My previous contribution to the MEMOs blog discussed the relationship between the Guinea Company and the East India Company between 1649 and 1660,  and how this stabilised the EIC and provided the platform for that entity’s subsequent pre-eminence.^[1] This entry considers in more detail the remarkable—and remarkably understudied—case of the Courteen Association, a venture formed to investigate global opportunities as conceived by its leader, Sir William Courteen, a vastly wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant. This endeavour collapsed into bankruptcy and attendant acrimony that generated over half a century’s worth of appeals and denunciations.^[2] The Association’s remains, though, provided enough in terms of conception, personnel, and capital to enable EIC agents on the ground to secure their position—and that of their employers—in Asia This position only improved following the acquisition of Bombay (Mumbai) from Portugal as part of Queen Catherine of Bragança’s dowry in 1662.  Meanwhile, a group of merchants led by Andrew Riccard and Maurice Thompson finally secured the company’s fiscal and political status in England.^[3]

Born in the late 1560s, Sir William Courteen was among the wealthiest of Charles I’s subjects and one of that king’s largest creditors by the 1630s. He achieved this status by transforming, with his brother Sir Peter, the family’s Zeeland tailoring business into an international commercial concern involving English partners, which sponsored whaling voyages and expeditions to collect salt from Venezuelan pans from the 1590s. These Venezuelan operations led Sir William to support tobacco plantations along the Essequibo River on the Wild Coast of Guiana, from which his agents extended his interests to the West Indies, especially Barbados (where Courteen’s agents founded a in colony 1627).

Sir William’s Caribbean interests, though, ran afoul of Charles I’s habit of granting conflicting patents to different people; in this case, James Hay, second earl of Carlisle, whose operatives saw off their Courteen competition in Barbados and kicked off a prolonged dispute that wracked the island’s politics and occasionally turned bloody. Courteen’s successors in interest finally lost their case at the Restoration, when Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, orchestrated the royal takeover of the colony (1660).

Meanwhile, Courteen had turned his attention eastward, at a time when the East India Company’s situation was parlous, with one commentator noting that its ‘dissolution was inevitable’ and that Charles I held an ‘ill opinion of their persons and endeavours’. In 1636, Sir William formed the Courteen Association, which included two former EIC employees, John Weddell and Nathaniel Mountney, along with the diplomat and groom of the royal bedchamber, Endymion Porter. The Association obtained a royal promise to contribute £10,000 and to send a fleet with wide powers, as well as Crown approval to investigate commercial possibilities at Madagascar, Mozambique, the coasts of Arabia and India, the Spice Islands, Macau, Japan, and California (‘on the backside of America’)—in sum, anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere that had no East India Company presence; to conduct diplomacy with foreign potentates, such as the Emperor of Japan; to claim (but not colonise) territory; and to take prizes. This venture was not intended to compete with or to usurp the EIC’s position; indeed, in addition to the pointed order that Association operatives not interfere at EIC factories (but that those factories should render assistance if those operatives requested it), there is evidence that Courteen and the company committees had cordial relations prior to the departure of the Association fleet for the Indian Ocean on 14 April 1636.^[4]

fig. 1, Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, and Pitt, Moses, fl. 1654-1696. “A mapp of the Isles of Iapon’.  Map.  1684.  Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center,  https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kq20b (accessed September 07, 2020). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

Commanded by Weddell, the Courteen fleet established factories at Carwar (Karwar) and Bhatkal on the Malabar Coast, at Aceh in Sumatra, and at Rajpur in Gujarat. Unfortunately, this proved the zenith of hopes that fell well short of the expectations of those concerned. These parties, including Sir William’s heirs and creditors, claimed that they had anticipated returns of ‘probably more than’ £150,000 but instead incurred alleged damages in excess of that same massive amount.^[5]

The litany of setbacks began when Sir William Courteen died shortly after the fleet left, and the loss of the Association’s chief compelled Mountney to return to the employ of the East India Company. Then Barbary pirates seized one of the Courteen vessels off of Land’s End, malaria beset the expedition, Dutch and Portuguese ships harassed the English, and embassies at Madagascar, Bhatkal, and Macau were rebuffed; the experience at Macau deterred Weddell from continuing to Japan, not to mention California. Only three of the original six vessels returned to England and Courteen’s son, also William, fled to the Continent to escape the Association’s creditors.

Moreover, the East India Company responded vigorously to what it regarded as a threat to its interests, even though the Crown had ordered it to assist the Courteen venture and the Association’s patent stipulated that it must not compete with the EIC, as noted above. Notwithstanding, the company committees ordered its factories to refuse to assist Courteen ships, petitioned the Crown for renewal and clarification of its rights, and launched a recapitalisation (the fourth in its history) that netted £105,000. Its agents succeeded in establishing the EIC presence on the Coromandel Coast, receiving a farman to establish a permanent base at Madras (Chennai) in March 1639/40 for conducting trade in and around the Bay of Bengal.

fig. 2, Blaeu, Joan, and Blaeu, Cornelis.  "Magni Mogolis Imperium."  Map.  1640.  Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center,  https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kq28j (accessed September 07, 2020). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

The Crown, meanwhile, tried to intervene on the side of the Courteen interest to such an extent that the EIC committees ‘were almost unanimously in favour of dissolving the trade’ by 31 January 1637/8. The outbreak of rebellion in Scotland, though, put paid to royal attempts to resolve the crisis of English interests in Asia, and no accommodation was reached. Courteen junior, for his part, had managed to sort out his debts and secured a contract to supply the parliamentary rebels against Charles I with Indian saltpetre. Accordingly, he sent a second voyage to the Indian Ocean in 1643-1644 charged with linking English interests in Africa and Asia for the first time by acquiring Guinea gold for trade in India; it also had a brief to establish a colony in Madagascar.

