England, the East India Company … and the VOC

The first appearance of the English was in 1580 as part of Francis Drake’s west-to-east circumnavigation of the globe. Having departed Plymouth in November 1577 with a fleet of five ships, he routed via the Cape Verde Islands (where he captured a Portuguese merchant vessel) and crossed the Atlantic, eventually reaching the southern Argentine coast.³⁸ Three ships were abandoned due to loss of men and in one case rotten timbers.

About a month later they reached the island of ‘Barateve’ (probably in the southern Banda Sea):

Their fruits are divers likewise and plentiful; as nutmegs, ginger, long pepper, limons, cucumbers, cocoes, figoes, sagu, with divers other sorts whereof we had one in reasonable quantity, in bignesse, forme and huske, much like a bay berry, hard in substance but pleasant in tast … of each of these we received of them, whatsoever we desired for our need.³⁹

Drake finally limped back into Plymouth on 26 September 1580, with a cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasure … but only fifty-nine of the original 164 crew.

Partly inspired by Drake’s achievements, but also by those of the Portuguese, a fleet of three ships set sail from Plymouth in April 1591 to seek trade and riches in the East Indies. The commander of the fleet was James Lancaster and the journey was to be devilled with misfortune. After reaching a harbour on the western Cape, the Merchant Royal was sent back to England carrying crewmen sick with scurvy.⁴⁰ Shortly after passing the Cape, another ship, the Penelope, was lost with all hands in a ferocious storm. The Edward Bonaventure continued northwards along the East African coast, but on reaching the Comoro Islands thirty men were killed by natives while attempting to collect water. They reached Zanzibar and stayed there until February, and then made a slow crossing of the Indian Ocean during which many more men died. They reached Penang and subsequently captured several vessels, mainly Portuguese merchantmen. They landed at the Nicobar Islands, and then made it to Ceylon in November. Lancaster was keen to stay here – ‘In this island groweth great store of excellent cinamonn’ – but with the remaining crew on the verge of mutiny they set sail for home, short of food and with conditions becoming desperate. They made it to St Helena and then to the West Indies. Helped by a French ship, only twenty-five crew were to survive and return to England in 1594. This first English voyage to the East Indies had been a disaster, but Lancaster wasn’t done yet.

Attacks on Portuguese and Spanish ships were proving very lucrative for England’s navy. In 1592, Sir Walter Raleigh led a fleet of six ships to the Azores to attack ships returning from the New World and encountered a Portuguese fleet near the island of Flores.

James Lancaster was one of the directors and he was commissioned to lead the first Company voyage with a fleet of four ships and 480 men, which left Woolwich in February 1601. They routed via the Cape, Madagascar and the Nicobar Islands to Aceh in North Sumatra, which they reached in June 1602. An agreement was reached with the Sultan of Aceh, and after a prolonged stay of some three months, during which they took on a load of pepper, cinnamon and cloves, they sailed for the Malacca Straits.⁴¹ After capturing a Portuguese ship and seizing its contents, they returned to Aceh, before taking their final leave in early November. At this point, one of the ships, the Ascencion, was sent home with its cargo of spices. The Hector and the Red Dragon headed for Banten, a major port in west Java, where they hoped to meet up with the Susan, which had been dispatched in advance. They found the Susan at Priaman on the Sumatran coast, where they had loaded 600 bahars of pepper and 66 bahars of cloves, with the bonus of the pepper being cheaper than at Aceh. The Susan was also sent back to England at this point.

On 4 December, the remaining two ships set off for Banten, arriving on the 16th. They established friendly relations with the (10-year-old) Sultan and his court, and stayed there trading for some five weeks, taking away 276 bags of pepper of 62lb weight each. The ships were fully laden by 10 February and prepared to depart. They were to leave behind three factors and eight men to sell their remaining wares and buy goods for the next English fleet.

The second voyage was commanded by Henry Middleton (who had captained the Susan in the previous voyage), departing Gravesend in March 1604, the fleet comprising the same four ships as the first voyage.⁴² Despite a forced stop at Table Bay in July, as many of the crew were very sick with scurvy, they reached Sumatra in December, which was remarkably good progress. With the crews still extremely sick, they struggled onwards to Banten, arriving on the 22nd. A large fleet of Dutch ships was already there, prescient of things to come, though its captain was friendly. The English contingent who had been left behind by Lancaster were overjoyed at the arrival of the English ships, but on boarding the flagship a party of these men was shocked at the state of the visitors: ‘but when we came aboard of our admiral, and saw their weakness, also hearing of the weakness of the other three ships, it grieved us much.’

