Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the east India Company

A book review

Sir John Lyman, 1616

One of my ancestors was, between 1620 and 1621, the master of one of the jewels of the East India Company’s fleet, a 1,000-ton East Indiaman named the Royal James. This enormous merchant ship, launched in 1616 (it was in fact the largest East Indiaman of the time), undertook three voyages to the Far East and Japan in the years to 1630. During the previous period (1613-1617) the Company had twenty-nine ships: by the end of 1617 eight had returned with cargoes, four had been either lost or broken up, two had fallen into the hands of the Dutch, and fifteen were still in the East Indies. It wouldn’t surprise me that John Lyman was appointed master of the vessel because his uncle, Sir John Lyman (1544-1632), whose stern, ruffed portrait stares at me every day from my study wall, was an early ‘venturer’ in the ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ and this was, of course, a family business. It wouldn’t surprise me also that the ship was named by Sir John, as he had, in 1616, himself been elevated to a baronetcy by King James I. His was the classic story of the rich merchant being lifted up from ‘trade’ (he was head of the Fishmongers Company) to the realms of social respectability (albeit as a baronet, only on the bottom rung) by virtue of his active contribution to keeping the financial ship of state afloat. But back to the Royal James. The voluminous records of the East India Company reveal that John Lyman attended a meeting on the high seas between two of the Company's fleets, one consisting of twelve ships and another of nine, on 26 January 1620. The masters of the combined fleet, deciding how best to sell their outbound goods to buy the silk and spices they would carry back to London, voted to sail for Acheen (Aceh) on the northernmost tip of today’s Sumatra and thence to Japan to repair the ships before travelling to the coast of China. The biggest threat to the financial success of their voyage was the Dutch East Indies Company, which had a stranglehold on the Spice Islands and used every tactic – above and below the board – to prevent the English from profiting from what they considered to be their trade. The result of a successful three-year journey to the East would be a return to London with untold riches from the silk and spices – mace, nutmeg, cloves and pepper – on board. Indeed, so rich was each consignment that only one in three vessels needed to make it home for the venture to have been profitable. On 16 March 1620 a further consultation was held on board the Royal James about a plan to send one of the ships, the Bee, back to England. But the following year John succumbed to one of the many maladies afflicting mariners on these voyages and he died at sea, somewhere between Japan and the ‘Spice Islands’. Only 30% of all sailors returned from a voyage to the East, a fact so well known to the Company accountants that they factored it into the estimates they made of the profit each trip would make. John Lyman’s widow – Joan – petitioned the Company in 1621 for ‘her husband's goods’  and again on 23 January 1622 for her husband's wages, a task I suspect that was facilitated by her uncle-in-law. It was agreed that she should be paid, and an award to her was made in pepper.

It is the human detail of the EIC and the ultimate triumph of its trading endeavours despite the best efforts of Portugal, the Dutch Republic and of the vicissitudes of Neptune that holds great fascination for me, and which is the triumph of Howarth’s intimate and intricate portrayal of the EIC in the first century of its existence. His great achievement is both to bring the dusty tomes of the Company back to life, not just to humanise one of the greatest trading ventures of all of human history, but to interpret the early years of the Company (his book spans 1600 to 1688, though most of the narrative is pre-1650) as a peculiarly human rather than an institutional endeavour. Is this important? Yes. Humans have agency; institutions consume or act upon the determining agency of human beings, not the other way around. Too much of modern (post 1880) history is based upon determining the perspective of organisations and movements (as interpreted by later historians, many with their own ideological baggage) rather than of actual, real live people making decisions for themselves in the peculiar and particular context of their lives and times. The means through which Howarth paints his story is by the decisions, actions and activities of actual people, some influential decision-makers and many others who were not, all of which makes up a remarkably vivid tapestry of human intercourse. Each chapter, for instance, is constructed around a person or group of people. One powerfully tells the story of the men of the Peppercorn, an EIC East Indiaman, as it seeks out the riches of a world on the extreme periphery of the consciousness of most Europeans. The ultimate triumph of European expansion into Asia is not difficult to comprehend. Europe was pursuing an adventure, aggressively, relentlessly and determinedly, to bring the riches of the world back to its own shores. At no time did the Chinese, Japanese, Indians or inhabitants of the Spice Islands return the favour. The energetic persistence of Sir Thomas Roe, for instance, the Company’s ambassador to the Mughal court (1615-1619), is easily compared to the intellectual (and alcoholic) indolence of the Great Mughal with whom Roe was attempting to interact. Roe was there, in India: Europeans were interested in the ‘East’ and with travelling to the other side of the world for purposes of human engagement, adventure, patriotism and, yes, greed and selfish self-interest. The Great Mughal, by contrast, was also driven by greed and self-interest, but he just wasn’t interested in exploring. He certainly wasn’t interested in Europe. He was already, in his view, at the top of the human tree and had no need for either the ideas or the money of the red-haired barbarians who came from across the sea, a sea that incidentally few Mughal emperors had (amazingly) ever even seen. Fascinatingly, the Mughal shared with King James I an abhorrence with ‘trade’, though James knew he needed grubby merchants like Sir John Lyman as they gave him coin. It wasn’t just about the merchants: Kings and governments needed the money that the merchants delivered by the bucket load because they couldn’t create it themselves. Howarth astutely observes that the ‘EIC belonged to the globe of politics as much as it did to the sphere of commerce.’ Indeed, something of a symbiosis between the two in Tudor and Stewart England created a sense of nationhood – in the face of the resistance of others, in Europe and further afield – for the first time. The Mughal Empire was ultimately swallowed up as a result of a dynamism by European politicians and merchants working in unison which it never bothered to replicate by undergoing the reverse journey.  

