The Archives

The ArchivesInstitutionsThe East India Company

The East India Company

The English, later British, joint-stock company chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600 to monopolise the East Indies trade, holding fortified factories at Surat, Bombay, Madras and in Bengal and wielding delegated powers of war, fortification and jurisdiction, and so the principal English corporate victim, complainant and lobbyist of the Red Sea piracy of the 1690s after Henry Every took the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695.

From31 December 1600Tothe 1870sAlso writtenThe Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies; The East India Company; EIC; The Company; The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies

The usual account has a charter of Elizabeth I, dated 31 December 1600, incorporating a body of London merchants as the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, and carrying with it a monopoly of English trade to the East Indies for a term of years and the ordinary corporate privileges: perpetual succession, a common seal, the power to hold property and to make by-laws. Successive monarchs renewed and enlarged it across the seventeenth century, by the same telling. The Company traded to South Asia, the Indonesian archipelago, the wider Indian Ocean and China through fortified factories at Surat, Bombay, Madras and in Bengal.1

It belongs in this archive as the principal English corporate casualty of the Red Sea piracy of the 1690s. Its ships were targets, its factors stood on Mughal ground and answered there for English seamen it neither employed nor could restrain, and it pressed the Crown and Parliament hard for a manhunt. The episode that fixed all three was Henry Every's capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695.

Who ran it

The charter of 1661, repeating that of 1600, put the Company's government in London in the hands of a Governor and twenty-four elected members called the Committees, who together had the direction of the voyages, the provision of the shipping and merchandise and the sale of what was returned. It provided in addition for one of the company to be Deputy to the Governor, and for a new Governor to be chosen annually between the tenth and the last day of April. Membership followed stock rather than craft or livery: a joint-stock corporation, not a regulated company of individual traders. Overseas in the 1690s the western Indian establishment ran through a President and Council at Surat under a General and Council at Bombay.2

A trading company with delegated public powers

The commercial work was bullion and English goods outward, spices, calicoes and silks, saltpetre and tea homeward, carried in armed East Indiamen under trading privileges, farmans, negotiated from the Mughal emperor and other Asian rulers. The charters allowed more than commerce: leave to make war and peace with non-Christian powers in the East, to raise and command armed forces, to erect fortifications, to exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction in its settlements, admiralty jurisdiction over maritime offences included, and to seize interlopers trading without its licence. A body that behaved like a sovereign in Asian waters could be held answerable for every English keel in them.3

The Ganj-i-Sawai

In the late summer of 1695 Henry Every's company took two of the Mogul's ships in the approaches to Surat from the Red Sea: first a ship of between two and three hundred tons carrying six guns, out of which they took about fifty or sixty thousand pounds in silver and gold, and then the great ship the English called the Gunsway, of about forty guns and, as her people said, eight hundred men, which yielded after a fight of three hours. The plundered ships came in to Surat on 11 and 13 September 1695, but the date of the capture itself is not fixed by these papers. The value is not recoverable either: the crew's own reckoning was about a thousand pounds a man among a hundred and eighty sharers, and the indictment laid the plunder at a hundred thousand pieces of eight and a hundred thousand chequins. What turned a robbery into a diplomatic emergency was the treatment reported of the pilgrims aboard, some of them connected to the imperial court.4

The reprisal at Surat

The reprisal fell on the Company, which had no hand in the act. The governor of Surat set a strong guard on the English factory, put the Company's people in irons, shut them up and stopped their letters until the Mogul's pleasure should be known. Hearing that letters had gone to the Siddy, who lay near them with an army, the Company's council at Bombay made what preparation it could for its own defence; the council also undertook to send one or two ships the next season to convoy the Mogul's Mocha and Jiddah fleet. The Company's defence, that the men were Englishmen but nothing to do with it, did not persuade Mughal officials, and the historian Khafi Khan openly doubted it. The Company's enemies at home suspected collusion between English private traders, colonial governors and the sea rovers of the Pirate Round; whether it existed is contested.5

