Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company (26 page)

Hedges could not have known that even as he penned this
cri de coeur
the directors in London were reaching precisely the same conclusion. Six months later, in July 1684, word duly reached Bengal that Agent Hedges had been dismissed the service and that their establishments in Bengal were again to come under the governorship of Madras. The reason given for terminating so abruptly the services of one in whom they had supposedly placed their confidence was that Hedges, or one of his over-zealous supporters, had intercepted private letters from one of
Charnock’s henchmen to Sir Josiah Child. Significantly, more heinous in Child’s eyes than adultery or malpractice was the crime of having interfered with his system of informers.

This pernicious system would last as long as the Company, and although the charge of subverting it would ever be of the most serious, it was not Child’s invention. He merely exploited it for his own often devious purposes. Never, in more than 150 years from the time of William Hawkins till that of Warren Hastings, did the Company in London master its profound distrust of its overseas employees or encourage among them the development of a responsible command structure. In Bantam, Surat, Bombay and Madras the same spectacle of bickering and bitterly divided factors would be witnessed year in and year out. Occasionally, and thanks mainly to the high mortality in the East, outstanding talents rose to the fore and commanded widespread respect. But this was in spite of the Company’s direction, rarely because of it; and invariably such luminaries were eventually disowned or discredited. The pleas repeatedly voiced by Hedges that he be accorded the confidence and authority to carry out the task for which he had been appointed would be repeated almost word for word by Warren Hastings a century later. By then Calcutta was ‘the city of palaces’ and Hastings Governor-General of a sizeable chunk of the Indian subcontinent; but in this one crucial respect nothing had changed.

Observing the unseemly Hedges-Charnock affair from the scented halls of his seraglio in Dhaka, Shaista Khan drew the obvious conclusion. ‘The English are a company of base, quarrelling people, and foul dealers’, he muttered as he ordered one of Charnock’s henchmen to be removed from court. Any intention he had had of interceding for such men in the matter of their customs exemption was now far from his mind. On the contrary, he pressed them for the duties which had accrued in the intervening months and showed more favour to the Dutch and to the detested interlopers than to the Honourable Company. Compared to the well-regulated Dutch company, which also had a chain of factories stretching up the Hughli river, the English seemed as keen to sell their brethren as their bullion. In short, they were fair game and their divisions played into the Nawab’s hands.

Hedges had advised that if the English were ever to be masters of their destiny in Bengal they must seek a fortified settlement there equivalent to Bombay or Madras. He understood the Dutch were contemplating something similar and he strongly recommended the island of Sagar at
the mouth of the Hughli. As the Nawab leant ever harder on the Company’s upriver factories, Charnock at Kasimbazar and Child in London also came to accept the need for drastic action. But instead of quietly occupying Sagar, a move which would probably have entailed an immediate interruption of trade plus the long-term expense of fortifications, they resolved on a show of strength with the Nawab to make him ‘sensible of our power as we have of our truth and justice’. The idea seems to have been that they would continue to trade – but at the point of a gun – while at the same time prospecting for a permanent base and ideally one that was already fortified.

Such was the muddled thinking that lay behind the Moghul War, or sometimes ‘Child’s War’, the results of which in so far as they affected Bombay and Surat have already been noticed. Interrupting the movement of Indian shipping in the Arabian Sea was all part of the plan but the main thrust of the attack was to be made where the main provocation was perceived – in Bengal. And to this end two ships carrying three companies of infantry arrived at the mouth of the Hughli river in the autumn of 1686.

‘308 soldiers to make war on an empire which had at that moment an army of at least 100,000 men in the field’, writes Sir William Hunter in his
History of British India.
With a fine sense of the absurdity of it all Hunter reckons that the Nawab alone had 40,000 troops at his command. ‘Conceived in ludicrous ignorance of the geographical distances and with astounding disregard of the opposing forces’ here was a contest with all the ingredients for sublime tragedy plus limitless scope for personal heroics; a foretaste perhaps of Clive at Arcot, or more likely a repeat of the Run blockade and the Amboina Massacre.

