The Honourable Company

ii

While English attempts to establish themselves at Surat were getting nowhere very slowly, events on the other side of the Arabian Sea had overtaken them. Although Keeling and Hawkins had failed to reach the Red Sea ports the Ascension, before running aground on the coast of Gujarat, had made good this omission. By chance she had also discovered the Seychelle Islands. ‘They seemed to us’, opined the ship’s boatswain, ‘an earthly paradise.’ But they were as yet uninhabited save for giant turtles and even the most pie-eyed of factors could see no commercial potential for turtle flesh ‘because they did look so uglie before they were boyled’.

Aden, ‘that famous and stronge place’, could hardly compare with the Seychelles. ‘A most uncomfortable place’, thought Jourdain, ‘for within the walls there is not any green thing growing, onlie your delight must be in the cragged rocks and decayed houses.’ The city was still in ruins following its conquest by the Turks in 1538. Small quantities of gum arabic, frankincense and myrrh were obtainable but the main terminus for oceanic shipping was now round the coast at Mocha in the Red Sea itself.

While the Ascension made for Mocha through the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, Jourdain, with the usual royal letter of introduction, journeyed inland to Sana’a, the capital. Yemen was a land of picturesque surprises; high passes gave way to fertile valleys in one of which he identified extensive plantations of what he called ‘cohoo. ‘The seeds of this cohoo is a great marchandise for it is carried to Grand Cairo and all other places of Turkey and the Indias.’ ‘Kahwa’ was the word used by the Arabs; in English it was sometimes rendered as ‘coughe’ and eventually ‘coffee’. Nowhere else in the world was it to be found and as yet there was no market for it in Europe. But by the 1660s coffee would become the staple export of the Red Sea ports.

At Sana’a Jourdain obtained permission to trade from the Turkish Pasha, or governor, and then proceeded on to Mocha. Thence a letter was sent via Cairo to London representing the potential of Mocha in highly favourable but misleading terms. In fact the town proved ‘unreasonable hott’; the Pasha’s permission was for the Ascension’s trade only, not for the establishment of a factory; and a profitable sale for the ship’s ballast, mostly iron, was lost through her commander ‘bursting out in anger saying that the merchants of Mocha mocked him to offer so little’.

But the Company knew nothing of this and in 1609, believing Hawkins favourably established in India and the Red Sea trade already wide open to them, the directors instructed the ships of their Sixth Voyage to concentrate on the Arabian Sea. After much deliberation James I had just granted the Company that new and enlarged charter; thanks largely to David Middleton’s success in the Spice Islands, confidence in the profitability of Eastern trade was growing; peers of the realm and ministers of state were willing to invest. To discredit the arguments of its critics and to capitalize on this spirit of optimism, it was vital that the Company be seen to be making the most of its eastern monopoly and to be doing its utmost for English exports. At £82,000 the subscription raised for this voyage was the highest yet. Two of its three ships – the wishfully named Trades Increase and the Peppercorn were brand new and the total tonnage for the voyage was second only to that of Lancaster’s fleet. English manufactures, mostly woollens, made up half the value of its trading stock. And Henry Middleton, now Sir Henry, was appointed commander. It was the sort of fleet of which a man of quality need not feel ashamed.

Having taken seven months over a voyage which took Keeling eighteen, all three ships were off the coast of Socotra by 18 October 1609. They ‘sheathed their pinis’ and learnt from the sultan of the island that the Ascension ‘had sold all her goods’ at Mocha. ‘This newes gave mee good content,’ noted Middleton. In expectation of doing as well if not better he headed for the Red Sea. The Peppercorn was left at Aden and on 13 November the other two ships came to rest off Mocha. In the case of the Trades Increase anchors were unnecessary. The enormous ship was in fact aground and had to be almost entirely unloaded before she could be refloated. This was contrary to the Company’s instructions which insisted that, where there was no factory, goods should never be landed until sold. Under the circumstances Middleton had little choice; but the landing of his cargo undoubtedly weakened his bargaining position and aroused the cupidity – and suspicions – of Mocha’s officials.

