The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [76]
Ibn Battuta's experiences were the norm. In Quilon in the twelfth century a European visitor, Benjamin of Tudela, said that when foreign merchants arrived three secretaries of the king came on board, wrote down their names, and reported them to the king. The king then gave them security for their property, which he claimed could even be left in open fields without guard.114 Marco Polo wrote generally, and perhaps over-flatteringly, that Indian merchants
are the best merchants in the world, and the most truthful, for they would not tell a lie for anything on earth. If a foreign merchant does not know the ways of the country he applies to them and entrusts his goods to them, they will take charge of these, and sell them in the most loyal manner, seeking zealously the profit of the foreigner and asking no commission except what he pleases to bestow.115
We also have an account demonstrating practice in the great Gujarati port of Cambay in the sixteenth century. While this is beyond the period of this chapter, Cambay was little affected by the policies of the Portuguese. The Frenchman Vincent Le Blanc was in Cambay in the mid 1570s. He wrote:
Trade is very faithfully carried on there [in Cambay] for the Factors and Retailers are persons of quality, and good reputation; and are as careful in venting and preserving other persons wares, as if they were their own proper goods; they are also obliged to furnish the Merchants with dwelling houses, and warehouses, diet, and oftentimes with divers sorts of commodities: the houses are large and pleasant, where you are provided with women of all ages for your use, you buy them at certain rates, and sell them again when you have made use of them, if you like them not you may choose the wholsomest and the most agreeable to your humour: all things necessary to livelihood may be made your own at cheap rates, and you live there with much liberty, without great inconveniences; if you discharge the customs rates upon merchandizes, nothing more is exacted, and all strangers live with the same freedom and liberty as the Natives do, making open profession of their own Religions.116
It could be that the allocation of a local to act as agent led to some fleecing of the ignorant arriviste. Tomé Pires described how in Melaka, before the Portuguese conquest, when a ship came in the captain or leading merchant negotiated a price with a group of ten or twenty local merchants, and they then divided the goods up among themselves. This did mean that sales were quick, an important consideration given the monsoon system.117 So also in Calicut, again at the end of our period. When the foreign Muslim traders, the pardesi, arrived, 'As soon as any of these Merchants reached the city, the King assigned him a Nayre, to protect and serve him, and a Chatim clerk to keep his accounts and look after his affairs, and a broker to arrange for him to obtain such goods as he had need of, for which three persons they paid good salaries every month.'118 This account is confirmed by Ma Huan, from Zheng He's fleet, and his account seems to show a very considerable degree of state control or facilitation: the two seem to merge in rather. He wrote that in Calicut pepper was held in a state storeroom, and sold at a fixed price, but one had to have an official's permission. When a ship arrived an official and the people on board negotiated fixed prices for the goods it carried, and also for what the people on ship wanted to buy from the locals. These prices had to be observed, with no deviation. 'Foreign ships from every place come there; and the king of the country also sends a chief and a writer and others to watch the sales; thereupon