The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Nothing, however, compared with the experiences of an official Japanese party that travelled all the way to Europe, by way of Mexico, setting out from Japan in 1613 and only returning home in 1620. Their journey continues to fascinate readers of Japanese literature, thanks to Shusaku Endo’s book The Samurai.64 The travellers reached Seville, where they brought a letter proposing a Japan–Seville trade route, and even promising that Japan would accept the new faith. Their arrival caused great excitement. They moved on to Madrid, where (given the Japanese obsession with rank) they probably understood the consternation of the royal court at the fact that the letter had not been written by either the emperor or the shogun, but by a lower official; so they were offered the same honours as would be provided for the ambassadors of an Italian duke. Their leader, Hasekura, was baptized by the royal chaplain in Spain before the embassy moved on to Rome, where Hasekura was given the title of patrician and senator and was granted an audience by the pope. Ironically, all this was happening just as Ieyasu embarked on another persecution of Christians in Japan; the promise that he would turn Japan Christian was an empty one.65 By the end of their extraordinary journey, they had not achieved much beyond knowledge of the New World and Europe, and if anything their immersion in the society of Philip III’s Christian empire made them more suspicious of the Catholic world, and less inclined to encourage the building of close relations between Japan and either the New World or Spain.66

  The issue of ‘vermilion seals’ by the government to Japanese ships trading southwards was another aspect of the vigorous economic policy the shoguns were pursuing. Roughly fourteen ships set out year after year, visiting eighteen countries, with a preference for Vietnam. At the start of the seventeenth century the most frequent visitors to Japan were the Portuguese, but the first Dutch vessel arrived in 1609, and four years later an English ship came to Japan; both nations aimed to set up trading stations on the island of Kyushu.67 But as tension grew, particularly over the Catholic missions, the Japanese government turned against the foreigners, banning the Dutch and English in 1616, so their stay was very short indeed. And then the shoguns turned against Japanese traders who ventured beyond their homeland. In 1624 the Japanese were ordered to stop trading in Manila, and such foreign trade as there was became concentrated in Nagasaki and Hirado. The vermilion seal was granted to fewer and fewer merchants, members of a small elite with access to the bakufu; remarkably, they included William Adams, indicating the value Ieyasu placed on his ability and knowhow – in 1613 Adams was a useful intermediary between Ieyasu and an English captain, Saris, who hoped to create a trading base in Japan.68 Gradually, though, prohibitions against foreign trade became stricter: the Spaniards were banned from Japanese soil in 1638, under pain of death, and a ban on the Portuguese followed a year later.69

  While it lasted, this trade was profitable. Ships carried grain, salted meat, fish and fruit to Manila, all vital supplies; they also carried military supplies, both horses and armaments; beautiful products of Japanese craftsmanship included lacquered boxes and painted screens and high-quality silks. The value of trade in silk alone was estimated at 111,300 pesos in 1606. In the other direction, Chinese silk, tea jars, glass, even Spanish wines, as well as spices brought from the East Indies, passed north to Japan. The fact that the Japanese came to Manila to obtain Chinese products underlines the importance of Manila as a trading hub attracting goods from all directions. The eclipse of trade with Japan and the disappearance of the Japanese community in Manila were easy to bear so long as Manila could continue to function as a channel through which Chinese goods passed to Mexico, as it continued to do until early in the nineteenth century; the last return trip to Manila by galleon took place in 1815. By then, the Spanish government had relaxed restrictions on the movement of goods between Asian ports and Mexico, so that Manila lost its central importance and smaller ships than the galleons, sometimes flying the flag of other nations (including the United States of America), were now plying between the western Pacific, including Manila, and various ports along the Mexican coast. The Manila galleons had survived for as long as the Spanish monopoly held, but once it was broken the galleons ceased to sail.70