This undertaking apparently began very promisingly both in Guinea and in the Indian Ocean, but disasters befell it as with its predecessor. The Madagascar colony, intended as a waystation for traffic between Guinea and India, was destroyed by the inhabitants of the island; the Dutch seized two Courteen vessels in the Straits of Malacca; and a third vessel was seized at Madagascar either by East India Company agents, according to Courteen, or by Association creditors, according to the EIC. Beyond this, the Courteen agents appear to have lacked experience in conducting themselves in India, finding themselves unable to attract partners who would deliver commodities of any value to them. William Courteen had to flee his creditors again.^[6]

Thompson and his associates assumed both the shell of the Courteen Association and, more significantly, the Courteen vision of connecting Asian interests with Guinea and America; they also took control of the moribund Guinea Company (as discussed in my previous blog). Thompson personally collected the record of the Courteen endeavour from Lady Katherine Courteen, Sir William’s daughter-in-law. This partnership, under the name of the Assada Adventurers (after the colony they proposed for an island off the coast of Madagascar), battled with the EIC leadership from the late 1640s, clashing over the conduct of English trade in Asia before the Cromwellian government finally intervened and compelled the competitors to merge.

The resulting new East India Company, chartered in 1657, conducted its business under a joint stock (rather than a free trade with the company only responsible for factories and fleets as preferred by Thompson) and raised an unprecedented capital subscription of £739,782 10s. This settlement thus brought equally unprecedented stability to the EIC committees, so that its united leadership, including Thompson and his brother Edward, Riccard, William Cockayne, William Ryder—and after Ryder’s death, his widow, Dame Priscilla - and Martin Noell, could support ambitions drawn from Courteen’s original conception.  

Their plan centred the EIC’s newly acquired interests in Guinea in a chain extending from the island of Pulau Run in the Moluccas to Barbados with St Helena in the South Atlantic as a transhipping point for enslaved Africans, gold, ivory, and Asian fabrics. The Restoration and fervent Dutch opposition—including the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667) that, ironically, the company had fervently advocated—put a serious dent in this scheme, however: the EIC surrendered its African posts to the new Royal Company of Adventurers trading into Africa and the Dutch reduced the English position in Indonesia to a post at Jambi in Sumatra by 1685. Nevertheless, the reorganisation of the company had bolstered its Indian commerce to an extent that it could overcome the fiasco of Child’s War (1686-90) and establish a significantly advanced Bengali presence at Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1690.

fig. 3, Jansson, Jan.  "Insulae Iavae, cum parte insularum Borneo Sumatrae, et circumjacentum insularum novissima delineatio."  Map.  1657.  Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center,  https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kq12n (accessed September 07, 2020). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

L.H. Roper is SUNY Distinguished Professor History at the State University of New York--New Paltz (USA), a Fellow of the New York Academy of History, and the author/editor of seven books on English overseas trade and colonisation in the long seventeenth century. He tweets @RoperLou

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[1] This contribution is drawn from L.H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and fuller references may be found there.

[2] E.g., Lex Talionis, Or, the Law of Marque Or Reprizals Fully Represented in the Case of Spoyls and Depredations upon the Ships, Goods and Factories of Sir William Courten and His Partners in the East-Indies, China and Japan (London: s.n., 1682).

[3] David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[4] Ethel B. Sainsbury (ed), A Calendar of Court Minutes, etc., of the East India Company, 1635-1639 to 1677-1679, 11 vols., with introductions by Sir William Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907-1938) (hereafter, ‘CCMEIC’), 1: v-xxxvi at xiv-xvi; The King’s Undertaking to join in the Adventure to the Indies, 6 December 1635, CCMEIC 1: 123-124; Reasons to move the King to confirm under the Great Seal Captain Weddell’s Commission, [May 1637], CCMEIC 1: 274-275; Royal Commission to Captain John Weddell and his associates, etc., 12 December 1635, CCMEIC 1: 128-131.

[5] Edward Graves, A Brief Narrative and Deduction of the Several Remarkable Cases of Sir William Courten, and Sir Paul Pyndar, Knights; and William Courten Late of London Esquire (London, 1679); J[ohn] D[arell], Strange News from the Indies: Or East-India Passages Further Discovered (London, 1652).

[6] The EIC opposed all English colonising plans for the Indian Ocean on the grounds that they would promote piracy, especially along the hajj route.