During much of the period covered by this chapter, the Anglo-French struggle for the control of India cast a long and ominous shadow across Sri Lanka. The losses inflicted on France in the Seven Years War had not put an end to her ambitions for the recovery of her overseas empire. Indeed, from about 1771, France entertained plans for the invasion of India. As a result, Trincomalee became a matter of vital interest to the two contenders for supremacy in peninsular India, but more especially, to the British.
The importance of Trincomalee in the days before the steamer was that it satisfied the needs of naval power in two ways. During the monsoons a squadron defending India had to lie to the windward of the subcontinent; it required a safe harbour in which to shelter during the violent weather occasioned by the inter-monsoonal storms in October and to a lesser extent in April. Only Trincomalee could fulfil these requirements adequately, hence its importance for the defence of India—it commanded both the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts of India. The British Eastern fleet faced the north-east monsoon in Indian waters on forty occasions between 1746 and 1795. On fifteen of them it used Trincomalee for this purpose, and eleven of these were during April in the period of the south-west monsoon. All these were apart from the frequent calls made at Trincomalee for repairs, wood and water.1 These statistics assume even greater significance when one considers the question of the availability of these facilities at Trincomalee during periods of war. During the closing stage of the War of Austrian Succession, the Dutch had been Britain’s allies and the British had been free to use the port. But they did so even before the Dutch entered the war. During the Seven Years War the Dutch had been neutral, but the British navy had continued to visit Trincomalee and to use its facilities.
But what of the future? Would Trincomalee remain what it had been up till that, namely a neutral port readily accessible to the British in times of peace and war? It was because events of the late 1770s and early 1780s were to reveal that the answer to this question was not a simple, straightforward ‘yes’ that the VOC in Sri Lanka became embroiled in the Anglo-French struggle in India. The treaty of 1766 was too much of an affront to their pride for the Kandyans to accept it in anything other than a mood of deep resentment.2 Not unnaturally, they showed no interest in cooperating in its implementation and this attitude was made evident from the time the treaty was ratified. Thus the advantages of the treaty to the VOC, such as they were, were bought dear in terms both of the increased cost of defending the coasts and borders and continued difficulty in collecting cinnamon in the Kandyan kingdom. Nor did the treaty of 1766 do much to ensure the security of the VOC in Sri Lanka in relation to potential threats from abroad. If in the first decade after its ratification such threats seemed to have receded somewhat, the relief was temporary. Once a breakdown on the European diplomatic front occurred again, the Dutch in Sri Lanka were wide open to attack from their European rivals. They were no match for the French or the British.
Falck, the craftsman who fashioned the treaty of 1766, was nothing if not circumspect in his handling of its implementation, no doubt realizing that it did not accurately reflect the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two powers, the VOC and the Kandyans. What he wanted most urgently was to bring under the VOC’s control all the coastal territories ceded to it and to do this with the cooperation of the Kandyans if possible. The alternative, he realized, was to do this without their cooperation, which always carried the danger that it would require the use of force—something which Falck was reluctant to consider. Thus he resolved on a policy of winning the Kandyans over to an acceptance of the treaty through a mixture of cajolery, bluff and firm determination, always stopping well short of a resort to arms or of provocative action which might compel the Kandyans to do the same. The latter, however, saw this as obvious evidence of weakness, which gave them greater confidence in facing up to the VOC. A diplomatic mission was sent to Kandy in January 1767 as part of Falck’s campaign. Although this mission did not achieve its purpose of bringing the Kandyans to an acceptance of the consequences of the treaty they had signed in 1766, it set the tone in maintaining a surprising cordiality in relations between the two estranged parties. A Kandyan mission set out for Batavia later in 1767 in the hope that the treaty might be renegotiated, but this mission was entirely fruitless. The Dutch would make no such concession; they hoped that they would wear down the Kandyans by refusing to consider any possibility of a departure from the treaty.
