Читать книгу British Rule in India - Harriet Martineau - Страница 10

“Sir, if any other come that hath better iron than you, he will be master of all this gold.”—Solon to Crœsus.

We are accustomed to consider the 16th century a very lively age in regard to foreign adventure, geographical and mercantile; and yet we recognise, in the beginnings of the East India Company, a good deal of that inertness which individual adventurers in commerce, discovery, and politics have always complained of in the English people. Even after Stevens and Fitch had told the story of their respective voyages, and some notion was entertained of the splendours which Leedes witnessed at the court of Akbar, it was difficult to obtain subscriptions of capital, however small, for a trading experiment to the richest country in the world. The founders of the speculation went about diligently among their mercantile friends, representing to them the prodigious profits that the Portuguese, and of late the Dutch, were making by buying spices and other eastern commodities on the coast of India, instead of from middlemen in nearer ports. There was evidence that we were paying nearly three times as much for our spices, indigo, and raw silk, by purchasing them at Aleppo or Alexandria, as we should if we sent ships to Malabar. There was a certainty of enormous profits, if the London merchants would but subscribe a sufficient sum to send out an expedition properly fitted out and guarded. At one time a favourable sensation was excited by the arrival of the cargo brought in as a prize by Sir John Burroughs, the commander of one of Raleigh’s armaments. This cargo of a Portuguese trader to India, seized near the Azores, and brought into Dartmouth, was found to consist of pearls and gold, silks and ivory, porcelain, cottons, drugs and perfumes, and other captivating commodities: and a fillip was given for the moment to enterprise in the direction of India: but in 1599 only 30,000l. had been subscribed in 101 shares. In the first year of the new century, the “Adventurers” obtained a charter from the Crown, giving them, during a term of fifteen years, privileges which constituted their trade with India a close monopoly. As this charter was the foundation-stone of the mighty structure of our Indian empire, it is worth while to glance at its leading provisions. “The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies” were empowered to engross the entire traffic beyond the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan, unless they chose to license private traders to repair to the same markets. The twenty-four directors and the governor (Thomas Smythe, Esq.) were appointed, in the first instance, in the charter; but the Company might at once elect a deputy governor, and in future all their office-bearers, from the highest to the lowest. The charter gave power to make bye-laws; to inflict punishments, corporal and pecuniary, provided they were in accordance with the laws of England; to export goods duty-free for four years; and to export foreign coin or bullion to the amount of 30,000l. a year, provided 6,000l. of it had been coined at the Mint, and that the amount thus exported was returned within six months of the end of every voyage, except the first. The Charter might be cancelled at any time upon two years’ notice being given. Such were the terms of that first permission to trade with India, out of which grew our acquisition of the greatest dependency on record in the history of nations.

The languor of the subscribers shows how entirely public expectation was limited to a small trade, to be carried on under very uncertain conditions. The contributors did not pay up; some had never believed they should see their money again; others thought it highly unpatriotic to send money out of the country; others again dwelt on the dangers of the voyage; and scarcely any body beyond the Board of Directors seems to have considered the project a hopeful one, in any view. It was in vain that the clever Director, Mr. Thomas Mun, represented that the husbandman is not a madman because he flings away good wheat upon the ground; and, in the same way, an exporter of gold and silver sends it abroad in expectation of a pecuniary harvest. Notwithstanding such illustrations, so many subscribers failed to pay up their share of the expenses of the first expedition, that the willing members were compelled to form an association within the Company, taking all cost and responsibility on themselves, and possessing themselves of all the returns.

It is not to our present purpose to follow the commercial fortunes of the Company in its early days. The object of dwelling even thus long on the details of its formation is to indicate that its aims were purely commercial, and understood to be so, by both the Government and people of England. As to the dimensions of the speculation, it will be enough to say that the first expedition consisted of five small ships; that the total cost of ships and cargoes was under 70,000l.; that the cargoes consisted of the precious metals, iron, and tin, broadcloths, cutlery, and glass; and that the result was fortunate on the whole. For a long term of years great losses nearly balanced great profits; and the prodigious consumption of time, in days when a voyage to the Malabar coast occupied from six to twelve or fifteen months each way, practically reduced to moderation, the profits which, computed in the Indian market, were boasted of as amounting to 130 or even 170 per cent. The first expedition sailed in February, 1601, and returned in September, 1603. There appears to be no evidence that it touched the coasts of the Indian peninsula at all, and its chief trade was certainly with some islands of the Eastern Archipelago.

