The First English East India Company Voyage, 1601-1603: The Human dimension (I).
Cheryl Fury
Introduction
The first voyage of the English East India Company (EIC) was the dawning of what would become a momentous relationship between England (later Britain) and Asia. Although hopes were probably high when the four ships and a victualler departed for Indonesia on 20 April 1601,2 only the most imaginative could have foreseen the enormous commercial empire that would be built on this early voyage. Although few would debate the global impact which stemmed from this modest beginning,' the human costs of this groundbreaking voyage have seldom been explored.
This essay will examine this foundational voyage in terms of the conditions and obstacles faced by the participants. Did the EIC or the men as individuals find effective means to cope with the many challenges inherent in this epic journey? It is possible to trace many of the men through the roughly 110 wills that survive as well as the extant documentation detailing some of the known members of the voyage and those who died on the outward leg.
From these, historians can compile fairly complete crew lists for the various ships. These lists provide hints about what sorts of men were willing to sign up for such a dangerous form of maritime employment as well as the nature of their inter-relationships.
Such an analysis is hampered by the limited primary and secondary sources which treat the voyage in any detail, thus making the two contemporary accounts by anonymous participants especially vital. An unknown writer aboard Ascension penned one of the accounts," while the other chronicler sailed on General Lancaster's ship, Red Dragon.
Both the authors were doubtless men of some standing and education, possibly merchants. In addition, Edmund Scott's account focussed on the participants from the voyage who stayed in the East Indies from 1603 to 1605.
Court Minutes and Company letters are likewise invaluable." In addition, over one hundred of the participants left wills, which can be analyzed for the wealth of information they contain - a methodology pioneered by J.D. Alsop and the late P.E.H. Hair in their groundbreaking work on Guinea seamen.
The EIC and Trade with the East Indies
The EIC was birthed by London merchants and investors who lobbied the Crown for a charter to "trade in the East-India, to bring into this realm spices and other commodities."
The goal was to pay for the spices with English goods or, barring that, to use bullion for payment. The Crown awarded the EIC a royal charter on 31 December 1600, and the Company began the onerous task of raising money to outfit the first voyage.
The English were late-comers to the East Indies trade. The Portuguese had been trading in the region for over a century; although their power was waning, they were keen to maintain their monopoly in the area. The Dutch were anxious to carve a place for themselves in the spice trade by challenging the Portuguese. The English had similar intentions, but the Dutch had the jump on the EIC because they had begun their voyages in 1595 and had made about ten trips before the English entered the arena. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch looked like the obvious challengers to Portuguese hegemony. The London merchants were spurred on by Dutch successes in the East Indies and the decline of the Levant trade." Above all, merchants and investors were seduced by the immense profitability to be gained by bringing spices back to European markets. The Crown was brought onside by a combination of circumstances, connections, pressure and profitability.
Many of the best and brightest men from the late Elizabethan commercial and seafaring communities departed from Torbay, Devonshire in 1601 aboard the small fleet. By cross-referencing the list of known participants against other contemporary documents such as records from the High Court of the Admiralty, state papers and parish records, we can see that many of the officers were well respected, successful seamen and merchants who lived in the Greater London region. Some were so influential that they have earned individual entries in the Dictionary of National Biography centuries after their deaths, including James Lancaster, the General of the Fleet, and John Davis, the Arctic explorer and pilot major. Significantly, both had been to the East Indies prior to the 1601-1603 voyage.
The EIC was concerned with the quality of both the men and the ships going on the voyage. The Company spent almost £40,000 to purchase, refurbish and outfit "four of the best merchant shippes of the kingdome." Red Dragon, Hector, Ascension and Susan were veterans of merchant and privateering service. The "admiral," Red Dragon, was the largest at 600 tons and carried the "General of the Voyage," James Lancaster. According to the Company's Court Records, the victualler was called Gift, although it has been listed elsewhere erroneously as Guest. The Court Minutes say that it was 120 tons, while the anonymous author of Purchas His Pilgrimes claims it was 130 tons."
Regardless, the victualler was abandoned on 20 July 1601, possibly because of the weakened state of the fleet due to scurvy.