And power? No. Howarth is remarkably clear that the primary task of the EIC was to make money, not to accrue territory, create power in foreign territories or aggrandise native populations. The role of the executive arm of the EIC (its ships, sailors and factors) was to make money for its investors, many of whom were the very merchant adventurers in the little ships travelling east over vast oceans. The great game of mercantile expansion took place because those who had most to lose were also sailing the ships, negotiating with foreign emissaries, fighting the Portuguese and the Dutch and placing their lives on the line. Amazingly, in 1570 England had only 58,000 tons of marine tonnage compared with Spain’s 300,000, and was very definitely the minnow in the rush to conquer the seas. The men who built and sailed its boats came from a long way behind, and yet in time were to build a seagoing commercial empire which more than rivalled all its competition. Its early growth was fuelled by the wealth provided by spice rather than slaves and, in contradistinction to what some modern historical moralists are keen to tell us, by a ‘reluctance to use violence and vigilance to avoid land commitments.’ Indeed, unlike that of the Dutch, and despite what one might assume if we were to read the British national anthem back into history, ‘expansion in England happened with no appeal whatever to national glory.’

The amazing thing about the EIC was just how chaotic and disorganised it was. There was nothing inevitable about its rise as a monolithic mercantile overlord destined for instance, in the due course of time, to rule India. Second guessing history is only possible for historians able to look backwards and identify trends and features, convictions that didn’t exist for those when history was happening trying to make their way through the fog of an uncertain and troublesome future. The EIC proved simply to be better organised than the Portuguese, and not distracted as the Dutch were in their long war against Spain. Luck and serendipity played as much a role on the eventual survival of the EIC as did its ability to raise massive amounts of money from venturers in England (every raise or round of financing was heavily over-subscribed) for its adventures and to recruit adventurers to take its ships to sea. The EIC was phenomenally successful in raising voluntary capital to fund its ventures relative to other European states. By comparison, ‘although Iberian barns might have looked well built and better stocked, once they were given a good kick the rusted hinges flew off.’

Howarth’s book is a joy of revelation, page by page. Who knew that the Hollander-hating Sir George Downing, after which Downing Street is named, was an American; that the process for creating saltpetre to preserve meat for the long voyages at sea killed many of the workers forced to inhale its poisons, and that EIC ships stocked lemon water as an antiscorbutic 150-years before the Royal Navy’s experiments to combat scurvy? There’s stuff like this on nearly every page.  It’s also beautifully written, as here, Howarth describing the Portuguese Carracks which first sailed to Asia:

These were ships the size of cathedrals, sterns of carved exuberance, windows fretted like the honeycomb, escutcheons hanging like so many lanterns at a festival, with such splendours of the deck giving way to hobbit-like burrows beneath.

Howarth didn’t wait long to give us that masterpiece of description, as its on Page 14. There are another 375 like this. Likewise, he utilises analogy well, sometimes startlingly. He describes the so-called ‘Massacre of Amboyna’ in which ten EIC factors were killed by the Dutch in 1623 as resulting ‘in fewer deaths than an American school shooting.’ Likewise he observes  that travelling without a knowledge of one’s longitude was like ‘flying from London to New York in a biplane.’

This is a fantastic book, written about almost fantastical people in an age we will never hope to understand if we view it through a prism of our own moral prejudices and social presumptions. Howarth does what all good historians should do: he lets the people of the story speak, and without moralising allows us to understand their remarkable story as it happened, rather than as we wished it might. ‘As Orpheus counselled Eurydice’ he reminds us, ‘ historians do well to look resolutely forwards, not backwards.’ In the process he reminds us that history as a morality tale is precisely what our medieval forebears practised, preaching to us the ways of God rather than allowing us to understand what happened, by whom and why. For my money I prefer Howarth’s approach.