Monday 24 August 2015

24th AUGUST 1608 FIRST SHIP "HECTOR " ARRIVED IN SURAT OF EAST INDIA COMPANY

East India Company 
or John Company. The Hector, a British galleon of the third voyage chartered by the John Company underWilliam HawkinsTapati, near Surat. This was the first ship to fly an English flag off the coast of India. arrived on August 24, 1608 at the entrance to the River 


SURAT -GUJARAT COAST 1608
Textiles from India

Although the English arrived at Surat in 1608, it was several years before a permanent factory was established. The long presence of the Portuguese on the west coast of India, pre-dating Mughal control, made unhampered access for other Europeans more problematical than on the east or 'Coromandel' coast, or at the open port of Bantam.

Surat, the outlet for the textile manufactures of Gujurat and the embarkation point for the annual Haj pilgrimage, was the most important centre for the overseas trade of the Mughal Empire. As well as providing textiles to be exchanged for pepper and spices in Southeast Asia, it offered the possibility of participating in and imitating existing trade networks westwards to Persia, a source of raw silk, and into the Red Sea, where Egyptian and Turkish merchants made annual purchases of Gujarati textiles with silver. Surat was also, of course, the first major Asian port city within reach of ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope.
Red Fort
The British Library
The Delhi Gate of the Red Fort at Agra, by an Indian artist, early nineteenth century. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan established Delhi as his capital and built the Red Fort in 1638 to house the imperial court. (BL shelf-mark OIOC Add.22716)

Existing arrangements between the Mughal local authorities and the Portuguese, who held a string of fortified bases along the coast north from Goa, backed up by regular naval patrols, were not to be easily overturned. The English had to demonstrate that they could be even more of a menace at sea and that they were capable of defeating Portuguese attacks. This they proceeded to do over the next few years. Sir Henry Middleton plundered the Red Sea shipping in the summer of 1612 and Portuguese fleets were beaten off with great loss, within sight of Surat, in December 1612 and January 1615. Even so, the Mughal authorities would not finally admit the English without Imperial permission, which led to a remarkable series of early contacts with the Mughal court.

The magnificence of the Mughals
Babur, a Turkic adventurer who claimed descent from the Mongol conqueror Timur or Tamerlaine and who had gained control over Afghanistan, invaded India in the mid-1520s. At his death in 1530 the new arrivals had established a loosely knit empire extending from Kabul to the borders of Bengal. mselves 'Mughal' or 'Mongol', the first generations spoke Turkish. Their successors adopted the Persian language and culture to create perhaps the world's most civilised centre of power, albeit ruthless, filled with all the magnificence and luxury that Asia could supply.

Babur's grandson Akbar, who occupied the throne from 1556 to 1605, consolidated Mughal rule over the whole of northern India, taking in Sind, Kashmir, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Orissa and Bengal, forming a partnership with the Hindu Rajputs to govern through a centralised bureaucracy with officers of state and provincial authorities under his personal direction. More open-minded than most contemporaries, Akbar married a Rajput princess, invited Jesuits, Brahmins, Jains and Zoroastrians to religious discussions, and abolished the poll tax that had customarily been levied on non-Muslims. Throughout his life he had a love of painting, maintaining artists at his court who produced illustrated manuscripts of Persian classics, Indian texts, histories, biographies, portraits and, to satisfy his curiosity about the outside world, copies of European prints and depictions of European manners and customs. Akbar's son Jahangir (reigned 1605-27) continued the tradition of artistic patronage, priding himself as a connoisseur of painting and thereby offering a fascinating opening for the first English diplomatic exchanges.

William Hawkins, commander of the Hector, left the ship at Surat in 1608 and travelled up to Agra to seek permission for a permanent trade. Even though he had nothing to offer as presents except broadcloth, he made a favourable impression on Jahangir, not least because he could speak Turkish and could match the Emperor's consumption of wine. Pressed to remain, he was made a captain of 400 horse, he married an Armenian Christian girl chosen by Jahangir and, dressed as a Muslim nobleman, he took his place among the courtiers. 
European lady
The British Library
A European lady with a dog, by a Deccani artist, c.1640. (BL shelf-mark OIOC Johnson 14.7)
Despite such personal standing, a grant of trading privileges was not forthcoming, so he and his wife left Agra for Surat at the end of 1611, getting on board Middleton's fleet in January 1612. He died before reaching England. His widow remarried Gabriel Towerson (who was executed at Amboina in 1623), returned to India with him, and then elected to remain there among her relatives rather than sail for Bantam. Her subsequent fate is not recorded.