Victualling, Morbidity and Mortality
If the EIC's records are to be believed, the ships were well provisioned with bread, beef, pork, fish, peas, beans, rice, cheese, butter, beer, cider, wine and aquavit, as well as items to add flavour to the predictable diet, such as honey, spices, oil and vinegar. This was typical shipboard fare: there was a remarkable tenacity about seamen's provisions in the early modern period which was reflected in the Company's staple diet. On paper, each man was entitled to three loaves of bread a day, fish or one pound of meat (normally salted or pickled beef or pork), half a pint of peas or beans, a pint of wine and a quart of beer or cider. Those who shared the Captain's table enjoyed special wine and/or slightly better victuals, as per maritime custom. Seventeenth-century seamen required a high caloric diet because seafaring was very labour intensive. On those occasions when the men had their full rations, their considerable caloric needs would have been satiated, although not their nutritional requirements.
The journey to the East Indies was very long. The fleet was furnished for twenty months with the expectation that fresh provisions would be obtained along the way." Unfortunately for the participants, most victuals were acquired well before the fleet's departure from England. There were few means to preserve food and drink in the early modern era so it is easy to imagine the putrid state of victuals months or even a year past their "best before date." No wonder the men tried to obtain fresh provisions by honest means or foul.
As was typical for European voyages, the English bartered with "the locals" for provisions several times on the way to the East Indies. Most of these exchanges were peaceful, but if need be the English were willing to resort to force, a common practice at sea even among countrymen. They traded with the "people of the country" not far from Antogil Bay, striking a deal to exchange beads for cattle, rice, lemons and plantains. Because cattle were scarce, the natives were unwilling to sell them, so the Englishmen took some "perforce, giving them in beads as we paide for the other, to the valew of ten shillings." The English also had no compunction about denuding a Portuguese ship they took in June 1601 of 146 butts of wine, 176 jars of oil and fifty-five hogsheads of meal. Lancaster divided up the provisions "without partialitie," and these proved "a great helpe to us in the whole voyage after." Most likely they enjoyed the victuals from San Antonio, a ship they took in the Straits of Malacca in October 1602. In addition, the men caught fish (including flying fish), seals and penguins.
The anonymous journal writers on Red Dragon and Ascension demonstrate that Lancaster was keen to purchase fresh food and drink for the fleet which would have been a great boon to his men. Contemporaries did not have the modern notion of a "balanced diet;" seamen were wedded to their staple diet which, on long-distance voyages, was not only monotonous and decaying but also nutritionally disastrous. Furthermore, the tropical climate hastened deterioration. Thus, for such voyages the greatest threat was malnutrition and disease, and in particular, Vitamin C deficiency (scurvy).
The spectre of illness appeared in Lancaster's fleet as it neared the Equator. The writer in Red Dragon tells us that when they passed the Tropic of Capricorn at the end of July, many men fell sick with scurvy "by reason of our long being under the Line." The men's health was compromised when the fleet was becalmed from 20 May to 21 June 1601. They also depleted valuable provisions. Typically, this "plague of the sea" materialized a month or two into a voyage when the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables began to take its toll.
The General's ship, Red Dragon, was the exception. By early August 1601, sickness was running rampant in Susan, Hector and Ascension: "the other three were so weake of men that they could hardly handle the sayles. "
Even the "few whole men" began to succumb to illness. The seamen were so weak that the merchants "tooke their turnes at the helme, and went into the top to take in the topsayles, as the common mariners did." Approximately eighty of the 480-500 men were dead before they made land. By early September, they sighted Cape de Bona Esperance "and all our men [were] very weake, we were in great danger, beeing very neare the shoare. But God strengthned us; so that by His Helpe, and the helpe of some of our admiralles men... we were preserved, not being able to helpe ourselves. ,, When the fleet was putting ashore for refreshing, Lancaster sent some of his own crew to help bring the other ships into the road.