  35

  The Black Ships of Macau

  I

  One of the constant and in many ways justified complaints about histories of the seaborne empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that they are Eurocentric, even when the subject matter is Goa, Melaka, Macau or Manila. This partly reflects the richness of the archives in Lisbon, Seville, Amsterdam and other European cities compared to what can be found in Asia; and it partly reflects an assumption that the Portuguese and their successors were able to dominate the long-distance movement of goods to the exclusion of any serious rivals. But that was not the case. At best the Portuguese could only blockade the Red Sea, for, as has been seen, they were unable to force their way into it, and much the same applied to the Persian Gulf, where they could control movement through the narrow Strait of Hormuz. But the trouble with a blockade was that it cost a good deal of money to maintain and produced no revenue. It made more sense to treat the Portuguese forts as customs stations through which the Asian merchants would have to pass. The Red Sea did remain open. So long as Gujaratis, Malays and others paid for their trading licences, they were able to carry on their business without further interference from the Europeans, who were more likely to confront one another (once the Dutch arrived in the Indian Ocean around 1600) than to interfere with local shipping. Indeed, paying for one’s licence brought a certain amount of protection. It has been well said that ‘the Portuguese forced their way into an established trading world; they did not revolutionise Euro-Asian trade.’1

  Portuguese methods were rooted in traditional medieval practices: they created trading bases, the nodal points of their Asian trading world being Hormuz, Goa, Melaka and Macau, which were backed up by coastal forts and by the Portuguese fleets that moved across the Indian Ocean and into the South China Sea. The Spaniards, on the other hand, did conquer entire territories, as happened in the Philippines, and as had already been happening in the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru. Their interest in commercial connections across the oceans grew as the silver mines of Peru and Mexico delivered vast amounts of bullion to Manila and Seville, and their conquistadors had been attracted by stories of the gold of the Aztecs and Incas. So the two Iberian empires had very different profiles, one more sea-based, the other more land-based. In reality, the Portuguese made more money out of the taxes they imposed on Asian shipping and out of their own intra-Asian shipping routes than they did out of the spice trade linking the Indies to Lisbon and Antwerp. Rather than pepper, nutmeg and cloves, the source of profit was cotton and calico cloth from western India, carried eastwards to what is now Indonesia (enabling the Portuguese to buy spices with the proceeds), while in the other direction they took these goods to east Africa, exchanging them for ivory and gold.2 This ability to carve out a role for themselves as intermediaries between Asian (and even African) ports was most clearly demonstrated in the trade route they created between Macau and Japan.

  The Portuguese became aware of Japan in stages. The traditional description of ‘Cipangu’ by Marco Polo placed the Japanese Empire much too far from the coast of Asia, and the major interest of the Portuguese following the capture of Melaka in 1511 lay in trade with China; even when they arrived in Japan, the Portuguese may not have realized that they had reached the land described by Polo. Until the 1540s the Portuguese remained vague about the layout of the western Pacific. The ambassador the Portuguese sent to China, Tomé Pires (who wrote a magnificent account of the Far East, the Suma Oriental), arrived in Nanjing soon after Albuquerque seized Melaka, aware that the links between Melaka and the outside world pointed in three directions: towards India, towards the Spice Islands, and beyond those islands towards China, for Chinese junks were a familiar sight in Melaka. It has been seen how Zheng He’s voyages, among other visits, brought fifteenth-century Melaka under th
e notional sovereignty of the Chinese emperor. After Albuquerque seized the town, its deposed sultan urged the Chinese to help him recover control of Melaka. All this created panic among the Portuguese: would the Chinese emperor sit back and permit the Portuguese to hold on to such a valuable possession? Tomé Pires had a frustrating time in China – he played board games with Emperor Zhengde in Nanjing, and he moved on to Beijing ahead of the emperor, hoping to negotiate a trade deal, but the emperor died almost immediately after returning to his capital. The new emperor was much less interested in these barbarians and sent them back to Guangzhou. Once again the Portuguese began to worry about Chinese intentions.3 No Chinese fleet materialized, and the Portuguese tentatively made their way deeper and deeper into the Pacific, by way of the South China Sea. They began to realize that there was profit to be made not just out of the spices of the East Indies but out of the lands that lay off the coast of China. First, they took an interest in the Ryukyu island chain, which, as an earlier chapter showed, possessed its own lively culture and functioned as the crossroads of the trade routes of the western Pacific. The Portuguese heard that these islands were rich in both precious and base metals, and Tomé Pires offered a description of the islands in his book, though he knew very little about Japan.4

