Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (16 page)

In 1613, as well as Mrs Hawkins, his future bride, Gabriel Towerson brought home another curiosity – the first South African to set foot in England. ‘Coree’, as the man was called, was a reluctant immigrant. With a fellow ‘Saldanian’ of Table Bay he had made the mistake of accepting an invitation to board the
Hector.
Acting on previous instructions from the Company, Towerson detained both men. The ship put back to sea, ‘the poor wretches’ grieved pitifully, and the companion died; it was ‘merely out of extreme sullenness’, complained his captors, ‘for he was very well used’. Coree, although equally unappreciative of his good fortune, had at least the grace to survive and was duly landed in London. There Sir Thomas Smythe himself, still Governor of the Company, accommodated him and nobly assumed the responsibility of equipping him for civilized society.

By common consent – and not a little conceit – the natives of Table Bay were reckoned the most primitive creatures Europe had yet encountered. Indeed ‘I think the world could not yield a more heathenish people and more beastlie’, declared Jourdain as he witnessed a horde of them devouring a mound of putrid fish guts ‘that noe Christian could abyde to come within a myle of’. Their meat too, especially entrails, they preferred well hung; and for convenience as well as appearance, where they hung it was round their necks. ‘They would pull off and eate these greasy tripes half raw, the blood loathsomely slavering.’ To English eyes it was not a pretty sight and because the Saldanians also anointed their bodies with decomposing animal fats, to English noses they gave off a most offensive smell. Additionally they stole, cringed and lied. They tilled no fields (they were, as their visitors knew to their advantage, pastoralists),
they said no prayers, and they wore very few clothes, ‘onlie a short cloake of sheepe or seale skinnes to their middle, a cap of the same, and a kind of ratte skinne about their privities’.

The women’s habit is as the men’s. They were shamefac’d at first; but on our returne homewards they would lift up their ratte skinnes and shew their privities. Their breasts hang to the middle; their hair curled.

This was the Reverend Patrick Copland, chaplain of the Tenth Voyage. The nicest thing that he could find to say of them was that they danced ‘in true measure’ and that, once they had overcome a fear born of too many Dutchmen rustling their cattle, they were ‘loving’.

If Coree was anything to go by, they were also obstinate. ‘He had good diet, good cloaths, good lodging and all other fitting accommodations…yet all this contented him not.’ With perverse determination he pined for his heathenish homeland and ‘would daily lie upon the ground and cry very often thus in broken English “Coree home go, Saldania go, home go”’. His only consolation was a suit of chain mail complete with armoured breastplate, helmet and backplate and all forged out of brass, ‘his beloved metal’. This conspicuous outfit he cherished greatly and wore whenever occasion offered. In it, in March 1614, he at last stumbled aboard the
New Year’s Gift
and, still wearing it, clanked off into Africa when the ship called at Table Bay. It was his only memento of civilization for ‘he had no sooner sett foot on his own shore but did presently throw away his cloaths, his linen and other covering and got his sheepskin upon his back and guts aboute his neck’.

Whether, as hoped, he repaid his patrons by disposing his people towards the English remains a moot point. One seafarer complained that he simply acquainted the Saldanians with the going rates for fatstock and ironmongery in London. As a result ‘we had never after such a free exchange of our brass and iron for their cattle’. But in 1615 the commander of the
Expedition
was royally entertained by Coree’s family and found the people ‘nothing as fearful as at other times nor so thievish’. Cattle were both plentiful and cheap and in Coree’s ‘towne’ even the youngest inhabitants could say ‘Sir Thomas Smythe’ and ‘English ships’ which ‘they often with great glorie repeat’. Some actually begged a passage to England ‘seeing Coree had sped so well and returned so rich with his brass suit which he yet keepeth in his house very charily’.

