CHAPTER XII

Early European Settlements, 1500-1700

Europe and India before 1500 A.D.

The Muhammadan invaders of India had entered from the north-west. The Christian conquerors of India came by the sea from the south. From the time of Alexander the Great (327 B.C.) to that of Vasco da Gama (1498 A.D.), Europe held little direct intercourse with the East. An occasional traveller brought back stories of powerful kingdoms and of untold wealth. Commerce never ceased entirely. It was carried across Western Asia; or through Egypt and the Red Sea, and finally fell to the Italian cities on the Mediterranean which traded with the Asiatic ports of the Levant. In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed westwards under the Spanish flag to seek India beyond the Atlantic, bearing with him a letter to the great Khan of Tartary. He found America instead.

Vasco da Gama, 1498

An expedition under Vasco da Gama started from Lisbon five years later, in the opposite or eastern direction. It doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and cast anchor off the city of Calicut on the south-western coast of India on the 20th May 1498, after a voyage of nearly eleven months. From the first, Da Gama encountered hostility from the Moors, or rather Arabs, who monopolized the sea-borne trade of the Malabar coast; but he seems to have found favour with the Zamorin, or Hindu Raja of Calicut. After staying nearly six months on the Malabar coast, he returned to Europe, bearing with him the following letter from the Zamorin to the King of Portugal:—‘Vasco da Gama, a nobleman of your household, has visited my kingdom, and has given me great pleasure. In my kingdom there is abundance of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, and precious stones. What I seek from thy country is gold, silver, coral, and scarlet.’

Early Portuguese Governors

In 1502, the King of Portugal obtained from Pope Alexander VI. a bull constituting him ‘Lord of the Navigation, Conquests, and Trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India.’ In that year Vasco da Gama set sail a second time for India, with a fleet numbering twenty vessels. He formed an alliance with the Rajas of Cochin and Cannanore against the Zamorin of Calicut, and bombarded the latter in his capital. In 1503, the great Affonso de Albuquerque sailed to the East in command of one of three expeditions from Portugal. In 1505, a large fleet of twenty-two sail and fifteen hundred men was sent under Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese Viceroy of India. In 1509, Albuquerque succeeded him as Governor, and widely extended the area of Portuguese influence. Having failed in an attack upon Calicut, Albuquerque seized Goa in 1510, which has since remained the capital of Portuguese India. Then, sailing round Ceylon, he captured Malacca, the key to the navigation of the Indian Archipelago, and opened up trade with Siam and the Spice Islands. Lastly, Albuquerque sailed back westwards, and, after penetrating into the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, returned to Goa, only to die, in 1515. In 1524, Vasco da Gama came out to the East for the third time, and died at Cochin in the same year.

Cruelties of the Portuguese in India

For exactly a century, from 1500 to 1600, the Portuguese enjoyed a monopoly of Oriental trade. But the Portuguese had neither the political strength nor the personal character necessary to found an empire in India. Their national temper had been formed in their contest with the Moors at home. They were not traders, but knights-errant and crusaders, who looked on every pagan as an enemy of Portugal and of Christ. Only those who have read the contemporary narratives of their conquests, can realize the superstition and the cruelty with which their history in the Indies is stained. Albuquerque alone endeavoured to win the goodwill of the natives, and to win the friendship of the Hindu princes. In such veneration was his memory held, that the Hindus of Goa, and even the Muhammadans, were wont to repair to his tomb, and there to utter their complaints, as if in the presence of his spirit, and to call upon God to deliver them from the tyranny of his successors.

Downfall of the Portuguese in India

In 1580, the Portuguese crown was united with that of Spain under Philip II. The interests of Portugal in Asia were henceforth subordinated to the European interests of Spain. In 1640, Portugal again became a separate kingdom. But in the meanwhile two hardier rivals, the Dutch and English, had appeared in the Eastern seas, and the Portuguese empire of the Indies was withering away as rapidly as it had sprung up.

