The Honourable Company. John Keay

vacant pending an English return and the same was found to be true of the Ayuthia factory to which, in 1659, a party of Company factors would repair after being driven out of Cambodia. As a result of their favourable reception, Ayuthia would reopen for another fraught but colourful interlude.

      In what may seem like a catalogue of defeats and retreats, of commercial bravado undermined by political reticence, there was, though, one outstanding exception: the factory established at Masulipatnam survived and continued to supply the eastern market and to look for new maritime outlets. Antheuniss had arrived back there in 1616. He did not send any factors inland, not even apparently to the court of Golconda (Hyderabad); but he did try to trade with Burma. From native merchants he learnt that Thomas Samuel, the man he had sent from Ayuthia to Chieng Mai in 1613 only to be captured by the Burmese, had been taken to Pegu (north-east of Rangoon). There he had died but it was reliably reported that the king was holding his merchandise pending the arrival of a claimant.

      In 1617 claimants in the shape of two Masulipatnam factors duly landed on Burmese soil. They had come in an Indian ship and with only sufficient goods ‘to make tryall of the trade’ This was a disappointment to the Burmese king who had high expectations of English shipping. His visitors, though well received, soon found themselves in the altogether novel position of being so welcome that they were detained. ‘We beseech you,’ they wrote to Masulipatnam, ‘to pitie our poor distressed estate and not to let us be left in a heathen country slaves to a tyrannous king.’ For, they went on, ‘we are like lost sheepe and still in feare of being brought to the slaughter’. It sounded much like a cry of ‘Wolf’ and indeed it was. A year later news reached Masulipatnam that the two men had in fact sold all their stock and were now borrowing heavily on the expectation of a well-laden English ship coming to relieve them. When, in 1620, no such vessel materialized, the king had ‘to enforce them to depart’. Very sensibly he withheld Samuel’s stock until they were already afloat ‘lest their ryot should consume all’. When eventually brought to book by their superiors ‘they could give no other account [for their expenditure] but that most was lost at play and the rest profusely spent’.

      The man who had the job of enquiring into these irregularities was William Methwold, who had succeeded to the charge of the Masulipatnam factory in 1618. Destined for a long and distinguished career in the Company, he remained on the Coromandel coast till 1622 and thus piloted it through the crisis years in Anglo-Dutch relations. Under the terms of the 1619 agreement, or Treaty of Defence, the English company obtained the right to establish a factory at the Dutch base of Pulicat. This accorded well with Methwold’s wishes. Masulipatnam he found ‘unwalled, ill-built and worse situated’; the exactions of its governor siphoned off the profits; and the local chintzes were not those in greatest demand in Java. Better by far were the ‘pintadoes’ (batiks produced by applying the wax with a pen), which were a speciality of the Tamil country for which Pulicat was the principal outlet. The place was also well walled, having been fortified against the Portuguese, and it was beyond the reach of Golconda’s venal officials in a pocket of south India still ruled by a Hindu dynasty.

      But once established at Pulicat the English found that, as at Ambon, they were at a serious disadvantage. For they were expected to contribute to the expense of the Dutch fortress yet not permitted to settle within the security of its walls. Far from being any protection, the place was a distinct menace and trade suffered accordingly. In 1626 the English finally withdrew to the village of Armagon and there, for the first time on Indian soil, landed guns and constructed some basic fortifications. The disturbed state of the country, where there was no strong authority as in Golconda, plus the hostility of the Dutch, seemed to justify this departure from usual practice. In London the Company was unconvinced and repeatedly refused authorization for improving these defences.

      During the course of the 1630s the headquarters of the Coromandel factors shifted from Masulipatnam to Armagon and back again to Masulipatnam. Famine, the Dutch, and wars between Golconda and its neighbours all contributed to the uncertain climate. But in 1633-4 the first English factors were sent north to Bengal and obtained permission from the Moghul Governor of Orissa to establish agencies at Harihapur and Balasore (Baleshwar) to the west of the mouth of the Hughli river. Thenceforth Bengal supplied the Coromandel factories with rice, sugar and a few items of trade, especially raw silk and muslins.

      Of greater significance at the time was a short voyage made by Francis Day, the agent at Armagon. In 1639 he sailed down the Coromandel coast calling at San Thomé, the Portuguese fort, and then at a fishing village three miles north of San Thomé where he successfully negotiated with the local naik, or ruler, for a building plot. The plot was of about one square mile and on it he proposed to build a fort to which the Armagon agency should remove. The name of the village, he was told, was Madraspatnam. Precisely why these few acres of surf-swept beach, dune and lagoon should so have attracted Mr Day is hard to explain. To all appearances they were as exposed, featureless and uninviting to shipping as the rest of India’s east coast but with the added disadvantage of being only a few minutes’ march from the Portuguese establishment.

      Day, though, had his reasons of which the most convincing must be that he had a ‘mistris’ at San Thomé. According to common report he was ‘so enamoured of her’ and so anxious that their ‘interviews’ might be ‘more frequent and uninterrupted’ that his selection of Madras (the ‘patnam’ was soon dropped) was a foregone conclusion. Certainly he had been to call at San Thomé on previous occasions and certainly his passionate advocacy of the new site now went rather beyond the call of duty. He wagered his salary for the whole of his period of service in the Company that cottons would there prove fifteen per cent cheaper than at Armagon; he threatened to resign if his plan was not accepted; and he volunteered to meet all interest charges on money raised to build the fort out of his own pocket. This latter undertaking only became necessary when it transpired that the wording of the naik’s grant was misleading. It seemed to say that the naik himself would pay for the new fort and under this happy impression the Coromandel factors voted to remove there. In fact it could be read as meaning that the English would pay for the fort, a more reasonable construction but one which came to light only when the English had already deserted Armagon and were encamped on the new site. Probably Day was not alone in wanting to force the Company’s hand. When he eventually reneged on his offer to defray the interest charges, he again met with no opposition from his colleagues.

      It was in February 1640 that the English landed at their new base. Soon the first of the fort’s bastions was rising above the flat sandscape. Fort St George, as it was to be called, was an elementary castle, square, with four corner bastions and curtain walls of about 100 yards long. It took fourteen years to complete and the Court of Directors in London baulked at every penny of the £3000 it cost. But if not immediately realized, ‘the growing hopes of a new, nimble and most cheape plantation’ continued to grow. By the end of the first year some 300-400 cloth weavers and finishers had set up home outside the fort, a motley collection of merchants, servants, publicans, money-lenders, gardeners, soldiers and prostitutes had decamped there from San Thomé, and the English factors were busy turning beach into real estate.

      But Madras was to prosper against the odds. ‘The most incommodious place I ever saw’ was how Alexander Hamilton would describe it towards the end of the century. He was a sea-captain and to seamen it would ever remain a place of hideous danger. In 1640, while Day and his men were encamped round their first bastion, the ships which had transported them from Armagon were overtaken by a typhoon. In so exposed an anchorage they stood little chance. One ran aground and ‘sodainly spleet to peeces’ while the other, after an epic struggle, was also beached and then found to be past repair. Hair-raising stories of crossing the ‘bar’ – that continuous reef of sand running parallel to the beach and near which no large vessel dared venture – became part of the Madras experience. Men and merchandise, pets, wives and furniture, had all to be transhipped over it in lighters and catamarans of minimal draft while a pounding surf tossed them like a salad. Thrills and spills were commonplace, disasters fairly regular. Scarcely a decade would pass without at least one fleet being pounded to ‘peeces’ in Madras roads.

      In 1656 ‘a common country boate’ carrying the captains of three departing East India ships, plus most of the local factors who had come to see them off, grounded on the bar and