Memories of Madras / by Sir Charles Lawson.

  • Sir Charles Lawson
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Memories of Madras / by Sir Charles Lawson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    26/398 page 4
    Day personally conveyed this important document to Masulipatam to enable the authorities there to obtain from him, at first hand, and without delay, such particulars as they might require in regard to it. He then found that Thomas Ivy, the chief factor, or Agent, had been superseded by Andrew Cogan, who had just arrived across country from Surat. Cogan was a man of good extraction, for the Herald’s Visitation of London, 1633-35 (published in 1880 by the Harleian Society), shows that he was a great-grandson of a Mayor of Bristol ; that a grand-uncle of his married a daughter of a Mayor of Oxford ; that his grandfather was Thomas Cogan “ of Dorsetshire ” : and that he was entitled to bear arms as an esquire. It is conjectured that he entered the service of the East India Company in 1615, during the reign of King James. He was employed some fifteen years in Bantam, Macassar, etc. ; and trading on his own account, as the Company’s servants were prompted by their beggarly salaries to do, he accumulated what passed for a good fortune. He then returned home. Nothing irritated the Directors of the Company more than the success of their servants in making money for themselves ; and, by way of deterring others from following Cogan’s example, the Company filed a bill in Chancery against him. But the Company, though hard pushed for dividends, did not wish to invite a public scrutiny of their affairs. Moreover, while the case was pending, Cogan married the daughter of Sir Hugh Hammersley, one of the Directors, an ex-Lord Mayor of London, the President of Christ’s Hospital, the Governor of the Russia and Levant Companies, and, inter alia, the father of fifteen children. So a compromise was arranged, and the case never went into Court. In the spring of 1638, or about eight years after this compromise with his late “ Honourable Masters,” Cogan sailed as a grass-widower for the East, this time bound, as a Member of Council, for Surat. He reached that port 111 September following. Ere long he was deputed to proceed to Masulipatam ; but was instructed to take, en route, Goa, where he had some business to transact with the Portuguese Governor-General,
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