Early English adventurers in the East (1917)/Chapter 21
CHAPTER XXI
The Adventurers and their Times
The passing of the era of adventure—The early English communities in the East—How they lived—Their religious observances—The first Indian convert—The pomp observed by the chief officials—Their dress—Few Englishmen in India—Drinking habits of the men—Literary tastes—What expatriation to the East meant in the seventeenth century—The debt Britain owes to the early adventurers
WHEN the three great centres of British influence in India had been definitely fixed a new era was entered upon in which life ran in more regular channels. Adventures there were for the adventurous as there always will be in India while "the East is East and the West is West"; but the struggle of the race towards their settled destiny assumed a distinctly new phase which carried it away from the arena in which it had hitherto irregularly been prosecuted. Men now played their part on a mightier stage with more or less definitely assigned parts. They were the leaders of armies and the makers and unmakers of kingdoms; they organized the rule of provinces and they settled the fate of dynasties; they were builders rather than prospectors or pioneers. It may, perhaps, even be questioned whether the greatest of them—Clive, Hastings, and the rest of their brilliant contemporaries—were adventurers in the fullest sense of the term. Like their congeners of a later generation they were the chosen instruments of a settled order for the execution of its decrees on lines which were fairly fixed. Romantic as their lives were in many respects they were a class apart from the merchant adventurers whose careers are traced in the preceding pages.
Not the least interesting feature of the century of which we have treated was the gradual growth of these English communities in the East which in some cases formed the germs of the great ports and cities of our own time. Established in the first instance by a mere handful of the Company's servants—occasionally by not more than a half dozen—the factories, if well placed, grew in importance until the staff was a complete organization, including the various grades of functionaries into which the covenanted body was divided, the whole representing a fairly large colony. They lived together in the factory, which was usually a roomy building with sleeping apartments grouped about a common room. The latter served the double purpose of a dining hall and a council chamber, and it was also made to do duty as a chapel until the time arrived when the community became large enough to justify the provision of a special room or building for devotional purposes. An appendage of some of the factories and notably of that at Surat, was a beautiful garden in a pleasant situation where in the cool of the evening the exiles might pass a congenial hour or two amid the fruit and the flowers, before partaking of the evening meal.
Religious observances were strictly enjoined upon their servants by the directors, who made special provision for the due execution of their orders in this respect by sending out chaplains to the principal establishments and in arranging for the service of lay readers in cases where the staff was a small one. Some of the appointments, like that of the Rev. Peter Rogers, the first of the regular chaplains, whose vagaries have already been referred to, were not happy. But on the other hand there were amongst these early clerical representatives men who were in every way a credit to their cloth. In this category deservedly may be included the Rev. Patrick Copeland, who went out to India a year or two after Rogers. He is described in a letter to the directors of the period by one of its principal agents in India as one "whose virtuous life suiting so well with his sound doctrine is a means of bringing men unto God." Not the least of Copeland's claims to a place in the early history of the English in the East is that he made the first Indian convert that the Anglican Church can claim. This was a Bengali youth whose acquaintance Copeland formed in the course of his travels. The lad was taken to England by his patron and publicly baptized at the Church of St. Dionis, Backchurch, Fenchurch Street, on December 22, 1616, in the name of Peter, to which, according to some accounts, King James added the surname of Pope. Subsequently the Indian Peter returned to his native land, to drop once more into obscurity. Copeland, whose later career was spent in the West Indies, died in the Bermudas.
The ordinary life of the Eastern factories ran on rather rigid lines. Usually the day commenced with prayers at 6 a.m. Afterwards was a light informal breakfast, analogous to the chota hazri, or "little breakfast" of the Anglo-Indian of to-day. At midday was the dinner, a substantial meal to which the members of the establishment sat down in the strict order of precedence, the chief agent and the members of his council at a top table, and the factors and writers and others in their due positions at a lower table. The various dishes were washed down with Spanish or Shiraz wine with, as a welcome accompaniment on most days, pale punch made of brandy, rose water, citron juice and sugar. Tea was also served at the meals and extensively consumed. On Sundays and days of high festival game was added to the menu and the toasts of the King and the Company were given, followed by the healths of every one present, down to the most junior official. The evening meal was on more frugal lines. It was followed by conversation, which sometimes became so animated as to call for the intervention of the seniors. At nine o'clock the gates of the factory were closed. An hour later the entire establishment was wrapped in slumber.