Yet not so. With extraordinary perversity the war insisted on taking a course of its own which bore no more relationship to the show of force that was intended than it did to the sound drubbing that was invited. For a start, it was never actually declared. Somehow the Company’s ultimatum which was to have signalled the outbreak of hostilities never reached the Nawab. He must, however, have had some inkling of trouble for long before the invasion force reached Bengali soil he took the precaution of surrounding the Company’s headquarters in Hughli with a few thousand troops. They were well behaved and, having no clear idea why 308 infantrymen from the other side of the world should choose to land in their midst, they duly permitted the newcomers to join their fellow-countrymen in the English factory.

Oddly, as it must have seemed to the Nawab’s troops, these alien soldiers included no officers above the rank of lieutenant. In their wisdom the Company’s directors had decreed that the conduct of their ‘warr with the Moghul’ would best be left to their much mistrusted factors and their passing ships’ captains, overall command being reserved for the head of the Hughli factory. There was no way that the directors could have known that this worthy had in fact succumbed during the previous monsoon, leaving the indestructible Job Charnock of Kasimbazar as the senior factor. Thus to ‘good, honest Job’, still wheeling and dealing to his heart’s content and a man with no military experience whatsoever, it fell to command the assault on the most powerful empire in Asia.

According to his instructions, this assault was not to be made from Hughli. The object of landing troops there seems to have been simply that of protecting the factory while its considerable stocks of saltpetre (‘soe necessary and valewable at this time’) were transferred to river craft. The English were then to take to their ships, waylay Moghul vessels in the river, and eventually stage an invasion by taking Chittagong, a place which figured largely in Sir Josiah Child’s calculations as the Achilles heel of the Moghul empire. The war thus began with the contradictory spectacle of the invaders endeavouring to withdraw, while the invaded, ever mindful of the value of European trade, sought to persuade them to stay.

As recorded by Charnock, hostilities actually commenced on 28 October 1686 when three of his soldiers, going peaceably about their shopping in the Hughli bazaar, were (reportedly) ‘beate, cut, and carried prisoner’ to the town’s governor. Without waiting to establish the circumstances, ‘Colonel’ Charnock responded with a series of ferocious reprisals during which the town’s guns were spiked, a Moghul ship was taken, and several houses set on fire. Only one English soldier was killed to the sixty fatalities of the enemy. ‘We had an absolute conquest and might have made the towne our own’, crowed the jubilant ‘Colonel’, oblivious of the fact that the Nawab might well have settled for just such an outcome. But Charnock had his orders and they ‘would not beare us out’; he was not to occupy Hughli but evacuate it.

To allow time for the loading of the saltpetre, a ceasefire was agreed and desultory negotiations were opened. They were still going on when, the warehouse at last empty, Charnock duly embarked his whole contingent and sailed downriver. No attempt was made either to hasten his departure or to prevent it. ‘Our coming off was very peaceable.’ If
anything the evidence suggests that Charnock was as reluctant to leave as his hosts were to see him go. But he was not going far. Having followed to the word the Company’s orders to evacuate Hughli, he now flatly contradicted their spirit by landing his entire force just twenty miles downstream.

The spot chosen was a long deep-water basin where the river curled to the west leaving a high mud ridge on its eastern flank. Although technically accessible to ocean-going ships at high tide, it was still seventy miles from the sea up a river which English skippers were as yet reluctant to navigate in any vessel over 300 tons. It was not much better than Hughli in this respect and, according to Charnock, it was even more vulnerable to attack by land. But at least it commanded the river and was well removed from the Moghul centres of power. Here negotiations could continue on more neutral ground while he cast about for alternative sites for a fortified base. He called the place ‘Chuttanutteea’ after the neighbouring village of Sutanati; others called it ‘Kalikata’ and eventually Calcutta after another nearby village, Kalighat.

During the winter months of 1686-7 negotiations with the nawab’s representatives seemed to be going well. In his mud and timber huts beside the river Charnock drew up his terms – a site for a fort, all the usual customs exemptions, and the payment of an outrageous indemnity of 6.6 million rupees (including one item of 2 million rupees for ‘1000 men and 20 ships for the warr’). Amazingly an agreement in principle seemed to be forthcoming. But in reality both sides were playing for time.

