Sultan Ala-uddin of Achin – the most powerful ruler in Sumatra island (Aceh today)

The psychological effects of victory were to change England forever. For decades the high seas had been the exclusive preserve of Spain and Portugal but now there was a new power to be reckoned with. Within months, news of England’s naval prowess had reached the kings and princes of the East Indies, rulers who had never before heard of England. In a region where military strength counted for everything, the local potentates of Java and Sumatra awaited their first glimpse of this newly victorious power, and when the first English mariners finally pitched up at the court of Sultan Ala-uddin of Achin – the most powerful ruler in Sumatra – they found that the Sultan knew every detail of the historic victory. So anxious was he to make an impression on this new naval power, and so keen to strike up a trading alliance, that he sent a train of elephants magnificently decked with streamers to meet them.

In the congratulatory letter that he sent to Queen Elizabeth I he was most effusive in his greetings. Imagining her as victorious ruler of vast swathes of Europe, he addressed his letter to the Sultana of England, France, Ireland, Holland and Friesland. Even good Queen Bess must have blushed at that.

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The men that survived the expeditions to the Spice Islands returned with such fabulous tales and scrapes, true Boy’s Own adventures, that their audiences were left spellbound. David Middleton had a dramatic escape from the cannibals of Ceram; the dilettantish William Keeling performed Shakespeare in the mangrove swamps of West Africa, whilst William Hawkins paid a visit to the Indian Great Moghul and spent the next two years watching gladiator battles of a scale and brutality not seen since the days of imperial Rome. There was Sir Henry Middleton, David’s brother, who dropped anchor off the coast of Arabia and distinguished himself by becoming the first Englishman to visit the interior of the country, albeit as a prisoner with ‘a great paire of fetters clapt upon my legges’. And there was James Lancaster, commander of the pioneering first expedition to be organised by the East India Company, who spent a delightful evening listening to a scantily clad gamelan orchestra that belonged to the lusty Sultan of Achin.

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On 5 June 1602, more than sixteen months after leaving Woolwich, Lancaster’s fleet finally arrived at the Sumatran port of Achin. A rich, powerful and cosmopolitan city, its sea power enabled it to exert influence over the western approaches to the East Indies and the Malay Peninsula. Although its shipping proved unable to compete with the Portuguese fleet anchored off Malacca on the far side of the Straits, Achin was nevertheless a vibrant commercial centre. When Lancaster arrived here he counted no fewer than sixteen ships at anchor, including vessels from Gujarat, Bengal, Calicut and the Malay Peninsula.

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Lancaster’s chief pilot, John Davis, had visited Achin on his voyage with Cornelis Houtman and vividly recorded his meeting with the city’s powerful ruler Ala-uddin Shah. The Sultan, he had discovered, was a keen Anglophile and had chatted enthusiastically to Houtman about England’s seafaring victories – an enthusiasm not reciprocated by the Dutchman. When Ala-uddin learned that Houtman had a genuine Englishman on board he demanded to meet him immediately. ‘He inquired much of England,’ wrote Davis in his diary, ‘of the Queen, of her Pashas, and how she could hold wars with so great a King as the Spaniard (for he thinks that Europe is all Spanish.) In these his demands he was fully satisfied, as it seemed to his great good liking.’

While in audience with the Sultan, Davis was gathering important information about Ala-uddin’s personality and tastes; information which proved invaluable when he arrived back in England. Not only was the Company able to draft a suitable letter to the Sultan written in Queen Elizabeth’s own hand, they were also able to buy him presents that were likely to find favour. He was a man of extravagant tastes; ‘a lusty man, but exceeding gross and fat’ – according to Davis – who was more than one hundred years old, ‘as they say’. According to local tradition, he had been brought up a humble fisherman but, courageous and daring in wartime, was given command of the army and married to a relative of the reigning monarch. Ala-uddin promptly murdered the king and assumed the purple, ruling the country with an iron fist. Born to fight, he had held Queen Elizabeth in the highest regard ever since news of the Spanish Armada’s defeat had filtered across the Indian Ocean. Now, with Lancaster’s fleet anchored in the bay, he was keen to meet one of her most trusted servants.

John Middleton, captain of the Hector, was the first to step ashore; he told the Sultan he had been sent by Lancaster to inform His Majesty that their fleet bore a letter from the Queen of England. The Sultan was most pleased and, presenting Middleton with a turban wrought with gold, he invited Lancaster to come ashore after he had rested himself for a day.

