The Honourable Company. John Keay
First, though, he returned to pay his respects to Ala-uddin Shah. Some choice items from the prize had already been set aside for the Sultan. They did not include ‘a faire Portugal maiden’ because Lancaster had seen fit to release all his captives and because Ala-uddin Shah already had wives aplenty. In respect of their own subjects the Sultans of Aceh brooked no refusals in their exercise of the droit de seigneur. ‘If the husband be unwilling to part with her’, noted an English visitor, ‘then he [the Sultan] presently commands her husband’s pricke to be cut off.’
Yet for harem exotics there was always a steady demand. Ala-uddin’s successor would go one better by lodging a request with the Company for two English maidens. By way of incentive he added that, if either bore him a son, the child would be designated his heir. Rather surprisingly the directors of the Company would take him seriously. There could, of course, be no question of condoning bigamy by sending two girls; but one was a possibility and it so happened that ‘a gentleman of honourable parentage’ had a daughter with just the right qualifications, she being ‘of excellent parts for musicke, her needle, and good discourse, also very beautiful and personable’. So keen was the gentleman of honourable parentage to part with this paragon that when theological counsel raised certain objections to marriage with a Muslim, he was ready with a long and closely argued paper rich in scriptural citations which the directors adjudged ‘very pregnant and good’. Happily it was not quite good enough; for the matter was then referred to King James who, as with other contentious issues, determinedly ignored it.
Lancaster was no less diplomatic in the matter of the missing Portuguese maiden. He told Ala-uddin ‘that there was none so worthy that merited to be so presented’, at which, we are told, the Sultan smiled. A fulsome reply to the Queen’s letter plus suitable gifts were now handed over and, having at last got the measure of his guests, Ala-uddin bade them farewell by singing a hymn for their prosperity. Lancaster and his followers replied with a lusty rendering of the psalm of David and on 9 November 1602 the fleet sailed out of Aceh. Two days later the Ascension, being near enough laden with all that Aceh had been able to provide in the way of pepper and spices, was despatched for home. She reached London to a joyous welcome in June 1603 after a voyage remarkable only for the fact that she called at St Helena, thus inaugurating the Company’s long association with that island, and that she fell in with a pair of ‘marmaides’. They were definitely mermaids because ‘their hinde parts were divided into two legges’ and according to the ship’s naturalist they were probably husband and wife ‘because the moste of one of their heads was longer than the other’. ‘They say they are signes of bad weather’, he added, ‘and so we found it.’
Meanwhile the Red Dragon and the Hector had met up with the Susan at Priaman and found her lading almost completed. She sailed for home a few days later and arrived soon after the Ascension. Continuing to coast along the forest-fringed beaches of Sumatra, the main fleet passed the then dormant Krakatoa, entered the Sunda straits between Sumatra and Java, and ‘with a great peale of ordnance such as had never been rung there before’ anchored off Bantam in time for Christmas.
The Portuguese had never really troubled themselves with Java and Sumatra. Their preoccupation had been with the Spice Islands and their pepper requirements had been more than met by the tangled vines of Kerala’s forests. It was thus unsurprising that first the Dutch and now the English would choose Java as their main base in the East Indies. With its enormous population, its rich soil, and its wealthy courts, Java represented a domestic market second only to India and China. Additionally the twin north-coast ports of Bantam and Jakarta attracted maritime trade from all over the archipelago. They were also visited by an annual fleet of magnificent junks, laden with silks and porcelain, from China, and they were home for thriving communities of Chinese financiers and middlemen. Once again Lancaster was reminded that commercial activity in the East had long since spawned a vast and sophisticated network in which the export of spices to Europe was still a marginal sideline.
The Sultan of Bantam turned out to be a mere child of ten years. Government was exercised by a council of nobles headed by a Regent, a state of affairs destined to last long after the Sultan came of age. Lancaster, having sorted out the protocol, applied for trading rights, protection, and permission to establish a factory, all of which were granted. ‘We traded there peacably’, wrote the diarist, ‘although the Javians are reckoned amongst the greatest pickers and theeves in the world.’ So it would prove; but after a few marauders were cut down in the act of breaking into the Company’s premises, business proceeded briskly. ‘Within five weekes much more was sold in goods [mostly Indian cottons] than would have laden our two ships.’ The surplus stock was entrusted to senior factors, or merchants, who were to be left at Bantam to buy and sell in readiness for the next fleet from England. Thus was established the first English factory in the East. In no sense, of course, did this modest agency represent a colonial nucleus or a political toehold. It was simply an expedient which by spreading the Company’s trading activities throughout the year eliminated those market factors which would otherwise inflate the price of spices and deflate the price of piece goods every time an English ship entered port. In theory it also reduced the turn-round time for shipping by ensuring that a cargo was always ready for loading.
As well as the factors left at Bantam, another small group was dispatched to establish a similar factory in the Moluccas. The latter sailed from Bantam in a forty-ton pinnace (which must have been commandeered or chartered since it was considerably larger than that assembled in Madagascar) in early 1603. Such satellite voyages were a necessary feature of European trade throughout the East and especially in the archipelago. The fleets of ‘tall ships’ plying between Europe and India represented only the main trunk of the spice trade. Its twigs and branches were an infinitely complex web of subsidiary voyages in small pinnaces and galleys, in Malay prahus and Chinese junks, often commanded but rarely crewed by Europeans, by which the produce and intelligence of remote parts and shallow waters were delivered to the factories and the fleets. The factory system necessitated this involvement in what was really another aspect of the carrying trade. But to the Company’s directors in London this branch of their servants’ activities, with all its bizarre and colourful ramifications, would ever be a subject for misunderstanding and suspicion. The ‘country trade’, as it was called, invariably confounded the auditors but enriched the adventurers.
In the event the pinnace assigned to the Moluccas was back in Bantam after two months, supposedly defeated by adverse winds. But if it had failed to reach the clove-producing islands of Ternate and Tidore, it is clear from the report of the Dutch admiral at Banda Neira that in March 1603 it had somehow found its way to Pulo Run in the nutmeg-scented Bandas. The English had lost the spice race – but only just and not irrevocably. John Middleton, Lancaster’s second in command, would have been the obvious man to have taken up the challenge of finding more places like Pulo Run where neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese had established monopolies. But he now died, the first of many to succumb to Bantam’s lethal combination of enteric amoebae and malarial mosquitoes. Instead it would be his two brothers, Henry and David, who would open up the Moluccas. Both were now serving under Lancaster; and both would eventually join brother John in an eastern grave.
On 20 February 1603, with another ‘great peale of ordnance’, the fleet at last ‘set sayle to the sea toward England’. Steering straight across the Indian Ocean they crossed the Tropic of Capricorn in mid-March and were off the coast of southern Africa by the end of April. There a storm whipped up such seas ‘that in the reason of man no ship was able to live in them’. Somehow they survived, but on 3 May came ‘another very sore storme’ which so buffeted the Red Dragon that it caused its rudder to shear off. The rudder sank without trace and there was no replacement.
This struck a present fear into the hearts of all men so that the best of us and most experienced knew not what to do. And specially, seeing ourselves in such a tempestuous sea and so stormy a place so that I think there be few worse in all the world. Now our ship drove up and down in the sea like a wreck so that sometimes we were within three or four leagues of the Cape Buena Esperanza [Good Hope], then cometh a contrary wind and drove us almost to forty degrees to the southwards into the hail and snow and sleetie cold weather. And this was another great misery to us that pinched exceeding sore so