THE DIRECTORS resolved as early as June 1825 to hire the China ships on short-term contracts ending in 1834, a clear indication that they expected the Company to lose its monopoly of the tea trade at the renewal of the Charter in 1833. Marquis Camden spent the final years of her service with the Company stationed for St Helena, Bombay and China, calling en route either at Penang, Malacca and Singapore, or at Singapore only. She entered the East India Dock for the last time as a Company ship in May 1834, at the end of her tenth voyage.

Tommy Larkins's world was completely different from that of his grandfather, William. Only once, twenty years earlier, at the start of his career in the Company's service as midshipman in Warren Hastings (3), had Thomas visited Bengal. He had never called at Madras or any other port on the east coast of India. When Captain William Larkins entered the service in 1746 the French and English companies were engaged in a life and death struggle on the Coromandel coast to obtain the main staple of their trade with the East, Indian textiles. His grandson would have been hard put to it to recall the name Compagnie Française des Indes, or what the letters VOC stood for. Taking advantage of disaffection in Bengal, the English company had acquired this rich region with its prized silks and fine cottons just at the moment when tea was overtaking them as the most profitable import from the East. Tea had dominated Tommy Larkins's whole career.

As commander of a 1300 ton ship, Captain Thomas Larkins had few problems navigating the oceans of the world. The British navy controlled all the main sea routes. He had never feared an attack by French warships or privateers issuing out of Mauritius or waiting off Pula Auro, or by Dutch warships cruising in the Strait of Sunda and off the Cape of Good Hope. The British owned all the ports on the route from Britain to China. Tommy would barely have recognized the problems his grandfather faced in navigating his much smaller ships.