For the VOC in Sri Lanka, the treaty of 1766 was a meaningless exercise if the boundaries of the territories conceded to them were not demarcated. More to the point, the Kandyans had to be persuaded to cooperate and to accept compensation for the loss they had incurred. But this the Kandyan ruler refused to do. Falck took as much comfort as he could from the fact that the Dutch were in de facto possession of these areas. In keeping with instructions from Batavia, he sent a mission to Kandy every year thereafter, seeking the king’s formal approval for the cession of the coastal regions. These requests were firmly rebuffed and the Kandyan ruler, convinced that the Dutch persisted in this policy only because they were too weak to resort to arms again, began to demand from 1770 onwards that the coastal lands be returned to the Kandyan kingdom. By 1773 Falck’s—and Batavia’s—patience had worn thin and the decision was taken to demarcate the boundaries unilaterally. In so doing, the company allocated to itself more territory than it was allowed by the treaty especially in the eastern coast—far beyond the limits of their own definition of the extent of a Sinhalese mile. This demarcation of boundaries, without their participation or consent, deeply offended the Kandyans.
The VOC evidently believed that its control of the island’s littoral would be sufficient guarantee against any possibility of Kandyan rulers making contacts with the European rivals of the Dutch. But it was not too difficult to elude the Dutch coast patrols, and the Kandyans sought the assistance of the French against the VOC
France’s intervention on the side of the beleaguered Americans in their War of Independence may be viewed as part of an ambitious plan to launch a concerted attack on the British overseas empire.3 This plan included a scheme for an onslaught to be delivered in Asia in the form of a joint military and naval offensive against British possessions in India. Britain’s defeat in America provided the opportunity to put it into operation. In the meantime, prolonged trade rivalries between the Dutch Republic and Britain, and British insensitivity to Dutch interests, had placed the Dutch increasingly under the influence of France and moved them to join an armed neutrality against Britain in 1778, and in 1780 into a declaration of war. Because these developments coincided with the loss of Britain’s American empire and the preparations by France for the invasion of India, Britain was faced with the urgent task of concerting plans for the security of her eastern possessions. With the outbreak of war between the British and the Dutch in 1781, the latter’s overseas possessions, including strategic points such as Trincomalee and the Cape of Good Hope, became potential bases for the French for the prosecution of their designs against the British possessions in Asia.
By 1781, the position of Trincomalee in relation to British interests had undergone a sharp change; from being a neutral port accessible to the British it was converted overnight into a viable base for French attacks on India. And once the British were denied the use of Trincomalee by the Dutch in 1781, the urgent need for a British base on the eastern side of India was underlined. Plans were devised for the capture of Trincomalee for the purpose of preventing its use as a base by the French for their projected invasion of British India. The plan of operation devised at this time had, in its original form, the limited objective of seizing Trincomalee and the Dutch possessions on the Coromandel Coast, but in October 1781 it was amplified into a grandiose project for the capture of all Dutch settlements in Ceylon. Trincomalee remained the prime target and the British captured it in January 1782. Its subsequent loss to the French under Admiral Suffren in August 1782 was a notable blow to British prestige. Very soon thereafter the British lost Madras and their position in Asia appeared to be seriously threatened. Only the failure of Bussy’s expedition and the dogged resistance offered by Admiral Sir Edward Hughes to the dynamic and imaginative forays launched by Suffren saved the British and foiled what was to be the last resolute effort of the French to retrieve their declining fortunes in India. Trincomalee in the meantime remained under French control till the end of the war in 1783.
