Mughal and Armenian Petitions and Complaints

These papers have no shelfmark of their own. They form a reconstructed category: the grievance voice of the victims of golden-age piracy, kept inside the paper of the institutions they were complaining to or about, from about 1690 to about 1725 and thickest in 1695 to 1702. What reaches a reader is what English officials chose to copy, translate, abstract or answer, in the correspondence of the East India Company and in the English state papers.¹

The three strands

First, the complaints of Mughal officials and Surat merchants after the plunder of the Fateh Muhammad and the Ganj-i-Sawai by Henry Every and his consorts in September 1695, carried to London by the Company. Second, the claims of Armenian merchants of New Julfa over the cargo of the Quedagh Merchant, taken by William Kidd in January 1698. Third, the standing demands of the imperial administration, made in Persian or orally at Surat and relayed in English paraphrase, that the Company suppress the pirates and make good the losses of the emperor's subjects.

The mechanism was adversarial and administrative at once. A merchant petitioned the governor of Surat; the governor confined the European factors; the factors wrote home; London laid extracts before the Lords of Trade and Plantations. At each transfer the original was compressed and re-voiced.

The packet of December 1697

One calendared entry makes that chain visible. Under 21 December 1697 at Whitehall stand "copies of advices received from Persia and India by the East India Company concerning piracies committed there for the most part, as it is represented, by the King's subjects", filed as Board of Trade, Plantations General, 4, Nos. 80 and 80I, with the covering letter and concluding extract only at 34, pp. 226-227.²

It carries the ordinary texture of the losses. A Bombay letter of 15 October 1696 reports the Ruparrell and the Calicut taken on 14 and 15 August 1696, both bound for Bombay, by a pirate "called the John and Rebecca, John Hore captain". The packet also reports a pirate commander telling Captain Mason "that most of the pirates which infest those seas are fitted out at New York, whither they return a share of their unlawful gains, the Governor conniving thereat". The Company transmits that allegation as reported pirate speech.³

The Armenian claims

An agreement signed in London on 22 June 1688, negotiated between Sir Josiah Child, Jean Chardin and Khwaja Panus Kalendar, sought to draw Armenian Asian trade through English shipping and ports. It failed commercially. Armenian merchants appear thereafter to have had standing in English forums and to have drafted their claims in the idiom of English pleading. A parchment deposition of the 1690s, quoted by Sebouh David Aslanian, opens "Imprimis [firstly] that it is the manner & Custom of Armenian Merchants in their trading for one of more merchants to buy or hire a ship", and explains how capital was pooled and cargo divided by share.⁴

The ownership of the Quedagh Merchant is not settled. Armenian tradition and much modern writing treat her as Armenian-owned; a sceptical argument holds that Armenian merchants freighted her, and that a French pass named the owner as "Coirgi", read as the Gujarati or Khoja name Kurji, a Surat merchant. The same pass names the Armenian merchant at Surat as Agapiris Kalender, that is Agha Piri Calendar. Names are unstable: the lead claimant appears as Coji Baba, Coja Baba and Coja Baba Sultanum, and "Coja" renders the honorific Khwaja.⁵

Where the papers sit

The English state side sits chiefly in Colonial Office series at The National Archives, Kew, reached through the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, whose legacy Board of Trade citations convert to modern CO piece references. The Company layer is in the India Office Records at the British Library: IOR/E/3, the Original Correspondence series between London and Asia; IOR/G/36, the Surat factory records, whose catalogue of Surat correspondence is at IOR/G/36/102; and IOR/B, the London court minutes. Kidd's Admiralty sessions of 8 and 9 May 1701 produced a printed report preserving the French pass defence on which the owners' claims turned.

Reading against the transmission

Every Indian and Persian voice here passes through an English pen with a stake in the outcome. The Company had two incompatible interests: to show Surat it was doing everything possible, and to show Whitehall that the pirates were the colonies' fault. The Calendar of State Papers Colonial prints transcripts and summaries, and says so; wording quoted from it is therefore an editor's abstract rather than manuscript wording. Sums claimed, reported and admitted diverge, and none is an accounting figure.⁶

What these papers cannot yet give is a custody trail for their own best witness: the Armenian deposition is published in its wording but not its shelfmark, no item-level reference for a petition by named Armenian merchants has been fixed in the calendars or the Company's court minutes, and no Persian-language petition, farman or Surat court record on these episodes appears in a catalogue.