Lancaster doubtless anticipated illness in his fleet. He had been one of the few who had survived the 1591 voyage to the East Indies and knew of the inherent dangers. To combat scurvy, he ordered that his own crew be given regular doses of lemon juice until it ran out: "hee gave to each one, as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every morning, fasting; not suffering them to eate anything after it till noone." The author goes on to say that the juice was more effective if the men kept a "short dyet" and refrained from salted meat.
They were not quite certain of the cause of scurvy, but the author on Red Dragon, following Lancaster's lead, blamed the "salt meate, and long being at the sea." Even though they may have been ignorant of the cause, Lancaster recognized the efficacy of fruits such as lemons, limes and oranges and, as mentioned, made efforts throughout the voyage to obtain them. For example, when scurvy was once again rife among the fleet in December 1601, Lancaster sent the ships' boats to St. Mary's Island off Madagascar "where wee had some store of limons and oranges, which were precious for our diseased men, to purge their bodies of the scurvy. ,ashore for refreshing, Lancaster sent some of his own crew to help bring the other ships into the road.
Lancaster doubtless anticipated illness in his fleet. He had been one of the few who had survived the 1591 voyage to the East Indies and knew of the inherent dangers. To combat scurvy, he ordered that his own crew be given regular doses of lemon juice until it ran out: "hee gave to each one, as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every morning, fasting; not suffering them to eate anything after it till noone." The author goes on to say that the juice was more effective if the men kept a "short dyet" and refrained from salted meat.
When did Lancaster's supply of lemon juice run out? From the fleet's departure in April until at least September, Red Dragon's crew remained significantly healthier than the rest of the fleet. Some have suggested that Lancaster was the first commander to use lime juice as an anti-scorbutic." While we must give Lancaster full marks for employing this treatment, he was probably not the first to stumble upon it. Butcher claims that he may have learned of it from the Dutch." Alsop discovered seamen in the Guinea trade using anti-scorbutics as early as 1562.
Richard Hawkins, a contemporary of Lancaster and member of an illustrious seafaring dynasty, also knew of the healing properties of oranges and lemons: "This is a wonderful secret of the power and wisedome of God, that hath hidden so great and unknowne vertue in this fruit, to be a certaine remedie for this infirmitie. ,,
The sick having been restored by fresh food and rest, the fleet set sail again at the end of October. Foster claims that the death toll at this point may have been a quarter of those who set out," but records reveal it was just over a fifth: 107 of the 480 or 500 men died before 29 October 1601. This autumn respite was indeed temporary: a number of the men were stricken by scurvy by the time the fleet passed the Cape of Good Hope at the end of the year. The entire fleet seems to have been affected at this point, so it is almost a certainty that Lancaster's lemon juice was gone.
During the Christmas season of 1601, the fleet stopped at the island of St. Mary off Madagascar before pressing on to Antongil Bay. There were eighteen fatalities during this phase of the journey. The men were suffering from "the flux" (dysentery) which was a recognized cause of maritime morbidity and mortality on long-distance voyages." Many had died by March 1602, reputedly from drinking water that was "not wholsome, as in most places in these hot countries they are not, in the times of their raines. "
The writers also mentioned "calenture," or fever, in their accounts of the first voyage. Contemporaries often used this as a catchall phrase for tropical maladies, especially malaria and yellow fever - a perennial problem for English seamen venturing in warmer climes." "Calenture" was frequently accompanied by delirium, which may explain why one of the afflicted men in Red Dragon "leaped overboord and was no more seene. George Watson's 1595 treatise shows just how perplexed contemporaries were by the causes, containment and cures of tropical illnesses." Thousands of European sailors were felled by fevers and fluxes in the East Indies throughout the early modem period.
While disease was the greatest killer on this and most other long distance voyages undertaken during the period, the shipboard work environment was also dangerous for other reasons. Accidents were commonplace.