The Turkish official in charge of the port had the title of Aga and for two weeks the English could find no fault with the warmth of his welcome. They were given an extensive property, Middleton was honoured with a robe of crimson silk embroidered with silver thread, and every day presents arrived from the castle. On the evening of 28 November, records Middleton, ‘according to my wonted custom I caused stooles to be sett at the doore where myself, Master Femmel and Master Pemberton [the principal factors] sat to take the fresh aire’. The red sun slid, orb-like, into the Red Sea; the muezzin sounded from the city’s mosques; contentment reigned. An emissary from the Aga dropped by and Middleton sent his servant to fetch the interpreter. The man burbled on in Arabic. ‘As he was aboute to say somewhat else, my man returned in great feare telling us wee were all betrayed, for that the Turkes and my people were by the eares at the backe of the house.’

I myself ranne after them, calling upon them as loud as I could to return backe and make good our house. But whiles I was thus speaking I was strooke upon the head downe to the grounde by one that came behinde mee.

Consciousness returned with the ‘extreame paine’ of having his hands tightly bound. He was immediately jerked to his feet and dragged off to prison. On the way he was robbed of all his money and of his three gold rings. ‘Then beganne they to put us in irons, myself with seven men being chained by the neckes all together.’ Eight of his men had been killed in the fighting, fourteen were badly wounded, and the remaining forty-eight were in chains. The only ray of hope was that a simultaneous assault on the ships had failed. But there too blood had been spilt and three Englishmen killed.

Why the Aga had so abruptly changed his tune was something of a mystery. In the interrogations that followed he accused the English of having broken a long-standing embargo against any Christian shipping calling at the pilgrim ports of the Red Sea. This was nonsense, although Islamic sensibilities could easily be aroused so near the sacred cities of Medina and Mecca and particularly so when, as now, fanaticism was heightened by the pangs of Ramadan. The Aga claimed to be acting on the orders of the Pasha at Sana’a; but the sight of Middleton and his men brazenly quaffing their madeira outside their house would have constituted a powerful provocation.

There was also, of course, the incentive of loot. To persuade Middleton to order the surrender of his shipping was now the Aga’s top priority. He tried bargaining – life and liberty for his captives in return for their ships’ cargoes – and he tried intimidation.

They stowed me all that day in a dirty dogge’s kennell under a paire of stairs…my lodging was upon the hard grounde, my pillow a stone, and my companions to keep me waking were griefe of heart and multitude of rats which, if I chanced to sleepe, would awake me with running over me.

For three weeks Sir Henry languished in his kennel daily expecting to be led away for execution. Instead he and all the rest were ordered up to Sana’a. ‘Our irons were knockt off our legges’ and a string of donkeys was provided for their conveyance. So was a guard of soldiers.

At Ta’iz, four days from Mocha, they were ‘marshalled into the citie two by two in a ranke as they doe at Stamboul with captives taken in the warres’. The townsfolk stood, stared and jeered and a sickly youth in Master Pemberton’s employ fell by the wayside. It was Christmas Day.

I kept no journal from this time forward [writes Middleton] but this I remember: we found it very colde all the way from Ta’iz to Sana’a, our lodging being the colde grounde covered with horie frost. In Sana’a we had ice a finger thicke in one night, which I could hardly have beleeved had I not seene it. I bought most of our men furred gowns to keep them from the colde; otherwise I think they would have starved.

They were fifteen days on the road and at Sana’a, ‘a citie somewhat bigger than Bristoll’, they were again paraded ignominiously through the streets. Then they were ‘clapt in waightie irons’ and consigned to prison.

The Pasha, like the Aga, claimed that he was only following orders. But it now emerged that the orders came from Istanbul and were in fact based on sound commercial considerations. In outbidding local merchants for the cargoes of Indian vessels reaching Mocha, the Ascension’s factors had unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of resentment. From Mecca, Cairo and Damascus had come complaints about the consequent dearth of Indian goods; additionally Mocha had been deprived of its customary import duties. Not so long ago the Arabs and the Turks had seen the bulk of their transit trade in spices diverted round the Cape by the Portuguese; now the remaining trickle of spices plus the valuable trade in Indian cottons and indigo were being threatened on their own doorstep by the English. English trade in the Red Sea was clearly detrimental to that of Arabia and Egypt; the English must therefore be discouraged from ever again entering the region.

Middleton took the point. While still fuming over the treacherous manner in which he had been treated, he had no answer to the Pasha’s logic and agreed that English ships would in future steer clear of the area. The way was now open for negotiations over the release of the hostages. In these Middleton relied heavily on the intercession of other merchants, especially the powerful Indian community. The Gujaratis had welcomed the English as trading partners and were not without blame in dislocating Arabian trade. They were also fearful of English retribution – and with good reason.

