The modern English pronunciation of tea took longer to catch up. When coffeehouse habitué Alexander Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock in 1714, he rhymed tea with away and obey. Fifty years later, the vowel had tightened, and the rake, rebel, and poet Charles Churchill wrote this sprightly couplet about reading tea leaves:
Matrons, who toss the cup, and see
The grounds of fate in grounds of tea27
By the time Churchill penned his verse, the price of tea had dropped from the dearly unaffordable to the merely expensive, and soon the drink moved from being a luxury of the aristocracy and upper class to a necessity of the working class. The British were enjoying a two- (or three- or four-) cups-a-day habit. Samuel Johnson declared himself “a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.”28
Certainly, one habit set the British apart from Chinese and Japanese tea drinkers: they were adding milk. Was it to avoid staining their fine bone-china cups? To soften tea’s astringency? Help digestion? Garway’s famed advertisement assured customers that tea prepared with water and milk “strengtheneth the inward parts, and prevents Consumptions, and powerfully assuageth the pains of the Bowels, or griping of the Guts and Looseness.”29 Maybe even, initially, it was simply fashion, following the French fad begun by the witty, prolific seventeenth-century letter writer Marquise de Sévigné, who advised her daughter to drink it with milk and sugar.30
Even though Britain struggled with the expense of importing tea, a burden passed on to those drinking, by the mid-eighteenth century, it was unquestionably the favorite drink in the British Isles. Its popularity never waned, nor did its status or significance.
Preparing tea had its own rituals, but they were never permeated with religious or philosophical elements as in China and Japan. “Despite its popularity, then, tea never became in the West what it had meant and still means to the East,” wrote Lu Yü’s fine English translator, Francis Ross Carpenter, in the introduction to The Classic of Tea. “If it was an extrinsic detail in the culture of the West, it was intrinsic to that of the East. The culture and the drink lived symbiotically, tea acquiring its mystique from the culture as it added new meanings and dimensions to life within the culture.”31
Yet in Britain tea gained a relevance unsurpassed in the rest of Europe, and the British drew as much pleasure and even dependence from the drink as those in any place in Asia.
* George Orwell—culinary proletarian, heroically, even perversely, aesthetic, and a rare vocal supporter of World War II cauldrons of the brew—thought so. “Tea is meant to be bitter,” the India-born author wrote, extolling the beverage’s virtues, “just as beer is meant to be bitter.” (“If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar,” Orwell pointed out. As the eighteenth-century English novelist and playwright Henry Fielding put it, “Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.”)
CHAPTER 3
The Company
In 1817, England imported a staggering 36,234,380 pounds of tea1—with a population of just 10 million. But where was it getting all of it? By time the teenage Queen Victoria became monarch in 1837, Britain ruled a patchwork of dominions that spread around the globe. Yet tea did not come from any of them.
Just as incredibly, for more than two centuries a single company held the exclusive right to bring it to Britain.
On the last day of 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter for fifteen years to a group of merchants for all of the trading rights to India and the Far East, which meant the vast territory east of Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and west of South America’s Straits of Magellan. The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies was the first of many incarnations of what was soon known by the more familiar East India Company. Or the Honourable Company. Or John Company. Or, colloquially in India, Company Bahadur (from the Hindi word for “brave”). Or, simply, the Company, with—always—a capital C.
At first it wasn’t looking for tea, but spices: pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg. Flavorings to enhance food, in some cases, to preserve it, and, frequently, to cover the taste of spoiling meats drove merchants to forge distant trade routes and search the farthest known, and even unknown, reaches of the globe.
Within two months of the charter’s being signed, Captain James Lancaster sailed not for India but for the East Indies—roughly the modern-day Indonesian archipelago—with a small fleet of four ships and 480 men. Two and a half years later, with an outbreak of the plague having carried away nearly 20 percent of London’s population and James I now on the throne, Lancaster returned carrying 1 million pounds of peppercorns from Sumatra in the hold of his flagship, the Red Dragon. Yet the journey was only a qualified success and the Company’s future was not immediately assured. While all four ships made it home—an impressive feat—the expedition cost the lives of 182 men, two-fifths of the crew.2 Unable to get ahold of cloves, Lancaster settled for a less valuable choice. Dumping five hundred tons of black pepper on the market drove down its value by about half, and the Company’s warehouses were overstocked in the spice for the next half dozen years.3
The Company, though, raised funds and quickly dispatched a series of further trading missions to the East Indies. With the third venture, when a haul of cloves alone turned more than a 200 percent profit,4 stakeholders began making healthy returns on their investments. In 1609 the Crown extended the Company’s monopoly. Growth was quick. By 1620, it had two hundred “factors”—agents or representatives—in more than a dozen trading posts5 that stretched from the Red Sea to Makassar on the southwestern tip of Sulawasi, Indonesia, near the Spice Islands. It also counted some thirty to forty “tall ships”—the type later known as Indiamen, with their high, raised poop and weapons—which the Company christened with names such as Peppercorn, Clove, and the particularly optimistic Trades Increase.6
Soon, but not by choice, the Company turned its attention to India. The Dutch had arrived first in the Spice Islands, and the Dutch East India Company, while smaller, exerted enough influence during the early decades of the spice trade to muscle the British out of the region and force them to set up elsewhere.7
In August 1608 an East India Company ship landed on the northwest coast of India at Surat, the principal Mughal port. While his ship returned to England, Captain William Hawkins headed inland to meet the Mughal emperor, Nuruddin Salim Jahangir, who ruled from the distant and splendid Agra. Hawkins, who spoke Turkish—not Persian, the language of the court, but Jahangir’s native tongue—made such a good impression that the Mughal ruler insisted he marry “a whyte mayden” from the palace, an Armenian. Once Hawkins was assured that she was a Christian, he did so, and, as Hawkins later wrote, “so ever after I lived content and without feare.”8
Yet a decade and succession of further envoys would pass before the Company was granted the right to reside and build some “factories,” or trading stations, where goods such as pepper could be bought when the price was low and stored until ships arrived to haul them back to Europe.