The Portuguese Possessions in 1892

The only possessions in India now remaining to the Portuguese are Goa, Daman, and Diu, all on the west coast, with an area of 1100 square miles, and a population of under 500,000 souls. There are also about 500 Portuguese in British India, besides a larger number of mixed descent. Over 30,000 of mingled blood are found in Bombay (‘Portuguese’ half-castes), and 20,000 in Bengal, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Dacca and Chittagong. The latter are known as Firinghis; and, excepting that they retain the Roman Catholic faith and European surnames, are scarcely to be distinguished, either by colour, language, or habits of life, from the natives among whom they live.

The Dutch in India

The Dutch were the first European nation who broke through the Portuguese monopoly. During the 16th century, Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam became the great emporia whence Indian produce, imported by the Portuguese, was distributed to Germany, and even to England. At first the Dutch, following in the track of the English, attempted to find their way to India by sailing round the north coasts of Europe and Asia. William Barents is honourably known as the leader of three of these Dutch arctic expeditions, in the last of which he perished. The first Dutchman to double the Cape of Good Hope was Cornelius Houtman, who reached Sumatra and Bantam in 1596. Forthwith private companies for trade with the East were formed in many parts of Holland or the United Provinces; but in 1602 they were all amalgamated by the States-General into ‘The Dutch East India Company.’ In 1619, the Dutch laid the foundation of the city of Batavia in Java, as the seat of the supreme government of their possessions in the East Indies. Their principal factory had previously been at Amboyna. At about the same time the Dutch discovered the coast of Australia, and in North America they founded the city of New Amsterdam or Manhattan, now New York.

Dutch Supremacy in the Eastern Seas

During the 17th century, the Dutch maritime power was the first in the world. Their memorable massacre of the English at Amboyna, in 1623, forced the British Company to retire from the Eastern Archipelago to the continent of India, and thus led to the foundation of our Indian Empire. The long naval wars and bloody battles between the English and the Dutch in the Eastern seas, were not terminated until William of Orange united the two countries in 1689. In the Indian Archipelago the Dutch ruled for a time without a rival, and gradually expelled the Portuguese from almost all their territorial possessions. In 1635, they occupied Formosa; in 1640, they took Malacca—a blow from which the Portuguese never recovered; in 1647, trading at Sadras, on the South-eastern coast of India; in 1651, they founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, as a half-way station to the East; in 1652, they built their first Indian factory at Palakollu, on the Madras coast; in 1658, they captured Jaffnapatam, the last stronghold of the Portuguese in Ceylon. In 1664, they wrested from the Portuguese all the earlier Portuguese settlements on the pepper-bearing coast of Malabar; and in 1669, they expelled the Portuguese from St. Thomé and from Macassar.

Short-sighted Policy of the Dutch

The fall of the Dutch colonial empire resulted from its short-sighted commercial policy. It was deliberately based upon a strict monopoly of the trade in spices, and remained from first to last destitute of sound economical principles. Like the Phoenicians of old, the Dutch stopped short of no acts of cruelty towards their rivals in commerce; but, unlike the Phoenicians, they failed to introduce their civilization among the natives with whom they came in contact. The knell of Dutch supremacy in India was sounded by Clive, when in 1758 he attacked the Dutch at Chinsurah both by land and water, and forced them to an ignominious capitulation. During the great French wars from 1793 to 1815, England wrested from Holland her Eastern colonies; but Java was restored in 1816, and Sumatra exchanged for Malacca in 1824. At the present time, the Dutch flag flies nowhere on the mainland of India. Quaint houses with Dutch tiles and ornaments in the now British towns of Chinsurah, Negapatam, Jaffnapatam, and at several petty ports on the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, together with the formal canals or water-channels in some of these old settlements, remind the traveller of scenes in the Netherlands.

Early English Adventurers, 1496-1596.

