Darjeeling (5 page)

Certainly, one habit set the British apart from Chinese and Japanese tea drinkers: they were adding milk. Was it to avoid staining their fine bone-china cups? To soften tea’s astringency? Help digestion? Garway’s famed advertisement assured customers that tea prepared with water and milk “strengtheneth the inward parts, and prevents Consumptions, and powerfully assuageth the pains of the Bowels, or griping of the Guts and Looseness.”
²⁹
Maybe even, initially, it was simply fashion, following the French fad begun by the witty, prolific seventeenth-century letter writer Marquise de Sévigné, who advised her daughter to drink it with milk
and
sugar.
³⁰

Even though Britain struggled with the expense of importing tea, a burden passed on to those drinking, by the mid-eighteenth century, it was unquestionably the favorite drink in the British Isles. Its popularity never waned, nor did its status or significance.

Preparing tea had its own rituals, but they were never permeated with religious or philosophical elements as in China and Japan. “Despite its popularity, then, tea never became in the West what it had meant and still means to the East,” wrote Lu Yü’s fine English translator, Francis Ross Carpenter, in the introduction to
The Classic of Tea
. “If it was an extrinsic detail in the culture of the West, it was intrinsic to that of the East. The culture and the drink lived symbiotically, tea acquiring its mystique from the culture as it added new meanings and dimensions to life within the culture.”
³¹

Yet in Britain tea gained a relevance unsurpassed in the rest of Europe, and the British drew as much pleasure and even dependence from the drink as those in any place in Asia.

*
 George Orwell—culinary proletarian, heroically, even perversely, aesthetic, and a rare vocal supporter of World War II cauldrons of the brew—thought so. “Tea is meant to be bitter,” the India-born author wrote, extolling the beverage’s virtues, “just as beer is meant to be bitter.” (“If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar,” Orwell pointed out. As the eighteenth-century English novelist and playwright Henry Fielding put it, “Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.”)

In 1817, England imported a staggering 36,234,380 pounds of tea
¹
—with a population of just 10 million. But where was it getting all of it? By time the teenage Queen Victoria became monarch in 1837, Britain ruled a patchwork of dominions that spread around the globe. Yet tea did not come from any of them.

Just as incredibly, for more than two centuries a single company held the exclusive right to bring it to Britain.

On the last day of 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter for fifteen years to a group of merchants for all of the trading rights to India and the Far East, which meant the vast territory east of Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and west of South America’s Straits of Magellan. The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies was the first of many incarnations of what was soon known by the more familiar East India Company. Or the Honourable Company. Or John Company. Or, colloquially in India, Company Bahadur (from the Hindi word for “brave”). Or, simply, the Company, with—always—a capital
C
.

At first it wasn’t looking for tea, but spices: pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg. Flavorings to enhance food, in some cases, to preserve it, and, frequently, to cover the taste of spoiling meats drove merchants to forge distant trade routes and search the farthest known, and even unknown, reaches of the globe.

Within two months of the charter’s being signed, Captain James Lancaster sailed not for India but for the East Indies—roughly the modern-day Indonesian archipelago—with a small fleet of four ships and 480 men. Two and a half years later, with an outbreak of the plague
having carried away nearly 20 percent of London’s population and James I now on the throne, Lancaster returned carrying 1 million pounds of peppercorns from Sumatra in the hold of his flagship, the
Red Dragon
. Yet the journey was only a qualified success and the Company’s future was not immediately assured. While all four ships made it home—an impressive feat—the expedition cost the lives of 182 men, two-fifths of the crew.
²
Unable to get ahold of cloves, Lancaster settled for a less valuable choice. Dumping five hundred tons of black pepper on the market drove down its value by about half, and the Company’s warehouses were overstocked in the spice for the next half dozen years.
³

The Company, though, raised funds and quickly dispatched a series of further trading missions to the East Indies. With the third venture, when a haul of cloves alone turned more than a 200 percent profit,
⁴
stakeholders began making healthy returns on their investments. In 1609 the Crown extended the Company’s monopoly. Growth was quick. By 1620, it had two hundred “factors”—agents or representatives—in more than a dozen trading posts
⁵
that stretched from the Red Sea to Makassar on the southwestern tip of Sulawasi, Indonesia, near the Spice Islands. It also counted some thirty to forty “tall ships”—the type later known as Indiamen, with their high, raised poop and weapons—which the Company christened with names such as
Peppercorn, Clove
, and the particularly optimistic
Trades Increase
.
⁶

Soon, but not by choice, the Company turned its attention to India. The Dutch had arrived first in the Spice Islands, and the Dutch East India Company, while smaller, exerted enough influence during the early decades of the spice trade to muscle the British out of the region and force them to set up elsewhere.
⁷

In August 1608 an East India Company ship landed on the northwest coast of India at Surat, the principal Mughal port. While his ship returned to England, Captain William Hawkins headed inland to meet the Mughal emperor, Nuruddin Salim Jahangir, who ruled from the distant and splendid Agra. Hawkins, who spoke Turkish—not Persian, the language of the court, but Jahangir’s native tongue—made such a good impression that the Mughal ruler insisted he marry “a whyte mayden” from the palace, an Armenian. Once Hawkins was assured that she was a Christian, he did so, and, as Hawkins later wrote, “so ever after I lived content and without feare.”
⁸

Yet a decade and succession of further envoys would pass before the Company was granted the right to reside and build some “factories,” or trading stations, where goods such as pepper could be bought when the price was low and stored until ships arrived to haul them back to Europe.