Lancaster acquitted himself well and, if the accounts are accurate, handled the Sultan with aplomb. Stepping ashore, he was welcomed by Ala-uddin’s messengers who immediately demanded the Queen’s letter so they could take it to the King. Lancaster refused, saying that such a letter, from so powerful a monarch, might be delivered only by himself.

The Sultan, too, was anxious to impress upon Lancaster the magnificence of his court and lavished every available resource on the English entourage:

He presently sent sixe great elephants, with many trumpets, drums, and streamers, with many people, to accompany the generall [Lancaster] to the court, so that the presse was exceeding great. The biggest of these elephants was about thirteene or fourteene foot high; which had a small castle like a coach upon his back, covered with crimson velvet. In the middle thereof was a great basin of gold, and a peece of silke exceedingly richly wrought to cover it, under which Her Majesties letter was put. The generall was mounted upon another of the elephants. Some of his attendants rode; others went on foote. But when he came to the court gate, there a nobleman stayed the general, till he had gone in to know the king’s further pleasure … And when the general came to the king’s presence, he made his obeysance after the manner of the country, declaring that hee was sent from the most mightie Queene of England to congratulate with High Highnesse, and treat with him concerning a peace and amitie with His Majestie, if it pleased him to entertaine the same.

First, Ala-uddin was presented with the gifts: a basin of solid silver with a fountain in the middle, a huge silver goblet, a rich looking glass, a case of fine pistols, a magnificent headpiece, and a finely wrought embroidered belt. The Sultan received all these graciously, but was particularly taken by the fan of feathers he was given. He called for one of his attendant mistresses and ordered that she fan him continually. This, the cheapest of all the gifts, was a runaway success: ‘the thing that most pleased him’.

Now it was time to present the Queen’s letter which, it was hoped, would make a favourable impression. Wrapped in silk, decorated with fabulous swirls of calligraphy and delivered to the Sultan in a gold ewer securely fastened to a huge bull elephant, it was given the most dramatic billing possible.

The letter’s contents were, by turn, flattering, obsequious, anti-Portuguese and businesslike. Pandering to the Sultan’s vanity, but at the same time imploring favourable trading privileges, it described Ala-uddin as ‘our loving brother’, recognising ‘the honorable and truly royall fame which hath hither stretched’. After glorifying him for his ‘humane and noble usage of strangers’, it went on to attack the Portuguese and Spanish who ‘pretend themselves to be monarchs and absolute lords of all these kingdomes and provinces’. Finally, after more than two pages of preamble, it arrived at the substance. Queen Elizabeth I, it said, would like to begin regular commerce with Ala-uddin, to settle merchants in his capital and open a warehouse for the stockpiling of provisions. ‘Trade,’ it grandiloquently informed His Highness, ‘not only breeds intercourse and exchange of merchandise … but also engenders love and friendship betwixt all men.’

Reading it in private Ala-uddin was captivated by the Queen’s sentiments and found himself agreeing wholeheartedly. He told Lancaster that he was well pleased with what he had read and accepted all the Queen’s requests. Once the deal had been signed it was time for the Sultan’s banquet, a dizzying affair in which prodigious quantities of food and alcohol were followed into the banqueting room by a troupe of the Sultan’s damsels and musicians. The food was served on beaten golden platters while the arak, a fiery and extremely alcoholic rice wine, was knocked back in copious quantities. Throughout the meal the Sultan, who sat aloft in a gallery, kept offering toasts to his new-found friend. Lancaster had to beg Ala-uddin that he might mix his arak with water, ‘for a little will serve to bring one asleep’. The Sultan, gracious as ever, consented.

Next came the cabaret. Sultan Ala-uddin ‘caused his damosels to come forth and dance, and his women to play musicke unto them; and these women were richly attired and adorned with bracelets and jewels’. This performance was a special treat, ‘for these are not usually seene of any but such as the king will greatly honour.’ But the entertainments did not end here; there were endless other activities to amuse the newcomers including a lengthy bout of cock-fighting, the Sultan’s favourite sport. And although not recorded in the ships’ journals, it is quite possible that some of the more daring crew members took part in the celebrated Achinese speciality, the sub-aqua drinking bouts in which guests perched on low stools in a river while court butlers served generous beakers of arak.

