Kanhoji Angre Turned Back an Anglo-Portuguese Army and Fleet at Kolaba in December 1721 and Held the Konkan Coast for the Marathas Until His Death in 1729

Kanhoji Angre commanded the Maratha navy on the Konkan coast until his death in 1729, and his best-known result came in December 1721, when a Portuguese and English army and fleet marched on his island fort at Kolaba, beside Alibag, and went home within a month without taking it. John Biddulph’s 1907 history gives 2,209 men on the English side and 3,910 on the Portuguese, about 6,100 together. The English sailed for Bombay on 28 December, after the Portuguese viceroy had opened talks of his own.

After the settlement of 1713 almost the whole coast from Bombay to Goa was in his hand, according to the 1883 Bombay Gazetteer, with a fortified post or boat station at nearly every creek and river mouth. The record of how he held it comes from Company letters, Portuguese reports and Indian historians, and it is fuller for his second half than for his first.

A career the record picks up around 1699

Little is known of his early life. S. N. Sen, who worked at the Imperial Record Department in New Delhi and read the Bombay, Portuguese and Dutch papers, found that neither the English presidents’ letters nor the Portuguese viceroys’ reports shed light on it. The Maratha chronicler Malhar Ram Rao Chitnis says Kanhoji was left in charge of Suvarnadurg when Rajaram fled to Jinji and did well there against the Sidis of Janjira. The official family account sent to the Inam Commission adds that he went with Rajaram to Jinji and got the chief command only after Rajaram returned.

The first English record Sen found that names him is a Bombay Castle consultation of 6 February 1699. Kanhoji had written to the Deputy Governor asking that Bombay’s salt boats be allowed to come to his country, and promised to get two men held at the Maratha fort of Padmadurg released. The Council agreed. A Portuguese letter of about 1703 addresses him as commander of Shivaji’s fleet.

His date of command is itself disputed. The Gazetteer and Sen put it at 1698, after the death of the admiral Sidoji Gujar. A 2013 Ministry of Tourism release says 1708. Sen adds that until about 1706 he was not the only subedar (commander) of the fleet, and that his reach was probably Kolaba and the northern Konkan.

Kolaba and Suvarnadurg

The Gazetteer lists Kolaba, the small island fort close to Alibag, as his headquarters, with stations at Suvarnadurg and Vijaydurg in Ratnagiri. Vijaydurg was also called Gheria, and the Gazetteer says he fixed his headquarters there after 1713. Sen calls Kolaba his headquarters at the time of the 1718 Khanderi expedition, and Kanhoji died there.

Suvarnadurg, Vijaydurg and Khanderi are among the twelve Maratha forts UNESCO inscribed in 2025, covered in the article on the Maratha military landscapes. UNESCO lists Khanderi and Suvarnadurg as island forts and Vijaydurg as a coastal one.

Gurabs, gallivats and how they fought

The fleet had two main types of boat. A gurab (grab in English records) was a broad, shallow warship with two masts, or three on the largest. The historian Robert Orme, quoted by Sen, put the biggest at about 300 tons. Two nine or twelve pounder guns under the forecastle fired forward over the prow, and six to nine pounders lined the sides. A gallivat was a big rowing boat of up to about 70 tons with forty or fifty oars, which Orme said could be rowed at four miles an hour.

In the Angre years a gurab carried sixteen guns and about 150 armed men, and a gallivat six guns and about 60 fighters, Sen writes. A gurab never went into action without gallivats. The 1883 Gazetteer describes the method. Seeing a merchant ship from an anchorage, the fleet slipped its cables, with gallivats towing the gurabs if there was no wind. The gurabs fired into the victim’s rigging until she could not manoeuvre. If she still would not yield, gallivats with two or three hundred men in each closed and boarded her from all sides.

Maratha boats generally waited for a calm, when oars beat sails, and fell back into shallow water where a heavier European ship could not follow, Sen says. He cites the Portuguese viceroy Ericeira for the fleet Kanhoji took over: eight or ten small vessels. By the mid 1710s Sen counts far more than forty. The Gazetteer gives eight or ten gurabs and forty or fifty gallivats for the whole fleet.

The dastak: a sea pass for every merchant ship

A merchant ship carrying Kanhoji’s dastak (sea pass) was left alone, and one without it was taken and held for ransom. Malgonkar says he priced it at roughly what the Portuguese charged for their own pass, the cartaz. Sen observes that in this Kanhoji did not differ from the Portuguese, English and Dutch, who accused each other of piracy yet refused to let other ships sail without their own papers unless a treaty allowed it.

Kanhoji put his case to the English in about 1704, in a reply recorded in the Bombay proceedings and printed by Sen. The Marathas, he said, had fought the Mughals for forty years and “lived now by their sword”, and would take any vessel that lacked his pass. To Dutch complaints in 1710 he answered, in Sen’s summary of the Dutch record, that he knew of no friendship with the Company, spared merchants who made him presents as the English, Portuguese and Moors did, and did not hold himself bound to return prizes.

The English settled with him in February 1713. Under the terms Sen prints, each side’s merchants could use the other’s ports, and Article 5 barred Bombay from letting ships of other nations fly English colours. That article led to the next war. In late 1717 his fleet took the Success on her way from Surat. The Bombay Council said she belonged to its Surat broker, Govardhan Das, and so was English. Kanhoji answered that ships of Bombay, Bengal and Madras would not be touched, but foreign-owned ships carrying English goods needed his pass. Bombay proclaimed war on 17 June 1718. Sen judges that modern practice would not back Governor Charles Boone’s claim that English cargo made a foreign ship English, and that Kanhoji’s excuse for taking Company timber in the same dispute was unsound.