Gifts to an emperor
While the Company's Directors issued strict injunctions against anyone following Hawkins' example, reports of Jahangir's artistic tastes now caused them to address the question `What do you give to an Emperor?'. The fleet of 1614 carried out 78 oil paintings: 41 of them, commissioned in London, were portraits of the King, the Queen, Sir Thomas Smythe, assorted lords, ladies and citizens, and two fanciful depictions of the 'Great Magoll' and 'Tamberlaine'; the rest, brought from studios in Rouen, depicted classical and religious subjects like Mars and Venus, the Judgement of Paris, and Adam and Eve, offering ample opportunity to portray fair and beautiful women. Such novelties were gratefully received but failed to secure permission for an English factory. This had to await the arrival of a 'proper' ambassador in 1615.

Influenced by the unanimous opinion of its servants on the spot that mere merchants had little status at the Mughal court, the Company's Directors persuaded King James I to despatch a special representative at their expense. The man selected, Sir Thomas Roe, was an established courtier, a close friend of Prince Henry (until his death in 1612) and Princess Elizabeth. Roe remained in India for almost three years. His diary (which is in the British Library's collections) describes the magnificence and intrigues of Jahangir's court. Roe had plenty of experience of courts and their conspicuous consumption, but the apex of the enormous human and natural resources of the Mughal Empire was another world.

At Ajmer in March 1616 Roe was received in audience by Jahangir. The Mughal, wearing pure white clothing `adorned with more jewels than any other monarch in the world', was seated on a throne raised four feet above the floor, in a hall canopied with hangings of cloth of gold, silk and velvet, with rich Persian carpets underfoot, and with seven of the 1614 oil paintings (including the portraits of the King, the Queen and Sir Thomas Smythe) arranged behind him. It is hard to imagine the other great Asian empire, Ming China, granting such an honour to a 'red-haired barbarian'. The outcome of the embassy was not some formal treaty of commerce between the two rulers, a totally alien concept that Roe soon had to forget. Instead he received an Imperial edict or farman assuring good usage of the English, together with a farman from Prince Khurram, the new Viceroy of Gujarat (who succeeded as Shah Jahan in 1628), granting favourable conditions of trade at Surat.

Farmans and forts
The Portuguese position in India had been weakened, though there was still serious fighting to come. From Surat the English began to participate in the Red Sea and Persian trades, as well as sending cargoes of textiles to Bantam. In 1617 Shah Abbas of Persia granted a farman for English trade at Isfahan and the Gulf port of Jask. 
Fort William
The British Library
Fort William, Calcutta, by George Lambert and Samuel Scott, c.1730. The painting is one of a set of six views commissioned by the Company for the Court of Directors' room at East India House in London. (BL shelf-mark OIOC F45)
In 1619 a new commodity, coffee, was bought at Mokha for sale in Persia. In 1622 the English Company's ships helped the Persians to capture the fortress of Hormuz, the key to the Gulf, receiving as their reward an annual share of the customs revenue of Bandar Abbas, to where the trade was now transferred.

On the other side of India the 1611 settlement at the Golconda port of Masulipatam on the Coromandel coast had maintained a fairly flourishing textile trade to Bantam. In 1639 an invitation to settle from the naik or local Hindu ruler of the coastal districts around the small town of Madraspatam, far to the south, was eagerly accepted by the English Company. As well as granting territory and trading rights, thenaik also licensed the construction of a fortress. Fort St George at Madras was the first of its kind for the English Company, comparable to the earlier Portuguese bases and to the VOC's efforts further east. It was followed by the castle at Bombay, an island commanding a superb harbour 160 miles south of Surat, ceded to the Portuguese by the Sultan of Gujarat in 1534. In 1661 it was transferred to King Charles II as part of the dowry of his Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza. He in turn handed it over to the Company, who made it their headquarters for India in 1674.

From the 1650s the English had also begun trading in Bengal under a farman from Shah Jahan, eventually settling their main factory at the village of Sutanati on the river Hugli, which became the city of Calcutta. Permission to fortify was granted by the Mughal Nawab of Bengal in 1696 and Fort William was completed in 1702. At the turn of the eighteenth century the English presence in India consisted of a sprinkling of small factories along the west and east coasts, and inland as far as Patna, plus three strong points at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. All owed their existence to Indian permission, partnership and complicity in the business of making money.

