The Old East Indiamen

by E. Keble Chatterton

And in order to know any of his Majesty’s ships when encountered in the East Indian waters the signal was to be as follows:—The ship to windward was to hoist an English Jack at the fore t’gallant masthead, and the ship to leeward was to answer by furling the mizen topsail and hoisting a French Jack at the mizen topmasthead.

The Company had their own agent at Deal, and considering the number of days that were spent by the East Indiamen in the Downs, both outward and homeward bound, his presence was very necessary. The ships were taken down the Thames by the Company’s own pilots, and this corporation owned its own pilot-cutter, which was a 60-ton craft with a master and six men, her cruising ground being between Gravesend and the Downs. However, even then, the Company’s ships were by no means immune from getting ashore, although it ought to be mentioned that by the middle of the eighteenth century a really good chart of the Thames estuary did not exist, and the exact nature of some of the numerous shoals was unknown. It is not surprising, therefore, to find casualties occurring as these big ships went up and down the London river. For instance, in March 1734 the East Indiaman Derby, outward bound in charge of a “Pylot,” ran aground “on the Mouse Sand below the Nore.” (This shoal is a few miles to the east of Southend pier.) She sustained so much damage that she had to put into Sheerness for dry-docking and repairs.

So also, a few days before Christmas in the year 1736, the East Indiaman Lyell “by the Unskilfulness of the Pilote has been Onshore on the Spaniard Sand,[D] in going down for the Downs.” So she also had to use Sheerness dock for repairs. Captain John Acton, the commander of the Lyell, in his report stated that the “Pylots” pretended not to have seen the “Buoy of the Spill,” and “borrowing too near on the Kentish Shore, he run us aground on the Spaniard at High Water, the wind blowing fresh N.W.” The “Spill,” or, as it is now called, the “Spile” buoy, marks the western end of the Spile Sand. The pilots had clearly got out of their course, for these East Indiamen, drawing as they did 20 feet of water, would never have taken the inner passage along the Kentish shore known as the Four Fathoms Channel. They should have left the Spile buoy to starboard and not to port, as clearly was the case in the present instance among the shoals. The north-west was a fair wind from the Thames to the Downs all the way, so that no one except by accident would have chosen to take such a ship so far out of the main, deep-water channel.

The ship was hard and fast on the Spaniard, and the conditions could scarcely have been worse—a fresh onshore wind, and the accident occurring at top of high water. All night the ship lay on the shoal bumping and injuring herself so that there were soon seven feet of water in the hold, and the pumps could not cope with it. But on the morning of Christmas Eve by a great piece of luck the ship was got off, for the wind veered to the north and sent in a bigger tide, as of course it would, and a local fisherman—doubtless from Whitstable or the East Swale—came and assisted with his local knowledge so that “thank God the ship floated and we got her off here.” Making a fair wind of it the Lyell then ran into the East Swale and anchored off Faversham. And a very handsome sight she must have looked lying to her hempen cable in that winding river.

One bleak day in January 1737 the East Indiaman Nassau had the misfortune to run on the south end of the Galloper in a “hard gale at SW,” as her captain reported. The Galloper is a treacherous bank in the North Sea off Harwich, and many a ship used to get picked up here in the olden days. The Nassau was now in a critical position, and every moment those on board expected her to go to pieces: “but,” wrote her skipper, “by the Providence of the Almighty in about an Hours time we forc’d her off again with her head sails, but had the misfortune at the same time of losing our Rudder, Main and Mizen Top Mast which obliged us soon after to come to an anchor.” But here again, just as had been the case with the Lyell, local assistance came to them. For after a time the Harwich packet passed them bound for Holland, and her captain, seeing the Nassau, hailed her skipper and advised her to stand in for Orfordness, and even sent on board his mate, as he knew every inch of that coast. However, the wind now veered to the north-north-west, which made it fair for running down the North Sea, so the Nassau sailed down towards the North Foreland and anchored in Margate Roads, whence her captain was able to send information to the East India Company, where also he would wait for orders.