Middleton and his officers were initially too sick even to go ashore and send their respects to the young Sultan. In early January 1605, it was resolved to send the Susan and the Hector back to England after loading up with pepper; the Ascension and the Red Dragon would proceed as per plan to the Moluccas. The latter two departed on the 16th but a different sickness took hold: the ‘flux’ (dysentery), and reports indicate the severity: ʻthis night [16th] died Henry Dewbrey of the flux … The seventeenth day died of the flux William Lewed, John Jenkens, and Samuel Porter … this day [20th] died Henry Stiles our master carpenter, and James Varnam, and John Iberson, all of the flux …’ and so on.

On 10 February, and after many more deaths, they anchored off Ambon Island. Contact was made with the Ambonese, requesting trade, but this was prohibited – unless permission was granted by the Portuguese occupying the fort in Ambon. The emissaries sent by Middleton were treated kindly and permission granted, but then a curious thing happened. The Dutch fleet (from Banten) had appeared and moored close to the fort, and a Portuguese contingent went aboard the admiral’s ship under a flag of truce to ask about their intentions, which, as it turned out, were not peaceable:

The Dutch general made answer that his coming thither was to have that castle from them, and willed them to deliver him the keys, and they should be kindly dealt withal; which, if they refused to do, he willed them to provide for themselves to defend it, for that he was minded to have it before he departed …

Middleton heard the following day that the fort had fallen and was now in the hands of the Dutch; the Ambonese were unwilling to trade given this new situation. Almost at the point of despair, the decision was made to split up – the Ascension was to head for the Banda Islands and the Dragon to the north Moluccas. The Dragon reached Tidore on 22 March after a long slog, with many more crew dying of the flux. They arrived to the spectacle of the Sultan of Ternate being pursued by seven Tidorean boats with murderous intentions. They rescued the Sultan and were given permission to trade for cloves at Ternate. They also established friendly relations with the Portuguese contingent on Tidore, but on 12 April, in an uncanny repeat of events at Ambon, the Dutch fleet appeared off the island, and on 9 May routed the Portuguese. Middleton had no choice but to leave, more or less empty-handed, and he did so on 18 May, collecting a small shipment of cloves from Makian on his return. He arrived at Banten on 24 July to the unhappy news that twelve of the twenty-four crew left at Banten had died.

The Ascension, under Captain Coulthurst, had better luck, arriving at Banda on 20 February 1605. They stayed almost twenty-two weeks, loading up with nutmeg and mace during this period, though details are unclear, and made friendly relations with the Sabandar of Nera, who gifted a bahar of nutmegs to King James. They departed on 21 July and reached Banten on 16 August. The Ascension and Dragon sailed back to England together. The Hector and Susan had departed several months in advance, laden with pepper, but with the crews so decimated that they had to hire Chinese and Indians to man the vessels. The Susan was lost with all hands off southern Africa, and the Hector narrowly escaped a similar fate: with many of its crew dead, only fourteen left alive, it was rescued by the Dragon. They arrived back at Plymouth in May 1606.

Middleton’s journey had mixed success, but the succeeding voyages of the EIC were all initially focused on the Spice Islands. The Dutch aggression seen in Middleton’s encounters became steadily worse, with their increasing belligerence making life difficult for the English. The third voyage (1607–10) used the Hector and Dragon again, with a third ship, the Consent. The Hector made history by becoming the first English ship to reach India. It subsequently sailed to the Banda Islands, where nutmeg and mace were purchased, and later picked up 4,900 bags of pepper at Banten on its return journey. The Dragon also traded a full load of pepper from Sumatra and Banten; profits of this voyage were 234 per cent of subscribed capital.⁴³ The fourth voyage (1608–09) comprised only two ships, but both were lost. The fifth voyage (1609–11) used only a single ship, the Expedition, which was ultimately successful in taking nutmeg and mace from the Banda Islands despite demands and threats from the Dutch. In a letter to the Company, the commander David Middleton (the younger brother of Sir Henry) summarised: ‘I have aboord 139 Tunnes, six Cathayes, 1 quarterne 2 pound of nutmegs; and 622 suckettes of mace, which maketh 36 Tunnes, 15 Cathayes, 1 quarterne, 21 pounds.’⁴⁴

The sixth voyage (1610–13), commanded again by Sir Henry Middleton, comprised three ships: the Trade’s Increase, Peppercorn and Darling. The plan was to stop at India en route to the Far East. The ships had a broad remit of goods to bring back to England: indigo, calicos, Ceylon cinnamon, cotton yarn, green ginger, red sandalwood, turbith, opium, benjamin, sal ammoniac, olibanum, lignum aloes, worm seeds, gumlac and Persian silk from India, pepper and gold from Sumatra, and nutmeg and mace from the Banda Islands.⁴⁵ They visited Surat but were opposed by the Portuguese and were able to do little trade. Both the Trade’s Increase and Darling were lost on this voyage, and only the Peppercorn returned to England laden with pepper – despite this, a healthy profit was made.