The trade in textiles
What of the textiles that had driven all this effort to the main production centres of Coromandel, Gujarat and later Bengal? The ready availability of raw cotton, silk and dyestuffs in all three areas had stimulated, over centuries, the growth of a village-based hand-loom industry that gave employment to hundreds of thousands of highly skilled weavers, dyers and washers, producing enormous quantities of different kinds of cloth for specific market requirements throughout Asia. A definitive glossary of types has yet to be compiled. 
cloth merchant
The British Library
A cloth merchant, seated in his shop, selling chintz to a customer, by a Tanjore artist, c.1800. (BL shelf-mark OIOC Add.Or.2531)
Among the more familiar are fine muslins, printed or painted chintz and palampores, plain white baftas, diapers and dungarees, striped allejaes, mixed cotton and silk ginghams, and embroidered quilts. Some cloths were patterned in the loom, others had gold or silver threads woven into them. But the supreme Indian achievements lay in the mastery of colour-fast dyeing techniques, and the fabulous designs and colour combinations produced by hand-painting and wood-blocking. English traders always referred to them as `piece goods'--each piece was usually about a yard wide (the width of the loom) and between ten and twenty yards long depending upon type.

Originally intended to facilitate the purchase of pepper and spices in Indonesia, once the first cargoes of cloth reached England demand at home grew rapidly--as early as 1620 50,000 pieces of painted and printed chintz were brought in, while as late as the 1750s Indian textiles accounted for 60 percent of the total value of the Company's sales in London. A typical eighteenth-century order, to Bengal for the season 1730-31, called for 589,000 pieces of 38 different types, sub-divided into 98 varieties.

Procurement of such quantities followed long-established practice. The English factors engaged Indian brokers who were paid a fixed percentage to negotiate and manage contracts with local authorities, village headmen and weaver families for the delivery of stated numbers of particular types by specified dates, and who guaranteed the safety of cash advances by the Company for the purchase of yarn and dyestuffs. The weavers, the ancillary craftsmen and the cultivators of the raw materials were at the bottom of the chain. Frequently devastated by climate, famine and war, they were always subject to varying degrees of pressure and exploitation, while the landholders, the brokers and the Company grew rich on their skills.

This session is adapted from pp.54--71 of Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600-1834 by Anthony Farrington, published by The British Library, 2002.
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Arrival of William Hawkins in court of Jahangir Share on emailShare on facebookShare on twitterShare on printShare on google May 31, 20112 Comments In 1607, William Hawkins commanded the ship “Hector” for East India Company on a voyage to Surat and Aden loaded with letters & presents from King of England James I. He arrived in Surat in August 1608, but the road ahead was not a cakewalk. As soon as Hector sailed in, it was captured by the Portuguese. William Hawkins was told that all the ports belong to the “King of Portugal” and none ought to come here without his license. But, he was later let leave and receive a pass for his journey to Agra. He was helped by the Viceroy of the Burhanpur midway and after much labor, toil and many dangers; he was able to reach Agra on April 16, 1609. Akbar who was contemporary of queen Elizabeth-I was little known in England, but when Hawkins arrived, there was a different personality sitting on the throne who was not at all known in England. But Captain Hawkins was received by this new emperor Jahangir with all Indian hospitality and warmth. His letter was read in the court with the help of a Portuguese Jesuit. Then he was taken to the private audience chamber and they had a conversation for some 3 hours. Hawkins was well versed in Turkish and Jahangir and some of his ministers also knew Turkish, the native tongue of Babur. So the discussions took place in Turkish. Hawkins was able to acquire a footing in the court of Jahangir and in due course of time he got so intimacy with the “talented drunkard” emperor that no Europeans had ever afterwards. Jahangir called him “English Khan“. This English Khan was able to persuade the emperor to grant a commission for an English factory at Surat but under the Pressure of the Portuguese Viceroy, the grant was withdrawn. Hawkins lived in the court of Mughal emperor till 1611, tried to reverse the orders, but the Portuguese influence over the King was impregnable. He returned in disgust on November 2, 1611. He died a couple of years later. 
http://www.gktoday.in/arrival-of-william-hawkins-in-court-of-jahangir/
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