The Honourable Company. John Keay
his estate now far from ‘in verie good being’, the methodical Floris dreamt up contingency plans and reworked his figures. The case looked nigh on hopeless when in January 1613 help came from an unexpected quarter. In Ayuthia, the capital, the king of Siam, anxious to encourage English competition with the Dutch, bought a substantial part of the Globe’s cargo. Then, following suit, in Patani the local Sultana advanced Floris the cash he needed to buy Chinese goods. Suddenly they were in business again.
The Sultana, or ‘queen’, of Patani made a deep impression on Floris. ‘A comely oulde woman nowe about three score yeares…she was tall of person and full of majestie.’ She was also ‘a good sport’, thought nothing of hunting wild buffalo in the forest, and was a great patron of the arts. Her dance troupe was the best Floris had ever seen; and when by request the Dutch and English obliged her with a few steps in their national idioms ‘the oulde Queen was much rejoyced’. With perhaps a republican’s sneaking respect for monarchy, Floris was moved to uncharacteristic adulation ‘having in all the Indies not scene any lyke her’.
Leaving Antheuniss in charge of the factory at Ayuthia, Floris sailed back to India at the end of 1613. By now the Globe was leaking badly and with the prospect of the long voyage to England ahead of her, he resolved to beach and repair her in an estuary near Masulipatnam. In the meantime the factors were busy selling their Thai and Chinese goods to Golconda’s merchants and buying more Indian cottons. When another Company vessel arrived to continue the Coromandel-Siam trade, Floris finally abandoned the idea of a return visit to Patani and Ayuthia. With the cottons he was now ordering at Masulipatnam, plus the Bantam pepper he had still to collect, he reckoned that he already had a cargo that would sell in London for the desired £45,000.
In the event it did rather better. Thanks to a growing expertise in the re-exporting of pepper to Europe, London prices had started to climb. Pepper was still being offered to subscribers to each voyage as a dividend in kind; but what in 1603 had been an unwelcome expedient to offset a market glut had now become a prized privilege. The Company itself took no part in the re-export trade; on the advice of the directors the General Court, i.e. the shareholders, set a price and then the same shareholders could bid to the value of their shareholding for stocks. This practice continued until the 1620s; for shareholders with the right commercial connections in Europe it could mean a profit comparable with that on the original voyage.
There is some confusion about the exact profit of the Seventh Voyage but it certainly showed a return of 318 per cent and possibly 400 per cent. The Globe had eventually reached London in August 1615. Sadly Floris never lived to enjoy the fortune that awaited him. He was taken ashore on a stretcher and died in London three weeks later.
Antheuniss continued the good work alone. At about the time of his partner’s death he was transferring from Ayuthia to Masulipatnam. The Siamese trade was scarcely buoyant but this was mainly due to the infrequency of English shipping. Indeed more news and more ships were reaching Siam from Japan than from Bantam. Most years ‘the honest Mr Cocks’ managed to send Adams or one of his other factors in a variety of junks either to Ayuthia, Patani or Cambodia (where Antheuniss had posted a small agency).
In 1617 even this lifeline slackened. The Dutch negotiated new and more favourable terms with the Siamese and began to show those monopolistic tendencies that were making life impossible for the English in the Spice Islands. Then in 1618 came news of the capture of the Zwaarte Leeuw at Bantam. The Companies were now at war and the English in Siam isolated. It was while trying to redress this situation that Jourdain, in 1619, was surprised off Patani and killed by that marksman’s bullet.
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In Japan Cocks was also complaining bitterly about the dearth of English shipping. The Hosiander in 1614 and the Thomas and Advice in 1615 called at Hirado but thereafter ‘by the indirect dealinges and unlooked for proceadings of the Hollander’ four years passed without sight of an English sail. Cocks withdrew his factors from Osaka and Yedo as trade ground from a crawl to a halt. The Dutch had put a price upon his greying head, ‘50 Rials to any man that could kill me and 30 Rials for each other Englishman they could kill’. Pitched battles took place at the gates of the English factory and only Japanese protection saved them.
