Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (42 page)

Benkulen had thus had four governors in two years. It was indicative of the West Coast’s plight and, since each renounced his predecessor’s commitments, it did nothing for peaceful relations with the local sultans. Besides crimes against the Company, one of the partisan factors stood accused of murdering two Malays, having first removed their fingers joint by joint. Such ‘provoking conduct’ had apparently resulted in a state of undeclared war, for another factor is accused of incompetence in suppressing a revolt and there is mention of much wanton destruction in the pepper plantations.

But Collet had full confidence in Cooke, his new appointee, and had already congratulated him on having restored order. He was thus happily pursuing the charges against Cooke’s predecessor when the first news from the archipelago reached Madras in 1719. It consisted of a slim and soiled package delivered by a Dutch vessel that had happened to call at Moco-Moco, one of Benkulen’s remote outstations. The covering letter read as follows.

To the Governor or Chief of any English Factory or Commander of a Ship.

Sir,

The occasion of this is to signify the great importance of the accompanying packet, directed to Fort St George, to acquaint the President of the bad state of affairs on the West Coast of Sumatria
[sic].
Fort Marlborough being quite destroyed accidentally by fire, the Governor [Cooke], his Council and all the Europeans left the place about two months past and embarked on board ship
Masulipatnam,
whom we have not heard of since; so that we are left destitute, standing in need of everything for support, and what is worse, the natives are at war, besides but little gunpowder to defend this factory. Pray expedite the packet that some relief may be sent us. Having no ship or any other vessel, therefore we must all of necessity perish if not succoured in a little time. I salute you with my respects and am, Sir, Your distressed Brother, William Ballett.

Moco-Moco Factory June 4 1719

This letter does not appear in the Madras records which are strangely
reticent about the whole disaster; presumably President Collet was too embarrassed by his protégé’s failure. But by the Bengal Council, never averse to point up its rivals’ shortcomings, it was copied in full together with further particulars gleaned from Cooke and his fellow survivors when they eventually reached India by way of Dutch Batavia (Jakarta). From these it appears that the burning of Benkulen was no accident. The place was first cut off by a mass revolt of the natives; in taking to their boats about thirty of the English were either massacred or drowned; the whole settlement was then fired. It was as complete a fiasco as Pulo Condore. Happily Ballett and his ‘distressed’ colleagues at Moco-Moco were speedily relieved; but it was over two years before the English returned to Benkulen and then only after firm commitments from the sultans and a directive from London that Madras never again interfere in the appointment of governors.

One reason why the Company persisted with loss-making establishments like Benkulen was its reluctance to write off a substantial investment or to relinquish hard-won privileges. Additionally there was every likelihood that, if it withdrew, its rivals – interlopers, Dutch, or French – would quickly move in. And as the danger of European wars engrossing eastern waters became an imminent certainty, such places began to assume a military and logistical importance that overshadowed all else.

The classic case was St Helena. With the Dutch now firmly established at the Cape, and with the French laying claim to the nearby islands of Réunion (Île de Bourbon) and Mauritius (Île de Dauphine or Île de France), St Helena became the English Company’s only safe haven, watering place, and larder on the direct route between India and England. The island had no commercial value and, though the directors periodically demanded that it achieve self-sufficiency, it remained a financial burden and an administrative liability. In terms of climate it could only be an improvement on Benkulen but this advantage was offset by a baneful influence not unknown in other Company settlements but here found in an extreme form. ‘There seems to have been something about St Helena’, explains the island’s annalist, ‘some sort of spell, which had a disastrous effect upon clergymen.’ Almost without exception those sent to minister to the island’s spiritual needs contrived to scandalize their congregation and infuriate their superiors; many were clearly mad, most alcoholic.

In other respects there was little to choose between St Helena and Sumatra. Governor Pyke, having ruled the former with a rod of iron for five long years, was deemed just the man to re-establish the Benkulen factory in 1721. His stint on the West Coast again lasted five years and he then returned to St Helena for a further seven years. In shuttling between these two equatorial outposts he was not alone. Hardship ratings as well as the logic of shipping dictated that the only appropriate corrective, short of the gallows, for a St Helenan miscreant was to be exiled to Benkulen and for a Sumatran offender to be exiled to St Helena.

