Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Bolts, Willem
BOLTS, WILLEM or WILLIAM (1740?–1808), a Dutch adventurer, was born about the year 1740, and after being, according to his own account, brought up in a merchant's office, and afterwards in Lisbon at the time of the earthquake, he found himself in Calcutta in 1759. In that year there was a great lack of civil servants in the Bengal presidency, and to supply this deficiency many merchants, including Bolts, were admitted into the Bengal civil service. He made use of his new appointment toengace in private trade, and entered into partnership with two members of the council at Calcutta, John Johnstone and William Hay. Bolts, who had become the head of a large business and had been appointed second in council at Benares in 1764, soon accumulated a large fortune. In 1764 the court of directors reprimanded Bolts for using the authority of the company in order to further his own private speculations, and in 1765 he was recalled from Benares for the same reason. On 1 Nov. 1766 he resigned the civil service in order to carry on his speculations unhindered, and was appointed an alderman of Calcutta, and from that time his quarrels with the company, and especially with the governor of Bengal, Mr. Verelst, who had succeeded Clive after his second administration, entered a more acute phase. The new governor was determined to put down private trading. In this respect Bolts was one of worst offenders. He employed a large number of agents, chiefly Armenian, but he was very unscrupulous in his mercantile arrangements. He was also distrusted because he was a foreigner, and in close comnmnication with the heads of the Dutch factory at Dacca and with M. Gentil, a Frenchman favour at the court of Sujah Dowlah. After many warnings, Bolts was arrested on 22 Sept. 1768, and deported to England. On reaching England in April 1769 he at once appealed to the court of directors, who would have nothing to do with him and declared him a 'very unprofitable and unworthy servant,' and in 1771 commenced a lawsuit against him. In 1772 he published his Considerations on India Ailairs,' a large volume in quarto, in which he attacked the whole system of the English government in Bengal, and particularly complained of the arbitrary power exercised by the authorities and of his own deportation by Mr. Verelst. The volume caused some excitement and was answered by Verelst himself in another quarto volume, which Bolts again attacked in a second volume of ' Considerations ' in 1775. A translation of his volumes by J. N. Demeimier, who was afterwards a distinguished member of the States-General, into French was published in 1778. His lawsuits with the company and the cost of publishing his books neary ruined him, for he had not been able to realise more than 30,000l. out of the fortune of 90,000l. which he had accumulated in India, owing' to his deportation, and he was glad, somewhere about 1778, to accept an other of the Empress Maria Theresa to enter the Austrian service. He was made a colonel at once and sent out to India to found establishments there for an Austrian East India Company. He founded six, and was on the way to lnake another fortune, when the death of Maria Theresa in 1780 ruined his hopes, for her son the Emperor Joseph refused to carry on her plans. After this he probably lived at Vienna till 1803, when he came to Paris to start some fresh speculative scheme, probably founded on his own knowledge of Austrian finances, for in the ‘Biographie des Contemporains' it is said that he was ruined by the outbreak of war with Austria, and according to the same authority he died a ruined man in a hospital in Paris in the same year.
[Biographie des Contemporains, 1836; Biographie Universelle (Michaud); Considerations on India Affairs, particularly respecting the Present State of Bengal and its Dependencies, by William Bolts, merchant and alderman or judge of the honourable the mayor’s court of Calcutta, 2 vols. 4to, 1772 and 1775; A View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengal, including A Reply to the Misrepresentations of Mr. Bolts and other writers, by Harry Veralst, 4to, 1772.]