A second diplomatic mission to Kandy despatched by the English East India Company coincided with the attack by the English on Trincomalee early in 1782. The passage of time had done little to alleviate the resentment of the Kandyans over the Pybus fiasco and thus Hugh Boyd’s task in 1782 was the unenviable one of conducting delicate negotiations against the background of deep-rooted suspicion. Boyd’s instructions were to negotiate with the Kandyan king, ‘to conciliate him to our interest’ and to impress upon him the good faith of the Company and its desire to cultivate his friendship. This time the British were prepared to enter into a mutually beneficial treaty of alliance with the Kandyans. In return for British military assistant against the Dutch, the Kandyans were asked to furnish provisions for British troops left behind on the island (presumably after the capture of Trincomalee). These terms, which would have delighted the Kandyans if Pybus had offered them in 1762, seemed much less attractive in the changed circumstances of 1782 and the offer was not accepted. The new king, R•jadhi R•jasimha, had succeeded to the Kandyan throne on the death of his brother, Kīrti Śrī R•jasimha, in December 1782 after a long reign of thirty-four years. In the years 1780–82, British power in south India seemed to be tottering in the face of attacks by the French and Hyder Ali; Suffren’s capture of Trincomalee in August 1782 and the fall of Madras would have provided seemingly undeniable signs of the decline of British power. Thus R•jadhi R•jasimha needed much more convincing proof of British good faith and of the basic viability of British power before committing himself to a treaty which would have the inevitable effect of precipitating war with the Dutch.4 Although the purpose of the Boyd mission was to make a bid to have Trincomalee as a British-controlled port, the British were generally more interested in a political arrangement that would deny its use to the French than in obtaining effective control over it in their own right. Thus at the peace negotiations of 1783–84, the British were content to let the Dutch retain Trincomalee.
By rejecting these overtures from the English East India Company the new king was signalling his readiness to normalize relations with the VOC. In permitting the peeling of cinnamon in his territories he gave further evidence of his friendly intentions. Falck was ready to meet him halfway. Realizing that the question of the coastal lands was the key to good relations between the VOC and Kandy, he urged Batavia to make some concession to Kandyan sensibilities in this regard. But he was baulked by Batavia’s intransigence. Thus when Falck died in early 1785 after an extraordinarily long tenure of office (twenty years) he left the problem of relations with the Kandyan kingdom as intractable as ever. His successor de Graaf (1785–94) was in every way a contrast to him.5 Where Falck had been conciliatory and restrained, de Graaf was aggressive and expansionist. Falck’s open diplomacy with the Kandyans gave way to intrigues in the Kandyan court directed by de Graaf’s mah• mudaliy•r with the governor’s blessings; the hatching of plots with some of the courtiers was in the hope of using them to extend the influence if not dominance of the VOC over Kandy. When de Graaf took over the administration, he had before him a Batavian directive that the return of the coastal lands—so often requested by the Kandyan ruler—was never to be considered, much less conceded. In urging de Graaf to remain adamant on this, Batavia was preaching to the converted. Yet in this both Batavia and de Graaf were totally unrealistic and short-sighted. The VOC was attempting to do in its decline what would have taxed its energies in its prime—not merely to hold the coastal territories without concessions to the Kandyans but to extend the frontiers further inland. De Graaf was the more culpable in thus misjudging the situation within the island.
He first moved against the vanniy•rs, the bulk of whom generally acknowledged the overlordship of the VOC and paid tribute to it. There had been frequent suggestions from Dutch officials in Trincomalee and Jaffna that the company should absorb these Vanni districts so that their agricultural potential could be better exploited, but little heed had been paid to such proposals till de Graaf took office as governor. Earlier, his predecessor Falck and the Batavian authorities had refused to make any such move, Falck because he regarded it as dishonourable and impolitic to abrogate the agreements entered into with the vanniy•rs, and Batavia—characteristically—for fear of the heavy expenses likely to be involved in the extension of Dutch control into these regions. De Graaf, unconcerned by such considerations, moved with decisive effect, despite much opposition, to annex these miniscule ‘chiefdoms’ and to bring much of the Vanni under the direct control of the VOC.
All this was part of a general policy of extending Dutch control well beyond the limits established in 1766. What de Graaf had in mind was the annexation of all the low-lying territories of the Kandyan kingdom, leaving a truncated state, consisting largely of mountainous territory, without the resources to challenge the VOC’s hold over the rest of the island and unable to maintain contact with the outside world except through the Dutch authorities. By 1791–92, he was ready for war against the Kandyans and prepared to provoke an incident to precipitate a conflict. His Kandyan policy was an essay in gullibility—wrong-headed, unrestrained and unrealistic. The VOC could not have embarked on such a venture with the human and economic resources at its disposal. Batavia awoke to the dangers inherent in de Graaf’s ‘forward policy’ and ordered him to abandon all his plans for a Kandyan expedition and to seek a reconciliation with Kandy. This latter de Graaf was unwilling to do and he resigned his post. The expedition never set forth, but the damage done to Kandyan relations under de Graaf was more or less irreparable—this at a time when the VOC’s position in the east was becoming increasingly and obviously vulnerable.