  The Portuguese discovery of Japan (insofar as it makes sense to use the term ‘discovery’) was unplanned, though not, surely, unexpected. To understand what was happening it is necessary to begin with a series of Portuguese attempts to penetrate the markets of China. Following the capture of Melaka, Portuguese merchants began to fit out junks, or occasionally (from 1517 onwards) European ships, and reached the south coast of China. The squadron of eight ships that set out in 1517 with Pires aboard was allowed to sail up the Pearl River and to dock at Guangzhou (Canton), where they were able to observe how the city acted as a magnet for ships coming from all over the region, including Japanese junks; unfortunately these peaceful Portuguese were followed by others who disregarded royal instructions not to interfere with other ships, and ‘captured islands, robbed ships and terrorised the population’; they were, this Chinese writer continued, ‘a crowd of riff-raff’ who set up ‘boundary stones’, which must be more of the padrões the Portuguese had been erecting all the way from west Africa to Asia. Skirmishes between the Portuguese and the Chinese in the waters off Hong Kong kept recurring; the Chinese made clever use of fireships, tactics they owed to a certain Wang Hong, who is still worshipped as a minor god in Castle Peak, Hong Kong.5 Other troublemakers along this coast included the wakō, who have been met already; this term was used mainly for Japanese pirates. The Portuguese had some contact with them and would therefore have known something, though not very much, about who the Japanese were.6

  In 1543 three private traders from Portugal were on their way from Ayutthaya in Siam to Quanzhou aboard a junk loaded with hides; they took a long way round because they knew that the Portuguese were ‘detested and abhorred’ in Guangzhou after events earlier in the century – a Portuguese ambassador had had the temerity to flog a mandarin.7 A Portuguese writer described their unexpected arrival in Japan:

  As this junk was making for the port of Chincheo [Quanzhou], it ran into a fearful storm of the kind the natives call typhoon [tuffão], which is fierce and appalling, and makes such bravado and quaking, that it seems as if all the spirits of Hell are whirling the waves and the sea, whose fury seems to cause flashes of fire in the sky, whilst in the space of an hour-glass, the wind boxes all the points of the compass.8

  They were blown on to the shores of Tanegashima, a small island off Kyushu, the southernmost landmass of Japan, where the inhabitants looked after them well. They had arrived in ‘Nipongi which we usually term Japão’. The Japanese were fascinated by the weapons the Portuguese carried, and now or subsequently they acquired some firearms and began to copy them; the term for a wide range of guns made in Japan became tanegashima, because that was where the lessons had been learned and where the guns were often made.9 In other respects the Japanese were mystified by the Europeans; a Japanese chronicler recorded the opinion of the Chinese interpreter who had acted as go-between between the islanders and the surprise visitors:

  They eat with their fingers instead of with chopsticks such as we use. They show their feelings without any self-control. They cannot understand the meaning of written characters. They are people who spend their lives roving hither and yon. They have no fixed abode and barter things which they have for those they do not, but withal they are a harmless people.10

  Apart from anything else, this passage reveals a very particular Chinese and Japanese attitude to literacy. And harmless they were not.

  II

  Macau (as Macao tends to be spelt nowadays) became the conduit for trade between Japan and the wider world in the second half of the sixteenth century. Its foundation in 1557 was the culmination of failed attempts to secure a base in the Pearl River, not helped by the all too typically aggressive stance of the Portuguese in the first half of the sixteenth century. Now avoiding the Pearl River, the Portuguese crept into other ports than Guangzhou, such as Quanzhou and Ningbo, near Hangzhou, and even unloaded their goods on to Chinese junks out at sea.11 Their difficulties in gaining free access to China encouraged them to seize a new opportunity, trade with Japan. Japanese soil contained rich veins of silver, and the Japanese were voracious consumers of Chinese silk, insisting that it was superior to their own excellent products.12 But the Portuguese knew that they needed a way station between Melaka and Japan, somewhere where they could break their journey, take on Chinese goods bought with Japanese silver, and refit their ships. Tentatively, therefore, they installed themselves about fifty miles from the mouth of the Pearl River, bribed the local officials, and set up their encampment on what they called the ‘Island of St John’. At first the imperial court tried to exclude European ships, because the Ferengi, or ‘Franks’, were ‘people with filthy hearts’, and pirates. But a spice shortage and the loss of revenue from trade were beginning to worry the emperor’s courtiers. So by 1555 the Portuguese were at last able to visit Guangzhou so long as they paid their taxes.13

  St John Island did not satisfy the Portuguese. It was too distant from the Pearl River, so they left after three years. The traditional account of the foundation of what became their base, the future city of Macau, tells how the Portuguese won the approval of the Chinese authorities by defeating a dangerous Chinese pirate. Wakō pirates had been making a thorough nuisance of themselves in the 1550s.14 But the permission granted to the Portuguese also generated a difficult question. The Chinese Empire could not really allow the Portuguese to treat this patch of territory as its own. Equally, the Chinese were perfectly aware that the king of Portugal had no intention of submitting to the Heavenly Emperor. The solution was to keep Chinese tax officials in place whose special (but not unique) concern lay with the taxation of Chinese visitors to Macau. The fact that no formal grant of the territory was made, as did indeed happen with parts of Hong Kong, left Macau vulnerable to China’s claim that the territory should be returned to China, as happened in 1999; in the case of Hong Kong, by contrast, the argument for cession of the territory to the People’s Republic turned on whether the treaty granting it to Great Britain had been unjustly imposed. The Portuguese appear to have received a scroll commemorating their help in defeating pirates and a document permitting them to set up their trading station; a version inscribed on wood and stone was kept in the Senate House of Macau, but the Senate House burned down and no one kept a record of what the inscription said. Macau was allowed to exist ‘completely outside the rules and precedents of the tribute system’; in other words the solution to the problem of its status was for the Chinese largely to ignore the problem.15

  The name Macau was derived from a Chinese term, A-ma-ngao in Cantonese dialect, meaning ‘Bay of Ama’, a goddess whose temple, pre-dating the arrival of the Portuguese, still stands by the site of the original inner harbour. This became Amacao and Amacon in Portugue
se documents, although the Portuguese had, typically, intended to give their settlement a Christian rather than a Chinese name: La Povoação do Nome de Deos na China, ‘The Town of the Name of God in China’, later elevated to the status of Cidade or ‘City’.16 Initially the settlement consisted of quite simple buildings made of wood and straw – what are called matsheds in the Far East.17 The Florentine traveller Carletti, who visited Macau in 1598 aboard a Japanese ship, described it as ‘a small unwalled city without fortresses, but having a few houses of Portuguese’; the imposing fortress that now dominates old Macau was built around the Jesuit College after his time, more as a defence against the Dutch than as a defence against local powers.18 The population stood at 800 in 1562.19 As the settlement grew, the ever-watchful Chinese authorities tried to ensure that fellow Chinese did not stay overnight, though there were ways of hiding away and there were Chinese servants living in Macau. The Chinese authorities worried that trade relations between Macau and Japan were making the Portuguese too friendly to the Japanese, nearly a hundred of whom were expelled from Macau in 1613 at Chinese insistence.20

  The Portuguese were not permitted to cross the wall into China proper, which meant that the growing town possessed no hinterland from which to draw its food. This suited the Chinese merchants who profited from supplying Macau with essentials, and it suited the Chinese officials who knew they could blockade Macau if trouble with the Portuguese loomed.21 The great age of building that threw up the magnificent Church of St Paul (partly built by Japanese craftsmen) and the substantial Dominican church was yet to come, but even before 1600 there existed a cathedral and convents for the three great orders of friars, the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the Augustinians, as well as the Jesuit College from which missionaries passed into China and Japan.22 A charitable foundation, the Santa Casa de Misericórdia, came into existence in 1569, following a model established elsewhere in Portuguese Asia – the first of these houses had been created in Cochin as early as 1505. This was a sign that the Portuguese saw Macau as a stable base for their operations, as well as a recognition of the need to cater for widows, orphans and others who fell on hard times so far from their original home.23