Three Hundred Years Ago

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 96, 14 July 1927, Page 7

Three Hundred Years Ago

JOHN HAWKINS WINS ! RENOWN ON EASTERN SEAS , ]

AT GREAT MOGATS COURT For a half-century, thre hundred years ago, Hawkins was a name of world-wide renown, in England a household word. To-day, we have all forgotten, or never learned, that but for Sir John Hawkins, there would have been no Dutch settlement at the Cape, and South Africa of to-day would be but an unconsidered Republic of coffee-coloured blood, the fungoid outgrowth of a decayed Spanish colony. Sir John and his son, Sir Richard, were the outstanding bearers of the Hawkins’ name. The rest of the family were adventurers all in their degree, dogged, resourceful island seacaptains at the least; and to one of them, “William Hawkins of Surat,” adventure befell in middle-age with a fantastic flavour of “Arabian Nights.” To the East By 1607 he was already a man in the forties at least, had an intimate knowledge of the West Indies, and spoke Turkish fluently; a breadth of accomplishment which to-day, in a merchant skipper, would be unique and was remarkable even in those more spacious days. Queen Bess was dead at last, the last of a great line of English Kings, the last of a great generation, whose ideas were now outworn. King James of Scotland had succeeded to her throne, and with the new Royal line came in the new men with fresh outlook, new ideas. The Elizabethan tradition of “spoiling the Egyptians” in the seas of Spanish-America had been worn threadbare before the Great Queen died; privateering had rotted into mere piracy. London was looking easterly again for wealth, and the East India Company fitted out a fleet in 1607, planning to thrust in to the Portuguese preserve of the Indian trade and to share with the Dutch the budding traffic with Java and Malaysia. Ashore at Surat As far as Surat, Captain Keeling and Captain Hawkins were in joint command. There, Keeling took over; and there Hawkins was set ashore with a merchant, a page-boy, and a cook, to grapple perhaps the hardest task ever yet to a middle-aged English merchant skipper. India was a seething pot of civil war, swarming with armies, with guerillas and mere brigands; the vei'y name of England was unknown; and Hawkins’s task was, as best he could, to find out the Great Mogul, to get access to his Court; and somehow to buy, cajole, or compel from the Ruler of All India a permit for the establishment of English trade. It was work for a man indeed, a task for all the manifold resource of an island sea-lion, since Portugal brooked no rivals in the gold-mine of Indian trade, and her officials were Jesuit priests who had no scruples where Lutheran islanders were concerned. The Great Mogul By dautless courage, resource, and while, hiring as guides men whom he found with a grudge against the Jesuits, he wormed his way to Agra, and penetrated to the very presence of the Great Mogu. And he, the “Great Panjandrum himself, who looked down on PJuropean Kings as mere tribal chiefs, took the island skipper to his hart on sight as a Man, beginning with an expression of frank and natural astonshment that Hawkins had got across India without being poisoned or stabbed at the instigation of the Jesuits. He had heard rumour of the English, he said, but the Portuguese had assured him that it was a delusion, that there were no such people. Now’, with a specimen of the race in disproof of the lie, he would gladly grant them all that Hawkins asked, only requiring him to settle at his court as English Ambassador. His offer was magnificent. Hawkins was to become an Indian Prince with revenue of £3,200 a year, some ~ 2 5,000 of to-day's money, with the rare privilege also of admission within the red throne-rails and unhindered access to the august presence. Plainly this William Hawkins was one of the breed which in earlier years, in another quarter of the globe, had “growen in love and favour with” coloured races. And the bluff honesty of the breed comes out in his report to the company that, seeing it must take six years for them to land a substitute, he had decided to accept, since in the meantime “ I should feather my neste, and doe you service.” Frantic With Hate

The Jesuits, of course, were frantic w r ith hate; and shortly afterwards. Hawkins’s whole staff was suddenly and suspiciously ill. This he reported to the Mogul, who was only surprised that Hawkins himself was still alive; and as a safeguard he “was very earnest with me to take a whyte Mayden out of his Palace; and hee would promise me shee should turne Christian, and by this means my meate and drinkes should be looked unto and I should live without fear.”

Moral and bashful, Protestant “John Bull” was inwardly appalled at the

thought of unmarriage with a young and beautiful heathen housekeeper. But as Ambassador he must needs try to emulate the repute of his great kinsman, Sir John as a diplomatist. Disclaiming any distaste for "Maydens” as such, he put forward a religious scruple; “in regard shee was a Moore (Mohamedan) I replied that if so be there could be a Christian found, I would accept it.”

It was a fatal feint. His Supreme Majesty the Great Mogul bethought himself of a “mayden,” an Armenian, who complied with all the stipulations of Protestant John Bull; she was willing. And, an added attraction maybe, to a chivalrous man, she was Christian, she was white, she was an orphan, the daughter of one Mubarique Shah lately deceased: a Great Captain in the service of Akhbar the Mogul’s father, a rich man whose fortune had been seized by his kin, leaving his daughter a beggar on the Mogul’s hands. To the Mogul too, there was temptation to make the match, since by presenting her to Hawkins as housekeeper he could saddle him with the cost of the girl’s keep, as a discount off the Ambassadorial salary. And while acquiring merit by providing for an orphan, he could leave her relations in possession of their loot and put an end to the noise and the stings of conscience. He Stood to his Word Caught short, John Bull rose to the occasion, faced Fate, and stood to his incautious word. “Seeing shee was of so honest a descent,' having passed my word to the King, I could not withstand my fortune.” But, honest to the core, he married the girl on sight; and later, finding his marriage not binding on him, had it repeated past question, for better or for worse. And so far as history goes, stout honesty found its reward, "for better” Was the end of the phrase; and the Armenian waif at the Court of the Ruler of All India found mutual happiness with a bluff islander, an elderly sailor-husband. So William Hawkins, of Plymouth, finding a wife in Agra, found a good thing, the only good thing he did find in all India. For the Mogul, having saved the cost of an orphan s keep, was moved by the Jesuits to save the salary of an English Ambassador. Money was spent like water in bribes to the court officials and on jewels for the Mogul, and ultimatums from Portugal were handed in almost a< The Jesuits, forgetting their early assurance to the Mogul that the English nation had no existence, now went the length of “murmuring to the King that wee were a nation that if wee once set foot wee would take his countrey from him.” So early in history was John Bull so suspect of land-grabbing though at that date Ireland and the Channel Islands were the only possible evidence for the suspicion. And the readiness of a slander so baseless in 1610 may be led as evidence for the defence in later years, when facts have better served to colour the ancient indictment. Nothing to Show

Meantime Hawkins’s official salary vanished, sticking to a multitude of fingers on its way to him: and his private means could not vie with the Jesuits in wholesale bribery of a great King and his court. His daily protests within the red throne-rails at last served only to irk the Mogul with a secret sense of the limits to the power of an All-Highest; the grasshopper monotony of his plaint became a burden, and desire of the novelty of the company of a sea-captain failed. Insular pride took fire at a king’s hint of boredom: and with much ado to evade the clamour of his wife’s relatives. Hawkins slipped aboard an English ship in 1612 with his wife and at least one child; and returned home with nothing to show for five years of strain and stress under the shadow of imminent death, except a devoted girl-wife and a child of his old age. an exotic strain bred into the posterity of the old merchant-skipper who had been so greatly “beloved and eseemed by K. Henry the VIII.’