For by the time Middleton and his men had been authorized to trail back to Mocha, it was March and the season for the arrival of shipping from India. April saw the port fill with dhows from Cambay, Surat and Dabhol, from the Malabar coast, Socotra, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. They were met by enormous camel caravans from Damascus, Suez and Mecca. This was the ancient exchange on which the prosperity of Arabia had subsisted and which the advent of English shipping threatened. There was no chance of Middleton being allowed to open shop but there was every chance that if the bullish Englishman were to regain his ships he would come amongst the dhows to wreak vengeance. The Aga therefore prevaricated over actually dismissing the English and saw to it that their commander was closely guarded.

On 11 May Middleton smuggled a note out to his fleet. The Turks were feasting their Indian guests, his guards were drunk, and ‘God had put into my head a devise.’ The ‘devise’ was a plan of escape. He instructed his men to saunter, ever so casually, to two pre-arranged embarkation points and await a boat. He himself climbed into an empty water butt; the butt was then sealed and floated out to sea. After what, even by seventeenth-century standards, must have been a cramped voyage, he was taken in tow by a tender from the English fleet, ‘which being done, I forced out the heade of the caske and came aboord’. His men fared less well, half of them being taken before they could be embarked’. But Middleton was free and once back on the heavily armed Trades Increase he gave his anger full rein. ‘I sent the Aga word that if he did not send me all my people with those provisions of the ships which he detained…I would fire the [Indian] ships in the road and do my best to batter the towne about his eares.’ To show he meant business he blockaded the port, interposing his own ships between the dhows and the shore.

The Aga ‘began to sing a new song’ – but at the same tempo; he was still playing for time. It was 28 May before all the English were released and 2 July before a final settlement was reached about the cargo. Middleton still hankered after revenge and for a whole month more he lay in wait for a richly laden vessel that was expected from Suez. Both the Pasha and the Aga supposedly had shares in her. ‘Yett she escaped us in the night.’ On 9 August, to catch the last of the westerly monsoon, Middleton ordered his ships to sail for Surat. The Aga must have breathed a long Turkish sigh of relief. It seemed reasonable to suppose that he had seen the last of the English and the last of Sir Henry Middleton.

iii

In India Middleton’s appraisal of the English position was inevitably coloured by his recent experiences at Mocha. He had hoped to find a factory at Surat, Hawkins in high favour at Agra, and the Ascension’s factors manfully extending English trade. In the event he found no factory and no factors. His letters ashore were answered by a ship’s carpenter (the well named Nicholas Bangham who had absconded from the Hector in 1607) who reported that Jourdain and his followers were even now straggling back from Agra and that a disgraced Hawkins with his family were not far behind. Worse still, Middleton could not even get ashore to ascertain matters. A small armada of Portuguese frigates was blocking the mouth of the Tapti and both on land and sea Portuguese patrols lay in wait for his men. Under the circumstances trade seemed out of the question. Another rescue mission was the most he could hope to achieve. Accordingly he positioned his fleet alongside three Gujarati vessels that were anchored off the ‘bar’ and announced in a now familiar ultimatum that they ‘should not depart till I had all the Englishmen aboord of me’.

The first of his would-be passengers to arrive at Surat was Jourdain. With help from Mukarrab Khan, of whom he had a better opinion than did Hawkins, he donned disguise and slipped past the Portuguese land patrols. Then he hid in the fields for three days, swam across a muddy creek, and eventually gained the attention of one of the English fleet’s boats by scaling a sand dune and waving his unravelled turban. ‘The skiffe came near the shore and I waded into her.’ He had arrived in India as a castaway (from the Ascension); now he left in the same bedraggled state.

His news, however, was not all depressing. Mukarrab Khan was evidently keen to obtain whatever the new fleet carried in the way of novelties suitable for Jehangir and was therefore making tempting offers about trade. So was the governor of Surat and from him Jourdain had learnt of a safe inshore anchorage just north of the mouth of the Tapti. It was called, rather uninvitingly, Swalley Hole. On the second attempt Middleton found the spot and safely eased two of his ships over its mud ‘bar’. It was not exactly a port, just an unremarkable piece of Gujarati shoreline. But amidst the lush fields and marsh grasses there soon sprang up an instant bazaar. The English fleet badly needed fresh water, meat, vegetables, whatever the land could offer; the men hankered after exercise and alcohol, and the merchants revived their expectations of trade. Swalley became the first purely English addition to the map of India.