As per the Company’s orders, Charnock was now supposed to have taken the offensive by attacking the Moghul marine and storming the town of Chittagong. But he lacked the men and ships for such an extensive programme, only a third of those originally intended for Bengal having materialized. It may be, therefore, that he was waiting for reinforcements. More plausibly he was also hoping that his instructions would be cancelled. For he realized that if carried out to the letter they would antagonize the Emperor as well as the Nawab and so ‘forfeit all our trade in the Bay’. Similarly the Nawab banked on the English in time coming to their senses. He understood their reluctance to jeopardize such a valuable trade and, seeing no reason for generous concessions, sought to prolong the negotiations. He therefore adopted his usual ploy of repudiating the agreement already reached in principle.

At this point Charnock once again panicked. Claiming that ‘the country
about us was up in arms’ and the Nawab raising an army ‘to thrust us out of the kingdom’ he went on the rampage, burning down ‘the King’s salt houses’, storming one of his riverside forts, ordering the destruction of Balasore, and sailing on downriver to Hijili, the last island before the Bay of Bengal, which he duly commandeered. There appears to have been no direct provocation for any of these attacks. Once again English losses were minimal – ‘one man’s leg’ – whilst at Balasore the whole town was sacked, some thirteen Moghul ships destroyed and much coin and merchandise plundered. So much for the English being ‘harried out of Bengal’.

For the Nawab this second assault was too much. Troops were ordered down to the delta – Charnock says 12,000 – and guns were landed on the shore opposite Hijili island. But Hijili was not an easy place to blockade. Although separated from the mainland by only a narrow waterway, to the east it was open to the main river, here some ten miles wide and navigable by the largest vessels. On the other hand it was not a healthy spot. There was a village, a fort that was rapidly improved, and a few fields; the rest was dense undergrowth, swamp and marsh with its full complement of tigers, insects and amoebae. It was now May and in the hottest month of the Bengali year the air scarcely stirred save when shots whistled across the narrows. Far more deadly than lead, though, were the fevers, the ague and the distemper which quickly ‘became epidemicall’. By the end of the month more than half of the Colonel’s men had been laid to rest in sandy graves and of the survivors less than a hundred were fit for duty. They included just four of the twenty-six NCOs and one of the fourteen junior officers. ‘Most desperate and deplorable’ was the position, then, when the enemy mounted their main attack.

Taking the fever-ridden defenders by surprise, on 28 May 700 cavalry splashed on to the island, took the village and were among the trenches round the fort before the English rallied. ‘Fierce engageings’ continued all that night and most of the next day. But ‘the Mogull’s courage, as their nature is, going out of them with their Bang
[bhang,
a marijuana decoction]’, some ground was regained and contact re-established with the Company’s shipping. More provisions and powder were landed as more enemy troops crossed on to the island. The first rains arrived, increasing the misery and exhaustion of the defenders and claiming yet more fever victims. Meanwhile the ships stood by. It was not now a question of victory or defeat, merely of evacuation or surrender.

‘Thus we held out for 4 daies’, wrote Charnock who seems to have remained in robust health throughout. On the fifth day tall ships appeared to seaward. For once the Company’s annual fleet from London to Bengal had made good speed. Amid joyful scenes seventy sailors marched ashore and ‘chearfully sallied out and beate the enemy from their gunns’. The same men ‘by 1 and 2 at a time’ were then spirited through the undergrowth back to their ships and, with much beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, ceremoniously relanded. The ploy worked. Convinced that the fleet contained unlimited stocks of fresh fighting men, the Moghul commander ‘grew dull upon it…and held forth a flag of truce’. The tables had turned once again.

Although ‘we would have accepted of any terms to have our Selves, Shipps and Goods conveighed off the island’, Charnock was not about to let his good fortune go to his head. It was the enemy who had sued for peace and, more to the point, he now had – and they knew that he had – bullion to spend and holds to be filled. There was nothing like a reminder of that mutual commercial advantage to bring all sides to their senses. Charnock therefore dug out the highly favourable terms negotiated at Sutanati and awaited events.