It was five years after its return that the arrival of the English seems to have first attracted attention in India. Akbar was dead when the British ship Hector arrived at Surat, under the command of Captain William Hawkins, who brought two letters to the Mogul Emperor, one from James I., and one from the East India Company. The reigning Emperor, the son of Akbar, criminal in all his relations in his youth, was by this time beginning to retrieve his character, chiefly through a long attachment to the immortal Nurjehan—the Nourmahal of “Lalla Rookh,” and the princess to whose memory the finest mausoleum extant, the Taj-Mahal, at Agra, was erected by her husband. It was during her term of political activity that the English were encouraged to make a lodgment, for commercial purposes, in India; and it might be for want of her discernment that Commander Hawkins and his comrades met with little favour in 1608, three years before her marriage with Jehanghir, and while she was the wife of another. It was nearly three years before the Hector got away; and then without replies to King James and the Company, and through the good offices of Sir Henry Middleton.

Sir Henry Middleton arrived at Surat in 1609, in command of a fleet which failed in its commercial objects through the opposition of the Turks on the Arabian, and the Portuguese on the Malabar coasts; but its appearance opened a way for better success two years later, when two ships, under the command of Captain Best, made such a gallant resistance when attacked by a Portuguese squadron, not far from Surat, as to impress the inhabitants very favourably. Captain Best had before been sounding the Governor of Ahmedabad, in Guzerat, about a treaty of commerce; and the negotiation was presently concluded, when the curiosity and interest of the inhabitants were fairly excited. In the same year that the Mogul Emperor married the glorious Nurjehan—the political heroine of Hindostan Proper, as Chand Bibi was the martial heroine of the Deccan—he permitted the English to establish four factories within his dominions. These factories were all on or near the Gulf of Cambay, being at Surat, Cambay, Ahmedabad, and Goga. In return for leave to make this lodgment, the English paid an export duty of 3½ per cent. on all their shipments.

In one sense, this acquisition of a footing in India was highly important to England. The Company were no longer a temporary association, drawing near the end of a fifteen years’ term, and trading on capital subscribed by a few eager speculators in the name of a much larger number. King James was easy to deal with, in comparison with the prudent Queen who had granted the first charter; and he made no difficulty about abolishing such limitations as did not suit the Company’s convenience. Under the renewal, which dated from 1609, there was no term fixed for the expiration of the charter. The Directors had an eternity before them, provided they escaped such impeachment as would bring a three years’ notice of dissolution upon them. They now dispensed with the private subscriptions which had at once caused them trouble and rendered the separate voyages more profitable than the subsequent joint-stock enterprises. The amount of the joint-stock capital on which the new scheme proceeded was 420,000l. Five years later, a further capital of above a million and a half was raised, and then separately managed; and in 1632, a third, of nearly half a million—incidents which show what were the commercial results of the first establishment of our factories in 1613. The Emperor’s permission was obtained, as I have said, in 1611; but the requisite firman was not signed till the 11th of January, 1613.

