as good as his word and, two weeks later, he was ready to accompany Saris on the long journey to Yedo (Tokyo) where presents and a letter from King James must be delivered as a preliminary to any grant of trading privileges.
The first leg of this journey was from Hirado off the island of Kyushu to Osaka on that of Honshu. They passed a mammoth junk, ‘much like Noah’s ark’, of 1000 tons (the Clove was a mere 500) and found both Fukuoka and Osaka ‘as bigge as London is within the walls’. The latter boasted ‘a marvellous large and strong castle’ with walls seven yards thick and bristling with drawbridges. Thence they continued overland, riding in palanquins with a pike-bearer jogging in front to clear the way. Shizuoka (Sampu) was even larger than Osaka, ‘as bigge as London with all the suburbs’, and Yedo larger still and of dazzling magnificence with its gilded roofs and lintels. The whole country was an eye-opener and Saris marvelled unreservedly at the roads, the people, the towns and the temples. (James I would not be impressed; on reading one of Saris’s letters he pronounced its observations ‘the loudest lies I have ever scene’.)
By contrast the audiences with Iyeyasu and his son, the latter the Shogun but the former still the power in the land, were somewhat disappointing. The gilt basin and ewer, standard centrepieces in any Company presentation to an Eastern potentate, were received without comment; so were the assorted lengths of finest cambric, lawn, and kersey, and the ornate looking-glass. Evidently the Japanese regarded such things as nothing wonderful; they accepted them out of a sense of obligation. But trading rights were granted and Saris returned towards Hirado well pleased. He even signified his gratitude to Adams by sending presents to Mrs Adams and the children.
It was November (1613) by the time the Yedo party put into Hirado and right glad was Richard Cocks, Saris’s second in command, to see them. ‘The honest Mr Cocks’, as Saris always called him, was an elderly and endearing figure already much attached to his vegetable garden and his pigeons. He was not cut out for authority and had made heavy weather of his stewardship. A Hirado brothel owner had threatened to kill him if he came calling for his men again, and Cocks had twice had to make official apologies for their drunken assaults on the townsfolk. Finally indiscipline had become mutiny when seven men, the womanizing Evans amongst them, had made off with one of the Clove’s boats; they were now said to be living it up with the ‘Portingalls’ in Nagasaki. Additionally a typhoon had demolished part of the English factory, several fires had almost consumed it, and trade was at a standstill. Even news of the privileges granted by the Shogun was making little difference. The Dutch had evidently resolved to dispose of their new rivals by undercutting them, and in effect, dumping on to the Japanese market all the woollens they could obtain.
That, at least, was the official reason. Saris, though, thought there might be another.
The natives were now more backward to buy than before because they saw that we ourselves were no forwarder in wearing the thing which we recommended to them. ‘For’, said they, ‘you commend your cloth unto us but you yourselves wear least thereof, the better sort of you wearing silken garments, the meaner fustians’. Wherefore I wish our nation would be more forward to use and spend this natural commoditye of our own countrey; so shal we better encourage and allure others to the entertainment and expence thereof.
It would seem that this advice was ignored. The market for broadcloth remained sluggish and of that famous Japanese silver little found its way into the Clove’s coffers. There were, however, other reasons for the factory which Saris devoted his last few weeks to setting up. Adams still maintained that cloth would sell, if not in Kyushu and Honshu then certainly in Hokkaido, the northernmost of the islands. He also urged that from there there was a real prospect of discovering the western end of the north-west passage (i.e. in the vicinity of the Bering Strait). In this view he no doubt received some encouragement from the youngest of the Hirado factors, Richard Hudson, whose father, Henry, had perished in the search for the eastern end. To assist in this and other projected ventures, Adams was taken into the employ of the Company as second in command to ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ as Chief Factor.
