Cornish Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

In order that he might represent the danger that menaced of losing Bombay Captain Keigwin resolved on reporting in person to the Company how matters stood, and he accordingly went to the directors and laid the case before them with such force that they consented to send him back to Bombay with the rank of captain-lieutenant, and he was to be third in the Council. But with singular capriciousness, in the following year, when Keigwin was at Bombay, they rescinded the order, reduced his pay to six shillings a day, without allowance for food and lodging, and made further reductions in the general pay and increase in the taxes. This embittered the garrison and the natives alike.[30]

"During the greater part of the reign of Charles the Second," says Macaulay, "the Company enjoyed a prosperity to which the history of trade scarcely furnishes a parallel, and which excited the wonder, the cupidity, and the envious animosity of the whole capital. Wealth and luxury were then rapidly increasing, the taste for spices, the tissues and the jewels of the East, became stronger day by day; tea, which at the time when Monk brought the army of Scotland to London had been handed round to be stared at and just touched with the lips, as a great rarity from China, was, eight years later, a regular article of import, and was soon consumed in such quantities that financiers began to consider it as a fit subject for taxation." Coffee, moreover, had become a fashionable drink, and the coffee-houses of London were the resorts of every description of club. But coffee came from Mocha, and the East India Company had sole right to import that, as it had absolute monopoly of the trade of the Indian Sea.

Nor was that all; vast quantities of saltpetre were imported into England from the East for the manufacture of gunpowder. But for this supply our muskets and cannon would have been speechless. It was reckoned that all Europe would hardly produce in one year saltpetre sufficient for the siege of one town fortified on the principles of Vauban.

The gains of the Company were enormous, so enormous as in no way to justify the cheeseparing that was had recourse to at Bombay. But these gains were not distributed among a large number of shareholders, but swelled the pockets of a few, for as the profits increased the number of holders of stock diminished.

The man who obtained complete control over the affairs of the Company was Sir Josiah Child, who had risen from an apprentice who swept out one of the counting-houses in the City to great wealth and power. His brother John was given an almost uncontrolled hand at Surat.

The Company had been popularly considered as a Whig body. Among the members of the directing committee had been found some of the most vehement exclusionists in the City, that is to say, those who had voted for the exclusion of James, Duke of York, from any claim to the crown of England on the decease of Charles II. This was an affront James was not likely to forget and forgive. Indeed two of them, Sir Samuel Barnardiston and Thomas Papillon, drew on themselves a severe persecution by their zeal against Popery and arbitrary power.

The wonderful prosperity of the Company had excited, as already intimated, the envy of the merchants in London and Bristol; moreover, the people suffered from the monopoly being in the hands of a few stockholders, who controlled the market. The Company was fiercely attacked from without at the same time that it was distracted by internal dissensions.

Captain Keigwin now called upon the inhabitants of Bombay to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown, and to renounce the Company and submission to its commands. With this the whole of the garrison, militia and inhabitants, complied; the troops from expectation of relief from the grievances of which they had complained, and the inhabitants from anticipating relief from taxation.

Captain Keigwin and his associates then addressed a letter to His Majesty and to the Duke of York, expressing their determination to maintain the island for the King till his pleasure should be known, and enumerating the causes which had impelled them to revolt—the principal being to prevent Bombay from being seized by the Siddee, or Admiral of the Mogul, who with a numerous fleet was lying near, or else by the Sambhajee, the Mahratta rajah, who was watching his opportunity to descend on Bombay and annex it.

Captain Keigwin and the conspirators next represented to the Court of Committee that the selfish scheme of Josiah Child in England, and of his brother John Child of Surat, had been at the bottom of the whole mischief which caused the disaffection, and added that both the garrison and inhabitants were determined to continue in allegiance to the Crown alone till the King's pleasure should be made known to them.