There were at least a handful of accidental deaths during the first voyage. For example, two men fell from the mainyard on 21 December 1601; one was saved and the other drowned. Another man died in May 1603 when the main-yard fell down, casting him into the sea. During their stay in Antogil Bay in February 1602, Captain William Brund and the boatswain's mate, John Parker, of Ascension were killed "by a very great mischance.?"? While going ashore for the funeral of William Winter, the master's mate of Red Dragon, Brund ordered that the ship's guns be fired, "as it is the order of the sea," to salute the dead officer. "The gunner of the ordnance shotte off three peeces, and, the bullets being in them, one stroke the Ascentions boate, and slue the captaine and the boatswaines mate starke dead; so that they that went to see the buriall of another were both buried there themselves. ,, The author of True and Large Discourse called it "the lamentablest accident...that happened since wee departed England" and laid the blame on Red Dragon's Master Gunner "being not so carefull as he should have beene." The author felt the loss of Captain Brund acutely: "Thus did we loose a man religious, wise, and provident; such a one as the whole fleete will misse, both for good husbandry, care, and good advice." In addition to the fatalities, the master of Ascension, his mate and a merchant were "hurt and besprinckled with the bloud of these massacred men. " There was a major reshuffling of the fleet's commanders to compensate for the fallen officers. Worse yet, this proved not to be an isolated incident.
Seamen also had to worry about the hazards of battle. As the previous example shows, this could include "friendly fire." England was at war with the mighty Spanish empire (which included Portugal and its possessions after 1580) until 1604, and merchant fleets were targeted by privateers and pirates. The Company had applied for a privateering license (letter of reprisal), but for unexplained reasons only Susan seems to have received one, and even it arrived after the fleet had departed. Nonetheless, the small fleet took two "prizes," subduing a small lOO-ton Portuguese ship off Vianna do Castello in June 1601 as well as a 700-ton ship called San Antonio in the Straits of Malacca. Neither vessel seems to have offered much resistance, nor was there any mention of English casualties." The Englishmen were lucky in this regard.
Rough weather and shipwreck were also a source of anxiety and potential fatalities. On one occasion, the author of True and Large Discourse reported that the fleet encountered a mighty storm in which both Ascension and Hector lost their anchors. Susan broke its bowsprit and in the melee, Ascension almost went aboard Dragon. During the twelve hours that the storm lasted, two of Red Dragon's men fell overboard." On the return voyage in the spring of 1603, the ships encountered a "very great and ... furious storme" on 28 April south of Madagascar: This storm continued a day and a night, with an exceeding great and raging sea, But God, in His mercie, ceased the violence thereof. But our ships were so shaken that they were leakie all the voyage after. The third of May wee had another very sore storme, which continued all the night; and the seas did so beate upon the ships quarter that it shooke all the ironworke of her rother [i.e. rudder], and the next day... our rother brake deane from the sterne of the shippe, and presently sunke into the sea. This strooke a present feare into the hearts of all men; so that the best of us and most experienced knew not what to doe. And specially seeing ourselves in such a tempestuous sea and so stormie a place, so that I thinke there bee few worse in the world.
Ultimately, Red Dragon's crew fashioned a makeshift rudder out of a mizzen mast, and the men dove to find what rudder irons remained. Despite Lancaster's orders to depart, the faithful Hector shadowed Dragon: "the ship [Hector] kept some two or three leagues from us, and came no neerer; for the master was an honest and a good man, and loved the generall well, and was loth to leave him in so greate distresse. ,, Lancaster hoped that if Hector was out of sight, the crew would stop agitating to abandon the damaged Red Dragon. The fleet was extremely lucky not to have lost additional men or Lancaster's ship.
No doubt ingenuity, experience and a generous helping of good fortune saved the day; those aboard Red Dragon may have been comforted by the loyal companionship of Hector. Such incidents demonstrate the wisdom of travelling in a fleet, albeit a small one.
Whatever the cause, the organizers and participants expected heavy casualties on a voyage such as this. The Court Minutes show that a long list of factors had queued up to be commanders because "the daies of mans lyfe are lymitted and the...end onlie knowne unto God." In the event of Lancaster's death, leadership was to pass to John Middleton, then to Master William Brund and then to Master John Havarde, the principal merchants of the voyage and captains of the ships. If the principal factors were to die, command was to go to the secondary factors in Dragon as the Admiral's ship, then Hector as the Vice-Admiral, followed by Ascension and lastly Susan:" Factors were willing to go on the voyage without wages, gambling that they would be promoted if the four salaried factors on each ship perished or became incapacirated." Both were distinct possibilities given the lengthy duration of the voyage and the high probability of morbidity and mortality. Thus, the ships may have carried more than their allotted complement of 480 men. 50 Foster reckons that the fleet had 500 men, and crew reconstruction suggests that the ships were heavily manned.