The War of American Independence and the Anglo-French War in Asia had underlined the importance of Trincomalee for the future of Britain in Asia, and this too led to a decisive change in British policy on Trincomalee. In the period 1788–95, the desire to gain possession of Trincomalee became one of the dominant themes in Britain’s relations with the Dutch. There was no cordiality in the relations between the two countries in this period. Britain’s overbearing attitude contributed to the increase of French influence in Dutch affairs. The ascendancy of the pro-French Patriot Party in Holland culminated in the conclusion in November 1795 of a defensive alliance between the French and the Dutch Republic, which posed the distinct threat of a Franco-Dutch attack on Britain’s eastern possessions, especially those in India. There was also the imminent prospect of the Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka being a bridgehead for French support to Tipu Sultan in India, the most formidable of the native rulers who opposed the British. No wonder then that Sri Lanka, and Trincomalee in particular, loomed large in the calculations and schemes of British statesmen. Pitt himself took the precaution of authorizing Cornwallis in 1787 to occupy Trincomalee in case of war with the Dutch. At the same time, the British persisted in diplomatic negotiations with the Dutch over the control of Trincomalee. These negotiations had begun around 1784 and continued intermittently till about 1791 when it became clear that no progress was possible. They had the effect of aggravating the suspicion and mutual recriminations which were the feature of Anglo-Dutch relations at this time. Nevertheless, when the British fleet returned to eastern waters in 1789 it again used Trincomalee as a refitting port.
With the outbreak of the revolution in France, the ideological gulf between the stadholderate and its adherents and the Patriot Party widened. While popular support for the Patriot Party increased, there was a corresponding decline in the influence of the stadholder. For the British, the most alarming feature of this development was the subservience of the province of Holland—through the Patriot Party—to revolutionary France. The occupation of Dutch territory by the French revolutionary armies in January 1795 and the establishment of the Batavian Republic brought the shape of the new politics in the country into sharper and clearer focus and underscored the threat which it posed to British interests, European and colonial. What concerned Britain most were the Jacobin implications of the French occupation of the Dutch Republic, the fear that with the establishment of the Batavian Republic, Dutch overseas territories would be stimulated to organize political insurrections on the same ideological pattern. To forestall the danger of such insurrections, which would have made the Dutch colonies an easy prey to the French, the British were compelled to take precautionary measures. Early in 1795 the Dutch stadholder sought asylum in England, where he was installed in Kew Palace. A document (which came to be known as the Kew Letter) was extracted from him in his capacity as captain-general and admiral of Holland, enjoining all governors of colonies and commanders to deliver possession of forts and installations under their command to the British forthwith. An assurance was given that these would be restored to the Dutch on the return of independence (presumably from the French) and of the country’s ancient constitution and established forms of government. This letter was used by the British as authority to mount a comprehensive operation to gain control of about a dozen Dutch territories. The occupation of the Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka was the most protracted—it took more than six months from July 1795 to February 1796—and the most eventful of the operations undertaken on the basis of the Kew Letter.
The Madras establishment of the English East India Company was in immediate charge of the negotiations that preceded the conquest of the Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka. The company made no secret of its determination to use force in case the stadholder’s letter was not accepted by the Dutch authorities in Sri Lanka, and an ultimatum to this effect was issued by Hobart in Madras. The Supreme Government of the English East India Company, reflecting the views of Governor General Sir John Shore, disapproved of the threat to use force and argued that Hobart should have employed conciliatory methods at the outset. Hobart’s memorandum was nevertheless sent. The Dutch authorities in Sri Lanka attempted nothing more than a show of resistance. They had neither the military (or naval) strength nor the financial resources for such an undertaking. There were, besides, sharp ideological divisions within the council and between them and the rank and file, with many of those in positions of authority anxious to accede to British demands to hand over the Dutch possessions to their control. At every stage they sought to prevent the organization of meaningful resistance to the British. When, after such hesitation, the decision was taken to offer resistance, influential groups in the leadership made certain that it would be merely perfunctory. All this was in sorry contrast to the obstinate and prolonged struggle which the Portuguese in Sri Lanka had put up against the Dutch in the seventeenth century.