The manhunt and the trials of 1696

To get its trade back the Company pressed the Crown hard, petitioning the Lords Justices in July 1696 for effectual means against Every, and proclamations followed. The proclamation of the Privy Council of Scotland, given under the signet at Edinburgh on 18 August 1696, forbade all subjects to shelter or supply the pirates and offered five hundred pounds sterling for Every himself and fifty pounds for each of twenty-five named accomplices; an English proclamation of the Lords Justices is referred to in the colonial papers, but its text has not been seen. The bounty of about a thousand pounds that popular histories add appears in no proclamation read here. The pursuit is often described as the first worldwide manhunt, and Every was pointedly shut out of the later acts of grace; both points rest on later accounts rather than on the record.6

One of those proclamations survives. A printed proclamation for apprehending Henry Every, issued in 1696 in the name of the Privy Council of Scotland, survives. It is evidence that the hunt was pressed across the three kingdoms.7

The manhunt caught a fraction of the crew. Six of Every's men were tried in London, at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey in October 1696, on an indictment for piratically taking the Mogul's ship called the Gansway, and the jury, against the expectation of the court, brought all six in not guilty. They were at once committed on a new warrant, re-indicted for piracies upon Indian, Danish and English shipping and convicted, Joseph Dawson pleading guilty and the other five being found guilty, and five of them were executed at Execution Dock on Wednesday 25 November 1696, Dawson being reprieved. Every himself was never taken, the grand jury finding its bill against him as one not yet taken. The affair ran on into the parallel scandal of William Kidd, commissioned in part against the Red Sea pirates who were ruining the Company's standing in India.8

The company after the crisis

The Company came out of the affair committed to escort, convoy and cooperation with the Royal Navy against Indian Ocean piracy, a stance it kept through the campaigns against the Madagascar and Red Sea pirates that followed. Its monopoly was meanwhile under attack at home. A rival body, the English Company Trading to the East Indies, was created by statute in return for a large loan to the state, commonly dated 1698, and the two were later amalgamated by tripartite indenture into the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, a union usually dated 1708 to 1709. Neither date is secure here. The united company grew from a trading corporation into a territorial power in India and was dissolved in the 1870s, the Crown having taken direct government of the subcontinent in 1858.

What the sources cannot yet give is the Company's own paper: the value of Every's plunder, the names and titles of the Surat and Bombay office-holders, the names and dates of the Surat detentions, the terms of the security given for Mughal shipping, whether the reopening of trade was made conditional on taking and punishing the pirates and whether the Company was in the end made to accept liability for the losses, the amounts and wording of the rewards, and the dating of the rival company's statute and of the union are none of them settled, and want the India Office Records, the calendared State Papers, the High Court of Admiralty series and the Company's own correspondence and minutes. The charter of 1600 and the privileges said to flow from it, the Company's government in London, and the course of the London trials of 1696 come from the printed charters of 1600 and 1661 and from the printed account of the trials of 1696.

