So also we must remember that after the arrival in this country of the goods from India they were sold at long credits—even as much as eighteen months and two years. Owing to the irregularity of the factors in keeping and transmitting their accounts, the concerns of the voyage could not be finally adjusted under six or eight years. “Taking the duration of the concern at a medium of seven years,” says Macpherson in his “History of European Commerce with India,” “the profit appears to be somewhat under twenty per cent. per annum.” The current rate of interest in those days was about 8 per cent., so that 20 per cent. could not be deemed for that time a very abnormal rate of remuneration when we consider the amount of enterprise required at the outset, and the vast risks which necessarily had to be run. Included in these profits were also the results of privateering and bartering. Between the years 1601 and 1612 the profits ranged from 95 to 234 per cent., with the exception of the year 1608, when both ships were wrecked.
Nowhere was the Company’s system of thoroughness better shown than in the completeness and organisation of her shipyard. The East India Company took itself very seriously and arrogated to itself all the dignity and self-importance which its unique prerogatives permitted. The Court was presided over by the Governor and it had its own rules of procedure. “Every man,” for instance, “speaking in the Court shall stand up and be bareheaded, and shall addresse his speach to the Gouernour or Deputy in his absence.” So runs one of the Company’s rules. Now the connecting link, so to speak, between the Company and its ships was the man who was known as the ship’s husband, one of its salaried servants. When the Court were met to discuss the plans for the yearly voyages to India, the husband had to attend in order to learn what shipping would be required. He then had to draw out a table of the proportion of victuals and other necessaries for each ship and to see that such were provided. After being got together these stores were then placed in the Company’s warehouses. In addition to being the victualler of the ships he was responsible also for providing the amount of iron likely to be required—“yron both English and Spanish”—and had to deliver it to the smiths at Deptford yard for the rudder irons and other purposes, and also to the coopers for making the hoops of the casks. The husband was also responsible for the supervision of the clerks and for keeping the account-books, the stores in the London warehouses being under the care of a “Clerke of the Stores.”