Introduction

As the geographer Tim Cresswell observes, ‘human mobilities [are] in an entangled web of “other” mobilities’ (2014, p 713): people move along with – and because of – other-than-human ‘things’, both animate and inanimate. It may seem a crashingly obvious point that such ‘things’ were important to the early voyages of the English East India Company (EIC); these were, after all, endeavours primarily concerned with trade in goods rather than – like England’s contemporary ventures on the other side of the Atlantic – the settlement of peoples or discovery of sea routes.² But as I hope to demonstrate across this chapter, a fuller attention to non-human actors can provide fresh perspectives on these voyages. As Bridget Anderson notes in the introduction to this volume, ‘[t]he separation of human movement/migration from the movement of non-human species and non-living things means our understanding of human movement is often highly partial and distorted, and we misread patterns and miss crucial interconnections’ (p 3). My focus here is on precisely these interconnections – on, that is, the more-than-human factors that shaped these voyages and those who undertook them. I am interested in these impacts both in the more literal sense of how, for example, animals provided sustenance for seafarers and in the more complex sense of how collaboration with and defiance of more-than-human entities shaped seafarers’ self-understandings and their sense of their journeys’ significance – and here I attend specifically to ideas about travel and heroism particular to early modern England. Finally, this chapter asks how attending to the non-human elements of these voyages can help us interpret them as episodes in environmental history. While Richmond Barbour has recently argued that they should be approached in this manner owing to the EIC’s providing a prototype for today’s resource-hungry – and so often resource-extracting – multinational corporations (2021, pp 240, 248–9), I am interested here not so much in how the Company and its agents impacted upon the world, but in how that world acted upon them.

This is an analytic approach that comes with certain dangers. An essay on the EIC in a volume on migration might, quite reasonably, be expected to focus on the large-scale and often traumatic movements of peoples towards which the Company was to contribute. During the EIC’s lifetime, its ships transported a substantial number of British men – and later women – to lands within the Indian Ocean, and in particular what would become British India; in total, around 4,600 voyages were undertaken from London (Farrington, 2002, p 23). Relatively few people travelled in the opposite direction during this period, but British involvement in – and exploitation of – South Asia occasioned widespread migration to the UK from that region in the 20th century. Early EIC voyages’ contact with the west coast of Africa also helped lay the ground for England’s (and later Britain’s) involvement in the forced migration of African men, women and children across the Atlantic over the following centuries; and in entering the Indian Ocean world, the EIC was beginning to participate in a geographical region that already had a long history of human movement, including via the trade in enslaved peoples (a business in which the Company would itself become involved, albeit in a relatively small way). Why worry about the non-human when there is so much to say about human experience?

One reason is that attending to the more-than-human world can help refocus attention on the power dynamics that prevailed in early EIC voyages. It can be tempting, from a 21st-century perspective, to see these expeditions as events leading inexorably towards British colonial rule. But as a recent historian of the EIC warns us, ‘Teleological thinking elides the radical contingency of historical process [and] overstates the solvency of imperial systems’ (Barbour, 2021, p 206). While it later became the most powerful company the world had seen, the EIC was in a fairly weak position in the early 17th century, both in relation to wealthy states with which it sought trade – in particular the Ottoman Empire, which was the great power within the Arabian Peninsula, and the Mughal Empire, which had, during the 16th century, conquered much of what is now India – and in relation to the European powers with which it jostled, Portugal and the Dutch Republic. According to Nandini Das, at the time of the first official English embassy to the Mughal Empire, which took place between 1616 and 1618, the English ‘barely had a toehold in the country’, and to the Mughals themselves ‘they were hardly worth a mention’ (2023, p xviii). Early voyages, she notes, were above all marked by ‘uncertainty’ (Das, 2023, p xix); and this uncertainty, I want to demonstrate, derived in part from non-human factors. Attending to such factors, I would suggest, can help us see the Company’s agents less as elements of an implacable force of human history and more as individuals with significant vulnerabilities, and it can therefore provide a more textured sense of the early history of the English in India. It can also steer us away from seeing these figures – as they have so often been seen in British historiography – as heroic adventurers imbued with extraordinary autonomy.

