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1610-20 portrait of a European from Victoria and Albert Museum
Ralph Fitch, the first English merchant to reach India, wrote home to London from Portuguese Goa, where he had been taken prisoner by the Venetians from his captured ship Tiger. “Here be Moors and Gentiles,” Fitch reported. “They worship a cow and esteem much of the cow’s dung to paint the walls of their houses. They will kill nothing, not so much as a louse. . . . They eat no flesh, but live by roots and rice and milk. And when the husband dieth his wife is burned with him if she be alive” (letter of 1853, in Locke). Fitch thus reported such exotic Hindu customs as sati and cow worship, but he also wrote of how fabulously rich many Goan merchants were, and how palatial and sumptuously furnished were their homes.
Fitch escaped from captivity in 1584, venturing north to great Mughal emperor Akbar’s capital, Fatehpur Sikri, which at the time had twice the population of London, as did the other great Mughal capital, Agra. His letters home now praised the fabled jewels many Indians wore on their elegant silks and satins, and spoke of the rich profusion of spices, which England desperately needed to preserve its meats and mull its ale. Enterprising Fitch went on to Varanasi, where he observed Hindus bathing from its ghats and the cremation of bodies on the bank of the busy Ganges; he then sailed farther east to Bihar’s capital, Patna, where he met many wealthy merchants from Bengal and Burma. He left India in 1586 to sail off to Malaya, starting home from Southeast Asia in 1591.
Fitch’s firsthand accounts of fabled India and its amazingly rich variety of peoples and produce helped whet the appetites of London merchants, who eagerly sought to sail east in the next century, when England’s East India Company vessels first headed for the Indian Ocean, determined to break the Catholic Portuguese monopoly of the spice trade and run their blockade, as would the equally bold Protestant Dutch sea captains from Antwerp and Amsterdam. Haarlem-born Jan Huygen van Linschoten had arrived in Goa as secretary to its archbishop just two years before Ralph Fitch was brought there as a prisoner, and Linschoten returned home a year after Fitch did, carrying priceless secret Portuguese navigation maps in his baggage, allowing Dutch vessels to cross the Indian Ocean without being blown to its bottom by monsoon winds. The Dutch quickly established themselves in force on the Spice Islands they coveted, massacring English merchant “allies” there at Amboina in 1623. The English company then fell back to buy spices along India’s Malabar coast, and at the great Mughal port of Surat, seeking silks and saltpeter from the rich province of Bengal, all of which they first learned about in reports by Ralph Fitch.
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Enter The East India Company
The Company traders were frequently engaged in hostilities with their Dutch and Portuguese counterparts in the Indian Ocean. A key event providing the Company with the favor of Mughal emperor Jahangir was their victory over the Portuguese in the Battle of Swally in 1612. Perhaps realizing the futility of waging trade wars in remote seas, the English decided to explore their options for gaining a foothold in mainland India, with official sanction of both countries, and requested the Crown to launch a diplomatic mission. In 1615, Sir Thomas Roe was instructed by James I to visit the Mughal emperor Jahangir. The purpose of this mission was to arrange for a commercial treaty which would give the Company exclusive rights to reside and build factories in Surat and other areas. In return, the Company offered to provide to the emperor goods and rarities from the European market. This mission was highly successful.
The company with patronage from Mugal Emperor soon managed to eclipse the Portuguese Estado da India, which had established bases in Goa, Chittagong and Bombay. It managed to create strongholds in Surat (1612), Madras (1639), Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690). By 1647, the Company had 23 factories, each under the command of a master merchant, and 90 employees in India. In 1634, the Mughal emperor extended his hospitality to the English traders to the region of Bengal and in 1717 completely waived customs duties for the trade. The company’s mainstay businesses were by now in cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpeter and tea. By 1689, the Company was arguably a “nation” in the Indian mainland, independently administering the vast presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay and possessing a formidable and intimidating military strength.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chaudhuri, K. N. The Trading World of Asia and the East
India Company, 1660–1760. Cambridge, U.K. and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Furber, Holden. John Company at Work. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1948.
Locke, J. C. The First Englishmen in India: Letters and Narratives
of Sundry Elizabethans. London: G. Routledge, 1930.