The earliest English attempts to reach India were made by the North-west or Arctic Sea. In 1496, Henry VII. granted letters patent to John Cabot and his three sons (one of whom was the famous Sebastian) to fit out two ships for the exploration of this North-western route. They failed, but discovered the island of Newfoundland, and sailed along the coast of America from Labrador to Virginia. In 1553, the ill-fated Sir Hugh Willoughby attempted to force a passage north-east, through the Arctic Sea along the north of Europe and Asia, the successful accomplishment of which has been reserved for a Swedish officer in our own day. Sir Hugh perished; but his second in command, Chancellor, reached a harbour on the White Sea, now Archangel. Many subsequent attempts were made to find a North-west passage from 1576 to 1616. They have left on our modern maps the imperishable names of Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, and Baffin. Meanwhile, in 1577, Sir Francis Drake had sailed round the globe, and on his way home had touched at Ternate, one of the Moluccas, the king of which island agreed to supply the English nation with all the cloves it produced. The first modern Englishman known to have visited India was Thomas Stephens, rector of the Jesuits’ College in Salsette, in 1579. In 1583, three English merchants—Ralph Fitch, James Newberry, and Leedes—went out to India overland as mercantile adventurers. The jealous Portuguese threw them into prison at Ormuz, and again at Goa. At length Newberry settled down as a shopkeeper at Goa; Leedes entered the service of the Mughal Emperor; and Fitch, after lengthened wanderings in Ceylon, Bengal, Pegu, Siam, Malacca, and other parts of the East Indies, returned to England. The defeat of the ‘Invincible Armada,’ sent by the united kingdom of Spain and Portugal against the English in 1588, gave a fresh stimulus to our maritime enterprise; and the successful voyage of Cornelius Houtman in 1596 showed the way round the Cape of Good Hope into waters hitherto monopolized by the Portuguese.

English East India Companies.

The English East India Company had its origin in the commercial rivalry between London and Amsterdam. In 1599, the Dutch raised the price of pepper against the English from 3s. to 6s. and 8s. per pound. The merchants of London held a meeting on the 22nd September 1599, at Founders’ Hall, with the Lord Mayor in the chair, and agreed to form an association for the purposes of trading directly with India. Queen Elizabeth also sent Sir John Mildenhall by way of Constantinople to the Mughal Emperor to apply for privileges for an English company. On the 31st December 1600, the English East India Company was incorporated by royal charter, under the title of ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies.’ The original Company had only 125 shareholders, and a capital of £70,000, which was raised to £400,000 in 1612, when voyages were first undertaken on the joint-stock account. Courten’s Association, known as ‘The Assada Merchants,’ from a factory subsequently founded by it in Madagascar, was established in 1635, but, after a period of keen rivalry, it combined with the London Company in 1650. In 1655, the ‘Company of Merchant Adventurers’ obtained a charter from Cromwell to trade with India, but united with the original Company two years later. A more formidable rival subsequently appeared in the English Company, or ‘General Society trading to the East Indies,’ which was incorporated under powerful patronage in 1698, with a capital of two millions sterling. However, a compromise was effected through the arbitration of Lord Godolphin, and the ‘London’ and the ‘English’ Companies were finally amalgamated in 1709, under the style of ‘The United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies.’

The First Voyages of the London Company.

The Indian Archipelago was the destination of the first English ships that penetrated into Eastern seas. Captain Lancaster, in the pioneer voyage of the Company (1602), established commercial relations with the King of Achin, and founded a factory, or ‘house of trade,’ at Bantam. In the following years, cargoes of pepper and rich spices were brought back from Sumatra and the Moluccas, Banda, Amboyna, and Bantam. The jealous Portuguese were still supreme along the western coast of India, and resisted English intrusion by force of arms. In 1611, Sir Henry Middleton resolutely took on board a cargo of Indian goods at Cambay in the teeth of Portuguese opposition. In 1615 occurred the famous sea-fight of Swally, near the mouth of the Tapti river off the Bombay coast, in which Captain Best four times beat back an overwhelming force of Portuguese ships, and for ever inspired the minds of the natives with respect for English bravery. In the same year, Sir Thomas Roe, sent out by King James I. as ambassador to the court of the Great Mughal (the Emperor Jahangir), succeeded in obtaining favourable concessions for English trade.

The Massacre of Amboyna, 1623.