Many had died prior to the fleet's departure from Achin (Kotaraja) in Sumatra in early November 1602 (see table 1). European seamen found the outward stretch especially perilous. Before the fleet headed for home, casualty rates were somewhere between thirty-three and thirty-six percent for Dragon (depending on whether one uses the lower or higher crew numbers), thirty-four to thirty-seven percent for Hector, forty-six to 47.5 percent on Ascension and forty-four to 48.8 percent on Susan. Lancaster's use of lemon juice to protect his men from scurvy (until it ran out) may be responsible for Dragon's slightly lower mortality rate. While Dragon's crew may have warded off scurvy for longer than the others, they only did marginally better than the men in Hector on the outward leg. There was less mortality aboard the Admiral and Vice-Admiral during this leg of the voyage, but death would be a more common visitor on Hector thereafter. Susan and Ascension fared worse. Forty men were aboard the victualler; once it was discarded, those men were absorbed into other complements. There is a decided lack of information about this vessel and its crew, no doubt owing to the fact it was cast off early on.
Sickness emerged again on the homeward voyage in May 1603 although it is more difficult to calculate the cost; we are fortunate to have a mortality list for the outward leg, but there is no comparable list for the return voyage. Instead, we must use wills to piece together the number who died and are therefore almost certainly underestimating the overall mortality. While we do not know the fate of the 131 unidentified men in the fleet, we can say that at least 224 men of the 369 who have been identified died, a mortality rate of 0.7 percent. The ships ran the gamut from a high mortality rate on Susan (roughly seventy percent) to a low on Red Dragon of about fifty-six percent. It is tempting to credit Lancaster's use of lemon juice for these differences, but Dragon's mortality rate was not significantly lower than Ascension's (57.3 percent). When comparing mortality figures for the outward voyage, Dragon does not seem to have escaped, except possibly from the spring departure to the fall of 1601 when Lancaster was doling out anti-scorbutics to the men in Red Dragon.
When measured against the limited information we have on mortality rates for comparable voyages, these figures do not appear unusual. By way of comparison, the expeditions of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suffered some very high death rates, especially on the outward leg from Europe to the Cape of Good Hope. But there were also VOC voyages that did not lose a single person. 52 Without question, the VOC regarded the health of its seamen at home and abroad as critical to the success of its commercial enterprises. Nonetheless, one author claimed that the Dutch lost somewhere between 150 and 200 men aboard five ships during their time in the Bay of Antogil. Hair and Alsop's research into the Englishmen in the Guinea trade demonstrated that mortality could vary considerably from voyage to voyage. There may have been a mortality rate of seventy percent on the first voyage in 1553, with a decrease in subsequent voyages. 55 Other estimates of the toll of scurvy on early modem trans-oceanic vessels hover around seventy-five percent.
The emotional toll aside, these figures are mind-boggling in terms of the crew's ability - or inability - to sail the ships home with their lucrative cargoes. Furthermore, the disparity between deaths from disease and those from other causes is striking. Nevertheless, mortality rates for the first EIC voyage were slightly below those of Vasco da Gama's first trip to India in 1497-1499 and well below the death tolls on the early Guinea voyages. This suggests that the care lavished on the men by the EIC may well have played a role in their survival; English seamen had possibly learned some lessons over the previous half-century since English expansion had begun in earnest. From the available figures for later European East Indian trading voyages, there was still huge variation, but mortality by disease decreased dramatically.
While H. Borton Butcher's early article on the first expedition is very informative, his assertion that "at least half of those who sailed on the voyage never returned" is short of the mark. 58 Sir William Foster overstated matters when he claimed that three-quarters of the men died on the sixteen-month outward passage. These "guesstimates" are typical of the age of exploration, with Butcher erring on the side of caution and Foster overstating the fatalities.
To be followed