If the English speculators thought of nothing but commerce in settling their Indian plans at home, much more certainly must they have contemplated nothing else when in Hindostan. What they saw there dwarfed everything English in a manner now scarcely to be imagined by us. By degrees the immensity of the territory opened upon them, as they heard of groups of sovereigns, and crowds of chieftains, each with a province or a district, or a kingdom or an empire under his control, and as they found the old Hindoo organization of rulers of ten towns, and a hundred towns, and a thousand towns, commemorated in traditions. The mere deserted capitals were like the metropolitan cities of Europe fallen asleep. By degrees they learned something of the two deltas, of the Ganges and the Indus, where the mere mouths of rivers might constitute fair kingdoms, without including the course of their mighty streams. By degrees their imaginations became able to attain the peaks of the Himalaya, and to comprehend the spaces of the Deccan which were guarded by the Ghauts. The more they learned of Indian magnitudes, the less could they have conceived of having any other than commercial business there. The phenomena of human life and manners were as stupendous in their proportions as the productions of nature. Our first residents at the native courts saw wars made on such a scale that they hardly dared to tell it at home, for fear of the contempt with which their “travellers’ tales” would be treated. In the battles between the powers of Hindostan Proper and the Deccan, 200,000 men were left dead after a single battle. A rebellious heir-apparent, the day after his defeat, was compelled to ride in front of seven hundred of his impaled supporters. As the elephant was to our cavalry horse, so were all the elements of the military system, so that an army was a marching nation, and its commissariat was the produce of an ordinary kingdom. In one expedition to the Deccan, the Mogul Emperor took 200,000 cavalry alone. The imperial wealth being in similar proportion to European ideas, the stimulus to commerce was strengthened, while every other ambition must have been overwhelmed. The Emperor sat on a throne, the jewellery of which would buy up all the crowns and coronets of kings and nobles all over the world. The shrines and mausoleums beggared the Western and Eastern Churches of Christendom, with all the Prophet’s mosques to boot, from Egypt to Cabul. When other nations represent us, at this day, as having crept in upon that new region, in a humble aspect, and with low pretensions, we may well ask what else we could do. We were few and humble, and limited in our objects, and not a little amazed and dazzled at the spectacle of society organised on a scale wholly new to the European imagination. Happily, we are in possession of evidence that the case was so. King James sent an ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to the Mogul Court in 1615, and, as he was received into high favour, and accompanied the Emperor on his military expeditions, as well as his journeys of pleasure, we have the means of knowing the proportion which substantial power bore to mere display. The real refinement and cultivation of the society into which he found himself thrown, were proved by the respect and courtesy shown to the bearer of gifts which must have appeared below notice to the princes and nobles of the Delhi court. Sir Thomas Roe reported many childish weaknesses in royal personages, intermixed with proofs of ability and wisdom; and he perceived that the military genius of the people must have declined considerably since Akbar’s time; but he excited the admiration of the English King and people by his account of the state of the arts in Hindostan. In regard to architecture, the Taj-Mahal is an immortal evidence of what the Mogul rule could produce; and, as to painting, the ambassador sent word that none but really good pictures would succeed; “Historical paintings, night-pieces, and landscapes,” were his order; “but good; for they understand them as well as we.” The language of the court was Persian; but Hawkins had found the Emperor ready to converse in Turkish; and everybody spoke Hindostanee. At one time, the Europeans at court saw Delhi so rebuilt that it might almost be said that Shah Jehán found it mud and left it marble; and on the other, they saw whole provinces annexed to the west, and the Deccan, with its vast plains, its groups of kings, and hundreds of strong castles, subjugated by mere force of numbers. The armies of the Mogul sovereigns poured over the Vindhya mountains, in a dark cloud of invasion, like locust swarms on a north wind; and the one invasion left everything as bare as the other. Rebellions sprang up again, inviting new invasions, so that the final conquest of the Deccan was left for Aurungzebe to effect; but the intermediate manifestations of power and resource by the Mogul empire were profoundly impressive to European observers. It was not a little dazzling to see the sunshine strike the peacock-throne, (the fantail imitated in gems,) which was valued at six millions and a half by professional European jewellers; it was a fine spectacle to see the growth of the New Delhi, with its wide streets, their canal and avenues, and its esplanade, crowned with its fortified palace, glittering with burnished gold and snow-white marble; it must have been a sweet and solemn pleasure to see the Taj-Mahal at Agra grow up into its funereal completeness, adorned with all the tranquil and gracious imagery of death and regretful remembrance; but the phenomena which most deeply and effectually impressed the English mind were those of a social rule which could produce such monuments of art and wealth, and conduct wars for the annexation of kingdoms, without increasing the burdens of the people, or perceptibly diminishing the treasure with which the imperial coffers seemed to be always filled. How was it possible that our first lodgment in such an empire should appear otherwise than small and unpretending? The imputation is, no doubt, that there was craft under the humility; but there is very clear evidence that the charge is simply slanderous. The English wanted to buy and sell; and they wanted nothing else whatever. Some excellent letters of advice of Sir Thomas Roe’s to the Company remain to satisfy us on this point. He recommends even the abolition of his own office, and the employ of one native agent at 100l. a year, to watch over their rights at Delhi; and another at the port at 50l. a year, to watch the trade, and communicate with his principal. One port was better than more, he thought; and perhaps one factory better than any number. “It is not a number of posts, residences, and factories, that will profit you. They will increase charge, but not recompense it.” But most emphatic was the exhortation to have nothing to do with military defences. “War and traffic are incompatible,” declares Sir Thomas Roe. “At my first arrival, I understood a fort was very necessary; but experience teaches me we are refused it to our own advantage. If the Emperor would offer me ten, I would not accept of one.”

At sea there must be warfare; and the general success of the British in their sea-fights with European rivals advanced their reputation on land; but those conflicts were only heard of; and, for a course of years, the native impression of an Englishman was of an energetic personage, always buying and selling, loading and unloading ships, emptying and filling warehouses, paying his way and demanding his dues, becoming irritable when the Dutch and Portuguese and the Spice Islands were mentioned, and always victorious at sea over the Dutch and Portuguese, and in the question of spice.

Such was the beginning of our connection with India. It was, as we see, purely commercial. A change took place in 1624, which excited no particular notice or marked expectation at the time, but which is now regarded as introducing a new period in our relations with India.