By March 1620 Cocks was at his wits’ end. He could now see no hope of ever interesting the Japanese in broadcloth and even Siamese hides were not selling. The Dutch were waylaying his men at every opportunity. The Shogun had curtailed the original trading privileges. And what support was he getting? Two of his factors were permanently sick and Adams was now behaving like a naturalized Hollander. ‘I cannot chuse but note it down’, whispered Cocks to his diary, ‘that both I myself and all the rest of our nation doe see that he (I mean Will Adams) is much more frend to the Dutch than to the Englishmen which are his own countreymen, God forgeve hym.’ An English ship had at last entered Hirado but it turned out that her crew was Dutch; she had been taken in the Spice Islands. More disgrace.
The last straw was that the President at Bantam was querying his accounts. ‘He never gave me roast beef but beat me with the spit’, moaned Cocks in a letter to the Company in London. ‘I beseeke Your Worships to pardon me if I be too forward of tongue herein’, he rambled on, ‘but my griefe is that I lie in a place of much losse and expence to Your Worships and no benefit to myself but loss of tyme in my ould age, although God knoweth my care and paines is as much as if benefite did come thereby.’
Of course, even Japanese clouds had silver linings. His sweet potatoes were doing well and he had acquired some much prized goldfish. They came from China and of the China trade in general he still had high hopes. Yet even these were destined for a setback. Late in 1620 there reached Hirado an English ship bearing news of the Anglo-Dutch agreement. To the amazement of their Japanese hosts, Dutch and English buried the hatchet and immediately took it up again against the Portuguese. Well placed to savage Portuguese shipping carrying China goods from Macao to the Philippines, both the Dutch and English companies were soon doing a brisk trade in Chinese silks without the expense of a Chinese factory. For perhaps the first time in its history the English house at Hirado was busily and profitably engaged.
It was not to last. As elsewhere the Anglo-Dutch alliance was resented by both parties. The Dutch complained of English indifference and the English of Dutch extravagance. When in 1622 it was officially terminated, Cocks felt that he was again on the verge of a breakthrough in his China negotiations. He therefore ignored orders from Bantam to withdraw from Japan, much to the fury of his superiors. In April 1623 Bantam tried again to winkle him out. This time a ship was sent with orders to remove the whole Hirado factory and to bid its inmates ‘to fulfil our said order as you will answer the contrary at your perils’. The same letter accused Cocks of having squandered vast sums on his China contacts ‘who hath too long deluded you through your own stupidity’ and of having ‘made what construction you pleased of our previous commission for coming from thence’. ‘We do now reiterate our commission [to depart]’, ended the letter, ‘lest, having read it in the former part hereof, you should forget it before you come to the end.’
Poor ‘honest Mr Cocks’, this was not the gratitude he had looked for. Reluctantly he gathered in his debts, sold off his stock, and found homes for his pigeons and his goldfish. ‘On December 22 many of the townsfolk came with their wives and families to take leave of the Factors, some weeping at their departure.’ Adams had died in 1620 but there were now other Englishmen who were leaving behind much loved wives and mystified children. Even the Dutch seemed to regret the passing of their old sparring partners. To save face, Cocks claimed that it was just a temporary withdrawal. But he knew otherwise. Disgraced and disgruntled, he died on the voyage home.
As part of the same retrenching policy the factories at Ayuthia and Patani were also closed. As in the Spice Islands, the English bid for a commercial role in the Far East had proved to be an historical cul-de-sac. Yet the experience was not forgotten. The Company would never abandon its interest in either the Far East or the archipelago. In ten years’ time English ships would again be trying to force open the China trade; and plans to reopen the Hirado factory were resurrected at least once a decade throughout the seventeenth century. In 1673 an English vessel would