The Dutch in the Spice Islands proved more dangerous rivals to the English than the Portuguese in India had done. The massacre of Amboyna, which made so deep an impression on the English mind, marked the climax of the Dutch hatred to us in the Eastern seas. After long and bitter recriminations, the Dutch seized our Captain Towerson at Amboyna, with 9 Englishmen, 9 Japanese, and 1 Portuguese sailor, in February 1623. They tortured the prisoners at their trial, and found them guilty of a conspiracy to surprise the garrison. The victims were executed in the heat of passion, and their torture and judicial murder led to an outburst of indignation in England. Ultimately, commissioners were appointed to adjust the claims of the Dutch and English nations; and the Dutch had to pay a sum of £3615 as satisfaction to the heirs of the servants of the English Company who had suffered. But from that time the Dutch remained masters of Banda and the Spice Islands. They monopolized the whole trade of the Indian Archipelago, until the great naval wars which commenced in 1793.

Early English Settlements in Madras.

The result of the massacre of Amboyna was to drive the English from the Spice Islands to the mainland of India. Their first settlements were on the Coromandel coast. An English agency had been established at Masulipatam as early as 1611; and this was now (1632) raised to the rank of a factory under the authority of a farman, known as ’the golden farman’ from the Sultan of Golconda. A few years earlier (1626) an English factory had also been founded at Armagaon (now a ruined place in Nellore District), which mounted 12 guns, and employed 23 European agents. At last, in 1639, Mr. Francis Day, the Chief of Armagaon, bought from the Raja of Chandragiri a more favourable site lower down the coast, called Madaraspatam or Chennapatam. Here he built Fort St. George, and became the founder of Madras. Madras was the first territorial possession of the Company in India. For some years it remained subordinate to the English factory at Bantam in Java, but in 1653 it was created an independent Presidency.

Early English Settlements in Bombay.

On the west coast of India, Surat was long the headquarters of English trade. The factory was established here in 1612-15, with agencies at Gogra, Ahmadabad, and Cambay, as the first-fruits of the naval victory over the Portuguese off Swally. At this time Surat was the principal port in the Mughal Empire, through which flowed all trade between Northern India and Europe. In 1661, the island of Bombay was ceded by Portugal to the British Crown, as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza, queen of Charles II.; but it was not delivered up by the Portuguese until 1665. In 1668, King Charles II. sold his rights over Bombay to the East India Company for an annual payment of £10. The city of Bombay was then a mere fishing village, dominated by an old Portuguese fort, and notorious even in the East for its unhealthiness. But it had the supreme advantage of being placed on an island, secure from the raids of Maratha horsemen. In 1663, the city of Surat, although not the English factory, had been pillaged by the Maratha leader, Sivaji. Accordingly, it was thought wiser to withdraw the seat of the Western Presidency from Surat to Bombay. This was ordered in 1685, and accomplished two years afterwards (1687).

Early English Settlements in Bengal.

The settlements in Bengal were later in time, and at first more precarious, than those in Madras or Bombay. Small agencies, offshoots from Surat, were opened at Ajmere, at Agra, and as far east as Patna, by 1620; but access was not gained to the Bengal seaboard until 1634. In that year a farman was granted by the Mughal Emperor, allowing the Company to trade in Bengal. Their ships, however, were to resort only to Pipli, in Orissa, a port now left far inland by the sea, and of which the very site has to be guessed. The factory at Hugli in Lower Bengal was established in 1640, and that at Balasor in Orissa in 1642. Three years later, in 1645, Mr. Gabriel Broughton, surgeon of the Hopewell, obtained from the Emperor Shah Jahan exclusive privileges of trading for the Company in Bengal, as a reward for his professional services. In 1681, the English factories in Bengal were separated from Madras; and Mr. Hedges was appointed agent and governor of the Company’s affairs in the Bay of Bengal, and of the subordinate factories at Kasimbazar, Patna, Balasor, Maldah, and Dacca. But the English had not yet acquired any territorial possessions in Bengal, as they had in Madras and Bombay. Their little settlements, planted in the midst of populous cities, were exposed to every outburst of hostility or caprice of the Native governors. In 1686, the Nawab of Bengal, Shaista Khan, issued orders confiscating all the English factories in Bengal. The merchants at Hugli, under their president, Job Charnock, retreated about 26 miles down the river Hugli to Sutanati, then a village amid the swamps, now a northern quarter of Calcutta. Here they laid the foundations of the original Fort William; and in 1700 they purchased from Prince Azim, son of the Emperor Aurangzeb, the three villages of Sutanati, Kalikata, and Govindpur, which were united to form the modern Calcutta.

