Maurice Thompson, as governor of both the East India and English Guinea Companies, arranges for the EIC to lease the Guinea Company’s West African trade monopoly
In December 1657, this lease is arranged for an annual payment of £1,300. The shift radically changes commercial operations at Castle Cormantine. The East India Company focuses exclusively on the gold trade in order to obtain bullion to purchase its goods in India and is willing to sell at a loss in Africa because gold is far more valuable in Asian markets. During its six-year operations, the East India Company dispatched 15 ships to Cormantine and shipped more than 2,781 pounds of gold to Fort St. George in Surat, modern India. The East India Company substantially repairs the dilapidated Cormantine Castle.
Most East India Company ships stayed in Cormantine less than a month, dispatching textiles and iron and for gold obtained through trade. By 1660, the volume of arriving English cargoes overwhelmed Cormantine Castle’s warehouses and the East India Company opened a secondary trading lodge at Cape Coast. Like the Guinea Company, the East India Company struggled to keep Cormantine Castle adequately staffed. They sent 111 employees out, and at least 55 died, often within weeks of arrival.
The East India Company exported of 47 enslaved men and women, transferring them to other East India Company outposts in St. Helena and India, and apparently imported more than this number of enslaved workers from the Kingdom of Ardra (Allada, Benin) to maintain Cormantine Castle. Because it was not concerned with the slave trade, and lacked the staff to police its trade monopoly, the East India Company ignored other English interlopers bartering for slaves elsewhere in West Africa as long as they did not also trade for gold. Governor Thompson and other East India Company investors with West Indian plantations and investment likely dabbled in both trades simultaneously, since demands and prices for enslaved African workers rose sharply in the 1650s as the Caribbean sugar economy expanded.
While Kormantin became a specialized gold market, nearby Anomabu and Winneba grew as destinations for English merchants seeking slaves. The sale of guns became a point of contention between English Kormantin and the East India Company. Governor Thompson knew that musket sold quickly and fetched a high price and accordingly had the East India Company ship more than 600 guns to Cormantine Castle to sell. The East India Company’s Kormantin employees, however, refused to sell them, arguing that gun sales dangerously destabilized interior gold traders’ trade routes andput their own lives at risk. East India Company firearms were often were rejected as inferior when compared with those of other nations. When the East India Company closed its West African operations, more than 3,000 muskets were found unsold in Cormantine Castle’s storerooms.