For the British, however, the Dutch resort to hostilities altered the whole complexion of the enterprise because it violated the terms of Hobart’s letters (which accompanied the stadholder’s Kew Letter) and freed them from the obligation to treat the Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka as protectorates taken on trust. Military action against the Dutch had been preceded by the initiation of diplomatic negotiations with Kandy, for which purpose the third of the English East India Company’s missions to the Kandyan kingdom during this period was despatched. A senior official, Robert Andrews, was chosen for this purpose. This time the Kandyans were far more receptive to British requests and offers than they had been in 1782. Kandyan relations with the Dutch had reached their nadir during the administration of de Graaf and there seemed little prospect of an improvement under his successor (and father-in-law) van Angelbeek (1793–96). Andrews was instructed to explain to the Kandyans that British actions against the Dutch in Sri Lanka in 1795–96 had been taken with a view to averting a civil war in the Dutch possessions and to prevent their capture by the French. He was urged to impress upon the Kandyan monarch the dangers of French revolutionary ideology, especially its virulent antipathy to monarchical rule. This was apart from instructions to obtain detailed information about Dutch–Kandyan relations, along with copies of treaties between the Kandyans and the Dutch. There was also a formal request for the Kandyan king’s permission for the English East India Company to set up a factory in some convenient part of the king’s territories for purposes of trade and to build fortifications for the factory’s protection.
In his discussions with the Kandyans, Andrews found that they sought guarantees against the return of the maritime regions to Dutch control and treated this as the most vital feature of any treaty to be negotiated. The British, on the other hand, were more interested in the short-term advantages of obtaining the king’s assistance against the Dutch and not inclined to give the categorical undertaking demanded by the Kandyans that the maritime regions should not revert to Dutch control. Although these two positions were in a sense irreconcilable, Andrews succeeded in persuading the Kandyans to send ambassadors to Madras to continue the negotiations. In Madras, Hobart took up the position that the British were entitled to all the Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka by virtue of conquest from the Dutch and dismissed without reservation the claim, made in the fourth clause of the draft treaty presented by the Kandyans, that the British were entitled merely to what the king of Kandy offered them out of his gracious pleasure. Hobart, nevertheless, offered the Kandyans a trade outlet on the coast which they could use for obtaining an adequate supply of salt and fish, with the right to employ ten ships for this purpose. The Kandyan ambassadors, reluctant at first, were persuaded by Andrews to sign a draft treaty on these lines, and Andrews himself returned to Sri Lanka in August 1796 to secure the king’s ratification of the treaty, but there he was faced with demands for an increase in the number of ports to be conceded to the Kandyans. He had no authority to concede these demands, nor was he inclined to do so. Thus the treaty was never ratified.
The draft treaty was far less rigorous than that imposed on the Kandyans by the Dutch in 1766. Not only did it provide for a source of supply for salt and fish under Kandyan control, but the Kandyans were also offered a base and outlet for their external trade. Thus the treaty was not without advantage to the Kandyans, although they persisted in their endeavour to get the British to concede—as the Dutch had done till 1766—the principle, which was no more than a legal fiction, of Kandyan sovereignty over the maritime regions of the island formerly under effective Dutch control. By the time negotiations over the treaty finally collapsed, the British were in command of the former Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka, without any substantial assistance from Kandy. And they soon came to know of the treaty of 1766 and recognized the strength of their legal position as successors to the Dutch by virtue of conquest of the coastal belt extending around the entire island, in depth seldom stretching more than 20 miles into the interior.
The traditional Kandyan policy of seeking foreign assistance to oust the European power established in the maritime regions had on this occasion led to the substitution of a very powerful neighbour for a weak one. Should this new neighbour ever decide that the independent status of the Kandyan kingdom was in any way an obstacle, let alone a threat to its territorial ambitions in south Asia, it had the resources—unlike its predecessors, the Portuguese and the Dutch—to subjugate that kingdom.