Although Lancaster was delighted by the Sultan’s reception he soon grew concerned that he had yet to buy a single ounce of spice. Worse, he now learned that pepper – far from costing four pieces-of-eight for the hundredweight – was actually being sold for almost twenty. Realizing that he could not hope to fill his ships in Achin, Lancaster returned to the Sultan and diplomatically asked for his permission to set sail for other ports. Ala-uddin agreed, but there was an important condition attached. ‘Thou must bring me a fair Portugal maiden when thou returnest, and then I am pleased.’ Lancaster smiled, the Sultan chuckled, and the English ships prepared to depart.

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Lancaster sent the Susan to the port of Priaman on Sumatra’s southern coast while he, together with the rest of the fleet, sailed into the Straits. Almost immediately he spied a huge Portuguese carrack heading for Malacca and opened fire with the Red Dragon’s great guns. Six cannonballs were all it took to disable her; her main yard was split in two and crashed onto the deck with a tremendous boom. Completely marooned, the Santo Antonio gave up the fight and surrendered to the English. When Lancaster saw what he had captured he rubbed his eyes in disbelief: she was laden with Indian calicoes and batiks which, though almost valueless in England, were worth a small fortune in the ports of South-East Asia. Here, at last, was something which could readily be exchanged for nutmeg, cloves and pepper.

It took a full six days to unload the Santo Antonio and, by the time all her goods were stowed aboard the English ships, Lancaster realised it was imperative that he found a supply depot, a base for future trading, where the cloth could be stored. Achin, he now knew, was useless for although an important centre for trade it was not the source of the spices he was seeking. He decided to head for the spice port of Bantam on the north-west coast of Java, but thought it diplomatic to first return to Ala-uddin to bid him farewell.

James Lancaster attacks the Portuguese Santo Antonio in the Straits of Malacca. He was astonished when he saw what he had captured: she was richly laden with calicoes and batiks worth a fortune in the Spice Islands.

The Sultan congratulated Lancaster on his success against the Portuguese, ‘and jestingly said he had forgotten the most important business that he requested at his hands, which was the fair Portugal maiden he desired him to bring with him at his return. To whom the general [Lancaster] answered that there was none so worthy that merited to be so presented. Therewithall the king smiled and said: if there be anything here in my kingdom may pleasure thee, I would be glad to gratify thy goodwill.’

The request for maidens was not an unusual one among the potentates of the East. To ensure their harems retained an international flavour, they liked to procure youthful damsels from as far afield as possible. Ala-uddin’s successor took his harem very seriously indeed and put in a request to London for an English rose or two. This put the Company’s puritanical merchants into something of a quandary: if they sent two girls they would be seen to be condoning bigamy and that was unthinkable. There was also the problem of religion. Achin was an Islamic country and there was a theological objection to uniting a good Christian girl in holy matrimony with a Mohammedan. Ironically, the directors’ most difficult task – that of finding a suitable virgin – was easily overcome. A London gentleman ‘of honourable parentage’ offered his daughter without further ado. She was, he explained, ‘of excellent parts for musicke, her needle, and good discourse, also very beautiful and personable’. He even wrote a lengthy tract justifying mixed marriages. What the girl in question thought about all this has unfortunately not been recorded but she probably heaved a sigh of relief when King James I declined to sanction the presentation of such an unorthodox gift.

Lancaster was on the brink of departing from Achin when the increasingly eccentric Ala-uddin had an even stranger request. He asked the English captain if he possessed a book of the Psalms of David and, as soon as a copy had been produced, begged Lancaster that he and his court might sing one as a duet. This done, the Sultan wished the English crew his best wishes for the rest of their voyage. His last act was to present Lancaster with a letter addressed to Queen Elizabeth I and written in fine Arabic calligraphy. So magnificent was this calligraphy, in fact, that its eventual translator, Reverend William Bedwell of St Ethelburga’s in Bishopgate Street, could scarcely read it. He did eventually produce a draft in English. It was absurdly grandiose and full of hyperbole and Queen Elizabeth was given a string of honorific titles. By the time the letter arrived back in England, she was no longer alive to read it.

Lancaster’s fleet sailed from Achin in November 1602. The Ascension, by now fully laden with pepper and spice, set course for England while the rest of the ships headed towards Java, meeting with the Susan on the way. She had fared well in the port of Priaman and her captain had bought a large stock of spices for an extremely competitive price: in Bantam, Lancaster was to find the prices lower still.