An initial example through which to explore some of these issues can be found in the spaniel belonging to Sir Henry Middleton, the general – that is, the overall commander – of the sixth EIC voyage. In October of 1611, the fleet arrived at Suvali (or Swally) near Surat, beleaguered after what had thus far been a far from satisfactory voyage. They were in a delicate position: to conduct trade, Middleton needed to circumvent a fellow European power – Portugal – which had a more long-standing presence in the region. At Suvali the prospects of successful trade depended on the disposition of Mukarrab Khān, the Mughal governor of Cambay. The EIC fleet waited several weeks for his arrival, which then took place on a grand scale: as recorded by Nicholas Downton, captain of one of the fleet’s smaller ships, the governor appeared with ‘one hundred horsemen, and many more footmen’, as well as ‘fiue Elephants, with diuers Camels, Carts and Oxen, for transportation of his prouisions’. In addition, Downton notes, ‘he had diuers [that is, several] Carts to carrie his Leopards’ (quoted in Purchas, 1625, p 298).

The English could hardly match this multi-species spectacle; in fact, as so frequently in their early voyages to the empires of Asia, they were embarrassed by an absence of impressive gifts to bestow as a means of greasing the wheels of commerce (Das, 2023, p 85). The most noteworthy thing they had brought along, in fact, was their flagship. At 1,300 tons, the Trades Increase was enormous by the standard of contemporary vessels; implicitly comparing it with the governor’s menagerie, Barbour describes it as ‘the marine equivalent of a troupe of castled elephants’ (2021, p 140). Mukarrab Khān expressed an interest in visiting the ship, even dining aboard and then spending the night there, and he took the opportunity to eye up items that he felt might be of interest to the emperor or that he fancied himself.³ Middleton granted the governor whatever he desired, though with some exceptions: he declined the request for ‘his perfumed Ierkin’ (that is, his jacket) and for ‘his Spaniell Dogge’ (Purchas, 1625, p 299). Middleton eventually relented, however, after Mukarrab Khān sent messengers the following day once again requesting these items.

The surrender of Middleton’s spaniel nicely illustrates the EIC’s precarious position in India, both in terms of the animal’s basic size – it is dwarfed by the governor’s elephants and leopards – and in terms of its significance: Middleton clearly did not wish to give it up, but Mukarrab Khān was not a man he could afford to displease. The spaniel incident interests me most, however, as a way into thinking about non-human agency in these voyages. What was the spaniel doing in Surat, and what was the effect of its presence aboard and then disappearance from the Trades Increase? Like other items given as gifts to officials and rulers during early EIC voyages, the spaniel’s worth can be regarded both in financial terms – diplomatic gifts were always evaluated in terms of local currency, and they were of course designed to facilitate economic exchange – and in more nebulous terms – as an item that was valuable due to its novelty (from the Mughal perspective), in relation to its connection to the giver or their nation, or in terms of the peculiar tastes of the recipient. But was the spaniel always intended to be a gift? In later voyages, dogs of this breed, which had a particular connection to English gentlemanly identity, were certainly given as gifts to Mughal officials (Das, 2023, p 163). But Middleton’s initial refusal to part with his spaniel may make us wonder whether it was on the voyage to serve a different purpose. It is difficult to imagine that – unlike the horses and attack dogs carried into the Americas and the Caribbean by Spanish conquistadors – it was deemed a working animal: spaniels can be used in hunting, but they do not hunt on ships in the manner of cats. Instead, the spaniel may have been taken along as a companion animal: that is, a creature that establishes a dynamic with a human involving two-way dependency (Haraway, 2008). The social historian Keith Thomas points out that the English have always been especially fond of dogs, and that ‘it was in early modern times that the foundations [of the nation’s] canine obsession [were] laid’ (1983, p 108).

Even if the spaniel had always been intended as a gift (perhaps to a man of higher rank than Mukarrab Khān), by November of 1611 Middleton would have been travelling with it for around a year and a half. At the very least, it would have served to shore up Middleton’s aristocratic identity as he entered lands unfamiliar to him; but there seems no reason not to assume, in addition, that Middleton and the spaniel had developed a mutual affection. What, then, was the impact of its loss? I am keenly aware that even asking this question risks sentimentalizing a man in charge of a venture that contributed – however indirectly and at however great a distance – towards the brutal English (or rather British) colonization of India. But there is surely an equal risk in refusing to treat historical actors like Middleton as individuals with vulnerabilities. What we do know, mainly from Downton’s journal, is that the general’s mental health declined considerably as the sixth voyage unfolded: Middleton ‘ached with the personal burden of responsibility for [its] failures’, the most prominent of which was the loss of the Trades Increase at Bantam – in modern-day Indonesia – when the ship was brought onto the beach for repairs (Barbour, 2021, p 227). There, Barbour records, Middleton ‘succumbed to disease and despair on 24 May 1613’ (2021, p 227). Retaining mental health during long voyages is challenging in any circumstances (Liebich and Publicover, 2021, pp 24–5); doing so in the cramped conditions and perilous circumstances of early EIC voyages must have been almost impossible. In his privileged but isolated position as the voyage’s general, facing continual rumbles of discontent from officers, sailors and merchants, whose diverse needs and desires he was compelled to manage and arbitrate between, the loyalty and straightforward affection of a dog – and spaniels are notorious for their affectionate nature – may have been especially meaningful to Middleton.

To put this another way: narrating Middleton’s loss of his spaniel gives us a rather different way of thinking about early modern European voyages into the Indian Ocean than might, for example, Os Lusíadas, the 16th-century epic poem recounting Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in 1497–99. Though nothing in English matched de Camões’ national epic, accounts of English voyages into the global oceans were often, similarly, given heroic trappings; and as Claire Jowitt notes, across the early modern period ‘maritime activities and achievements became key cultural markers of, and justifications for, Europeans’ beliefs about the superiority of their value systems’ (2020, p 533). Heroic narratives of English voyages written and published in the period contemporary with them – most notably Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589; expanded 1598–1600), a compendium of voyage accounts explicitly aimed at encouraging further English maritime expansion – then ‘underpinned the development of the nineteenth-century theory of “Great man” history’ (Jowitt, 2020, p 533). Treating men like Middleton not as figures consistently exerting their will on the world, but instead as individuals often at the mercy of – or at least working in collaboration with – non-human agencies, can therefore help us see these voyages less as the early stirrings of an English global expansion fuelled by heroic patriotism and feats of derring-do and more as episodes involving what ecomaterialist scholars might call an ‘assemblage of actors’.

Non-human organisms

Organisms of various kinds and in various states shaped long-distance voyages of the early modern period. Pre-slaughtered animals were taken aboard for consumption: one of the more striking examples can be found in the 14,000 dried penguins provisioning an English voyage returning in 1592 from what is now Argentina (Jowitt, 2020, p 543). While early modern English sailors generally survived on a diet of dry salted beef and cod, as well as pickled beef and pork, live animals were also brought aboard to be slaughtered mid voyage, and both live animals and carcasses were sometimes gifted between high-ranking men on different ships as a means of maintaining good relations (Strachan and Penrose, 1971, pp 34–5; Das, 2023, p 66). A stock of live animals could also be taken aboard from island or coastal way stations – frequently, ones that had been stocked deliberately for this purpose. The third EIC voyage of 1607–10 stopped at the Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic, settled by the Portuguese over a century earlier, and the sailors helped themselves to 70 goats (Barbour, 2009, p 158). St Helena was another island stocked with animals for this purpose, and coastal locations around southern tip of Africa became key reprovisioning points for English mariners entering the Indian Ocean.

Organisms encountered overseas could also disrupt voyages. Some of these were very small: EIC sailors often lacked immunity from diseases carried by microbes on foreign shores, for example. Bantam, where Middleton died, was known as a particular death-trap for Europeans (Barbour, 2021, pp 205, 227). (In an inversion of this process, diseases carried by European voyages were to cause an almost unthinkable degree of destruction in the Americas.) Larger organisms carried on ships could also prove troublesome. Over the course of the 17th century, many ‘exotic’ animals were transported on EIC ships, sometimes accompanied by handlers from their point of origin, as in the case of an elephant accompanied by two Bantanese men in 1675 (Farrington, 2002, p 119). These creatures could sometimes pose a physical threat. In one case, a tiger cub unwisely shipped from Surat was killed after it ‘severely mauled’ a sailor (Farrington, 2002, p 119). Causing far more frequent disruption, however, were rats. As already noted, long-distance voyages in this period typically took cats along so that they could kill rats, which otherwise raided food stocks and destroyed sails. One Tudor text confidently states that there are ‘few ships but have cats belonging to them’ (Baldwin, 1988, p 14), and the similarity of feline DNA across major global trade routes – for example between Kenya and Sri Lanka – hints at their presence on board ships (Bradshaw, 2014, p 56). Nonetheless, rats continued to present significant problems on EIC voyages. In a journal of 1616–17, one seafarer complained of the damage caused to sailcloth by ‘innumerable many Ratts’. It was not, he complained, only stores and sails they attacked. They also attacked sleeping sailors, and they feasted, rather gruesomely, on men who had died in the night: ‘some menn … before morning have had their toes eate quite off’ (Strachan and Penrose, 1971, p 44; see also Das, 2023, p 64). What is worth noting here is that rats do not simply diminish supplies and harry humans both living and dead; by damaging sails, they also affect the speed of the voyage – and the longer the voyage lasts, the more deadly it becomes.

The other organism which consistently affected the speed and safety of early EIC ships was shipworm. As Derek Lee Nelson and Adam Sundberg explain, while these marine parasites – which are ‘are actually related to clams’ – feed ‘mostly on plankton’, they have, in an ‘evolutionary quirk’, also ‘learned to eat wood’; some species can ‘grow to a meter or more’, though most are much smaller, and ‘often went undetected by seamen …, who lived in constant fear, never knowing if the ships below their feet were hollowed-out hulks’ (2023, pp 38–9). Until the advent of effective copper sheaths (and thereafter iron and steel hulls), shipworms were kept at bay through ‘sacrificial’ wooden sheaths placed around the hull and through the use of human hair and tar, which, wrote one EIC mariner, ‘the worm […] cannot abide’ (quoted in Barbour, 2009, p 220). Another issue presented by long-distance voyages was that ships’ carpenters lacked both the materials to repair hulls and dry docks, in which careening (turning a ship on its side for repair) could be safely managed. In fact, the loss of the sixth voyage’s flagship occurred because, lacking the proper support when brought ashore for repair in Bantam, its mainmast collapsed, and with no appropriate timber available it was abandoned. In damaging the prospects of the sixth voyage, then, the shipworms and other marine organisms that had ravaged the hull of the Trades Increase also helped dispose of its by then spaniel-less general, Henry Middleton.

Vibrant matter

In this section, which sits under a term taken from the new materialist philosopher Jane Bennett (2010), I wish to consider some of the ‘things’ – that is, the matter beyond living organisms – that shaped these early voyages and the experiences of those who participated in them. Perhaps most important among these were the ships bought or built by the Company; and attending to the agency of shipworms can remind us that these ships were not ‘givens’, but constantly degrading and emerging entities. Anthony Farrington notes that in the early modern period ‘four voyages to Asia over a period of eight to ten years was the expected life of a wooden hull’; and this lifespan assumes a regular regime of repair (2004, p 24). In an Atlantic storm, both the Trades Increase and the smaller Peppercorn suffered fractured masts – a result, perhaps, of the low-quality timber from which they were built. William Burrell, the man who oversaw the construction of the Trades Increase at Deptford, had requested Latvian timber, but it appears this material never arrived (Barbour, 2021, p 34). In any case, new masts – including a mainmast for the Trades Increase – were hurriedly fashioned from trees felled on the Cape Verde islands; and as we have seen, it was the flagship’s mainmast that eventually fractured during its attempted repair at Bantam. Had the Latvian timber arrived, perhaps Middleton would not have succumbed to despair.

It perhaps takes the vision of a novelist like Conrad – a man who also knew a thing or two about seafaring and about the European footprint in Asia – to bring home the strangeness of all this. Pepper was not unknown in early modern England; during the 16th century, it had been imported from Africa (Dimmock, 2022, pp 39–40). But the Portuguese discovery of sea routes to the Indian Ocean significantly increased its flow into Western Europe from what is now the Indonesian archipelago, and the EIC and Dutch East India Company were able to secure huge profits through its importation. Marlow’s ironical apostrophe nicely captures the manner in which EIC agents were in the thrall both of their employers – Company shareholders – and, in some strange way, the pepper itself. Their heroism, in Conrad’s vision, is both dependent on and qualified by the relatively mundane matter for which they risked their own lives and took the lives of others.

Another key material carried by early EIC voyages was the paper on which ‘remarkable’ events were recorded. It is, in fact, what Das calls the EIC’s ‘obsession with paperwork and record-keeping’ that allows us to reconstruct the voyages in relatively fine detail (2023, p xxiv, see also p 63). (English voyages of plunder and discovery have, by contrast, left a piecemeal paper trail.) As well as blank pages waiting to be filled, ships carried journals – or copies of journals – from previous voyages; rather like early modern Rough Guides, these provided information (sometimes unhelpfully outdated) on foreign lands as well as on winds and ocean currents. The reading material carried abroad also included voyage narratives printed for a wider audience, and on the third EIC voyage (1607–10) such material had a particular effect. Unlucky with winds, the Hector and Red Dragon became stuck in mid-Atlantic, and their decision to seek provisions in Sierra Leone was taken after reading about it in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, the compendium of voyage narratives mentioned earlier (Barbour, 2009, p 14).⁴

Sierra Leone was also the site of the most notorious incident – or possible incident – during these early voyages, which has again to do with texts carried aboard. Two supposed 19th-century transcriptions of the now-lost journal of the voyage’s general, William Keeling, record a shipboard performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet staged for at least one African man: the Portuguese-speaking Lucas Fernandez, who served as interpreter during the EIC’s sojourn. The validity of these transcriptions remains questionable, but a production of Hamlet does not seem out of the question. Ambassadors visiting London were often entertained by theatrical performances at Whitehall; in this case, perhaps, the theatre itself was mobile. (In neither instance, it appears, was difficulty in understanding English deemed a significant obstacle.) If this performance did occur, it was, we can assume, the first performance of Shakespeare ever to take place outside Europe (Hamlet had been written only around seven years earlier), and to make it happen – in whatever form it took – the third voyage would need to have been carrying either the first quarto of Hamlet, printed in 1603, or the longer and more familiar second quarto, printed in 1604–05. Transformed into performances, these books contributed towards the voyage’s success by facilitating good relations with trading partners.⁵

If the 19th-century transcriptions are to be believed, this was not, in fact, the only performance of Shakespeare during the third voyage of the EIC: there were two subsequent productions staged in mid-ocean, first of Richard II and then again of Hamlet. The entry recording this final performance also reflects on its purpose: Keeling permitted it ‘to keepe [his] people from idleness and unlawful games, or sleep’ (Barbour, 2009, p 17).⁶ Keeling’s remarks – if, of course, they are his remarks – can help us reflect on the final form of non-human agency I wish to touch on here: oceanic agency. Traversing the oceans before the age of steam was challenging partly because one had to work with an oceanic environment that often refused to cooperate. Journals from these voyages are peppered with anxious entries concerning winds and currents, as well as sandbanks and bars that, in unfamiliar waters, were tantamount to mines, especially for a vessel as large as the Trades Increase. As these mariners well knew, though we can sometimes be prone to forget, far from being a blank and smooth surface of connection, the oceanic environment is a site with its own flows and topographies, and it can, in different circumstances, be collaborator or antagonist. Long periods spent in regions without wind – most famously, the doldrums – could have severe consequences on morale; as Cheryl Fury notes in a study of breaches of discipline and their punishment during early EIC voyages, ‘for Tudor-Stuart seamen the 2–3 year round trip to the East Indies was one of the most challenging forms of maritime employment’ (2020, p 153). Because the Company ‘frowned upon cards and backgammon’ (Das, 2023, p 65), other forms of entertainment were necessary, and shipboard performances could do for mental health what lemons did for physical health. These did not have to be performances of scripted drama; other ‘things’ brought on early voyages included musical instruments (Das, 2023, p 42).

People

Shipboard performances were valuable in part because they reminded seafarers of home, in what were unfamiliar lands and waters; and perhaps most unfamiliar, to English mariners, were the monsoon winds, a system they had to learn from pilots and mariners with experience navigating Indian Ocean routes. One individual who directly suffered from the English mariners’ lack of knowledge was a man named Nasher. After a brief sojourn in Socotra, an island at the entrance of the Gulf of Aden, the Hector and the Red Dragon headed east across the Arabian Sea, having spoken with Gujarati merchants about trading prospects on the west coast of India. As they were leaving, Nasher swam out to join them, hoping to escape enslavement on Socotra. Unfortunately for him, however, the ships were attempting the crossing to India too late in the year, and they ran into monsoon winds; when they were forced to retreat to Socotra, the king would only agree to provide provisions if Nasher were returned to him (Barbour, 2008, p 268).

In addition to providing an example of how more-than-human forces might shape individuals’ experiences during early EIC voyages, Nasher’s aborted journey across the Arabian Sea helps remind us that these voyages involved people other than Englishmen. We have already heard of the Bantanese elephant handlers who sailed to London in 1675. Also in the late 17th century, two ambassadors from the deposed Sultan of Bantam came to London requesting arms; in an echo of the third voyage’s visit to Sierra Leone in 1607, they were entertained with an adaption of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (Farrington, 2002, p 118). A less voluntary visit to London was made by a man named Corey, abducted in 1613 from Saldanha Bay – around 150 kilometres north-west of what is now Cape Town – by Gabriel Towerson, then captaining the Hector, in the hope that he might provide intelligence helpful in future voyages. Staying at the house of the EIC governor Sir Thomas Smythe – who had on his wall an Inuit canoe that served, as Barbour puts it, as ‘a reminder of the governor’s global interests and the Company’s perpetual hope of a northwest passage to Asia’ (2021, p 11) – Corey learned enough English to continually express his desire to return home. Granted his wish after six months,⁷ he then exacted a degree of revenge on his abductors by disclosing to his countrymen that the brass the English had been using to purchase livestock and other provisions was of little value in London (Stevenson, 2022, p 197). As a result, the price of cattle rose. But Corey also went on to assist English mariners rounding Africa. A journal entry from June 1614 has him providing a ‘young steere’ to Downton, the colleague of Middleton (Foster, 2016, p 2), and another journal records that inhabitants of a craal in Saldania would greet English mariners by saying ‘Sir Thomas Smith’s English ships’, presumably words learned from Corey (Stevenson, 2022, p 196).

The shorter passage between London and the southern tip of Africa was also undertaken by men involved in the first English experiment with transportation. Nineteen condemned men were taken on the voyage departing in 1615, with ten of them then left at the Cape in the hope that they would establish a way station furnishing provisions for subsequent voyages (that is, that they would become English versions of Corey). This was not a success. The three who had not either died or absconded in Portuguese ships were reconveyed to England in 1616; on arrival home, they deserted and resorted to theft, subsequently being recaptured and then executed (Strachan and Penrose, 1971, p 37). Many more failed to make it home at all. Global voyages in the early modern period were, to say the least, perilous affairs: of the 270 men who departed on Magellan’s circumnavigation of 1519–22, only 18 returned (Magellan himself not among them). The rate of attrition in the EIC was not quite so bad, but the figures remain chilling. Of the first 3,000 mariners who departed for the Indian Ocean, only around a third returned, a proportion mirrored in the voyages of the Dutch East India company (Das, 2023, p 48). As one contemporary pamphleteer and critic of the EIC put it: ‘though ships come home, yet they leave the men behind’ (quoted in Barbour, 2021, p 250).

These men suffered at the hands of various forms of non-human agency. Some died at sea, including in shipwrecks wrought by a combination of heavy seas, marine parasites and deadly shoals. In other cases, placid seas were the problem. During the first EIC voyage (1601–03), a lack of winds in the Atlantic left the ships stuck at the equator for a full month; by the time they arrived at the Cape, a hundred men – a fifth of the voyage’s complement – had perished. The mortality rate for the voyage as a whole was around 60 per cent (Fury, 2020, p 153). A direct consequence of losses of this kind was that EIC ships became decidedly multinational spaces, with able seamen picked up in port towns en route. There are records of Indian, Javanese and Japanese mariners on EIC ships, some of whom made it all the way to England. Most of these returned to their native lands on subsequent EIC voyages after staying in England for as long as a year (the fleet leaving England in 1615, for example, carried 11 Japanese men and 14 men from Gujarat; Das, 2023, pp 47–8), but others remained in England for longer, or even indefinitely, gathering especially around the shipyards at Deptford (p 54). Some modern accounts of Corey’s sojourn in London suggest that his presence would have been deeply strange to early modern Londoners; but as recent research is demonstrating, London’s developing status as a global port in this period was rendering it an increasingly multicultural space – due in no small part to the early voyages of the EIC.

Conclusion

In concluding, I wish to return to issues raised briefly in my introduction: the ways in which these voyages have been ideologically framed and the relevance of non-human agency to this framing. In doing so, I aim also to place this study of mobility within the context of ideas about travel and its effect on the traveller that are more specific to early modern England.

‘The restless energy of maritime heroic values dovetails well with colonial ideology’, writes Claire Jowitt, ‘since continuous expansion and forward movement are the assumptions upon which both are predicated’ (2020, p 544). For empire to function, of course, this ‘forward movement’ needs to be accompanied by return voyages (of ships, if not necessarily of individuals), thus mapping neatly onto the dynamic of movement encountered in chivalric romance, in which the hero moves away from and then returns to the court (Spearing, 1994, pp 138–9). This connection between romance narratives and European voyages of expansion is, in fact, one that has received significant scholarly attention, and for good reason. Famously, conquistadors on their way to the Americas carried romances with them, while Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations contained (in its first edition, though not its second) the romance-inflected text Mandeville’s Travels. In short, European voyagers in this period – including English ones – understood their adventures through the lens of the romance narratives with which they were familiar.

Like scholarship within mobility studies, these narratives take an interest in what happens to someone when they travel. The knight-errant’s identity depended, as his name would suggest, on mobility (‘errant’ here conveys wandering or roving), and this mobility allowed the knight to confirm and, in some sense, update his – or occasionally her – identity: feats undertaken away from the court established a chivalric heroism whose dependence on movement is apparent in its fundamental relation to horsemanship (‘chivalry’ is a borrowing from the French chevalerie, which itself derives from the French word for ‘horse’, cheval). But how, exactly, is the knight-errant understood to move through their environment? It seems fair to suggest that although chivalric heroism is sometimes concerned with stoical endurance, it usually depends on the individual’s capacity to dominate the space through which they move; the ideal knight-errant, that is, should not be permeated by their environment, but instead remain sealed off from it, even while affecting it.

This is not quite a paradox. Like the knight-errant, Jonson’s ideal traveller can act upon – can even choose to incorporate elements of – their environment, but they will not be acted upon by that environment. The ‘seas, stormes, tempests’ through which they will travel indicate perils that are cultural as much as geographical and meteorological: a fear often encountered in English texts from this period is that travellers might be tainted through contact with foreigners and their customs. And yet, as the enjambment highlights, William will return from these adventures as precisely the same ‘selfe’, and this is because he will have worked at his travel – hence the familiar early modern play on travel and travail in Jonson’s final words – rather than having been worked upon by the dangerous world through which he has passed.

What light might this poem – which draws on both classical and medieval notions of travel – throw on the early voyages of the EIC? It is one of the enduring interests of state-sponsored travel that those who journey abroad to ‘represent’ a state no longer become, in the strictest sense, ‘representatives’ of that state; instead, they may begin to take on the qualities of, or even sympathize with, the peoples with whom they now associate (which is why, even today, diplomats are moved between postings every three or four years). Would the ‘Englishness’ of those Englishmen who travelled to the Indian Ocean in the early 17th century have been similarly qualified by the lands into which they travelled? This is certainly the view of Barbour, albeit that he seems to take the more Jonsonian position that these men had a high degree of control over their transformations: ‘Their opportunistic pursuit of two enormous challenges, survival and profit, freed these mariners from perpetual performance of the Jacobean identities and nationalist Christian agendas … On unfamiliar shores, they understood the need to adapt and, where possible, collude with local powers of whatever ethical or religious persuasion’ (2021, p 136). There is plenty of evidence to back up Barbour’s position. The third EIC voyage’s William Hawkins spent a long period at the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, becoming known as the ‘English Khan’, and while there he married an Armenian Christian named Mariam Khan. (When Hawkins eventually left the court, his wife travelled with him, and they were sailing to England on the same ship as Corey when Hawkins died in mid-Atlantic; Mariam then married Towerson – Corey’s abductor – before both returned to India in 1617.)⁸ Jonson would, I think we can assume, have disapproved of this degree of acculturation.

It is also worth remembering that, as noted earlier, Englishmen on EIC voyages would have worked and suffered with men from several different parts of the world, again perhaps complicating their sense of national identity. Where we might take this concern with the ‘hybridization’ of the traveller further, however, is in considering them permeable not only in their capacity to be affected by (or to take on aspects of) different cultural identities, but also in their vulnerability to non-human actors. The knights-errant of medieval and early modern romance narratives frequently fought dragons, or as they were known in Middle English, ‘worms’; in doing so, as I have explained, they established their heroism by exerting their will on their environment. The worms which posed challenges to EIC voyagers provide a very different context for considering heroism and vulnerability. Like the ocean currents and monsoon winds affecting the ships’ paths through the waters, the microbial organisms invading seafarers’ bodies, or the pepper that drew them into the Indian Ocean in the first place, shipworms undermined human autonomy within these voyages. In a sense, this is something that would have been very well understood by the seafarers themselves: as scholarship of the past two decades has demonstrated, early modern men and women perceived their bodies to have a high degree of ‘openness’ (Paster, 2004). Work focused on travel has demonstrated how this notion of the body’s permeability meant that those entering new lands were thought to be affected by climate: what has been called ‘geohumoral theory’ held that the body’s composition was directly shaped by geographical location, adding a more physiological dimension to widespread concerns over how foreign ‘cultures’ might contaminate the traveller (Feerick, 2006). What work in ecomaterialism can perhaps bring to this understanding of early modern travel, and to studies of mobility more generally, is a fuller sense of how travellers entered into dialogue with ‘things’ beyond climate and people – how those travellers’ agencies, and therefore their identities, were shaped or compromised by other matter(s) both organic and inorganic and both within and beyond the ship, establishing something like the dynamic that Stacy Alaimo (2016) has called ‘trans-corporeality’.

To an extent, what this involves is simply focusing greater attention on the voyages themselves rather than their consequences and, further, treating the oceans across which these ships moved not as smooth surfaces but instead as textured sites that could in various ways resist as well as collaborate with English expansionism. And if the risk of approaching the voyages in this way is that it may divert attention from the responsibility of those involved for the often-horrific consequences of this expansionism, a benefit is that it can help us see these historical episodes not as faits accompli, but instead in all their perilous contingency. Seawater is, after all, at the very heart of these narratives, for its buoyancy reduces the amount of energy – and therefore cost – required to move goods. Today, ‘[m]oving a 20-foot container from Shanghai to Frankfurt by ship costs a mere third as much as shifting it by plane’ (Armstrong, 2022, p 14); in the early modern period, the choice was between ships powered by wind and arduous journeys across land involving camels and horses. The EIC voyages’ negotiation of this watery world can be – and has been – read through a heroic lens, as a tale of dignified suffering and perseverance in the face of adversity.⁹ But attending to the non-human agents at play in these endeavours does not need to lead us in this direction. Instead, it can pull into sharp focus the weak position the EIC was in during the early years of its existence; and, more generally, it can help us better understand how, to return to Tim Cresswell’s words, ‘human mobilities [are] in an entangled web of “other” mobilities’ (2014, p 713), from ocean currents to animal carcasses, timber, pepper and spaniels.