Only Gombroon (Bandar Abbas) on the Persian coast enjoyed a less fashionable reputation. Mocha in the Red Sea had prospered with the increasing demand for coffee but Gombroon, in spite of that share of the customs dues won by Weddell after the siege of Hormuz, remained a place of negligible trade and less enchantment. A sailor’s adage of the period had it that ‘only an inch of deal stands between Gombroon and Hell’. ‘You cannot get excited about Gombroon’, wrote James Douglas, the Bombay historian. ‘It would be difficult to select a place less known or less calculated to awaken an interest of any kind in the reader.’ Point taken.

Excluding the China trade, that leaves just the Company’s scattered trading stations on India’s west coast. Collected in a haphazard fashion during the previous century and originally adminstered from Surat, these now comprised three settlements, Karwar, Tellicherry, and Anjengo, each controlled from Bombay and each roughly equidistant from the other in a chain that stretched down the coast to its southernmost tip. As with Benkulen, pepper was the mainstay of all three and, as with Benkulen, all were ‘run at a loss for the private benefit of their chiefs and factors as country traders’ (H. Furber). As the first landfalls on the Indian coast for shipping from England, they were also important communications centres whence news from Europe could be dispatched by runner or coastal craft to Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. It was this prior access to information often of considerable commercial value which made for the popularity of a Malabar posting.

In 1717 by order of the Bombay Council, Anjengo, the most southerly, was entrusted to the Governor’s favourite, one William Gyfford, who accompanied by his young and attractive bride duly took up residence in the little seaside fort nestling amongst the palm fronds between Quilon and Trivandrum in what is now the state of Kerala. Elsewhere the English were celebrating the news of Farrukhsiyar’s
farman
, but in
Anjengo the Company’s ‘Magna Carta’ was an irrelevance. Moghul rule had never extended to the extreme south and even when, at the turn of the century, Aurangzeb had pushed his authority on the east coast as far down as Madras, on the west coast around Bombay the Marathas had already reclaimed a vast Hindu patrimony. Thus isolated from the ebb and the flow of Moghul-Maratha rivalry, the lush coastline of Kerala was still divided into a patchwork of minor Principalities and trading centres with a political and commercial profile more like that of the south-east Asian archipelago than India.

Anjengo had been acquired in 1693 by arrangement with the local rani, or queen, at nearby Attingal. She is said to have fallen in love with a ‘beautiful’ young English emissary who, although rejecting the chance of a royal wedding, ‘satisfied her so well’ that she could scarcely refuse his countrymen anything. As is the way with lovers, she later regretted her generosity and especially the grant of Anjengo. But by 1717 she had passed away and been succeeded, as was customary among the matrilineal Nair caste, by a new queen. At first Gyfford, like his predecessors, was sorely torn between the political temptation of meddling with the peculiarities of Nair sovereignty and the commercial imperative of monopolizing the pepper trade for his personal gain. Two years of intrigue, strife and precious little trade seemed to cure him of the first; and in 1721, ‘flushed with the hopes of having peace
and
pepper’, he conceived the idea of making amends by leading a grand deputation to the royal court in Attingal.

Bearing gifts in pale imitation of the Surman embassy, he assembled most of the Anjengo establishment, numbering over a hundred, paddled up river and then processed through the coconut groves, flags aloft, to the beat of a drum and the tinkle of ‘country music’. ‘The details of what followed are imperfectly recorded and much is left to conjecture’, writes Colonel John Biddulph (whose own exploits on the wrong side of the Himalayas would, five generations later, also leave much to conjecture). One of rather few Victorian officers to write sympathetically about the Company’s ‘Dark Age’, Biddulph examined the Anjengo affair in some detail and concluded that Gyfford was inveigled into the ambush less by the Nairs’ cunning than by his own conceit. Surrounded, disarmed and hopelessly outnumbered, he dashed off a note to those left at Anjengo which ended with a wonderfully absurd ‘Take care and don’t frighten the women; we are in no great danger’. Minutes later the massacre began. Gyfford himself had his tongue cut out, the tongue was then nailed to his
chest, and he then nailed to a log and sent floating down the river. The rest of the deputation were simply dismembered; just twenty horribly mangled survivors made it back to the fort.

