East Indiaman

The East Indiaman Repulse (1820) in the East India Dock Basin.

An East Indiaman was a ship operating under charter or license to the British East India Company. The company itself did not generally own merchant ships, but held a monopoly granted to it by Queen Elizabeth I of England for all English trade between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, which was progressively restricted during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. British East Indiamen usually ran between England, the Cape of Good Hope and India, often continuing on their voyages to China before returning to England via the Cape of Good Hope. Main ports visited in India were Mumbai (then Bombay), Madras and Kolkata then Calcutta.

East Indiamen were designed to carry both passengers and goods and to defend themselves against piracy, and so constituted a special class of ship. In the period of the Napoleonic Wars they were often painted to resemble warships, and some carried a sizable armament. A number of these ships were in fact acquired by the Royal Navy, and in some cases they successfully fought off attacks by the French. One of the most celebrated of these incidents occurred in 1804, when a fleet of East Indiamen and other merchant vessels successfully fought off a marauding squadron commanded by Admiral Linois in the Indian Ocean. The event is dramatised in Patrick O'Brian's novel HMS Surprise.

East Indiamen were the largest merchant ships regularly built during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, generally measuring between 1100 and 1400 registered tons. Two of the largest were the Earl of Mansfield and Lascelles being built at Deptford in 1795. Both were purchased by the Royal Navy, completed as a 56-gun Fourth Rate Ship of the Line, and renamed Weymouth and Madras respectively. They measured 1426 tons on dimensions of approximately 175 feet overall length of hull, 144 feet keel, 43 feet beam, 17 feet draft.

Another significant East Indiaman in this period was the 1176-ton Lord Warley that was being built at the Perry yard at Blackwall in 1795 when sold to the Royal Navy and renamed HMS Calcutta. In 1803 she was employed as a transport to establish a settlement at Port Phillip and during the following year moved it to Hobart Town in Tasmania. HMS Calcutta was seized by French forces in 1805 and sunk by the Royal Navy off Sicily in 1809.

Due to the need to carry heavy cannon the hull of the East Indiamen, in common with most warships of the time, was much wider at the waterline than at the upper deck, so that guns carried on the upper deck were closer to the centre-line to aid stability. This is known as tumblehome. The ships normally had two complete decks for accommodation within the hull and a raised poop deck. The poop deck and the deck below it were lit with square-windowed galleries at the stern. To support the weight of the galleries, the hull lines towards the stern were full. Later ships built without this feature tended to sail faster, which put the East Indiamen at a commercial disadvantage once the need for heavy armament passed.

With the progressive restriction of the monopoly of the British East India Company the desire to build such large armed ships for commercial use waned, and during the late 1830s a smaller, faster ship known as a Blackwall Frigate was built for the premium end of the India and China trades.

The shipwreck of one of the largest East Indiamen, the Earl of Abergavenny, is located at Weymouth Bay, in England.

The word is also used as a translation of the Dutch Oostindiëvaarder of the Dutch East India Company.

Some East Indiamen

Name	Faction	Length (m)	Size (tons)	Service	Fate	Comment
Admiral Gardner	BEIC	44	816	1797-1809	stranded	Blown ashore on Goodwin Sands with most of the crew lost. Wreck located in 1985 with plenty of coins (mostly copper) salvaged.
Albermarle	BEIC	?	?	-1708	stranded	Blown ashore near Polperro with her freight of diamonds, coffee, pepper, silk and indigo. The ship was a total loss and little of the freight ever recovered, yet it is said that most of her crew survived. The location of the wreck is still unknown.
Batavia	DEIC	56.6	~1200	1628-1629	sunk	Struck a reef on Beacon Island off Western Australia but most of the crew and passengers made it to a nearby island. In 1970, the remains of the ship and many artifacts were salvaged.
Dutton	BEIC	?	755	1781-1796	stranded	Chartered to the government to carry troops, blown ashore on Plymouth Hoe, most of the crew and passengers rescued by Sir Edward Pellew.
Earl of Abergavenny (I)	BEIC	?	1182	1789-1794	?
Earl of Abergavenny (II)	BEIC	?	1460	1796-1805	sunk	Sunk in the English Channel with more than 250 lives lost
Earl of Mansfield (I)	BEIC	?	782	1777-1790	?
Earl of Mansfield (II)	BEIC	?	1416	1795-?	?
Repulse	BEIC	?	1334	1820-1830	?
Royal Captain	BEIC	44	860	?-1773	sunk	Struck a reef in the South China Sea, 3 lives and the entire freight was lost. Wreck located in 1999.
Sussex	BEIC	?	490	1736-1738	sunk	Sunk off Mozambique, located in 1987. No actual wreck, but the freight was dispersed over a large area on the Bassas Da India atoll due to wave movement. Several cannon, two anchors and thousands of porcelain fragments were salvaged.
Tryal	BEIC	?	500	1621-1622	sunk	The likely wreck site was found in 1969 off western australia (Monte Bello Islands). At least 95 of the crew of 143 were lost and due to use of explosives while searching for treasures, there are only very few remains.

BEIC = British East India Company, DEIC = Dutch East India Company,