Harking back: The Empress and her two doomed pilgrim ships

The most influential queen of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, and mother of Emperor Jahangir, was the beautiful Empress Mariam Zamani, also allegedly known as Jodha Bai. She is still remembered as the lady who built Lahore’s first most exquisite mosque opposite the Lahore Forts Akbari Gate.

She stands out as an adviser who maintained that without a strong navy, the Mughal Empire would be overtaken by foreign armies. As the Mughals had come from Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, both landlocked countries, the concept of a navy was just not in their DNA. But then Akbar allowed her to build ships for trade and Haj pilgrims at the Khizri Darwaza on the River Ravi, since renamed by Maharajah Ranjit Singh as Sheranwala Darwaza after he tied two lions there to celebrate his victory over Multan. Local youngsters would pelt the lions with stones, ultimately killing them.

As Mariam Zamani built her first ship, she named it ‘Rahimi’, and it was soon to meet a sad end. The ship in its time was the largest ship in the world and carried, besides pilgrims, to Arabia indigo, cotton and other goods for onwards despatch on camels to Egypt and Europe. On the way back it was laden with pilgrims returning to India, as well as gold and silver received for goods sold. On its return journey it carried what was considered the largest treasure to take to the seas.

The Mughals paid the British and the Portuguese a protection fee for these ships. Though on land the Mughals were very powerful, they had no answer to the naval power of the European trading nations. In the area where the British protected ‘Rahimi’ they allowed the ship to safely pass through. But even though the Portuguese were paid in full in advance, yet they did not allow the ship to reach the Indian coast. In the process they hijacked the ship, killed the men, raped the women and threw them overboard and removed all the gold and silver. They then burnt the ship.

The Empress was enraged and ordered her son Jahangir to close down all churches, ban all Jesuit priests, lock all Portuguese business persons in a fort and let them starve and ban all trade with Portugal. The Mughals then captured almost 100 smaller Portuguese trading ships berthed at Goa and set them alight. The king of Spain and Portugal offered ten times the loss of the ‘Rahimi’ to allow trade to continue, but it was just too late. The Empress was not for turning. In a way Portugal lost the chance to capture the entire Mughal Empire. It was a gap that saw the English slip in.

The Empress Mariam Zamani then ordered the building of an even larger ship with 62 guns and placements for over 400 musket men. It was named ‘Ganj-i-Sawai’, and it was in its day the most fearsome ship on the seas, and its objective was to trade and take pilgrims to Mecca, and on the way back convert all the goods sold into gold and silver as well as bring the pilgrims back.

But then the English, posing as pirates, attacked with a 25-ship armada of alleged pirates. At Mecca they claimed they were slave traders. On the 7thof September 1695, the ship ‘Fancy’ attacked and captured the Ganj-i-Sawai. The few male pilgrims aboard were all butchered and the ‘pirates’ raped every women and threw them overboard. On board was a treasure of gold and silver, claimed as being the largest ever shipped. The attackers were commanded by a Capt. Henry Every, who the British claimed was a pirate, even though he had earlier commanded their navy ships.

The Emperor Aurangzeb threatened to end all East India Company trade and to attack its forces at different forts. In its day it was the greatest robbery ever committed. Soon the king of England, William the III, ordered that all the sailors be declared pirates, and be arrested and hanged.

But the ‘pirates’ escaped to the Bahamas. A few returned quietly to Ireland, and all of them were arrested and hanged. No gold was ever recovered. The pirates decided that the safest place to go to was the new American colonies. The treasure of the ‘Ganj-i-Sawai’ soon became a legend and no trace has ever been found, that is till recently an American researcher zeroed in on a likely place where the treasure was hidden.

In 2014, the first traces emerged in a farm in Middletown, in the Massachusetts Bay area. Using a metal detector researchers found gold and silver coins with Arabian texts, also in the treasure chest were musket balls and a shoe buckle. As the search widened they found another collection of silver coins again with Arabic text, all of which had darkened over age.

The ship that brought the ‘pirates’ on shore at Rhodes Island saw its sailors settle in the American colonies. Soon three other samples of Arabian silver coins were found at the field that were owned by former pirates. Interestingly, just off the coast the wreck of one of the ships has been found.

So it was that the two great ships built at Khizri Darwaza met a fate that also saw the entry of the colonial powers into our land. It seems that the advice by Empress Mariam Zamani was ignored for which the Mughals lost their empire.

If you ever visit the mosque of the Empress Mariam Zamani opposite Lahore Fort’s Akbari Gate, you will be surprised at the intricate work on this most beautiful of the three great mosques of old Lahore. There is no doubt that the Wazir Khan Mosque is beautiful, as is the huge Badshahi Mosque, but in terms of intricate beauty, none can match the Empress’s Mosque. She was after all the woman who built the first large sea-faring ships of the Mughals at Lahore. There was a ship-building facility at Surat, which built smaller trading ships.

The role of the sea, in the ultimate analysis, was a major factor that brought the colonial powers to the sub-continent. For trade to grow military power plays a critical role. This to a great extent is still true. The entry of the Jesuits in Lahore in Akbar’s days surely had a trading ambition of the Portuguese. As you study colonial expansion, you will be surprised at its alleged piety, which really is a camouflage which traders even today, invariably, use as a cover.

If you walk through Sheranwala Gate and explore the streets and lanes, it should not come as a surprise the name of many of them. They are all connected to ship-building and boat manufacturing. This is because outside the River Ravi flowed. But then the geographic phenomena of ‘meandering’, has moved the river over a mile to the West. So it is that the legend of Mariam Zamani has also moved away from the collective memory of the people of the old city.