I trusting upon his [Jehangir’s] promise and seeing it was beneficial both to my nation and myself, being dispossessed of that benefite I should have reaped if I had gone to Bantam, and [seeing] that after halfe a dozen yeeres Your Worships would send another man of sort to my place, in the meane time I should feather my neast and doe you service; and further perceaving great injuries offered us by reason the king is so farre from the ports, I did not think it amiss to yeeld unto this request.
Nor, a few weeks later, did he think it amiss to yield to another imperial request. Jehangir, ever considerate, was insistent that he ‘take a whyte mayden out of his palace’. It was simply a precaution, of course; the girl could oversee the preparation of his victuals and thus frustrate attempts to poison him. Jehangir would supply her dowry and her servants and, if the ‘Inglis Khan’ so wished, she might turn Christian. Hawkins, feigning strong religious scruples, claims to have refused unless the white maiden were already baptized. ‘I little thought’, he writes, ‘that a Christian’s daughter could be found.’ But lo, Jehangir knew just the person. She was the daughter of an Armenian Christian who had been high in Akbar’s favour but had since died leaving her ‘only a few jewels’. To the Emperor’s solicitude were now added the dictates of compassion. ‘I, seeing she was of so honest descent and having passed [i.e. given] my worde to the king, could not withstand my fortune.’ They were duly married by his English servant and ‘for ever after I lived content and without feare, she being willing to go where I went and live as I lived’.
When Hawkins prevaricates he is at his most transparent. Subtlety was never his strongest suit but for six months he had successfully consolidated his position and was now one of the Emperor’s closest companions. Matters began to change as soon as news reached Agra that another Company vessel was approaching the ‘bar’ at Surat. At first the change was in Hawkins’ favour. In expectation of at last receiving worthy tokens of English esteem, Jehangir issued the desired trading rights. When word came that the ship had in fact been wrecked on the Gujarat coast he even issued orders for the reception of the castaways and their cargo.
But such favours aroused the jealousy of Jehangir’s ministers ‘for it went against their hearts that a Christian should be so great and neere the king’. Additionally the threat of more English shipping activated the Portuguese at court. And, to cap it all, ‘that dogge’ Mukarrab Khan put in another appearance. Officially he was in disgrace for having appropriated Hawkins’s cargo but, with an ingenuity one can only admire, he managed to turn an imperial order to reimburse Hawkins into the means of disgracing him. He did this by undervaluing the goods in question and then representing Hawkins’s refusal to accept payment at this questionable valuation as an act of disobedience to the Emperor. It was a complex dispute but with so many anxious to discredit the Englishman, and with Hawkins himself exhibiting a pugnacious stubbornness, his reputation plummeted.
The arrival of ‘unrulie’ English hordes from the wrecked Ascension contributed to his discomfiture. In Surat they had already disgraced themselves ‘with palmita drinke (toddy) and raisin wine’. According to Finch they ‘made themselves beasts and soe fell to lewd women that in shorte time manie fell sicke’. Worse still, one Thomas Tucker, perhaps tired of singing for his supper, butchered a calf which Finch rightly described as ‘a slaughter more than murther in India’. Local Brahmins organized a lynch mob and Tucker was saved only when the English themselves were seen to whip him into insensibility. To Finch’s immense relief the officers and men of the Ascension at last set off for Agra. Many never arrived but amongst those who did was the factor, John Jourdain, who was to figure so prominently at Bantam.
Hawkins, Jourdain reported, was ‘in some disgrace with the kinge’. The factor had taken an instant dislike to the Captain and, not without gloating, he proceeded to list the reasons for Hawkins’s disgrace. Amongst them occurs the oft-quoted reference to Hawkins’s drunkenness. According to Jourdain he had been publicly reprimanded for appearing at court after ‘filling his head with stronge drinke’. Perhaps he had. But Jehangir was not noted for his abstinence and Hawkins mentions having passed many paralytic hours in the Emperor’s company. Even if the Emperor had undergone some conscience-stricken reformation it seems unlikely that he would have objected to Hawkins drinking in his own home. More probably this was simply another instance of the Captain’s many enemies trying to engineer his disgrace.
After five wasted months Jourdain and most of his followers returned towards Surat in the hopes of being rescued by another English vessel. Hawkins remained at Agra and briefly his fortunes revived. ‘Againe I was afloat’, he writes. Jehangir seemed disposed to make Mukarrab Khan settle with him and to grant the cherished farman for an English factory. Hawkins also had high hopes of receiving back payment of his promised salary. Then once again his enemies rallied and the Portuguese outbid him for the Emperor’s favour. He applied for leave to depart from Agra and, instead of being detained with fair promises as expected, he found himself dismissed. With Mrs Hawkins, her few jewels and her many relatives, he left Agra in November 1611. His plan was to head for Goa and with the help of the Portuguese, only too pleased to hasten his retreat, to sail from there to Europe. In the event he changed his plans and headed for Surat. An English vessel, indeed a most impressive fleet, was off the ‘bar’ and its commander was adopting a radically different approach to both Moghul officialdom and the Portuguese.
ii
While English attempts to establish themselves at Surat were getting nowhere very slowly, events on the other side of the Arabian Sea had overtaken them. Although Keeling and Hawkins had failed to reach the Red Sea ports the Ascension, before running aground on the coast of Gujarat, had made good this omission. By chance she had also discovered the Seychelle Islands. ‘They seemed to us’, opined the ship’s boatswain, ‘an earthly paradise.’ But they were as yet uninhabited save for giant turtles and even the most pie-eyed of factors could see no commercial potential for turtle flesh ‘because they did look so uglie before they were boyled’.
Aden, ‘that famous and stronge place’, could hardly compare with the Seychelles. ‘A most uncomfortable place’, thought Jourdain, ‘for within the walls there is not any green thing growing, onlie your delight must be in the cragged rocks and decayed houses.’ The city was still in ruins following its conquest by the Turks in 1538. Small quantities of gum arabic, frankincense and myrrh were obtainable but the main terminus for oceanic shipping was now round the coast at Mocha in the Red Sea itself.
While the Ascension made for Mocha through the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, Jourdain, with the usual royal letter of introduction, journeyed inland to Sana’a, the capital. Yemen was a land of picturesque surprises; high passes gave way to fertile valleys in one of which he identified extensive plantations of what he called ‘cohoo. ‘The seeds of this cohoo is a great marchandise for it is carried to Grand Cairo and all other places of Turkey and the Indias.’ ‘Kahwa’ was the word used by the Arabs; in English it was sometimes rendered as ‘coughe’ and eventually ‘coffee’. Nowhere else in the world was it to be found and as yet there was no market for it in Europe. But by the 1660s coffee would become the staple export of the Red Sea ports.
At Sana’a Jourdain obtained permission to trade from the Turkish Pasha, or governor, and then proceeded on to Mocha. Thence a letter was sent via Cairo to London representing the potential of Mocha in highly favourable but misleading terms. In fact the town proved ‘unreasonable hott’; the Pasha’s permission was for the Ascension’s trade only, not for the establishment of a factory; and a profitable sale for the ship’s ballast, mostly iron, was lost through her commander ‘bursting out in anger saying that the merchants of Mocha mocked him to offer so little’.
But the Company knew nothing of this and in 1609, believing Hawkins favourably established in India and the Red Sea trade already wide open to them, the directors instructed the ships of their Sixth Voyage to concentrate on the Arabian Sea. After much deliberation James I had just granted the Company that new and enlarged charter; thanks largely to David Middleton’s success in the Spice Islands, confidence in the profitability of Eastern trade was growing; peers of the realm and ministers of state were willing to invest. To