Over the next decades, as the Company continued to grow—not in a steadily ascending curve of imports, exports, and revenues, but in fits and starts, of boom years followed by ones with lost or pirated cargo—it garnered broader diplomatic and political support in London as well as presence on the Indian coast. Oliver Cromwell renewed the Company’s charter in 1657, during the short-lived republican Commonwealth of England, and extended its power to fortify and colonize any of its establishments, and to bring settlers, goods, and ammunition to them. In 1661, within a year of the House of Stuart’s being restored to the throne, the Company, granted Charles II, “shall and may, from henceforth for ever … into the said East-Indies … Trade or Traffick.”

The Company completed 404 voyages to the East Indies in the three decades between 1658 to 1688.
⁹
By the end of the seventeenth century, it had established and fortified three main coastal bases in India: the presidencies of Calcutta in the northeast; Madras, some 850 miles to its south; and, on the west coast, Bombay (today called Mumbai). Bombay was not conquered but rented for £10 in gold a year from the cash-strapped Charles II, who had received it in his wife’s dowry. These, although just a trio of spots along the considerable coastline, with a vast interior between them, were a solid start.

The following century was relatively peaceful and focused on trade. Business was steady and so were dividends. “Though commercially astute, the Company’s servants were not trained for politics or war,” wrote the celebrated Delhi-born novelist Ahmed Ali.
¹⁰
At first they kept away from those twin distractions. But by the mid-eighteenth century, that changed. The Company’s expanding riverside Fort William in Calcutta made the young nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, suspicious. “You are merchants, what need have you of a fortress?” he demanded.
¹¹
When the British ignored him, the nawab marched on the city and, in 1756, managed to briefly occupy it. While unable to expel them from Bengal, the nawab drew British public fury with the infamous Black Hole incident, in which a large (and still-disputed) number of British were jammed into the fort’s small prison and, by morning, nearly all of them had suffocated.

In 1757, a Company force of a thousand British soldiers and two thousand sepoys—Indians, largely from the country’s traditional warrior
or soldier castes, trained and uniformed into a disciplined army—led by Robert Clive retaliated and defeated the nawab and his much larger (though largely unpaid and disgruntled) army of fifty thousand soldiers and five hundred war elephants
¹²
in the mango groves of Plassey outside Calcutta to claim the richest and most fertile province in the empire. It was a massive catch. The eminent Raj scholar Lawrence James speculates that Bengal had a population of perhaps 40 million, or about four times that of Britain.
¹³
On the nawab’s throne, the Company placed Mir Jafar—a leader who had switched sides with his soldiers to join Clive—and dictated to him the terms of the treaty, which provided, not surprisingly, a windfall. The Company made a tidy £2.5 million. The British officers took over £1.25 million, with Clive getting £234,000 of the bonanza,
¹⁴
plus a piece of property in Calcutta that brought him £27,000 a year in rent. Clive sailed home in 1759 some £300,000 richer. It was the greatest fortune ever made by an Englishman in India, and an especially staggering amount for a man who had gone out to India at nineteen on a modest salary of £5 per year—a trip he had to pay for himself as well as cover the expenses during the journey. At thirty-three, Clive had suddenly become one of the richest men in Britain.
¹⁵

The Company soon reaped even larger rewards. In 1765, it dramatically improved its financial stake when it was awarded the
diwani
of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, gaining, in exchange for a tribute to the emperor in Agra, rights to collect tax revenues. (The tribute part of the deal did not last long. Warren Hastings, India’s first governor-general, soon canceled it.)

The significance of Plassey only became fully evident in hindsight. If Surat was the kernel of the British rule in India, Bengal and its tax revenues became the solid foundation toward gradual rule of the entire subcontinent. The East India Company’s private army ballooned over the next half century from 18,000 to 154,000 by 1805, “far beyond the needs of self-defense,” as one modern historian put it.
¹⁶
Or of merchants. As the Mughal Empire slowly declined, the East India Company moved into its place.

The Company began by looking for nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and pepper and, in doing so, grew into the most powerful commercial company ever to exist. It established global cities such as Calcutta and Bombay as well as Singapore and Hong Kong and shaped and governed much of the Indian subcontinent. At one time, it employed a third of the British workforce, controlled about half of world trade, and had
the largest merchant navy in the world. It moved from a mercantile organization—the standard-bearer of what Karl Marx labeled Britain’s “moneyocracy”—to being the main political and military power in South Asia. Ahmed Ali likened the new character of the Company, once well versed in both politics and war, “to that of war lords.”
¹⁷

But if spices were the Company’s initial commercial impetus, tea became the locus of its financial success, and the cornerstone of its trade strategies.

The Company began by importing tea from China using intermediaries. Its first chest, in 1664, was shipped via Bantam, Java, and classified alongside “rarities of birds, beasts or other curiosities … fit to present to His Majesty,”
¹⁸
Charles II, though most likely destined for his tea-drinking Portuguese wife. A similar negligible amount followed two years later. In 1669, the East India Company brought its first significant order of 143½ pounds from Bantam. A load of nearly five thousand pounds of tea in 1678 flooded the market for the next few years.
¹⁹

As imports increased, the Company soon wanted to buy directly from the Chinese. In 1689, it made its first purchase of tea from the port of Amoy.
²⁰
Initially limited, quantities shot up within a few decades and surpassed 1 million pounds by the early 1720s. In 1750, the East India Company’s annual imports of tea equaled nearly 5 million pounds, and in 1766 hit 6 million.
²¹
Because of the high taxes levied on tea in Britain, another 4 to 7 million pounds was being smuggled in illegally.
²²
Dutch and French ships carried some of the contraband that made its way to the English coastline via the Channel Islands, but it was also transported on the Company’s own vessels by officers using their allotted cargo space.