For their part, Cocks and Saris pinned their hopes on the China trade. Disappointingly the Shogun had specifically refused their request to land any goods taken from Chinese junks by force. But Chinese silks and satins were in great demand and there were other ways of obtaining them. Hirado, facing the Chinese mainland, was ideally sited for contacts with China and Cocks would soon be engaged in delicate and protracted negotiations for direct access to this forbidden market. Yet another possibility was that of trading with the fleets of Chinese junks which annually coasted the South China Sea to Siam (Thailand) via Cochin China (south Vietnam) and Cambodia. In 1614 Adams was dispatched to Siam to intercept this Chinese trade and buy local dyes and leathers; and in the same year two other Hirado factors would be sent to Cochin China. What made the first of these ventures especially attractive was the news that two English factories had just been established in Siam.
But the future of Far Eastern trade would be of no concern to Saris himself. To take advantage of the winds the Clove sailed from Hirado on 5 December (1613) leaving Cocks and Adams to handle affairs in Japan. After some bitterness with Jourdain at Bantam over a loading of pepper, Saris continued homewards and reached Plymouth in September 1614. There, for several weeks, the Clove stayed, much to the fury of the Company’s directors who assumed that any ship which put into a Channel port must be up to no good. The interception of a letter from Saris to his brother bidding him to meet him off Gravesend with a barge added substance to these suspicions; for ‘they gave the Company great cause to suspect that Capn Saris had used very great trade for himself and proposed to convey away his goods out of the ship’. To the inevitable hue and cry that followed over Saris’s private trade were added the wrath of his crew’s womenfolk for that meanness over the rations and the indignation of all right-minded shareholders when tipped off about his ‘lascivious bookes and pictures’. Soon after his arrival in London a bonfire was lit in the courtyard of Sir Thomas Smythe’s house and, with a crowd of indignant shareholders acting as official witnesses, Saris’s entire collection of pictures and books was dumped in the flames ‘where they continewed till they burnt and turned to ashes’. The row over his personal trade lasted longer; he was never again employed by the Company.
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Like other commanders, Saris would attempt to justify his personal trade on the grounds that it was common practice. So it was and so, in spite of repeated proscriptions, it would remain. There were a few exceptions, a few men of extraordinary probity like ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ who never ventured a penny on their own account; but, as will be seen, they rarely made effective factors. It stood to reason that any man willing to gamble his life on a voyage to the Indies would think nothing of gambling his wages on a few diamonds or a sack of cloves.
Even the Dutch Company was finding it impossible to suppress the entrepreneurial spirit of its merchants. In 1609 two Dutchmen, lately returned from the East with a handsome profit of £600, offered to invest their nest egg in the London Company. From the uncertainty over their real identities it may be assumed that the V.O.C. had refused to re-employ them and that they were keen to cover their tracks. To the directors of the London Company they were ‘Peter Floris’ and ‘Lucas Antheuniss’ and their offer was in the nature of a rather intriguing proposal.
Evidently both men had served at Dutch establishments on the east, or Coromandel, coast of India. This was an area of considerable interest to the London Company as a principal source of those Indian cottons so beloved of the Javanese. Keeling had been instructed to call there on the Company’s Third Voyage (1607) but had failed to do so. Now Floris and Antheuniss were proposing to take up the challenge on the Company’s behalf and open trade not only on the Coromandel coast but also in the Gulf of Siam. They asked no wages, they would venture their own £600 towards the capital, and they would be happy with a share of the returns which they confidently predicted at 300 per cent.
After due consideration and some careful vetting of the Dutchmen’s characters, their proposal was accepted by the Court of Committees. A subscription book was opened and a single ship, the Globe of about 300 tons, was made ready. She sailed, the Company’s Seventh Voyage, in January 1611 (so three months ahead of Saris).