While the Company’s fleets plied back and forth grimly bent on
momentous matters of war and trade, southern Africa – whose undreamt of reserves in gold and diamonds could have bought more cottons and spices than all Europe could consume – provided mere light relief. Here outgoing crews took a last bracing breath before plunging into Asia’s malarial miasma and here returning wanderers dared to dream again of cool green pastures and dank ale houses. The Cape was deliciously temperate and many a passing factor marvelled at its agricultural potential. A dedicated band of horticulturalists and hoteliers could turn it into a veritable paradise ‘healthfull and commodious for all who trade the East Indyes’. Jourdain even suspected that it might afford some saleable commodities. For it was ‘in the midst of two rich countries, Ginnee [Guinea] and Mozambique’. He was thinking particularly of ‘elephaunt’s teeth’, for that we saw the footinge of manie’. Much in demand throughout the East, ivory sometimes made up a substantial percentage of outgoing investments. But it could only be purchased in Europe which it reached by way of north Africa, and was therefore never cheap.

Responding to such promptings, in 1615 the Company agreed to an experiment. Ten condemned men who had lately been awaiting execution in Newgate prison were shipped aboard the
Expedition.
They proved troublesome shipmates and reluctant pioneers. But in due course they were dumped at one end of Table Bay and thus became the first English convicts to be deported to the southern hemisphere. They were also the Company’s first colonists and south Africa’s first white settlers. With such dubious claims to fame it was hardly surprising that they fared badly.

Tools and provisions were also landed and one Captain Cross, a yeoman of the royal guard who had been convicted of several duelling deaths, assumed command. Expectations of ‘a plantation or at leaste a discoverye further into that countrye’ were quickly disappointed. When the homeward-bound
Hope
sent Cross in search of beef cattle he was ambushed by Coree’s Saldanians and one of his followers killed. A peace of sorts was patched up and Coree obligingly sent cattle ‘and as an extraordinarie favour one of his wifes’. ‘The cattell we bought’, wrote the
Hope’s
commander, pointedly. In return for the promise of a house ‘built after the mannor in England’ Coree also agreed to help the settlers. Captain Cross, however, was taking no chances. He successfully pleaded for muskets and a boat and was understood to be planning the removal of his camp to an island in the bay. Already densely populated with creatures described as part beast, part bird and part fish ‘which hath a strange and proude kind of going and finny wings’, the island was duly called Penguin Island. Its name has since been
changed to Robben Island. Captain Cross and his men must have been the only convicts ever voluntarily to have removed to a penal settlement more notorious than Alcatraz.

Like later exiles, Cross soon discovered that penguins were poor company and rank eating, and that escaping from Robben Island could be difficult. Their boat was ‘split in pieces’ and a raft constructed in its stead proved far from satisfactory. While paddling out to rendezvous with the
New Year’s Gift
in February 1616 it was upset by two whales. ‘Terrified with the whales and benummed with water’ Cross somehow regained the island and ‘having shifted a shirt and refreshed himself’ tried again. He seemed to be making fair progress, then suddenly disappeared ‘which is the last newes of him’.

With Cross gone, his followers made it known that they would rather return to Newgate than continue the unequal struggle. The
New Year’s Gift
gave passage to three of them and the rest seem to have got aboard a passing Portuguese ship. When news of their failure reached a second consignment of deportees they begged that rather than be abandoned in Africa they be hanged from the yard-arm. Instead they were landed at Bantam, which was much the same thing. Meanwhile Coree and his people enjoyed a few more precious years in undisputed possession of their homeland.

In 1620, with James I taking a lively interest in East India Company affairs as a result of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of Defence, Saldania was unofficially annexed by the Company on behalf of the Crown. Andrew Shilling, commander of the
London,
performed the honours by issuing to the empty veldt ‘a solemn publication of His Majesty’s title’ and causing the erection of ‘King James his mount’ at Table Bay. But no fort was built and no English were settled. It was purely a tactical move designed to pre-empt the Dutch ‘since no European power had at this time claimed a right to that part of the coast of Africa’. Coree was eventually superseded by Hadah who after picking up some English at Bantam was deposited on Robben Island, there to act as the Company’s ‘postman’. Whenever a ship anchored in the Bay he quickly donned jacket and hose and pushed past the penguins with whatever messages had been left in his care. Not till 1652 and Cromwell’s Anglo-Dutch war was a permanent station established. Five years later the first colonists began erecting their homesteads. They were Dutch. A century and a half would elapse before the Company’s claims, based on the adventures of Coree and Cross and the opportunism of Andrew Shilling, would be revived.

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’.