Volume 2: Triumph and Decline 1708-1834
Following his ground-breaking and award-winning five-volume History of the British Merchant Navy, a revised version of which is now published both in e-book and print-on-demand editions by the Endeavour Press, Richard Woodman’s A Low Set of Blackguards tells the neglected and forgotten story of the East India Company’s shipping – its ‘Maritime Service’.
Volume One, The Heroic Age, appeared last year to critical acclaim. This second and last volume, Triumph and Decline, covers the years 1708 to 1834, during which the United East India Company’s ships grew the trade-route between Great Britain, India and China. This period witnessed an expansion of the fleet of East Indiamen at the Company’s disposal, marking huge improvements in hydrography and navigation in which the Company’s sea-officers were pioneers.
The complex foreign relations between Britain and China; the gains made by the Company’s armies in the Indian sub-continent and the several wars fought during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, compelled the Maritime Service to become adaptable, to look to its own defence, often without the assistance of the Royal Navy.
The enemies encountered ranged from pirates of one sort or another to the considerable sea-power exerted by other European maritime nations, especially the French. Under Napoleon, the French were particularly active in their war against British trade, especially in the Indian Ocean and long after Nelson had died at Trafalgar. Besides surviving the French onslaught, the Company’s ships took part in military operations, from those on the Indian coast to the capture of Manila and the taking of Java.
It was an irony that British forces on the battlefield – in Europe and North America – relied upon the saltpetre brought from Bengal for the purpose of making gun-powder. The carriage of such a dangerous cargo resulted in several catastrophic fires. Other disasters besetting the Company’s ships were groundings and founderings, the latter a hazard of the tropical revolving storms which periodically rage in the eastern seas.
Once again, Woodman rescues these extraordinary events from obscurity, setting them in their proper historical context within the Georgian Age. He reminds the reader that there is more to our maritime history than the epic story of the Royal Navy. His narrative is told in great detail but with an illuminating verve that will leave the reader convinced that, although many of the men who manned these ships were ‘blackguards’ in one sense, they were not untouched by a brand of stoic heroism that makes them deserving of the notice of history.