Apart from its casual inception the voyage of the Globe was unusual in that it afforded clear evidence of the Company’s interest in Asia’s internal carrying trade. The original proposal envisaged an absence of four years during which the ship would ply back and forth between the Coromandel coast, Bantam and Siam. In the event some of this shuttling had to be curtailed; but the Globe would still be away some four and a half years and for most of that time would be carrying, or awaiting, cargoes that were never intended for European consumption. The two Dutchmen knew the eastern markets and the trading seasons and they had done their sums carefully. While English commanders like Saris or the Middletons were making speculative calls and optimistic assessments at any port that would entertain them, Floris and Antheuniss had a definite plan of investment.
The total subscription for the voyage came to some £15,000 of which perhaps £7,000 was available as trading capital (after equipping and provisioning the ship). Most of this sum was in pieces of eight. By repeatedly investing them in Indian cottons and then reinvesting them in Thai and Chinese products, and eventually buying pepper and Chinese silks for the homeward voyage, they aimed to raise the value of their trading stock to over £45,000, thus giving the desired return of 300 per cent on the original £15,000. Other voyages of the period operated on a similar cumulative principle; but in this case because there was only one ship, because its commanders had a high stake in its success, and because they were in no position to engage in any political posturing, the bare commercial realities are more pronounced. It is significant that the Court of Committees when faced with such a juicy proposal allowed no reservations about the proposers’ nationality to cloud their judgement.
With all possible speed the Globe made straight for the Bay of Bengal. By late August 1611 its factors were ashore at Petapoli and Masulipatnam, ports within the independent kingdom of Golconda (later Hyderabad, now Andhra Pradesh) at which the Dutch were already established. Cottons suitable for the eastern market were ordered and monies advanced to the weavers and dyers. There was the usual wrangling over customs dues but by February they had acquired a good loading ‘without having made any penny in bad dettes or leaving any remnants behind us on shoare’. Profits on the sale of their few English exports had more than covered all duties and gifts, and ‘having yett a good monsoon to performe our voyage’ Floris was pleased to report that ‘our estate is att this present in verye good being’.
In April 1612 they called at Bantam and landed part of their Indian cargo plus a factor who was to sell the cottons and buy pepper whenever the markets were favourable. The Globe then sailed north and thereafter matters went less smoothly. The plan had been for a quick turn-round in Siam so that the ship could catch the south-east monsoon back to India at the end of the year. This proved over-optimistic, and the Globe was to remain in the Gulf of Siam until the autumn of the following year, 1613.
Floris and Antheuniss had miscalculated on three counts. The first was the attitude of their countrymen. At both Patani and Ayuthia, the two Siamese cities at which the Globe attempted to trade, Dutch factories were already in existence. Not without reason would Coen complain that the English fed off Dutch enterprise. Relations between the two nations were rapidly deteriorating and, as in Japan, the Dutch did their utmost to flood the local markets. They also agreed to exorbitant customs dues and other restrictions that might discourage their would-be competitors. Floris was frankly nonplussed. Four years earlier he had seen ‘such a vente [sale]’ at Patani that ‘it seemed the whole world had not clothings enough to provyde this place as was needful’. Now it was so ‘overcloyed’ that instead of a 400 per cent profit ‘I cannot at this present make 5 per cento’. He would happily have abandoned the Siamese trade altogether were it not for the fact that his remaining stock of Indian cottons had been specially ordered for the Siamese market and would not sell elsewhere.
But if disposing of his cargo presented difficulties so did the purchase of a new lading. Siam turned out to be in a state of turmoil, with war threatening on several fronts and internal trade at a standstill. When a factor was sent north to Chieng Mai in search of those forest products – skins, dyes and resins – for which the country was famous, he was captured by the Burmese and not heard of for four years. Yet somehow Floris must employ his capital during the long sojourn in Siam. He therefore dispatched another factor with a cargo for Japan (he knew of Adams’s existence but not yet of Saris’s arrival) and yet another for Macassar. Neither of these ventures brought a speedy return so that when in the spring Chinese junks began to appear at Patani and Ayuthia he had no cash with which to buy their silks and porcelains.
