ABSTRACT
No East India Company ships traded direcdy with the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf but from mid-eighteenth century, the Company servants in Surat and Bombay had made sure that merchants were forced not to use Gujerati vessels but British ships. After complaints from Chelliabys, with an appeal to the Court of Directors, the trade was freed and after the mid 1790s the Bombay Country ships played a comparatively minor role in the trade.137 Holden Furber summed up the characteristics of that trade as being 'its close connection with Indian capital.,138 He gives as an example that one of the ships in 1779/80 belonging to Chelliabys, shipbuilders and merchant princes of Surat, arrived from Mocha with 3 lakhs of rupees in gold, 4 lakhs in silver, 1 lakh in pearls, 10 bales of almonds and 200 maunds of ivory. In 1790 slave uprisings in the West Indies made Mocha coffee viable again. In response to the Company's need for 200 bales of Beitelfakik coffee, ~ best quality 'Oden sort' and the rest 'shammy or second sort', on 29 Feb. 1796, Fahar Chelliaby Valed Hosson Chelliaby offered to supply the Company with 1,500 bales of Mocha coffee providing 'my ship gets safe to Mocha and back to Bombay'. He offered to supply 1000 bales of Odensort and 500 bales of shammy at Rs.1l5 per bale which included 'the freight and risk from Mocha and all other charges except Bombay hamelage, boat hire etc.' It would be clean garbled coffee. He was cautious: 'The Company shall send with me proper person to Superintend purchase of coffee so that no fault shall be found with it when it arrives at Bombay'. The Company typically complained his tender was too high; between 1789 and 1795 coffee had been imported more economically, for instance in 1789 by HCS Winterton, and in 1790 by Country ships - Begler & Ceres.
