Читать книгу The Honourable Company - John Keay - Страница 25

Although for much of the seventeenth century the Dutch and English were bitter rivals throughout the East, on the long voyage to and from Europe hostilities were usually suspended. At the Cape and at St Helena ships of the London Company amicably exchanged news and provisions with those of the V.O.C. Hadah was postman for both Companies; and occasionally Dutch and English ships actually sailed together.

This was not the case with the Portuguese. Anywhere outside European waters Spain/Portugal continued to regard the ships of the Protestant powers as little better than pirates and, peace treaties notwithstanding, they jealously maintained the exclusive character of their eastern bases. In the Arabian Sea further English endeavours at Surat and Swalley between 1612 and 1620 were seen as a direct challenge to Portugal’s maritime supremacy on the very threshold of its eastern metropolis at Goa. The Portuguese would respond vigorously. But once again a purely Indo-centric reading of these engagements is misleading. At stake was a dominant role not just in India’s external trade but in that of all the trading coasts of the Arabian Sea including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Naval battles in the Gulf of Cambay would have counted for little had not the Portuguese also been challenged at Hormuz, Goa, and a host of lesser ports from the coast of Mozambique to that of Malabar. Hostilities would last for twenty years; and they would embrace the whole trading world between Africa and India.

In 1612, blissfully ignorant of Sir Henry Middleton’s débâcles at Mocha and Surat, the Company had despatched two more ships for Surat, the Twelfth Voyage, under the command of Thomas Best, a highly experienced master mariner. The commander, or ‘General’, of an East India Company fleet controlled two distinct establishments, the one nautical and headed by his subordinate captains and masters and the other commercial and headed by one or more chief merchants. Almost invariably commanders were appointed on the strength of their performances during a previous voyage; and usually they were merchants who had thus acquired some knowledge of navigation. Hence the ideal commander should be part sailor, part merchant and, if possible, part ‘man of fashion and good respect’. But Thomas Best was just a sailor. Presumably the loss of the Ascension had convinced the directors that amongst Gujarat’s treacherous mud banks navigational skills were more important than social graces. The difference is evident in Best’s journal which triumphantly belies the idea that seventeenth-century travelogues were necessarily discursive and entertaining. True to his calling, Best merely kept a log.

Terse and laconic as it is, it is nevertheless odd that this document contains no mention of the fleet’s first contact with the Portuguese which occurred in the Mozambique channel north of Madagascar. In what may be a reference to it, Best elsewhere refers to ‘the goodliest ship thatt ever I sawe’ as being a Portuguese carrack ‘with a tower of ordnance beseeming a castell’. From the journal of one of his subordinates it appears that there were in fact two such ships off Madagascar, each of over 1500 tons and each intent on putting its tower of ordnance to good use. Broadsides were exchanged and at least three Portuguese killed before Best ‘steered away his course’. ‘For yt was contrarie to commission to meddle with them in respecte of peace we have with their king.’ But the English crews were ‘prepared to feight’ and if they felt somewhat cheated by Best’s delicacy, their rancour would be short-lived.

Best reached the mouth of the Tapti river in September 1612, only six months after Middleton had been ordered to sea by Mukarrab Khan. The news that all the English factors had been withdrawn was depressing enough but when word arrived of Middleton’s retaliatory activities in the Red Sea, Best despaired. The news affected him ‘like a drinke of cold water to a man on a cold and frostie morning’. Already two of his factors had been captured by the Portuguese. As soon as he could secure their release he was all for beating a hasty retreat towards Bantam.

But his remaining factors were more sanguine and Best, reckoning they knew their own business best, sensibly deferred to them. It seemed that for once the Moghul officials were being positively obliging. Perhaps they were worried that Best might follow Middleton’s example and blockade their shipping in the Red Sea. Perhaps they had simply reevaluated the advantages of a new trading partner and a new source of largesse. At all events a farman granting interim trading rights was immediately forthcoming, a promise was made that within forty days it would be ratified by Jehangir, and the English were invited to send another representative to Agra to negotiate a permanent agreement. It was as if the dismissals of Hawkins and Middleton had all been a terrible mistake. Within days of the fleet’s arrival new emissaries and a new letter from King James were on their way to Court. So were some of the presents known to please the dilettante emperor. There were paintings ‘espetially such as discover Venus’ and Cupid’s actes’ and there were various musical instruments in the care of Lancelot Canning, a virtuoso on the virginals, and Robert Trully, a cornettist. The latter found high favour with Jehangir. He converted to Islam and eventually blew his cornet in half the courts of India. Not so Lancelot Canning. The virginals proved too insipid for Moghul tastes and the mortified Canning, a distant kinsman of India’s future Viceroy, is described as having ‘dyed of conceitt’.

Best meanwhile repaired to Swalley to await Jehangir’s confirmation of the farman. As usual during any period in port the crews took to drinking and gambling. Even at ill-appointed Swalley Hole two men were ducked from the yard-arm for swimming ashore on the Sabbath and getting ‘drinking drunke with whores ashore’. Instructions issued to the commanders of all Company fleets proscribed such conduct in the most vigorous terms. But as with the injunctions against private trade, those against blasphemy, gaming and drunkenness were habitually ignored. They may be seen as implying not that the English seafarer of the seventeenth century was a God-fearing paragon of Puritan virtues but exactly the opposite.