The pattern continued over the next decade with mixed success, but generally yielding high profits despite appalling losses in men and ships. The Dutch were better financed, better armed and more ruthless in their dealings in the Far East. The second expedition of 1598 led by Jacob Van Neck showed how it could be done: they took eight ships and returned with a huge volume of pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. They had established their United (Dutch) East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) in 1602 with similar objectives to the British. The VOC was extremely well organised and well equipped, in effect a military-commercial enterprise backed by the Dutch government. It was also the world’s first publicly traded company. One of the main objectives was to dominate the Southeast Asian spice trade, which they proceeded to do with ruthless efficiency. The Dutch had already displaced the Portuguese from Ambon in 1605, while in 1603 the newly established VOC had seized the richly laden Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina off Singapore and established a trading post at Banten, and subsequently Batavia on Java in 1611. But between 1605 and 1621 the Dutch forced the Portuguese out, giving the Netherlands a monopoly on the trade in nutmeg and cloves.⁴⁶

The British and Dutch clashed in the Banda Islands in 1604 and on numerous subsequent occasions. In 1616, Nathaniel Courthope sailed his ships Swan and Defence to the island of Run, where he formed an alliance with the islanders and fortified it as a stand against the Dutch. The Dutch finally overran the island and killed Courthope after a 1,540-day siege. The postscript to this was that the Dutch killed or enslaved all the native men on the island and cut down every nutmeg tree to deter future English interest. Events culminated in 1623 with the Amboyna Massacre, when the Dutch arrested, tortured and executed twenty men, including ten English traders. They had been accused of treason and conspiring to seize the Dutch fortress in Ambon and assassinate the governor. They were executed by beheading, and the English leader, Captain Gabriel Towerson, had his head impaled on a pole. The political fallout was immense and indirectly helped lead to the First Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–54.

Nutmeg cultivation was concentrated on Banda Island and Ambon, and in 1651 the Dutch uprooted nutmeg and clove trees on the other islands, as with Run, better to control the monopoly. By 1681, about 75 per cent of the Spice Island clove and nutmeg trees had been destroyed, leading to scarcity of the spice and an increase in prices that benefited the VOC.

According to a letter to the EIC in 1613, the Dutch had twenty-eight factories and fifteen forts in the Far East, compared to the Company’s single established factory at Banten.⁴⁷ The EIC did establish a factory at Makassar on the south-west coast of Sulawesi in 1613, which was a key entrepot in the region and received a wide range of goods. In addition, it was conveniently close to the Spice Islands, and the EIC could acquire smuggled nutmeg, mace and cloves and avoid Dutch aggression. In December 1632, more than 81,000lb of cloves were shipped to England.⁴⁸ Dutch hostility towards Makassar increased from the 1640s, and as a consequence the price of cloves rose dramatically until the mid-1660s, and supply to Makassar all but dried up. The English, hopeful of an upturn in the situation, lingered on in Makassar until 1667, when they were finally expelled by the Dutch, essentially marking the end of Company activity in the eastern archipelago.

By 1700, the Portuguese had lost their hold in the region apart from small enclaves in western India and Macau. The Dutch had usurped their positions in most of Asia and now largely controlled the Asian spice trade. The English would never make major inroads into Southeast Asia other than via a few positions in Sumatra, but they had a solid foothold in India, where they would soon become dominant.

The EIC refocused on developing its tentative foothold in India. Rights had been granted to establish a factory in Surat and other areas in 1612 by the Mughal emperor Jahangir. By 1647, the Company had twenty-three factories in India and had eclipsed the Portuguese – though spices were not the main business here, but silk, calico, indigo and tea, among other commodities. The factories often evolved into forts. Despite several Anglo-Indian wars from the late seventeenth century, the EIC expanded its operations in India and eventually had its own army, which grew dramatically from the mid-eighteenth century. ‘Presidencies’ were established at Bombay, Madras and Bengal, each administered by a governor.