What the evidence does not settle

Surat detentions and security terms

  • Names, dates and security terms of Surat detentions unestablishedVery likely

Reward proclamations for Every

  • Exact wording, dates and amounts of Every rewards not establishedLikely

New Company statute and union dating

  • New Company statute date and 1708 to 1709 union unfixed

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. The East India Company was incorporated by charter of Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600 as the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, with a monopoly of English trade to the East Indies for a term of years and the ordinary corporate privileges of perpetual succession, a common seal, the holding of property and the making of by-laws, renewed and enlarged by successive monarchs across the seventeenth century. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Royal charter: Charter granted by Queen Elizabeth to the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies, dated the 31st December in the 43rd year of her reign, Anno Domini 1600, printed in Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761, read in the Internet Archive copy (archive.org/details/charters-relating-to-the-east-india-company-from-1600-to-1761). The grantees "shall be one Body Corporate and Politick, in Deed and in Name, by the Name of The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies"; they "shall have Succession", are "capable in Law to have, purchase, receive, possess, enjoy and retain, Lands, Rents, Priviledges, Liberties, Jurisdictions, Franchises and Hereditaments", "may have a Common Seal, to serve for all the Causes and Business of them and their Successors", and may "make, ordain and constitute such, and so many reasonable Laws, Constitutions, Orders and Ordinances, as to them, or the greater Part of them... shall seem necessary and convenient, for the good Government of the same Company"; the trade is granted "by the Space of Fifteen Years". The same volume prints the confirming and enlarging charters of 31 May 1609, 3 April 1661, 5 October 1677, 9 August 1683 and 12 April 1686, and the charter of William and Mary confirming the former charters.
  2. The Company was governed in London by a Governor and twenty-four elected members of the company called the Committees, who together with the Governor had the direction of the voyages, the provision of the shipping and merchandise and the sale of what was returned; the charter of 1661 provided in addition for one of the company to be Deputy to the Governor, and for a new Governor to be chosen annually between the tenth and the last day of April. Overseas the western Indian establishment of the 1690s ran through a President and Council at Surat under a General and Council at Bombay; the names of its office-holders are not given in the documents used here. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Royal charters and Company correspondence: Charter of Queen Elizabeth of 31 December 1600 and Charter of Charles II of 3 April 1661, printed in Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761, read in the Internet Archive copy: "there shall be from henceforth One of the same Company, to be elected and appointed... which shall be called the Governor of the said Company, and that there shall be from henceforth Twenty-four of the said Company, to be elected and appointed... which shall be called the Committees of the said Company, who together with the Governor of the said Company, for the Time being, shall have the Direction of the Voyages of and for the said Company, and the Provision of the Shipping and Merchandizes thereunto belonging; and also the sale of all Merchandizes" (charter of 1661, repeating the charter of 1600); the 1661 charter also provides for one of the company "to be Deputy to the said Governor" and carries the marginal rubrics "Deputy Governor to be elected and sworn" and "Company to choose a new Governor annually between the 10th and last Day of April". For the Indian establishment, Abstract of East India Company letters from Bombay of 12 October 1695, London, Privy Council, Unbound Papers, 1:46, printed as document 60 in J. F. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (1923): the letters come from "the Generall and Councill for the English Affairs residing att Bombay", and the ship sent "for Surrat" was met by "the President, according to Orders", who "fell to unlading her".
  3. Beyond its trade monopoly the Company's charters vested it with delegated public powers unusual in a private corporation, to make war and peace with non-Christian powers in the East, to raise and command armed forces, to erect fortifications, to exercise civil, criminal and admiralty jurisdiction within its settlements, and to seize interlopers trading without its licence. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Royal charter: Charter granted by Charles II to the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies, dated 3 April 1661, printed in Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761, read in the Internet Archive copy. The Company may choose commanders and officers and "give them Power and Authority, by Commissions under their Common Seal or otherwise, to continue or make Peace or War with any Prince or People, that are not Christians, in any Places of their Trade"; it may "send either Ships of War, Men or Ammunition, into any their Factories", and "erect and build such Castles, Fortifications, Forts, Garrisons, Colonies or Plantations, at St. Helena, as also elsewhere, within the Limits and Bounds of Trade"; "the Governor and his Council, of the several and respective Places where the said Company have, or shall have any Factories... may have Power to judge all Persons, belonging to The said Governor and Company, or that shall live under them, in all Causes, whether civil or criminal, according to the Laws of this Kingdom, and to execute Judgment accordingly"; and the Company has "full Power and Lawful Authority, to seize upon the Persons of all such English, or any other Our Subjects, in the said East-Indies, which shall sail in any Indian or English Vessel, or inhabit in those Parts, without the Leave and Licence of The said Governor and Company". Admiralty jurisdiction rests on the further charter of 9 August 1683, printed in the same volume as the charter "establishing Courts of Admiralty at such places as the Company shall think fit".
  4. Henry Every's company took two of the Mogul's ships in the approaches to Surat in the late summer of 1695: first a ship of between two and three hundred tons carrying six guns, out of which they took about fifty or sixty thousand pounds in silver and gold, and then the great ship the English called the Gunsway, of about forty guns and, as her people said, eight hundred men, which yielded after a fight of three hours. The plundered ships came in to Surat on 11 and 13 September 1695. The date of the capture itself is not fixed by these papers, one of the Old Bailey indictments laying a taking on 28 September 1695 forty leagues from Surat and another laying the taking of the Gunsway ten leagues from Cape St John near Surat without a date; and the value is not recoverable, the crew's own reckoning being about a thousand pounds a man among a hundred and eighty sharers, and the first indictment laying the plunder at a hundred thousand pieces of eight and a hundred thousand chequins. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Depositions, Company correspondence and a printed trial: Examination of John Dann of Rochester, mariner, taken 3 August 1696, Public Record Office C.O. 323:2, no. 25 IV, printed as document 63 in J. F. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (1923): they "mett with one of the Moores ships, betweene 2 and 300 tons, with 6 Guns, which they tooke", and "tooke about 50 or 60,000 l. in that ship in Silver and gold"; then "they espied another ship... she had about 40 Guns mounted and as they said 800 men. Shee stood a fight of 3 houres and then yeilded", and the plunder made "each mans share with what they had taken before about 1000 l. a man, there being 180 that had their Dividents". Abstract of East India Company letters from Bombay of 12 October 1695, Jameson document 60: "on the 11th Ditto, One of Abdull Gofores Ships arriving, their people sent the Governour word, that they were plundered by an English Vessell", and "the 13th in the Morning, the Gunsway, one of the Kings Ships, arrived from Judda and Mocho". The Tryals of Joseph Dawson and five others (London, 1696), read in the Internet Archive copy of the Early English Books text (archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_the-tryals-of-joseph-daw_1696): the grand jury's bill is for taking a ship "called the Gansway" with "100000 Pieces of Eight, and 100000 Chequins, upon the High Seas, ten Leagues from the Cape St. Johns near Surat", and a later indictment is for a piracy on a Moorish ship "on the 28th of September, 1695" in a place forty leagues distant from Surat. No document read here gives 7 September 1695, the name Fateh Muhammed, or a valuation of about 325,000 or about 600,000 pounds.
  5. In reprisal for Every's capture of the Mogul's ships the governor of Surat set a strong guard on the English factory, put the Company's people in irons, shut them up and stopped their letters until the Mogul's pleasure should be known; the Company's Bombay council, hearing that letters had gone to the Siddy, who lay near them with an army, made what preparation it could for its own defence, so that an apprehended armed threat to Bombay is in the record and not only in the reference accounts; and the council undertook to send one or two ships the next season to convoy the Mogul's Mocha and Jiddah fleet. Whether the reopening of trade was made conditional on the capture and punishment of the pirates, and whether the Company was ultimately made to accept liability for the losses, is not established by the papers read here. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Company correspondence and petition: Abstract of East India Company letters from Bombay of 12 October 1695, London, Privy Council, Unbound Papers, 1:46, printed as document 60 in J. F. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (1923): "upon this the Governour sent a very strong Guard to the Factory and clapt all our People in Irons, shut them up in a room, planked up all their windows, kept strict Watches about them, that no one should have pen, ink, or paper to write, stopped all the passages, that no Letters might pass to Us"; "being informed also, that Severall Letters are gone to the Siddy (who is very near Us with an Army) from Court and Surat, wee are making what preparation Wee can for our Own defence, nott knowing what this Extream ferment may produce"; and "have promised that if Our Shipping arrives according to Expectation, that wee will send one or two next Season to Mocho and Judda to convoy their Fleet". Petition of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies to the Lords Justices, endorsed as read 16 July 1696, Jameson document 58: "the Factoryes of the said Company at Surrat had guards set upon their Houses by the Governour of the place till such time The Mogulls pleasure was known".