From November 1611 till February 1612 the fleet remained there. Portuguese troops continued to molest any who trod the twelve crosscountry miles to Surat but at Swalley itself the English were safe. So much so that goods were landed and some calicoes and indigo bought. When Mukarrab Khan himself came aboard and was visibly impressed by the ships’ strength and contents, it looked as if Middleton’s gloomy forebodings had been misplaced. A factory at Surat was again being mentioned, although it was unclear to what extent this depended on further gratifying Mukarrab Khan’s curiosity. Already he had been through Middleton’s lockers and successfully wheedled out of him his ‘perfumed jerkin’, a beaver hat and a ‘spaniell dogge’. ‘Whatsoever he sawe there of mine that he tooke liking to, I gave him for nothing.’

There were a few tense exchanges about the price of Indian goods and the accuracy of Indian scales but well into January trade was still proceeding and Mukarrab Khan still smiling. Then the Hawkins ménage reached Surat and matters abruptly changed. Without so much as an explanation Mukarrab Khan denied ever having mentioned a factory and peremptorily ordered the English fleet to depart. Jourdain, for one, made the obvious connection; Hawkins ‘was the chiefest cause Mukarrab Khan made such haste for us to be gone’ and was ‘the cause that Sir Henrie had not settled a factory’. But this was surely just another attempt to discredit ‘the Captain’. It was Jehangir, under pressure from the Portuguese, who had dismissed Hawkins and it was almost certainly Jehangir who ordered Mukarrab Khan to get rid of the English fleet.

With Hawkins, Mrs Hawkins, Jourdain, most of the Ascension’s factors and officers, and any other Englishmen keen to see their homes again, the fleet finally sailed on 9 February. After four years the first English attempt to trade with the Moghul empire had come to nothing; and during four months Middleton had not so much as seen Surat. Ironically, just as he was leaving he received a letter ‘from one Peter Floris’ recently arrived at somewhere called Masulipatnam. His ‘estate’, Floris reported, was ‘in good being’. There at least trade had been established.

Middleton proceeded on down the west coast of India to Dabhol, the main port of the kingdom of Bijapur and a place of considerably more importance than the nearby Portuguese settlement at Bon Bahia (later Bombay). At Dabhol some broadcloth was sold while on board the Trades Increase an important conference took place. The question was whether the fleet should continue to Bantam or whether it should first return to the Red Sea. The monsoon winds favoured the Red Sea and so did Middleton. The others concurred ‘though for divers reasons’.

One was that the letter from Floris had spoken of another Company fleet already on its way there; they must be warned off. Another was the juicy prospect of interfering with that great spring concourse of Indian shipping at Mocha. Jourdain saw this simply as a means of ‘recompense of the wrong done us at Suratt’; and in conformity with this Indo-centric view, Middleton’s conduct has often been represented as a vengeful and unscrupulous act of piracy against the Moghul shipping.

But this was not how Middleton saw it. He had no quarrel with the commanders of India’s Arabian Sea fleets and had in fact received much kindness from them during his earlier tribulations in the Yemen. As he explained, by staying their ships ‘I thought we should do ourselves some right and them no wrong to cause them to barter with us, we to take their goods as they were worth and they ours in lieu thereof’. It would be trade under duress certainly, but not pillage; and the party to suffer most by it would not be the ships of the Moghul, but the officials of Mocha. For in Sir Henry’s opinion the decisive reason for sailing back to the Red Sea was ‘to take some revenge for the great and insufferable wrongs and injuries done me by the Turkes there’. He was thinking of his dead comrades, of those ‘waightie irons’ and of the ‘dirty dogge’s kennell’.

By April the fleet was in position across the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Indian dhows were being corralled into a holding area in the Bay of Assab. Here, on the Ethiopian coast, each vessel was ‘rommaged’. A selection was made of its most desirable commodities, and broadcloth put in their place. Middleton meanwhile wrote to the Aga of Mocha explaining his behaviour and inviting compensation if not capitulation. Dearly would he have loved to witness the Aga’s reaction. But his old adversary had, it transpired, been replaced; and the new incumbent claimed an unexpected ally in John Saris, commander of the Company’s Eighth Voyage amongst whose ships was the Japan-bound Clove.