The admiral the Company called a pirate

For three decades the East India Company tried to remove one man from the Konkan coast, and for three decades it failed. When Kanhoji Angre died at Colaba in July 1729, the Company had never taken a single one of his ships at sea.

They called him a pirate. It is worth being precise about why that word was chosen, because it was not carelessness.

Sarkhel

Angre held the title Sarkhel — admiral of the fleet — under the Maratha state, and he came up the hard way, through the coastal garrisons rather than through any court. Sources disagree on where and exactly when he was born: August 1669 at the sea fort of Suvarnadurg by one account, 1667 at Angarwadi inland of Pune by another. The family name was Sankpal before it became Angre. Neither version has settled the argument.

What is not in dispute is the system he ran. Ships trading along that coast bought a pass. Those that carried one sailed unmolested. Those that did not were stopped and made to pay jakat — a toll levied in waters the Maratha state claimed as its own.

The pirate question

That is not piracy. That is a customs regime, which is among the more ordinary things a state does with its coastline.

The East India Company understood this perfectly well, because it was running the identical system out of Bombay — issuing its own passes, stopping ships that lacked them, and backing the arrangement with guns. The objection was never to the principle of taxing the sea. It was to somebody else doing the collecting.

Why they could not catch him

Angre fought in water he had chosen. His gallivats and grabs were shallow-draught and oar-assisted — quick in the creeks, over the bars and among the shoals where a European man-of-war drew too much water to follow. Those bigger ships would have destroyed him in open sea. He declined to go there.

Behind the ships stood a coastline of fortified anchorages — Suvarnadurg, Vijaydurg on its headland, Colaba at Alibag — and the fishing communities of the Konkan, who knew every channel and sandbar and supplied the crews. It was a complete maritime system, not a raiding operation.

1721

In November 1721 the British and the Portuguese stopped competing long enough to combine against him. The Portuguese Viceroy, Francisco José de Sampaio e Castro, joined a British force under Commodore Thomas Mathews: four men-of-war and some six thousand troops, sent to finish the business at Colaba.

It achieved nothing. The expedition broke up, the allies fell out, and Angre went on collecting his tolls for another eight years. Mathews went home to accusations that he had been trading privately on the very coast he had been sent to police — a charge that trailed him for years afterwards and which historians still argue about.

What happened after

He died in his bed, undefeated, and left the fleet to his sons. It did not hold. The brothers fell out among themselves, and in 1756 the Peshwa's government made common cause with the Company against Tulaji Angre and took Vijaydurg from him. The Maratha state helped the British finish the Maratha navy. That is the uncomfortable half of the story and it belongs in it.

The name on the chart

Roughly a hundred kilometres off Vijaydurg there is a submerged coral bank in the Arabian Sea. It appears on modern navigational charts as Angria Bank.

The Indian Navy's shore establishment in Mumbai is INS Angre. The island the British knew as Khanderi is now Kanhoji Angre Island. Three hundred years on, ships still alter course around a shoal that carries the name of the admiral the Company could not catch.

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Sarkhel Kanhoji Angre

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