The 1713 settlement with Shahu and the Peshwa

Kanhoji had backed Tarabai’s side against the Maratha king Shahu, and in 1713 he captured Shahu’s Peshwa, Bahiropant Pingle, along with the forts of Lohgad and Rajmachi. Shahu sent Balaji Vishwanath to settle with him. Balaji was made Peshwa, the chief minister, before he set out, Malgonkar says, and the two met near Lonavala.

Sen dates the settlement to the latter part of 1713 or the early months of 1714, and Malgonkar to 8 February 1714 at Kolaba. Kanhoji accepted Shahu as king and gave back his mainland conquests except Rajmachi. The Gazetteer says he received ten forts and sixteen fortified posts from Devgad in the south to Khanderi in the north, and was confirmed as admiral with the titles Vizarat Maab and Sarkhel. Malgonkar puts the revenue at 36 lakh rupees a year. The Peshwa promised help whenever occasion arose, Sen writes.

In 1721 that help came. Sen reports that Pilaji Jadhav and then Baji Rao I arrived near Kolaba with a Maratha horde of about 25,000 cavalry. Kanhoji visited Shahu at Satara in 1725 and was received with honour. At the Dassara meeting there in October 1727, Malgonkar says, he argued against a Konkan war with the Sidi of Janjira.

Khanderi in 1718 and Kolaba in 1721

Boone led the first big attack himself. On 1 November 1718, by the log of his flagship Addison that Sen read, he sailed for Khanderi, the island fort at the mouth of Bombay harbour that Shahu had put in Kanhoji’s care. The force was the Addison and Dartmouth, three gurabs, a galley, a ketch, two bomb ketches and 48 gallivats, with 558 sepoys to land. The defenders answered with guns and threw stones from the rocks. The sepoys would not follow the grenadiers ashore, and on 8 November a council of war decided to sail for Kolaba.

The 1721 expedition rested on a treaty between the Company and the Portuguese viceroy, which Sen dates 20 August 1721, a week before the Royal Navy squadron of Commodore Thomas Mathews reached Bombay. Kolaba was to go to Portugal and Gheria to the English. Biddulph gives the march. The force left Bombay on 29 November, camped near Alibag on 12 December and stormed the fort on 13 December without its heavy guns landed.

Biddulph says Maratha horse sent by Shahu, about 1,500 cavalry and 1,000 foot, charged the Portuguese, who broke, leaving the English storming party to retreat with 33 killed and 27 wounded. Sen says Kolaba held 1,000 infantry and 700 cavalry. The English blamed Portuguese treachery, and Biddulph writes that nothing justified the charge. On 17 December the viceroy proposed a truce. A treaty between the Peshwa and the viceroy followed at the Alibag camp on 9 January 1722, in which Portugal agreed to stop convoying ships of the Marathas’ enemies, Sen says.

The Gazetteer and Grant Duff both date the Kolaba attack to 1722. Sen and Biddulph, who cite the Bombay records, place it in December 1721.

The Portuguese and the Dutch

His first Portuguese victim, Sen writes, was a pal (a warship the Portuguese compared to a European frigate) carrying the retired Governor of Chaul. In 1712 he dismantled the flagship of a convoy under Luiz da Costa and took at least forty vessels of the merchant fleet it guarded. In 1713 Antonio Cardim Froes blockaded Kolaba with six pals and some gallivats, and Kanhoji hauled his fleet ashore out of gun range. The Portuguese left after three months, called away by news of an Arab fleet at Surat.

The Dutch first appear in March 1703, when Kanhoji took a 30 gun Dutch ship by sending gallivats alongside with a claim to carry provisions, according to a report Deputy Governor John Burniston passed to Sir John Gayer. He took a Dutch sloop and a galley in 1710. In 1724 the Dutch attacked with seven ships, two bomb vessels and troops, and failed. The Gazetteer and Grant Duff place the attack at Vijaydurg, and a footnote in Sen says Kolaba.

After 1729

Sources disagree on the date of his death. Sen gives 20 June 1729 at Kolaba, from a Portuguese chronicle. Malgonkar gives 4 July 1729. Grant Duff says about the end of 1728 and admits he is unsure, and the Gazetteer notes that Low and the English writer Grose give 1731. He left six sons known to history. Sekhoji took Kolaba and Sambhaji took Suvarnadurg, the Gazetteer says, and Gheria fell in 1756 to the English and the Peshwa together.

Sen calls Kanhoji the second founder of the Maratha navy and says he left its strategy and guns as they were in Shivaji’s time. In 1754 the Dutch authorities at Batavia told ships sailing from Surat to avoid an encounter with Angria’s pirates, a quarter of a century after he died, and Sen reads that as a compliment to the name.

Khanderi was renamed Kanhoji Angre Island in 1998, on the 125th anniversary of the Mumbai Port Trust, the Ministry of Tourism release of 2013 records. At the Navy Day programme at Sindhudurg on 4 December 2023, the Prime Minister named him among the sea warriors who remain an inspiration. The Navy’s present Indian Ocean work is covered in the article on the Indian Ocean and security partnerships.

The Navy’s main base and depot for the Western Naval Command in Mumbai is INS Angre. The Navy’s own page on the base’s 64th anniversary says it took the present name in 1951 and is named after the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre.