Sebouh Aslanian: `Quedah Merchant was no ordinary vessel’

reporter.am
June 18, 2009

Expert puts legendary ship’s story in historical context

Earlier this month, Armenian Reporter Washington Editor Emil Sanamyan
wrote about the recent discovery of a 17th-century Armenian ship, the
Quedagh Merchant, off the coast of the Dominican Republic. The rare
find, which has excited archeologists and historians, has also
highlighted the lesser-studied periods in Armenian diaspora history in
Iran, India, and elsewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries.

One of few experts on this subject is Sebouh Aslanian, a historian of
the early modern Indian Ocean who will be teaching at Cornell
University next year as a Mellon Foundation post-doctoral fellow in
world history.

Dr. Aslanian’s book, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean:
Circulation and the Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from
New Julfa, Isfahan, 1605-1747, is coming out next year from the
University of California Press. He is writing a second book, "The
Santa Catharina: Voyages from a Ship’s Floating Archives to the 18th
Century History of the Indian Ocean," as well as an essay on the
Quedah Merchant (Quedagh Merchant).

On June 16 Dr. Aslanian responded to Mr. Sanamyan’s questions by
e-mail.

Armenian Reporter: How did Armenians become involved in maritime
trade?

Sebouh Aslanian: The earliest references to Armenian maritime trade
can be traced back to Cilician Armenia, a kingdom on the
Mediterranean. After the fall of Cilicia in 1375, Armenians ceased
being a maritime people and were largely landlocked until the Safavid
ruler, Shah Abbas I, forcibly resettled the population of Julfa on the
Aras River (Araks in Armenian) to his imperial capital of Isfahan in
1605.

Julfan merchants work with the English
Shortly after their relocation to Iran, the Julfans, with Safavid
backing, became important merchants in the Indian Ocean arena. Roughly
until the second half of the 17th century most of their trade was
dependent on overland caravan routes both to the commercial centers
near the Mediterranean where they sold Iranian raw silk to European
merchants, as well as east toward India where they traveled to engage
in the textile trade of the subcontinent.

In 1622 the strategic gateway of the Indian Ocean from the Persian
Gulf at Hormuz passed from Portuguese control to Iranian rule, thus
allowing a greater number of Julfans to fan out into the Indian Ocean
basin.

In 1688 another event paved the way for Julfan-Armenian participation
in Indian Ocean maritime trade. On June 22 of that year, an eminent
Julfan merchant residing in London, Coja Panous Calendar (khwaja Panos
Ghalandarian), acting on behalf of the larger Julfan community of
merchants, signed an agreement with the English East India Company in
London, whereby the Julfans agreed to transport their silk and other
merchandise using English company shipping and were granted a number
of privileges, such as equal rights with "Englishmen freeborn" in
residing in the company’s settlements in such places as Madras,
Bombay, and later Calcutta.

Thus, soon after signing the 1688 agreement, many Julfan Armenians
began using English company ships to transport their goods and
themselves across the Indian Ocean.

Armenian ships on the Indian Ocean

AR: Did Armenians own and operate their ships?

SA: Around the same time, some wealthy Armenians became ship owners in
their own right and began to operate their trade using their own
ships. In most cases, the nakhudas, Persian for pilot or captain of a
ship, were Europeans or Indians. In a number of cases, however, we see
Julfans who were also nakhudas. There are several famous Julfan
nakhudas that we know of.

Some Julfan merchants, such as Khwaja Minas of Surat, were famous
shipping tycoons and operated a merchant fleet that plied the waters
of the Indian Ocean and traded as far a field as the Red Sea,
Southeast Asia, and Manila as early as the 1680s. Much of the shipping
between India and Spanish-controlled Manila [in the present-day
Philippines] was done on Armenian ships.

So there are about a dozen cases of Armenian-owned ships sailing the
Indian Ocean in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Another common practice among Julfan merchants was to freight ships
from other merchants in order to load their cargo on board and
participate in what was known as the "country trade" (or intra-Asian
port-to-port trade) in the Indian Ocean.

This was the case with a Julfan-freighted ship called the Santa
Catharina carrying merchandise (including about 2,000 pieces of family
and mercantile correspondence that later ended up in a British archive
where I discovered them) on a return trip between Bengal and Basra
when it was intercepted by the British navy in 1748 on the pretext
that it was a French vessel and could therefore be legally confiscated
as a wartime prize (Britain and France were at war at the time and
both sides were engaged in taking the enemy’s ships as prizes).

I am now in the process of writing my second book where I will attempt
to write the history of the Indian Ocean during the 18th century using
the Julfan documents stored in Santa Catharina’s hold.

Cannons and European dominance
AR: What were relations like between Armenian and European merchants
on sea?

SA: The Europeans, including the Portuguese, English, and Dutch, were
dominant on water from the first arrival in Calicut of Vasco Da Gama
in 1498.

Some Asian merchants (including the Julfan Armenians) also had a share
of the maritime trade but they were progressively edged out as the
European East India Companies came to dominate the trade of the Indian
Ocean and impose their state-chartered monopolies there.

Asian merchants had to be careful of European power. European ships
dominated the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean because they had better
guns and sails. Cannon on ships was a European innovation and among
the principal reasons for European dominance.

Before the arrival of the Portuguese, trade in the Indian Ocean was
mostly peaceful and merchants were unaccustomed to seeing ships armed
with cannons, as no Asian power had thought about controlling and
monopolizing an entire body of water as the Portuguese and, following
them, the Dutch and English did.

Enter Captain Kidd
AR: How did the encounter between Quedagh Merchant and Captain Kidd in
1698 come about?

SA: Captain William Kidd began his career as a privateer and was hired
by the British Crown in the 1690s to capture pirates. Kidd arrived in
the Indian Ocean traveling from New York in 1696 and had little luck
in capturing any pirates. It was then that he turned his sights on
capturing merchant vessels, plundering several small vessels but
without significant cargo.

Then, on January 31, 1698, Kidd came across his greatest prize. A
400-ton vessel much of whose freight belonged to Julfan-Armenian
merchants residing in Surat, the Quedah Merchant was on its return
voyage from Bengal where it had sold its cargo and was returning with
large quantities of raw silk, cotton, muslins, calico, opium,
saltpeter, iron, and many chests filled with silver.

According to a court deposition given in London on 17 July 1701 by
Coji Babba, one of the Julfans invested in the ship’s cargo, the
Julfan stakeholders of the Quedah owned "1200 Bayles of Muslins raw
silk and Callicoes of all sorts fourteen hundred baggs of brown Sugars
84 Bayles of raw silke and eighty Chests of Opium besides iron and
other goods," including diamonds, rubies, gold bars, and so on.

The vessel had just rounded the southern tip of India and was sailing
north, with its Armenian colors, when two of Kidd’s ships, The
Adventure Galley and November, both flying French colors (a typical
ploy used by pirates to deceive their unsuspecting prey) intercepted
it near Cochin.

Off to Madagascar
Upon seeing the Adventure’s flag, the Quedah’s English captain, John
Wright, hoisted his French flag and sent over one of his French
officers who showed Kidd the Quedah’s French pass. Kidd then boarded
the vessel and, showing the Captain his English letter of marque
authorizing him to seize French ships, confiscated the vessel.

At this point, Coji Babba Sulthanoom, one of about seven Julfans
traveling on the ship, confronted the English pirate and offered him
20,000 rupees to set the ship free, but Kidd spurned the offer. He
took the Quedah to the nearby port of Quillon where he sold some of
its cargo at an estimated price of 7,000 to 8,000 pounds. He then
sailed the Quedah to Madagascar, a famous pirate outpost in the Indian
Ocean.

As Kidd’s flagship vessel, the Adventure, was badly leaking and unable
to make the long journey back to North America, Kidd refitted the
Quedah, renamed the Adventure Prize.

In the fall of 1699, Kidd’s crew sailed to the Caribbean island of
Hispaniola with The Adventure Prize, whence Kidd sailed on another
vessel to New York harbor, where he was hoping to get a pardon from
the Earl of Bellomont, his erstwhile friend and business partner and
the governor of New York and Massachusetts, who had influential
friends in London.

But instead Kidd was arrested and shipped to London (along with some
of the Quedah’s cargo that had not yet been sold) to face trial on
charges of piracy and murder.

AR: Why was there such a tough verdict against Kidd in a British
court?

SA: Part of the reason for this sea change in English policy with
regard to piracy has to do with events unfolding in Surat, one of the
most important port cities in Mughal India.

Three ships plundered
The 1690s brought in a rich harvest of booty for pirates and
privateers preying on Mughal shipping along the Red Sea-Surat corridor
frequented by pilgrim and merchant ships alike. It was also the most
taxing decade for the East India Company’s factory (colony – Ed.) in
Surat.

Three important ships belonging to Surat-based merchants were
plundered in quick succession during that period. Genj-i-Sawai (known
in European sources as the Gunnesway), the Fatehi Mohammed (The Great
Mohhamed), and the Quedah Merchant were all ships with significantly
rich cargos.

The first appears to have belonged to Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (who
ruled in 1658-1707) and was returning with pilgrims from Mecca when it
was plundered by Captain Avery. The Fatehi Mohammed, also plundered by
pirates on its return voyage from the Red Sea with a cargo of pilgrims
and silver, was owned by the "merchant prince" Mulla Abdul Ghafur, the
most influential Muslim merchant of Surat.

The plunder of these ships sent shock waves in Surat’s mercantile
community and even provoked the ire of the Mughal court. The British
factory in Surat came under intense pressure from the Muslim Governor
of the city to compensate for losses and provide secure convoys for
Surati shipping.

The price of English business
Of these, however, the capture of the Quedah seems to have been the
event that finally tipped the scale against the East India
Company. The Quedah was no ordinary vessel. Mukhlis Khan, an eminent
Mughal nobleman and a leading member of Emperor Aurangzeb’s court,
appears to have been heavily invested in the ship’s cargo.

When news of the Quedah’s capture reached Surat, an Armenian merchant
who had a stake in the Quedah’s cargo had immediately gone to Delhi to
complain to the emperor. He had informed Mukhlis Khan of the events
and the fact that he had seen the English pirate’s letter of marque
from the English Crown. This revelation further reinforced the Mughal
Court’s convictions that all pirates were Englishmen (so-called
"hatmen") and that, moreover, they were operating with the blessing of
the English government and the East India Company.

The news soon spread through the streets of Surat. The city’s Muslim
governor took strong measures to isolate the English factory. The mobs
outside the compound began to whip up anti-European sentiment (already
on the rise after rumors that pirates had violated Indian Muslim women
aboard the Fatih Mohammed, returning from their hajj to Mecca). Faced
with mounting opposition and violence to its presence in India,
Company officials in Surat appealed to the Court of Directors in
London to increase pressure on Parliament to pass strict legislation
outlawing piracy.

It was in this context that the High Court of Admiralty in London
issued an arrest warrant for Kidd. Though the Court had offered a
general pardon for pirates that same year, Kidd was exempted from this
amnesty since he had become notoriously implicated in the fate of the
company’s trade in India.

In a sense, he had come to symbolize English piracy in the Indian
Ocean and as such was a liability for the continued success of the
company’s trade in India. His punishment was therefore a price the
company was forced to pay to resume its profitable activities on the
subcontinent.

Piracy or spoils of war?

AR: According to the French pass issued to the Quedah Merchant, the
merchants involved in the ship’s voyage were Khoja Owaness and Khoja
Jakob, as well as Agapiris Parsi Kalendar and Cohergy Nannabye
Parsi. What is the background of these individuals?

SA: During his trial, Kidd had vociferously claimed that the Quedah’s
capture (the principal charge for which he was hanged) did not
constitute piracy in the technical sense, since the ship was traveling
with a French pass or letter of safe conduct, and Kidd was empowered
to take French vessels at a time when England and France were on
opposing sides of a war.

The court had dismissed the existence of the pass in question and
Kidd’s inability to produce the pass before the court was a major
factor in his guilty verdict.

Historians of piracy had also cast doubt on the existence of the pass
until in 1910 an American researcher stumbled across the pass in the
Public Records Office (PRO, now the National Archives of Great
Britain) where it had been misfiled.

Who were the Armenian merchants?

As for the names mentioned in the pass and the actual ownership of the
vessel itself, the present state of scholarly research on the Quedah
Merchant, and the paucity of reliable archival documents regarding the
ship do not permit us to have definitive views.

The few documents in our possession (including one from the PRO
collection and another one from the manuscript collection from the
Bodleian Library of Oxford University) suggest that a group of Julfan
merchants including "Cogi Babba Sulthanum, Augau peree Callendar,
Ovaness Sarkes[,] Fasali di Maruta, Cachig di Jodgar, Marcus di pocus
[Poghos?], Marcus di Ovaness, Maranta Tasseler [?] Ovaness petros,
Bagdasar Avetich Malin Bogoz, Gregore Agazar, Aga Perry Assator
Comondore [?] Aga Mal Mirsa Mahomet, Hagi Mirsa Beg de Bagon, and
others Armenian merchants Subjects of the King of Persia… did hire
upon freight of one Coergi an inhabitant of Suratt the ship Quidah
also Kary Merchant of which Ship he was then owner and John Wright was
master to go from Surrat to Bengall and so back to Suratt." (see HCA
24/127 "High Court of Admiralty: Instance and Prize Courts." PRO) So
it seems that the ship itself belonged to a wealthy merchant in Surat
and was leased or freighted by the Julfan merchants mentioned both in
the French pass as well as in the above-cited document from the PRO
containing Coji Babba’s deposition to the court claiming some of the
goods from the Quedah Merchant that had been brought back to London
with Kidd.

We know next to nothing about the ship’s owner ("Coergi" or "Cohergy
Nannabye Parsi"), though his name suggests that he was a wealthy
member of the Parsi community of merchants active in Surat at the
time.

As to the "Augau peree Callendar" mentioned in the PRO document as
well as a similar document preserved in a manuscript at Oxford there
is no doubt in my mind that he was Aghapiri Calendar (Ghalandarian), a
reputable Julfan merchant operating from Surat with solid connections
with both the Mughal court and the East India Company, whose father
Khwaja Panos Calendar of London had signed the famous "Agreement" of
1688 with the English East India Company.

In fact, both Aghapiri and Coji Babba (Khwaja Babba Sulthanumian) had
been present at Kidd’s trial in London and had pressed charges against
him.

Flying Armenian colors
AR: What is the story of the Armenian merchant marine flag?

SA: The official court proceedings of Kidd’s trial mention that the
Quedah Merchant was indeed "flying Armenian colours" just before
Kidd’s ships had intercepted her.

This seems to have been a rather common practice with Armenian ships
engaged in maritime commerce. In this connection, it is interesting to
note that in the maritime trade between India and Manila, East India
Company officials during the late 17th century occasionally used
Armenian-owned ships flying Armenian colors as a cover for their trade
with the Philippines. It was forbidden for the English to trade with
Manila whereas no such restrictions existed for Armenian ships.

As for the Armenian flag itself, it is reported to have had three
horizontal stripes (red, yellow, red) with the Lamb of God in the
middle yellow stripe. That is the extent of our knowledge on this
flag. Most of our evidence on the flag is scattered in Armenian and
European sources and none of it sheds light on the history of how and
when Julfans began to use it.

Armchair scholars and Armenian history
AR: From state-centric perspective, Armenian history of 16th to 17th
centuries is sort of the "dark ages" after the fall of Armenian
kingdoms and principalities and before the rise of the national
movement for independence. How did you come to study this period?

SA: That is indeed true. Armenian history during the early modern
period (roughly extending from the beginning of the 16th to the late
18th century) is one of the most understudied periods in Armenian
studies.

It is sometimes referred to as the "black hole" of Armenian history on
the grounds that we do not have sufficient primary-source
documentation. This, of course, is far from the truth, and is probably
a reflection of the unfortunate lethargic state of mind of many
Armenian scholars who are more armchair scholars than historians who
get their hands and feet dirty in archives.

I first became interested in this period at the beginning stages of
working on my Columbia University dissertation in 2003. While
conducting archival research in London at the time, I stumbled across
2,000 Julfa-dialect letters and other commercial documents stored at
the PRO in London that had been confiscated by the British Navy from
the Julfan freighted ship, the Santa Catharina. This discovery
prompted me to study the obscure dialect of the Julfans and to conduct
further research in quest of discovering more Julfa-dialect documents.

Since my initial discovery in London, I have traveled and worked in
about 30 archives across 13 countries (including archives in New
Julfa, over 15 archives across Europe, and even in the State Archives
in Mexico City). The result has been the collection of digitized
archives of about 15,000 or so pieces of Julfa-dialect documentation
(amounting to over 100,000 pages of documentation when fully
transcribed) that are not only important in shedding light on Julfan
and Armenian history during the early modern period, but also
important for the study of world or global history during this crucial
period of history.

Many of these documents are mercantile in nature and as such are
primarily useful for economic historians. But there are also other
documents in my collection that include priceless travel accounts or
itineraries written by Armenian merchants and travelers as well as
various historical tracts whose value for scholars goes beyond the
confines of the field of economic history.

A global Armenian network
AR: How did the Julfan merchant network stretching from Amsterdam to
Manila come about? Other than business interests, did it project a
kind of sense of common, national mission?

SA: I have dealt extensively with the expansion of the Julfan network
in my various publications and in my forthcoming book, so I won’t go
into it in detail now.

Suffice to say here that shortly after their forced resettlement in
the suburbs of the Safavid imperial capital of Isfahan, Julfan
merchants came to preside over one of the greatest trade networks of
the early modern period, with settlements stretching from London,
Amsterdam, and Cadiz in the west to Mughal India, Canton in China, and
Manila in the Philippines in the east.

There is also evidence that some intrepid Julfans were not content
with reaching Manila and had ventured further by crossing the Pacific
Ocean using the Spanish fleets known as the Manila Galleon to travel
and trade in New Spain (Mexico). Documents from the archives of Mexico
City that I discovered testify that several globetrotting Julfans were
trading with Acapulco in the 1720s and at least one merchant (a
certain "Don Pedro di Zarrate" Agha Petros vordi Sarhati?) was a
resident of Mexico City for about ten years in the 1720s.

The flow of information
Many of the Julfan settlements across their far-flung network where
traveling merchants resided were connected to each other and to the
center of the network in New Julfa through the circulation of various
subjects and objects including merchants (all of whom were young men
working for wealthy merchants known as Khwajas in New Julfa), capital,
women, information (in the form of family and mercantile
correspondence), and priests. The circulation of these objects and
subjects and especially that of information glued the network together
and was responsible for maintaining the structural integrity of the
network for over a century.

As for your question relating to the "sense of common, national
mission" above and beyond the projection of "business interests," it
is difficult to say one way or another. Talking about a "national"
mission in the absence of the nation-state is a complicated and
difficult issue.

In the absence of a state of their own, Julfans relied on various
"techniques of survival and prosperity" some of which can be seen as
forms of "stateless power." One technique was for these merchants to
rely on the state institutions of their "host societies" to achieve
ends that were in the interest of the larger Julfan network.

The case of the Quedah Merchant is illustrative of this form of
stateless power, since the Julfans who had lost significant property
on the ship relied on the Mughal state to apply pressure on the East
India Company to restitute the Julfan owners of the ship’s cargo.

The Julfans invested in the Quedah also appealed to the Safavid state
to intervene on their behalf. A letter from the last Safavid ruler
Shah Sultan Husayn (ruled 1694-1722) addressed to King William III of
England asking the English Crown to render justice to the Shah’s
Armenian subjects has been preserved both in the British Library as
well as the PRO.

Similarly when the Santa Catharina was confiscated by the British navy
in 1748, the ship’s Armenian merchants appealed to the court of
Bengal’s governor, Aliverdi Khan (r. 1740-1755) who went so far as to
wage a small war against the East India Company in Bengal in order to
have the property of his Armenian and other merchants restored.

Imagining a larger Armenian nation
In all these cases what Julfan merchants did to retaliate against
their more powerful state-backed rivals was in some ways similar to
what we would today call "diaspora lobbying." The cases mentioned
above illustrate that when push came to shove, Julfans were indeed
resourceful at finding ways to defend the larger collective interests
of the Julfan network and its Julfan members. This is not the same
thing as pursuing a "national interest," since the latter would have
to involve the interests of other Armenians who were not members of
the Julfan network and its community of merchants.

We should keep in mind that Julfan identity was place- and
culture-specific. It was defined by one’s family and cultural ties to
the suburb of New Julfa in Iran. There was a strong tendency among
Julfans to define themselves as a "diaspora within a diaspora" and
this meant that the identity in question was more specific and
regional than a larger collective Armenian "national identity."

To be sure, the Julfans came to radically "re-imagine" and re-invent
themselves not only as Julfans but as members of the larger Armenian
nation mostly in the late 18th century when a small group of Julfan
neo-intellectuals in Madras (India) including Shahamir Shahamirian
began to formulate republican ideas and wrote constitutional treatises
for a future republic of Armenia that would not exist on the map for
another 140 years or so.

But this shift from a strictly regional Julfan identity to a national
Armenian one did not occur until the Julfan network along with the
hayrenik (homeland/patria) of the Julfans in New Julfa had collapsed
in the second half of the 18th century, compelling the Julfans to
re-invent themselves as members of a larger and modern Armenian
nation.