The Honourable Company. John Keay

were reclining ‘verie merrie in discourse’ as they ‘solemnised the day in valedictory ceremonies’. As the ship struck they were all washed overboard; three were drowned. The whole thing happened so suddenly that others in the bottom of the boat simply rolled over with her. ‘Suddenly we found ourselves tumbled together in the water among chests, cases of liquor and other such lumber and with a score of sheep that we were carrying aboard.’ The writer, three other Englishmen, and some twenty native seamen were still in the boat although now under it ‘as within a dish swimming with the bottome upwards and the keele in the zenith’.

      ‘It was thare as dark as in the earth’s centre.’ But amazingly a pocket of air had been trapped with them. By sitting on the thwarts in water up to their necks, twenty-four men and several sheep, gulping like goldfish, survived. ‘And in this condition we lived two hours.’ They prayed of course, they debated their chances of survival, and they thought much about Jonah in the whale. They also stripped off their clothes in case they should have to swim for it.

      In fine [or to cut a long story short], the boate running ashore upon the sand, and whyles the water was still as high as our necks, with our feet we digged a pitt in the sand near the boate’s side, in doing whereof the current helped us; and then sinking down into the water and diveing, krept out under the side of the boate one by one.

      They emerged to find themselves 180 paces from the shore. The water, though only waist deep, was running with such a ferocious undertow that sixteen of the survivors were immediately sucked out of their depths and drowned.

      Captaine Lucas and I held each other by the armes and (naked) waded through the current, suckering each other in perilous stips; for if either had but lost his footing, the violent torrent was so great that we should neaver have rise more in this world.

      At last being gott out of the water as naked as Adam, we had a mile and a halfe to run to the towne, with the hot sand scalding our feet, and the sun scorching over our heads, which caused all the skin of our bodies to peel off although we ran a pace; and the first Christian whom we met was a good Dutchman who lent me his hatt and his slippers.

       CHAPTER FOUR Jarres and Brabbles

      THE ARABIAN SEA

      In the seventeenth century the words ‘India’ and ‘Indies’ had no precise geographical connotation. They were used indiscriminately to describe anywhere east of the Cape and west of the Azores. Thus the Spice Islands might be regarded as part of ‘India’, and Goa as somewhere in the ‘Indies’. As seen from the crow’s nest of a European merchantman the south Asian subcontinent, like the Far East, comprised several distinct trading areas – the Coromandel coast, the Malabar coast, Bengal, Gujarat, etc. Each belonged to a different and independent state with its distinctive language and its particular productions; each was historically and commercially linked to various trading areas in east and west Asia; and each was separated from the others by weeks, even months, of sailing. For the Jacobean navigator, as for his employers in England, India as a political entity simply did not exist.

      The case of the Coromandel coast was typical. Its commercial and historical links were with Burma, Bengal, Persia (the kings of Golconda were of Persian extraction) and above all with the south-east Asian archipelago. The English retained Masulipatnam and founded Madras because on the supply of cottons from ‘The Coast’ depended the purchase of pepper in Java and Sumatra. ‘The Coast’ served Bantam and was administered from Bantam. In the same way the Portuguese had their Coromandel base at San Thome which served Malacca, and the Dutch their Coromandel base at Pulicat which served Jakarta (Batavia). At none of the Coromandel ports did Europeans glance further inland than they need for their own trade and security. Rather did they face resolutely out to sea, scanning the eastern horizon for a sail and sniffing the breeze for new overseas markets.

      It was the same on the coast of Gujarat where at Surat the London East India Company would establish its main factory in what we now call India. Gujarati ships had always sailed to Java and Sumatra to exchange cottons for spices and pepper, but no less important were their annual sailings to the ports of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. It was to exploit these trade links, not to open up India’s internal trade and certainly not to gain a political toehold on the subcontinent, that the Company first directed its ships to western India.

      Of course, from a nineteenth-century perspective things would look very different. British imperialism craved as long and proud a pedigree as possible; it was a kind of legitimization. Hence Surat, whence its ‘founders’ were known to have treated with ‘The Great Mogoll’, was represented as the seed of the Raj. Into all the earliest English contacts with the subcontinent a special significance had to be read. Factories in India were different; they were ‘settlements’. Their disposition round the perimeter of the peninsula was seen as a pincer movement which would lead inexorably to the acquisition of the whole country. If there was no master plan, there was surely a destiny at work; and the factors at Surat, Masulipatnam and Madras were seen as living and labouring with a rugged spirit born of the conviction that one day their Clive would come.

      The effects of such chronological rewinding are still evident in twentieth-century studies. It may, for instance, be unhelpful to bill the first visit by a Company factor to the Moghul court as ‘the opening scene in the history of British India’; or to applaud his successor as ‘the first of the many great Englishmen who have served their country in India’; or to describe the commander of a fleet that called at Surat in 1615 as ‘a most undoubted worker on the foundations of Empire in India’. The imperial perspective wildly distorts the endeavours of the young Company in India just as it marginalizes the activities of the Company elsewhere.

      In 1607, as part of that policy to diversify its activities, exploit the existing carrying trade, and find a market for English woollens, the Company instructed the ships of its Third Voyage to proceed to Bantam by way of the Arabian Sea. Specifically they were to call at Socotra, Aden ‘or some other place thereaboute’, and Surat. Lancaster, whose advice is evident in the detailed instructions for the voyage, had identified the Arabian Sea as a distinct trading basin with the Gujarat-Red Sea axis as its main trade route. This was the last leg of the sea journey by which spices, cottons, silks and other luxury items reached the Middle East. The London Company’s numerous ex-Levant directors were familiar with the desert caravans which conveyed these goods onward to Cairo and Damascus; and they knew that most Red Sea purchases of such goods were made for cash.

      The Company’s factors were therefore to inquire into all aspects of this trade with three objectives in mind. One was the possibility of selling broadcloth for cash; another the possibility of obviating the Company’s existing and much troubled trade with the Spice Islands by buying spices at Aden or Surat; and the third and ideal solution was that of improving their purchasing position at Bantam by obtaining, in return for English exports, the Indian cottons so sought after in the East. This could be done either at source in Gujarat (Surat) or where the Gujaratis finally disposed of their cottons (Aden and Mocha).

      Whichever scheme proved more viable it was hoped, as usual, that English woollens would find a better market in the ports of the Asian mainland than they were ever likely to in Java and the archipelago. The Third Voyage carried an unusually large stock of broadcloth samples and included a factor ‘brought up in the trade of woollen commodities’. There was also William Hawkins, who spoke Turkish, a useful medium throughout the Islamic world, and who, as second in command, would be entrusted with all diplomatic negotiations.

      The commander was William Keeling, although there was some doubt about his appointment until the fleet was actually under way. Keeling, a family man, had submitted an unprecedented request to the effect that Anne, his wife, might accompany him. She was willing; the Company was not. Undeterred, Mrs Keeling smuggled herself aboard the Red Dragon. As was surely inevitable in a ship of 600 tons crammed with nearly 200 men, her presence was quickly detected and Keeling was ordered to land the stowaway or hand over command. She was put ashore at the Downs. Three years later when Keeling returned, it is pleasant to record that she was again at the Downs. Having been the last