A great deal of pomp marked the incoming and outgoing of those in authority in the factory. As early as 1623 the agent at Surat, when he made his public appearances, was preceded by a banner and a saddle horse and was attended by a native company composed of men armed with swords and bows and arrows and bearing shields. Later the practice was improved upon, and the merchant adventurers when they went abroad did so in regular procession. At the head of the line went a silk flag—the national emblem—followed by a body of musicians and the chief agent's Arab horses in state trappings. Then came the great man himself, reclining in luxurious ease in a palankeen borne upon the shoulders of four orderlies with two others as reliefs behind. A considerable body of native servants in scarlet uniforms followed. Behind them were the members of council in large coaches drawn by oxen. The tail of the procession was formed by the junior officials, some on horseback, some in carriages. Even the ordinary movements of the members of the staff were strictly regulated. The chief and the second in rank had palankeens at their disposal, and the other members of the council, with the chaplain, were honoured by having an umbrella borne above them when they left the factory. The less favoured mortals were denied these conveniences with a stern regard for the native laws of etiquette, which demanded that authority should be marked in this special way.
In the matter of dress the Englishman, at the outset at all events, largely adhered to their European garb. Roe made a special point of this during his embassy, under the rightful supposition that he was more likely to win respect by observing his national customs as far as possible than by masquerading in native costume. He probably set the fashion in this matter, for, for a generation at least, broadcloth was the only wear of the Englishman on ceremonial occasions. It must have been a terrible infliction in the sweltering days of the Indian hot season to move about in the thick heavy garments which the fashion of the day decreed, and it was doubtless with a sense of what was due to comfort and health that as the century progressed a more rational style of dress was introduced, the English cloth giving place to the indigenous calico. Wigs, too, were largely discarded, though those high in authority continued to clung to them as adjuncts which lent their personalities additional impressiveness in the eyes of the natives. That there was something in this theory was shown about the end of the century when a Sumatran queen before whom a deputation of officials from Madras attended was so attracted by the wigs that she was not satisfied until they had been taken off and handed up to her for her inspection.
Until towards the end of the century no Englishwomen were permitted by the Company to share the exile of its servants. At the time of Roe's embassy much trouble arose through a sudden irruption of Englishwomen—Steele's wife and another—upon the factories at Surat and Ahmedabad. In his irritation at the disturbance of his peace, for which the ladies were responsible, the ambassador, strongly urged the directors to prohibit their servants from having their wives in India with them. This ungallant advice was followed, with the consequence that until the door was practically forced by the establishment and growth of permanent settlements the single roof of the factory covered the entire English community. The distant wives, however, were not forgotten. Mandelslo, the Italian traveller who visited Surat about the year 1638, notes that at the English factory it was the custom of the leading functionaries at dinner to drink to their wives in England.
It is not remarkable that in the absence of the refining and restraining influence of women social customs in these early settlements should have degenerated largely into drinking customs. "There is a general complaint that we drink a damnable deal of wine this year," wrote Thomas Pitt at the close of the seventeenth century. He was doubtless well within the mark as excess is written large over all the records of the Company of this period. But it was not the wine which worked the mischief so much as the poisonous decoction known as arrack punch, manufactured from the raw native spirit. The deadly effects of this compound upon the early English communities are testified to by Bernier and other writers who visited India at this period. In the case of seamen especially it was a fruitful source of mortality as it is unfortunately still to-day amongst the careless Jacks of the mercantile marine who are stranded for a period in one or other of the great Indian ports.
