Abstract
Dutch port records are a valuable source to study the development of shipping in the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century, especially the important but elusive local short-sea trades. This article presents data from the Dutch port records of Cochin (Kochi) and Bimilipatnam (Bheemunipatnam).
Maritime trade and shipping are important aspects of the history of the Indian subcontinent in the medieval and early modern periods. Ports on the subcontinent formed crucial links in international long-distance exchanges, linking the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and East Africa to the South East Asian archipelago and China to the east. It has been argued that the lack of maritime focus on the most important polities on the subcontinent in the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries – most notably the Mughal Empire – has relegated the importance of maritime trade and commerce to a secondary role in the historiography. 1 Work on Indian merchant communities and individual merchants and shipowners has tended to focus on the high end of the spectrum: rich merchants engaged in long-distance, high-value trade, sometimes owning not just one ship but whole fleets. 2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly have described these merchants as ‘portfolio capitalists’. 3 Perhaps the best-known example of such a merchant is Virji Vora, who was described in contemporary East India Company records as the richest merchant in the world. Yet these fabulously rich merchants, operating multiple – often very large – vessels on long-distance trades in rich goods, were of course an exception, the very tip of the merchant pyramid. R. J. Barendse has argued that the norm was in fact small craft, owned by smaller merchants operating in local trades. The difficulty is to chart these merchants in the sources. On the basis of an analysis of a list of ships departing from and arriving in Cochin in 1699, he has argued that the total tonnage engaged in trade in the Arabian seas should be revised upwards tenfold, from 60,000 to some 600,000 tons. 4 As a consequence of this, the European share in the total volume of trade in this area of the wider Indian Ocean becomes much less impressive. Gerrit Knaap has made similar arguments on a broader empirical basis. Based on the port registers of Batavia, Banten, Cirebon and Makassar, he has argued that, even by the late eighteenth century, the role of indigenous and Chinese shipping remained important. 5
To understand the wider development of trade in the Indian Ocean and the economic history of India in this period therefore requires us to get a better sense of the development of Indian coastal trade throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The port registers of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) for the various ports it administered in India can shed some light on these issues. This article presents some preliminary data by looking at the sources preserved for two different ports: Kochi (Cochin in the sources) in the present-day state of Kerala and Bheemunipatnam (Bimilipatnam in the sources) in Andra Pradesh. Barendse has argued that only one boomboekje - a document listing ships departing and arriving - for Cochin has been preserved, but the Tamil Nadu Archives in Chennai hold a record for licences granted to ‘indigenous’ vessels between 1738 and 1790, albeit with a number of gaps. The available records for the east-coast ports do not present such a long-running unbroken series. 6 Yet even here the available sources do allow for at least a glimpse of local shipping patterns. I present here some figures for the port of Bheemunipatnam in the 1730s. The data presented in this article is not exhaustive but intended to underline the value of the port registers.
Shipping at Cochin
Kochi, known as Cochin by both the Portuguese and the Dutch, is today a major port and shipbuilding centre in the south of India, with the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant being built in the port. The VOC captured the port in 1663 from the Estado da Índia, reduced and refortified the town, and turned it into the capital of its newly instated Malabar Command. The initial goal for the conquest of Cochin had been mostly strategic – to guard the western flank of Ceylon – but the VOC turned its attention to trying to secure exclusive contracts with the neighbouring kingdoms for deliveries of pepper. The attempt to secure a monopoly would ultimately fail, and Malabar would be a problematic and loss-making governorate for the VOC well into the eighteenth century. 7 The ‘licences for native vessels’ have been preserved from 1738 to 1790 in the Tamil Nadu Archives in Chennai, with a number of gaps (see Table 1).
These sources have been scanned and made digitally available by the Dutch National Archives. 8 The files give information on the ownership of vessels, crew size, merchant in charge, destinations of departing ships and cargo. The carrying capacity of the vessels is mostly given in candyls, a unit of dry volume used in south India with varying local standards, but roughly equivalent to 500 pounds. 9 Occasionally, ship types are also given, though defining what was meant by any given designation over a period of nearly 60 years is of course problematic. Despite these difficulties, the rough estimates of the sizes present a wide range of ships that were permitted to sail from Cochin – from the unnamed thony owned by the Muslim merchant Marca Oetta from Ponnani, estimated at just three candyls, which sailed from Cochin on 7 January 1738, to the three-masted ghurab Sophia, owned by the Jewish merchant David Rabby, manned with 50 men and armed with 12 guns, which set sail for Coromandel and Bengal in April 1779. 10 These two examples show some of the other challenges in working with these sources. The names of local merchants and shipowners were rendered in a way that made them intelligible to Dutch officials. The spelling of names does not seem to have been uniformized, so tracking a single individual throughout the sources, as well as linking individuals mentioned with other sources, requires due diligence. Additionally, these are the official permits for trade that was legal in the eyes of the VOC. Goods smuggled in contravention of the VOC's rules were, of course, not mentioned in these records. Finally, the ‘licences’ record vessels operating from ports with owners and destinations permitted by the VOC. Further study of the development of the VOC's rules is required to chart the long-term development of the short-sea shipping recorded here.
Preserved ‘licences for native vessels’ in Cochin.
Despite these reservations, the Cochin licences represent a rich source for Indian short-sea shipping. The long period recorded in these files allows us to chart the development of local trade networks, ownership of ships and the development of the fleet engaged in this trade. For now, I will present some preliminary results for the number of ships departing from Cochin, their average size and the size of their crews for six sample years, one for every decade from 1740 to 1780. Data up to 1790 is available, but that year has been left out of this sample due to the poor legibility of the sources.
