In the long history of the East India Company, Streynsham Master (1640-1724) occupies an important place. Master’s association with the Company began in 1656, when he travelled to Surat with his uncle, the administrator George Oxenden. After working as a cape-merchant, he was appointed to a series of roles, including company factor, warehouse keeper, and, in 1675, agent and governor of Fort St George (Madras). Along the way, Master oversaw a number of administrative and judicial reforms, as well as the founding of the first Anglican church in India in 1678. The most significant of these reforms, however, had to do with accounting and bookkeeping. Master reorganised the Company’s system of accounting, devising new procedures which prioritised regularity, legibility, and moral order. As Miles Ogborn has shown, these changes transformed the social and political life of the Company’s factories, as well as the relationship of factory employees and the Company directors in London.^[1] Master’s writings thus offer insight into the Company’s structure and operations. But they also tell us a great deal about global trade in the seventeenth century more broadly, including the imbrication of financial and moral notions of accounting, the production and travel of knowledge, and the interaction of religion and trade.  

Here, I consider an aspect of Master’s output which is under-examined, yet centrally concerned with the issues that shaped his career as well as the trajectory of the company he served: his devotional writing, composed in the 1660s. I suggest that Master’s devotional writing might be understood as continuous with, rather than distinct from, his engagements with financial accounting. At the same time, by situating Master in generic contexts in which he is not typically read – devotional writing, travel writing, as well as “life writing”, broadly conceived – I make a few observations about travel, rhetoric, and form, particularly travellers’ uses of scripture. In doing so, I deal briefly with themes explored at greater length in my current book project, on the relationship of rhetorical and geographical place in seventeenth-century English travel writing.

Held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Master’s “Booke of Devotions, Prayers, &c” (Folger MS V.a.648) is written in his own hand. The first page of the manuscript provides a set of details: Master was “Borne y^e Eighth son of Richard Master Esq at East Langdon County of Kent, Wednesday October 28 anno Do 1640” and “Baptised Novembr 3^d 1640”. It adds that the devotions and prayers within were “Collected anno 1666”.^[2] From the outset, then, Master frames his devotions in autobiographical terms, as an account of a Christian life. Like other examples of early modern life writing, however, Master’s book is not autobiographical in any kind of straightforward way.^[3] Instead, it is a miscellaneous collection of prayers, precepts, prompts, meditations, comments on scripture, and lists including “The Patriarchs”, “The Books of Holy Scripture”, “The 9 Orders of Angells” and “The 7 Cursed Nations”. Master’s prayers are organised under a series of headings which refer to particular purposes or occasions, such as “Devotions for y^e Morning”, “For Sunday Morning Prayer” “For Faith”, and “For Hope”. Perhaps the most compelling prayers, and the only ones which allude to the author’s location in India, however obliquely, are those which deal with travel, gathered together towards the end of the manuscript. One of these is “In a storme”, which includes the lines:

O my God thou didst creat y^e earth &

y^e sea for thy glory & y^e use of man, &

dost dayly show wonders in y^e deep 

look upon ye danger and fear of thy ser

vant: my sins have taken hold upon

me, and & with out y^e supporting arme of

thy mercy I cannot look up; but my

trust is in thee. Doe thou o Lord rebuke

y^e wind & y^e sea, & make it gentle &

calme, say unto them peace, be still,

for to thee y^e winds & y^e seas doe obey:

o let not y^e waters swallow me up, but 

let thy spirit, y^e spirit of gentleness

& mercy move upon y^e Waters: be they

reconciled unto thy servants, & y^e face

of y^e waters will be smooth. Cast out

all my sins, & throw not thy servants

of y^e living into y^e depths where all

things are forgotten. But if it be thy will

y^t we shall goe downe into ye waters,

Lord receive my soul into thy holy hands^[4]

Although Master’s conception of faith as a journey is utterly conventional, his use of scriptural allusion enables us to locate this prayer within a more specific context. The prayer, particularly the phrases “wonders in y^e deep” and “goe downe into ye waters”, alludes to Psalm 107, a locus classicus in early modern travel writing. One of its earliest and most memorable appearances in the period occurs in the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, published in 1589. Here, Hakluyt tells of his introduction to “certeine bookes of Cosmographie” by his cousin, who showed him “an universall Mappe”, pointing to all known “Seas, Gulfs, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes, and Territories”, before moving “From the Mappe” to “the Bible” and directing his attention to Psalm 107.23-4. Quoting from the Geneva Bible, Hakluyt read “that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his woonders in the deepe”. Hakluyt’s encounter with the “Mappe” and the Bible took on the status of a personal mythology, a conviction that it was his calling to “prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature” with God’s assistance.^[5] These verses also appear in a sermon preached to the merchants of the East India Company in 1649 by Edward Terry, chaplain to Thomas Roe at the Mughal court of Jahangir (recently discussed in a MEMOs blog by Charles Beirouti).^[6] Master’s allusion to Psalm 107, and his devotional writing on travel more generally, thus belongs to a longer tradition of English travel writing which attempts to bring together geographical places and the “places” of the Bible.

Master’s book of devotions might seem entirely removed from the other genres in which he worked, including official ledgers and letters. But we might read it, instead, as an extension of his preoccupation with accounting, in that his devotions constitute an attempt to hold himself accountable to God. This book, and others like it, have the potential to expand and enrich our understanding of the East India Company, as well as of the lives of the individuals in its service. More generally, it is yet another example of the rhetorical inventiveness of early modern travel writing (broadly conceived), which drew on strategies including allusion, citation, revision, and borrowing to describe travellers’ experiences.   

For more details on the manuscript see: https://collections.folger.edu/detail/A-booke-of-devotions-prayers--26c-by-Streynsham-Master.../cdc94380-b18d-4ad8-b8a4-41a9b02799ea

This research was supported by a Folger Institute Short-Term Fellowship in 2019-2020.  

Image: Sir Streynsham Master, oil on canvas, 1714, accessed here

[1] Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the East India Company. University of Chicago Press, 2007, especially pp. 67-103.

[2] Streynsham Master, Booke of Devotions, Prayers, &c., Folger MS V.a.648, 1. Hereafter “Booke of Devotions”.

[3] For further discussion of the forms of early modern life writing, see Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

[4] Booke of Devotions, 241-42.

[5] Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols. London, 1598-1600, 1: sig. *2^r.

[6] Edward Terry, The Merchants and Mariners Preservation and Thanksgiving. London, 1649.