If Bacchus was at times unduly worshipped the gods of learning and literature were not entirely neglected. There is evidence in the correspondence of the period that men kept up their acquaintance with the classics, and that they took a real pleasure in intellectual pursuits. At the Surat factory, quite early in its history, a library was formed with the Company's assistance. The collection of books furnished was, perhaps, not exactly of the kind which would have appealed to the tastes of the average man. What it was like may be gathered from a communication from Sir George Oxenden to the directors in the year 1666. "Your library here," wrote the President, "is carefully looked after and preserved, and we could wish it were better furnished with books. It consists for the main of English treatises and is almost totally defurnisht of the works of the ancient writers. We find none of the Fathers' works, any more than the Epistles of Clemens Romanus. Here are Epistles of Ignatius. The works of Epiphanius and St. Augustine, with some imperfect pieces of other Fathers, only belonging to a private library."
The suggestion made as to the deficiencies of this Surat library conveys rather a terrifying impression of the reading tastes of that far-off Anglo-India. Nor does it appear that addiction to "heavy" literature was a peculiarity of the generation of exiles to which Sir George Oxenden belonged. In 1720—to take a year a little beyond the period at which our narrative in the main closes—there was sold "by public outcry" at Anjengo, the birthplace of Sterne's Eliza, the following books belonging to different persons:Coles' English and Latin Dictionary, The Worthies of Devon, Tillotson's Works, Government of the Tongue, Atkinson's Epiphany, The History of the World, 2nd volume of The Taller, Art of Self Government, The Present State of England, Cæsar's Commentaries and Moll's Geography. Here is a decidedly miscellaneous list, far removed for the most part from the reading of the ordinary Englishman of to-day who lives in the East. It must be remembered, however, that when these books were sold Pamela had only just been born, that Clarissa Harlowe was still to arrive—that, in fact, the modern novel had yet to be created.
It is difficult to part with the old era without a pang of regret. It was a spacious age in which great things were accomplished with scanty means and in the face of enormous difficulties. Only men of the finest fibre could have passed, as most of our heroes did, successfully through the ordeals which marked their careers. Though all were traders, intent on commercial gain, they could at times rise to the loftiest heights of self-abnegation in the interests of their country. We cannot in these days, perhaps, realize to the fullest extent the sacrifice that most of them made. Expatriation to the East had an added terror in that period when the voyage was often times an odyssey of disease and misfortune and when a comparatively small proportion of those who went out to fill assigned positions ever returned home. There were none of the luxuries which now make life in the tropics tolerable to the European, and there were few of the plain comforts which to-day are regarded as absolutely indispensable to healthy existence. It was for many a life of dull heart-breaking monotony, varied only by the visitations of disease or the vicissitudes incidental to the precarious relations in which the English stood to the native powers in whose territory they resided.
This work has been written in vain if it does not show how much Britain owes to these men and more especially to the leaders, who by their devotion and heroic self-sacrifice gave such a splendid impetus to the cause of national expansion. Lancaster, Courthope, Jourdain, Middleton, Downton—these are names worthy to rank with those of the seamen of the earlier generation who won fame on the Western main, and they will compare not unfavourably with the naval heroes who in a later age secured for Britain the mastery of the sea and with it the consolidation of her overseas possessions. They are of the immortal company of whom Tennyson sang in his memorable lines:—
"We sail'd wherever ship could sail; We founded many a mighty state; Pray God our greatness may not fail Through craven fear of being great."
And of the prominent figures who played their part on land in this overture to the great drama of British dominion in the East may we not also say that they too are of the body of the elect—true Empire builders? Though their deeds were not so spectacular as those of the great administrators and soldiers of subsequent centuries, Oxenden, Aungier and Charnock were worthies whose achievements we cannot overlook in appraising the human forces which assisted to build up the British-Indian Empire.
But when all has been said that can be said of the work of the early adventurers something is left for explanation as to the causes which produced the wonderful results which are seen visibly shaping in the immediately preceding chapters. England, beaten, humiliated, discredited in Eastern Asia, turns her face to India. Her resources are limited, her prestige is lower than at any period in her recent history, and she has almost lost faith in herself amid the misfortunes of a period of internal conflict and;subsequent degeneracy of national morals and instincts; and yet in spite of all she steadily marks out for herself the lines upon which in the next century she advances—as regards her European rivals—to an impregnable position on the Indian peninsula. Can we account for this except by a reference to those higher influences which govern our lives? As "there's a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," so in the working of that miracle, the establishment of British rule in India, may we not see the finger of Providence?