Table 2 shows a number of interesting developments, but also some of the problems with trying to record a broad development over time in a single table. The information was not always recorded in a uniform way, so, for some years, the size of vessels was recorded in candyls, while especially early in the period there seems to have been a preference for recording the number of oars. Most years mention the number of sailors on board, and in some cases the ship types, but such information is not mentioned in other cases. Yet, despite these problems, a number of points stand out. The data for 1760 and 1780 is striking: the average ship and crew sizes are much larger than in any of the other years for which data is presented in Table 2. In the latter year, the presence of ships from Muscat stands out in particular (see Table 3), which is also apparent from the appearance of dhows and bombaras in the listed ship types. 11 The importance of the link between Muscat and Cochin has been noted by scholars working on Muscat, but the significance of the Muscat trade in terms of the total Cochin trade has not yet been remarked on. 12 The increase in the size of ships, as well as the more diverse and distant ports they sailed to and from, is probably reflective of the more permissive attitude towards non-company trade by Gasparus de Jong and Adriaan Moens, the respective VOC commanders in these years. Moens would enter into correspondence with the ruler of Muscat to foster important trade between the two ports. 13
‘Native’ shipping in Cochin, 1742, 1751, 1760, 1770 and 1780.
Home ports of merchants in 1780 with average ship size per home port.
Although 1770 is an incomplete year with only three months of records preserved, there is a good record of ownership for these three months. Table 4 shows the descriptions of the owners of vessels departing from Cochin in this period (I have maintained the terms used in the sources).
Owners of vessels, January–March 1770.
The importance of the monsoon season for shipping is clearly visible in the pattern of shipping over an entire year. Figure 1 shows the number of departures per month for five selected years, demonstrating a clear drop-off in departures between May and August.
Departures per month in selected years.
Shipping at Bimilipatnam
Bheemunipatnam, in the state of Andra Pradesh, is today a suburb of the Vishakhapatnam metropolis. During the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, the town was a minor port in its own right and one of the ports on the northern Coromandel coast in which the VOC was active. The VOC, which referred to the town as Bimilipatnam, had been active there from 1687 onwards. Initially, the port had mainly been of importance for the trans-shipment of rice to Java and Ceylon, but later it became one of the centres for the VOC's trade in cotton textiles in northern Coromandel, along with Masulipatnam, Jaggarnaikpuram (Jagganathpur) and Jaganaar. 14 The latter two ports, as well as Bimilipatnam, would become much more important for the VOC after the fall of Masulipatnam during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) to the French and later the East India Company (1759). 15 Bimilipatnam has largely existed on the fringes of the historiography of the VOC, with recent attention mainly devoted to the saga of the fort built there during the 1750s, which collapsed multiple times. 16 But the records of Bimilipatnam and the ports in which the VOC was active in the area are valuable for more than this. For Bimilipatnam, the movement of ships in the port is recorded in some detail for the 1730s. The records of Bimilipatnam show how a minor port was plugged into a wider network and, by examining the merchants involved, we can gain a better understanding of the positions of these smaller merchants in the changing world of trade in eighteenth-century India.
The river port of Bimilipatnam served as a shelter for smaller vessels during the adverse monsoon season. For six years during the 1730s, company officials not only recorded how many ships docked in the port, where they came from and who owned the vessels, but also passed this information on to Batavia, which sent copies of the files to the Netherlands. Throughout the decade, the number of ships seems to decline, from a high of 51 in 1733 to a low of 22 in the final two years for which figures could be found (1738 and 1739; see Figure 2). In some cases, it is unclear whether the records actually record the home ports of the vessels or the last port from which a vessel sailed to Bimilipatnam. The Bimilipatnam records for the 1730s are especially interesting as they record the names of the merchants who owned the vessels, making it potentially possible to link these sources to other records where their names might appear. One such source is the register of outstanding debts to the VOC in Bimilipatnam, where many of the merchants also appear. 17 One problem in possibly linking these Dutch sources to others is the particular rendering of Indian names in Dutch. The Bimilipatnam case study could be expanded in the future by also including roughly contemporary information from other Dutch-administered or Dutch-controlled ports on the Coromandel coast, such as Jagganathpur, Negapatnam, Pulicat, Porto Novo and Sadras. 18
Number of ships docked in Bimilipatnam during the monsoon season.
Conclusion
The port records of a number of Dutch-controlled ports in India can provide a valuable insight into the character and development of Indian short-sea shipping over the course of the eighteenth century. The records of Cochin, from which a small sample has been presented here, seem especially valuable, but these can be complemented by the less extensive extant sources for a number of the Coromandel coast ports, and even Ceylonese ports. Even more valuable would be to link these records to any such records in other extant archives, whether French, British, Portuguese or those compiled by Indian states, or existing data sets, such as that on slave transport permissions from Cochin. 19 This would allow us to shift the perspective from that of the port, where we see a cross section of shipping, to that of the individual ship, merchant and voyage, charting how these small traders moved from port to port throughout the year. If this could be done for a sufficiently long period, it would allow us to reconstruct the changes in the nature of Indian short-sea shipping over the course of the eighteenth century. This article has only scratched the surface of this fascinating topic and these valuable sources. Further analysis of the development of short-sea shipping in this crucial period will shed further light on this important topic and the economic history of the Indian subcontinent in general.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Erik Odegard defended his PhD from Leiden University in 2018. He currently works at the IISH in Amsterdam on an NWO-funded research project on private investment in Dutch Brazil in the seventeenth century. Erik has published on early modern economic, colonial, maritime and military history.