Another peril which these East Indiamen had to remember was the presence of pirates. These consisted not merely of local Eastern craft, but of such people as Captains Avery and Kidd, two of the most notorious men in the whole history of piracy. In the early part of the eighteenth century the latter were found in many parts of the Indian Ocean. Madagascar was a favourite base for these rovers, but they would be found off Mauritius, or at the mouth of the Red Sea awaiting the East Indiamen returning from Mocha and Jeddah. Not content with this, these European pirates would hang about off the Malabar coast, and the East India Company’s ships suffered considerably, and feared a repetition of these attacks. And yet, when we consider the matter dispassionately, were Avery, Kidd and his fellow-pirates very much worse than some of those captains who first took the English ships out to the Orient, who thought it no wrong but a mere matter of business to stop a Portuguese ship and relieve her of her cargo just as these eighteenth-century pirates would assail the ships of the present monopolists of the Eastern trade? The only difference that seems obvious is that Lancaster and those other early captains were acting on behalf of a powerful corporation having a charter from the sovereign: whereas Avery, Kidd and the like were acting on their own and were outlaws. And even this cannot be pushed too far, seeing that at one time of his career Kidd received a commission from William III. to go forth and, as “a private man-of-war,” capture other notorious “pirates, free-booters and sea-rovers,” on the old principle of setting a thief to catch a thief.

Sometimes these East Indiamen were taken for the enemy even by English men-of-war. You will remember the famous voyage of Lord Anson round the world in the years 1740-1744. One day whilst they were in the South Atlantic they saw a sail to the north-west, and the squadron began to exchange signals with each other and to give chase “and half an hour after we let out our reefs and chased with the squadron ... but at seven in the evening, finding we did not near the chace ... we shortened sail, and made a signal for the cruisers to join the squadron. The next day but one we again discovered a sail, which on nearer approach we judged to be the same vessel. We chased her the whole day, and though we rather gained upon her, yet night came on before we could overtake her, which obliged us to give over the chace, to collect our scattered squadron. We were much chagrined at the escape of this vessel, as we then apprehended her to be an advice-boat sent from Old Spain to Buenos Ayres with notice of our expedition. But we have since learnt that we were deceived in this conjecture, and that it was our East India Company’s packet bound to St Helena.” This is certainly a fair proof of the sailing qualities of the Company’s ships, seeing that not even the English cruisers could overhaul the merchant ship.

At this time the chief cargoes which these East Indiamen took out to the East still included those woollen goods which had been sent ever since the foundation of the first Company, and they continued to bring back saltpetre, but now tea was becoming a much more important cargo. But in addition to that tea which came home in the Company’s ships and paid custom duty, there was a vast amount brought in by smugglers. And one argument used to be that this had to be, because the East Indiamen brought back chiefly the better, higher priced kind, compelling the dealers to send to Holland for the cheaper variety.

The East Indiamen’s captains were not above engaging in the smuggling industry, at any rate as aiders and abettors. One of the methods was to wait until the ship arrived in the Downs. Men would come out from the Deal beach in their luggers and then take ashore quantities of tea secreted about their person. This was the reason why the Revenue cruisers were told to keep an especial watch on the Company’s ships when homeward bound, because of “the illicit practices that are continually attempted to be committed by them.” So notorious indeed and so ingenious were the methods to land goods without previously paying duty, that the Revenue cutters were ordered to follow these bigger ships all the way up Channel, keeping as close to them as possible as long as they were under sail, and when the East Indiaman came to anchor, the cutter was to bring up as near as possible to her. This was to prevent goods (such as silk and tea) being dropped through the ship’s ports into a friendly boat that had come out from the beach, a practice that was by no means unknown on board these merchant craft home from the Orient.

Just as there was serious friction sometimes between the Revenue cutters and the ships of his Majesty’s navy concerning the wearing of pendants, so these incidents were not unknown to happen to the ships of the Honourable East India Company. As an instance, Captain Balchen, R.N., during the year 1726 wrote to the latter complaining that one of their ships had hoisted a broad red pendant at the main topmast head. There was certainly no possible defence, and the Company were compelled to reply that they were “entire strangers” to the complaint, and would give directions to prevent this occurring again. But otherwise these East Indiamen were treated with far more respect than any other merchant ships. No finer ships other than men-of-war sailed the seas. On arriving at their port in India they were always saluted, and their captains ranked as Members of Council, being saluted with thirteen guns when they landed, and the guard turning out when they entered or left the fort. No one, in fact, other than officers of the Royal Navy received such respect. Under the captain were from four to eight officers in the bigger ships, who all wore uniforms, the duties on board being carried on with just the same discipline as in a man-of-war.