The English Company embarks on Territorial Sway.

It was about this same time (1689) that the Company determined to build up its power in India by acquiring territorial possessions, so as to enable it to resist the oppression of the Mughals and Marathas. With that view they passed the following resolution for the guidance of their servants in India:

‘The increase of our revenue is the subject of our care, as much as our trade; ’tis that must maintain our force when twenty accidents may interrupt our trade; ’tis that must make us a nation in India.’

With the same view, Sir John Child was appointed ‘Governor-General and Admiral of India,’ with full power to make peace or war, and to arrange for the safety of the Company’s possessions.

Other ‘East India Companies.’

The Portuguese at no time attempted to found a large mercantile company, but kept their Eastern trade as a royal monopoly. The first private company was the English, established in 1600. It was quickly followed by the Dutch, in 1602. The Dutch conquests, however, were made in the name of the State, and ranked as national colonies, not as private possessions. Next came the French, whose first East India Company was founded in 1604; the second, in 1611; the third, in 1615; the fourth (Richelieu’s), in 1642; the fifth (Colbert’s), in 1644. The sixth was formed by the union of the French East and West India, Senegal, and China Companies, under the name of ‘The Company of the Indies,’ in 1719. The exclusive privileges of this Company were, by the French King’s decree, suspended in 1769; and the Company was abolished by the National Assembly in 1790. The first Danish East India Company was formed in 1612, and the second in 1670. The Danish settlements of Tranquebal and Serampur were both founded in 1616, and acquired by the English by purchase from Denmark in 1845. Other Danish settlements on the mainland of India were Porto Novo, with Eddova and Holcheri, on the Malabar coast. The Company started by the Scotch in 1695 may be regarded as having been still-born. The ‘Royal Company of the Philippine Islands,’ incorporated by the King of Spain in 1733, had little to do with the Indian continent. Of more importance was ‘The Ostend Company,’ incorporated by the Austrian monarch Charles VI, in 1723, its factors being chiefly persons who had served the Dutch and English Companies. But the opposition of the European maritime powers forced the Court of Vienna in 1727 to suspend the Company’s charter for seven years. The Ostend Company, after a precarious existence, prolonged by the desire of the Austrian Government to participate in the growing East India trade, became bankrupt in 1784. The last nations of Europe to engage in maritime trade with India were Sweden and Prussia. When the Ostend Company was suspended, a number of its servants were thrown out of employment. Mr. Henry Köning, of Stockholm, took advantage of the knowledge which these men had acquired of the East, and obtained a charter for the ‘Swedish Company,’ dated 13th June 1731. Its operations were, however, of little importance. King Frederick the Great of Prussia gave his patronage in 1750 and 1753 to two short-lived Prussian Companies trading to the East.

The Survival of the Fittest.

The Indian trade was thus a prize for which many of the European nations strove with each other during four hundred years; and dreams of an Indian Empire had allured some of the greatest European monarchs. The English East India Company outlived all its rivals. To the Portuguese and Spaniards, India seemed a second Peru where diadems might be torn from the brows of princes; another New World to plunder and to convert. To the Dutch, it formed a great market which afforded, however, little room for individual enterprise, as the profit from the India trade was a strictly guarded national monopoly. To the French, India was a theatre for lucrative intrigue, in which splendid reputations might be won; but reputations fatal in the end to their owners, and sterile of results to the nation. The methods of the English Company were less showy, but more sure. Its youth was passed under the stern self-restraints imposed by having to make a hazardous private enterprise pay. It laid in a store of knowledge of the country before it embarked on any scheme of conquest. At length, when the breaking up of the Mughal Empire compelled it to choose between being driven out of India or ruling over India, it firmly made up its mind. No sufferings, no disasters ever shook for a moment its resolution; nor did the British nation ever fail its East India Company in any crisis of peril.