To make matters still worse he was having acute problems with his men. The captain of the Globe, Anthony Hippon, had died as soon as the ship reached Patani. Of the three men who in turn took his place, two proved to be dangerous drunkards, the third turned mutineer, and all were professionally incompetent. To the crime of fisticuffs on deck they added that of private trade ashore. Floris and Antheuniss, if anyone, might have been disposed to overlook this matter were it not that the crew’s trade was competing directly with that of the Company. The men were habitually underselling their chief factors by ‘up to 50 per cento’.
With his estate now far from ‘in verie good being’, the methodical Floris dreamt up contingency plans and reworked his figures. The case looked nigh on hopeless when in January 1613 help came from an unexpected quarter. In Ayuthia, the capital, the king of Siam, anxious to encourage English competition with the Dutch, bought a substantial part of the Globe’s cargo. Then, following suit, in Patani the local Sultana advanced Floris the cash he needed to buy Chinese goods. Suddenly they were in business again.
The Sultana, or ‘queen’, of Patani made a deep impression on Floris. ‘A comely oulde woman nowe about three score yeares…she was tall of person and full of majestie.’ She was also ‘a good sport’, thought nothing of hunting wild buffalo in the forest, and was a great patron of the arts. Her dance troupe was the best Floris had ever seen; and when by request the Dutch and English obliged her with a few steps in their national idioms ‘the oulde Queen was much rejoyced’. With perhaps a republican’s sneaking respect for monarchy, Floris was moved to uncharacteristic adulation ‘having in all the Indies not scene any lyke her’.
Leaving Antheuniss in charge of the factory at Ayuthia, Floris sailed back to India at the end of 1613. By now the Globe was leaking badly and with the prospect of the long voyage to England ahead of her, he resolved to beach and repair her in an estuary near Masulipatnam. In the meantime the factors were busy selling their Thai and Chinese goods to Golconda’s merchants and buying more Indian cottons. When another Company vessel arrived to continue the Coromandel-Siam trade, Floris finally abandoned the idea of a return visit to Patani and Ayuthia. With the cottons he was now ordering at Masulipatnam, plus the Bantam pepper he had still to collect, he reckoned that he already had a cargo that would sell in London for the desired £45,000.
In the event it did rather better. Thanks to a growing expertise in the re-exporting of pepper to Europe, London prices had started to climb. Pepper was still being offered to subscribers to each voyage as a dividend in kind; but what in 1603 had been an unwelcome expedient to offset a market glut had now become a prized privilege. The Company itself took no part in the re-export trade; on the advice of the directors the General Court, i.e. the shareholders, set a price and then the same shareholders could bid to the value of their shareholding for stocks. This practice continued until the 1620s; for shareholders with the right commercial connections in Europe it could mean a profit comparable with that on the original voyage.
There is some confusion about the exact profit of the Seventh Voyage but it certainly showed a return of 318 per cent and possibly 400 per cent. The Globe had eventually reached London in August 1615. Sadly Floris never lived to enjoy the fortune that awaited him. He was taken ashore on a stretcher and died in London three weeks later.
Antheuniss continued the good work alone. At about the time of his partner’s death he was transferring from Ayuthia to Masulipatnam. The Siamese trade was scarcely buoyant but this was mainly due to the infrequency of English shipping. Indeed more news and more ships were reaching Siam from Japan than from Bantam. Most years ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ managed to send Adams or one of his other factors in a variety of junks either to Ayuthia, Patani or Cambodia (where Antheuniss had posted a small agency).
In 1617 even this lifeline slackened. The Dutch negotiated new and more favourable terms with the Siamese and began to show those monopolistic tendencies that were making life impossible for the English in the Spice Islands. Then in 1618 came news of the capture of the Zwaarte Leeuw at Bantam. The Companies were now at war and the English in Siam isolated. It was while trying to redress this situation that Jourdain, in 1619, was surprised off Patani and killed by that marksman’s bullet.
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