East India Company

East India Company

Group of six documents relating to a Scottish legal case following the seizure of the Annandale, a ship belonging to the Company of Scotland, comprising:

i) Copy letter from Mallory Peirson, Walter Comber and John Johnson, owners of the Annandale, consenting for Captain ap Rice to deal with the Company of Scotland, 1 page, integral blank, folio, 10 September 1703

ii) Signed deposition of Captain John ap Rice "late Captain or Commander of the shipp Annandale", 3 pages, folio, 23 May 1704, worn with slight loss

iii) Draft deposition of Captain ap Rice, 3 pages, folio

iv) Note on a statement by Robert Lourie, the defendant ("...the Trunck or box of Ordre Instructions and other papers Bookes and writings seized on board the shipp Annandale maybe be restored..."), 1 page, paper slip

v) Draft deposition of Charles Robertson "on the behalfe of himselfe as for the English Company tradeing to the East Indyes", 2 pages, integral blank, folio

vi) Plaintiff's brief for the trial of Robertson v. Lawrie on 28 June 1704, with marginal notes and passages underlined in red crayon, 4 pages, folio, final leaf worn with minor loss

A GROUP OF LEGAL DOCUMENTS RELATING TO AN ANGLO-SCOTTISH DISPUTE ON THE EVE OF UNION. The failure of the Scottish attempt to found a colony in the Gulf of Darien at the end of the seventeenth century left the Scottish economy in tatters and the Company of Scotland looking for new opportunities. The Annandale was a ship belonging to the Company of Scotland, although largely backed by London merchants, which was returning to Britain with a cargo from the Spice Islands when it was seized by the English East India Company in January 1704. The Company had a monopoly on English trade with the East and claimed that English mariners were illegally employed on board. It was a tangled case - the ship's captain, John Ap Rice, may have deliberately planted the English mariners to provide the East India Company an opportunity to break up this attempt to undermine its monopoly - that generated considerable ill-feeling north of the border. In April 1705 an English ship, the Worcester, was seized in Leith and three members of the crew hanged for piracy, an act that was seen by many as retaliation for the Annandale incident. None of this activity enabled the Company of Scotland to bring its vast debts under control, and indeed those debts were one reason that the Scottish Parliament passed the Act of Union in 1707, as a part of which the Company was wound up and its debts paid by the English exchequer. 

PROVENANCE:

Sotheby's, London, 11 December 1997, lot 39