It took the arrival of an impressive Portuguese fleet to bring the Swalley revellers to their senses. There were four galleons (warships, smaller than the cargo-carrying carracks but larger than any of the English vessels) and twenty-five inshore frigates. They had been dispatched from Goa and their instructions were to disperse the new English challenge by force of arms.

In the engagements that followed – and in those fought by ships of Richard Downton’s fleet two years later – the Portuguese were apparently the stronger. They had more ships and their ships had more men. They were also larger and, under full sail, faster. But they were of deeper draught, less manoeuvrable, poorly crewed, and under-gunned. Portuguese tactics still relied heavily on grappling-irons and fire-ships, the idea being to panic the enemy and then get alongside him for a full-blooded boarding in which higher superstructures and numerical superiority must prove decisive.

But all this assumed that men-of-war were just floating castles and that their defenders would always heave to and fight it out. This was not how the English had frustrated the Armada and, according to a disgruntled Portuguese account, it was not how Best chose to conduct his battles in the Gulf of Cambay.

The reason [for the Portuguese failure] was that the enemy’s [i.e. the English] vessels drew less water and thus could retreat or attack when they pleased, not making it a point of honour never to show their backs as did our men; for being ships of war we should feel it a great disgrace to avoid an encounter, while they, relying only on artillery fire from a distance, withdrew or came on as they pleased thanks to the hardiness of their vessels which were well-fitted and better sailers than ours.

Although the Portuguese galleons never got within grappling-iron distance of Best’s ships they did manage to surprise the Merchant’s Hope of Downton’s fleet. Swordsmen swarmed aboard her and a desperate struggle ensued. Three times the English appeared to be done for, and it was only thanks to the timely arrival of their whole fleet that the boarders were finally repelled. The ship had been dismasted and would require an elaborate refit. ‘I never sawe menn fight with greater resolution than the Portingales’, declared Downton; in no way could they be ‘taxed with cowardice as some have done.’

But this close encounter was the exception. For the most part the English persisted with their gun-boat tactics, keeping at a safe distance and exploiting wind and tide to manoeuvre over the mud banks and swoop in open water. All the aggression came from the gunners. ‘We began to play upon their Vice-Admiral with great and small shott’, writes Best of his first engagement. In the second the Red Dragon (Lancaster’s old flagship) ‘steered from one to another and gave them such banges as maid their verie sides crack’. Her sister ship, the Hosiander, is described as ‘dancing the hay’ amongst the enemy or, better still since her master was a certain Nathaniel Salmon, as ‘swimming, frisking lightly (but not without effect), and leaping about these huge whale carkasses’. Among the English, losses were negligible, typically three or four dead and as many injured. The Portuguese fared worse but since no large ships were either sunk or captured, estimates of several hundred dead were probably exaggerated. There would be sterner battles between the English and the Portuguese but they were not fought in the waters off Surat and are therefore often ignored in histories of the Company’s doings in India.

Best outsmarted the Portuguese in two two-day encounters and Downton in a series of protracted skirmishes. The factors naturally took great delight in these victories. Besides confounding their commercial rivals, they had made a most salutary impression on the Moghul authorities. Best’s second assault was watched by a whole Moghul army which lined the shore and later ‘divulged the same farre and near to our nation’s great fame’. Yet at the time both Best and Downton, mindful of the Company’s instruction to avoid hostilities, were reluctant warriors. Best could see no prospect of either loot or lasting commercial advantage and to provide his men with some token of appreciation for their bravery he was obliged to waylay a number of innocent Malabar dhows. The moment the Portuguese backed off he too was all for withdrawing and hastening to Bantam to proceed with the main business of his voyage. Only the urgent protestations of Thomas Aldworth, one of his factors, persuaded him to wait on for Jehangir’s confirmation of the farman and then to leave behind goods and factors at Surat.

Aldworth was immensely optimistic about prospects for trade at Surat. It was, he told the Company in a letter of January 1613, ‘the fountainhead from which we may draw all the trade of the East Indies, for we find here merchandise we can take and sell in nearly all parts of the Indies and in England’. Moreover he hazarded that it could all be paid for with exports of English broadcloth. Best was too ‘incredulous’; in other words he was unconvinced. Profits – his own as well as the Company’s – lay in pepper and spices. He proved his point by eventually showing a handsome return on the investment for his voyage and a colossal profit on his own investment. On his private stock of pepper the freight charges alone would be estimated at £300 and in the wake of his returning fleet the Channel ports were said to be awash with contraband spices. He was saved from prosecution only by the celebrity that attached to his victories over the Portuguese.

Aldworth’s expectations of driving a brisk trade in broadcloth soon proved mistaken. Some was sold as horse blankets – or as their elephant equivalents – but in India as in Japan English tweed never caught on as human apparel. Nevertheless the Indian trade prospered. Indigo, the blue dye obtained from a species of vetch, and of course the usual cornucopia of Indian cottons were readily available and sold well both in the Indonesian archipelago and, increasingly, in England. The Merchant’s Hope, refitted after the Portuguese attack, was the first vessel to sail straight from Surat to England where her cargo of mainly cotton goods was quickly disbursed. Instead of English tweeds revolutionizing Eastern fashions, Indian cottons were about to invade English domestic life. Napkins and table-cloths, bed sheets and soft furnishings, not to mention underwear and dress fabrics, quite suddenly became indispensable to every respectable household. A new vocabulary of chintzes and calicoes, taffetas, muslins, ginghams and cashmeres entered everyday use. Having first invaded the larder, Eastern produce was about to take over the linen cupboard.