  6. The East India Company petitioned the Lords Justices in July 1696 for effectual means against Every, and proclamations followed. The proclamation of the Privy Council of Scotland, given under the signet at Edinburgh on 18 August 1696, declared Every and his accomplices pirates, forbade all subjects to shelter or supply them, and offered five hundred pounds sterling for Every himself and fifty pounds for each of twenty-five named accomplices. The English proclamation of the Lords Justices is referred to in the colonial papers but its text has not been read here, so the date of 17 July 1696 is not established; and no bounty of about a thousand pounds appears in the proclamation that has been read. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Proclamation and state papers: Proclamation for apprehending Henry Every, alias Bridgeman, and sundry other Pirates, given under the signet at Edinburgh the eighteenth day of August 1696 by William III with advice of the Lords of the Privy Council of Scotland, printed at Edinburgh by the heirs and successors of Andrew Anderson, read in the Internet Archive copy of the Early English Books text (archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_proclamation-for-apprehe_scotland-privy-council_1696): "We with Advice foresaid do make Offer, and Assure the Payment of the Sum of Five Hundred Pounds Sterling for the said Henry Every, alias Bridgman", and fifty pounds sterling for every one of the other persons named (the words for the lesser sum imperfectly printed in this copy), and "We with Advice foresaid Peremptorly Inhibit and Discharge all, and every one of Our Subjects whatsomever to Shelter, Harbour, Conceal, or any ways Assist, or Supply the said Henry Every, or any of his Accomplices". Petition of the East India Company to the Lords Justices, endorsed as read 16 July 1696, printed as document 58 in J. F. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (1923). Robert Snead to Sir John Houblon, endorsed "Recd. Read, 20 Sept., 1697", Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol 15, 1696-1697, no. 1,331, British History Online, for "the proclamation of the Lords Justices".
  7. A printed proclamation for apprehending Henry Every, issued in 1696 in the name of the Privy Council of Scotland, survives, contemporary official evidence that the hunt for him was pressed across the three kingdoms. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Printed proclamation: Proclamation for apprehending Henry Every, Scotland, Privy Council, 1696 (Internet Archive, digitised from Early English Books 1641 to 1700)
  8. Six of Every's men, Joseph Dawson, Edward Foreseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewis and John Sparkes, were tried at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey in October 1696 before the commissioners for executing the office of Lord High Admiral, on an indictment for piratically taking the Mogul's ship called the Gansway; the jury, against the expectation of the court, brought all six in not guilty. They were at once committed on a new warrant for other piracies, re-indicted, and convicted, Dawson pleading guilty and the other five being found guilty on indictments for piracies upon Indian, Danish and English shipping, and five of them were executed at Execution Dock on Wednesday 25 November 1696, Dawson being reprieved. Every himself was never taken: the grand jury found its bill against him as one "not yet taken". The printed trial does not report a reprieve for Joseph Dawson. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Printed trial: The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewis and John Sparkes, for several Piracies and Robberies by them committed, in the Company of Every the Grand Pirate (London, 1696), read in the Internet Archive copy of the Early English Books text (archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_the-tryals-of-joseph-daw_1696). Sessions of oyer and terminer and gaol delivery for the jurisdiction of the Admiralty of England at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey, October 1696, in the eighth year of King William the Third (the day of the month damaged in this copy), before the Admiralty commissioners, Sir Charles Hedges as judge of the High Court of Admiralty, and Lord Chief Justice Holt among others. The grand jury returned "finding Bills vera against Henry Every not yet taken, Joseph Dawson, Edw. Foreseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewes, and John Sparkes, Prisoners"; "the Jury, contrary to the expectation of the Court, brought in all the Prisoners Not Guilty, whereupon the Sessions was Adjourned to Saturday the 31th of October following, and the Prisoners were committed upon a new Warrant for several other Piracies"; on the new indictments "Joseph Dawson pleaded Guilty; the other five pleaded nor Guilty" and were found guilty; the court then adjourned "to Friday next the 6th of Novemb." for two further indictments; sentence was passed on all six "for the same detestable Crimes committed upon the Ships and Goods of Indians, of Danes, and your own Fellow-Subjects"; and "According to this Sentence, Edward Foreseth and the rest were Executed, on Wednesday, November the 25th 1696, at Execution-Dock, that being the usual Place for the Execution of Pirates."