Roger Williams, author of London’s Lost Global Giant: The East India Company, fills us in.
Lorenzo a Castro’s A Dutch East Indiaman off Hoorn (1672-86) © Dulwich Picture Gallery, London / By permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery
Among Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection of marine paintings is Lorenzo a Castro’s A Dutch East Indiaman off Hoorn (1672-86), showing a magnificent 36-gun cargo ship Ooievaas (Stork) belonging to the Dutch East India Company. Born to a Flemish master painter of Portuguese descent, Castro became a popular marine painter in England, and the Gallery has seven examples of his work (more than any other single collection in the country). They formed part a bequest to the Gallery in 1686 from the actor and collector William Cartwright.
An East Indiaman called Ooievaas had been captured by the English in the First Anglo-Dutch War, and this may have been painted to show what a prize she had been. On a recent visit to Holland I was surprised to see a full-scale replica of another East Indiaman, the Amsterdam, tied up beside the National Maritime Museum. The original had foundered off the coast of Hastings in 1749.
Replica ship of the Amsterdam Location: Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, Holland. Credits: Eddo Hartmann, © Het Scheepvaartmuseum.
No such replica has been built in Britain, though our own Honourable East India Company had an unprecedented fleet of these huge, armed sailing ships that dominated trade and were often better built than ships of the King’s Navy. Founded by royal charter in 1600, the Company had a monopoly of trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, a private army of more than 250,000 and was the largest corporation the world had ever seen. It was deemed too big to fail until the Indian Mutiny of 1857 showed that it had lost control, and its territories were transferred to the Crown to become the keystone of the British Empire.
Eliza and Mary Davidson by Tilly Kettle. Date c.1784. © Dulwich Picture Gallery, London / By permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery
The visit to Amsterdam made me wonder what had ever happened to the Honourable East India Company at home. Why wasn’t I aware of it as I walked around London? Where were its ships and its heroes? What had become of East India House, known as “the Monster of Leadenhall Street”, and its vast library and museum collection? As I began the hunt, I found its stories tucked away in many corners. The British Library and the V&A had benefitted most from its demise. It had affected many lives, too. The Company had, for instance, provided employment for ambitious young men such as William Linley, who for a while was a Writer in Madras. He came from a musical family and was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence; his parents and some of his six siblings also had their portraits painted and it was because William’s older brother, Reverend Ozias Thurston Linley, was organist at Dulwich College that he bequeathed this unique set of family portraits to Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Several artists, ever in search of patrons, headed east. Johan Zoffany was prominent among them, and his paintings can be seen in Artists and Empire, the current exhibition at Tate Britain, in which a number of Indian paintings have come out of hiding. Works by Tilly Kettle (1734–86) are not among them, though he was a significant portraitist in India. His 1784 painting of Eliza and Mary Davidson, in which the daughters of Alexander Davidson, Governor of Madras, are seen in fashions influenced in India, was recently researched by Sarah Capes.
Elsewhere in London, the Company’s reach was wide. Its adventure in India had a lasting influence on British dress and cuisine, supplying the the weavers of Spitalfields with raw silk and bringing a national addiction to tea. The Company also stocked the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, and Sir Stamford Raffles, a charismatic Company governor, was a founder of London Zoo. No public memorial exists to Raffles, and even the imposing statue of Clive of India in Whitehall fails to mention his employers, the East India Company, by name.
I cannot be the first person to have an interest sparked off by a chance sighting of the Company. The result of my visit to Amsterdam — and Dulwich Picture Gallery — is a book London’s Lost Global Giant: in Search of the East India Company. Illustrated and with maps, it is in the same pocket-sized paperback format as its companions, The Temples of London and Father Thames and would slip easily into a Christmas stocking.