There the young Mrs Gyfford and Anjengo’s two other Englishwomen were quickly bundled aboard a native longboat. Four weeks later they came ashore in Madras, dishevelled and destitute. Their plight excited great sympathy and even wrung from the Fort St George council a small compensatory allowance. There was, however, some doubt whether Mrs Gyfford would accept charity. Although barely twenty-six years old she had had the presence of mind to come away from Anjengo with the factory records and a useful sum of money which she claimed as belonging to her late husband. She knew better than to let grief get the better of business and she had every intention of extracting more than charity from her husband’s employers. For, as will appear, she had been widowed before.

Meanwhile back at Anjengo a long and occasionally heroic siege had ensued. The defendants, down to about thirty-five in number, were marooned on the sand spit where stood their stout but roofless fort. They had access to the sea and received occasional supplies and reinforcements. But it was six months before the relief expedition arrived from Bombay, raised the siege, chastised the Nairs and restored the pepper trade. Such was the cost of condiments, such still the value of the spice trade.

Three hundred miles up the Malabar coast, Tellicherry had requested military assistance from Madras in 1714 and, according to one visitor, was continuously at war with the local Nairs from at least 1703. ‘This war and fortifications has taken double the money to maintain them that the Company’s investments came to.’ The writer was none other than the garrulous Captain Alexander Hamilton whose more than thirty years before the eastern mast had taken him to just about every port between the Cape and Canton. On his last visit to Tellicherry in 1723 the factors were still hard at war with their neighbours.

Karwar, midway between Tellicherry and Bombay, the Captain knew even better. For here, in 1717, he had found himself in the unlikely role of commodore of a fleet of Company warships. How a private trader, renowned for his outspoken criticism of the Company and cordially detested by its factors from Gombroon to Canton, came by the command of its Bombay fleet is something of a mystery. Earlier in the year Hamilton’s ship,
en route
from the Persian Gulf, had been assailed by a
fleet of Gujarati pirates. Belying his years, the Captain had shown great courage and resourcefulness in disengaging from them and it was presumably news of this action which commended him to the Bombay Council as a doughty commander. He was promptly engaged at eighty rupees a month and sent off with a small squadron to chastise the Raja of Karwar, then besieging the Company’s factory.

The expedition was not a great success and within six months Hamilton had resigned his commission and resumed the free and easy life of a. private trader. For the trouble at Karwar, as at Tellicherry and Anjengo, he blamed the Company’s local chief who ‘pretended to be Lord of the Manor’, appropriating the profits of the pepper trade to his personal account and antagonizing the Raja with an assortment of contentious claims. Hamilton would have none of it, and was so thoroughly disgusted by the whole affair that his account of the expedition and of its negotiations gives no hint that the author was in fact its commander and chief negotiator.

The disasters at Anjengo and Benkulen, and the near disasters at Karwar and Tellicherry, could be largely ascribed to the inconsistencies of Company policy when left in the hands of ambitious and vindictive men who put personal advantage first. Private trade as conducted by the Company’s employees was certainly no crime and not necessarily an evil. It attracted into the Company’s service a brand of extraordinarily resourceful and rugged individuals; it relieved the Company of the need to remunerate them properly, and it contributed as much to the growth of British commercial predominance in the East as the Company’s own trade. But, particularly in the remoter settlements, it also bred a contempt for the Company’s cumbrous and moralizing ways and a devotion to ruthless opportunism. Closer supervision would have helped but was scarcely practical when it could take three to four months to get an approval from Bombay or Madras and at least a year from London. Only war, or some similar danger perceived as common to the whole English community, could effect a closing of ranks, a burying of hatchets.