Citing Thomas Aquinas, from the thirteenth century, and the eloquent Spanish writer of the early sixteenth century Vitoria, Grotius insisted that Christians have no right to deprive infidels, such as the Indians, of dominion unless they can show that they have suffered some injury from them. As a Dutch Protestant, Grotius gave no credit to the pope for dividing the world between Spain and Portugal, insisting that papal authority did not extend over those who were not members of his Church. As for the sea, this is a common or public domain: ‘it can no more be taken away by one from all than you may take away that from me which is mine.’8 It is not as if you can build upon the sea. No part of it belongs to any people’s territory; when you take fish from the sea, you draw from the common resources that the seas provide; he ticked off William Welwod, whose prime concern was the rights of Scottish fishermen to have unchallenged use of their own waters, with the words: ‘the use of that which belongs to no one must necessarily be open to all, and among the uses of the sea is fishing.’9 Grotius emphasized that he was speaking about the wide oceans rather than inland seas or indeed rivers, for the ocean encompasses the whole earth and is subject to the great tides that man cannot control – this ocean ‘more truly possesseth than is possessed’.10
Grotius’s arguments were not simply concerned with theoretical issues concerning sovereignty over open seas. He was keen to press the case for free navigation and free trade, arguing that the Dutch had a perfect right to enter and trade in Spanish and Portuguese waters.11 Although Grotius’s tract on the free seas became a standard point of reference in what later developed into international law, one should not blind oneself to the simple fact that Grotius was arguing his own partisan case in favour of his compatriots who had not merely challenged the Spaniards on land, but were now challenging them and the Portuguese (who were ruled by Philip III of Spain). In his other writings, Grotius could show himself to be a tenacious defender of Dutch trading rights in the Indies, insisting that where European nations had planted their flag they had established their individual and exclusive right to dominion. Moreover, it is hard to describe the capture of the Santa Catarina off Singapore as anything but an outrageous act of piracy. So there was something opportunistic about his tract on the free sea, which was moulded as much by circumstances as by logic or idealism.
II
The last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth century saw the Dutch entry on to the world stage. Both the Dutch and the Flemings began to show their face in the Mediterranean, filling gaps in the market when grain was in poor supply. In the early 1590s up to 300 Dutch ships were unloading grain in Italy each year. How much the Italians appreciated Baltic rye is a moot point; this was not their preferred grain. But the Dutch brought other goods into Italy all the way from Archangel, including beeswax and caviar. They made deals with the merchants of Genoa, Venice and Tuscany (where the newly enhanced port of Livorno welcomed people of all nations), enabling them to bring currants from the Ionian Islands and exotic goods such as Turkish mohair back to Amsterdam. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the impact of the Dutch, who were only at the start of their remarkable ascent, and were not always welcome. Conflating Dutch and Flemings, English merchants in the Ottoman Empire complained that ‘Flemings merchants doe beginne to trade into these countryes which will clean subvert ours’; the English already saw the Dutch as rivals on the international trade routes, and their sympathy for the Dutch revolt was muted by the awareness that the Dutch were, unexpectedly, making themselves into a world force. Another sign of success was the way they increasingly cornered the market for spices in Lisbon, turning themselves into major suppliers across northern Europe. Hopes for the future were soon dashed. At the end of the century King Philip III renewed the ban on trade between his Iberian kingdoms and Holland, with the result that the number of visits to Lisbon plummeted. In 1598, 149 Dutch ships visited Portugal. The next year there were only twelve. Just as telling is the sharp decline in Dutch traffic heading straight into the Baltic: over 100 in 1598, and twelve the next year. The Hanseatic merchants enjoyed something of an Indian summer as they eagerly filled the gap, sending 153 ships along that route in 1600.12
The lesson of the conflict with Spain was that the Dutch would have to extend their ambitions a long way beyond either the Baltic or the Mediterranean. One of the peculiarities of the Spanish and Portuguese embargo on Dutch ships was that it did not seem to apply to Portuguese possessions overseas, and the Dutch were sending about twenty ships each year to the Portuguese trading stations in west Africa at the start of the seventeenth century. The Portuguese had done them the favour of creating the infrastructure they needed, so that when Dutch ships put in at São Tomé there were sugar plantations in place, and plenty of Portuguese settlers keen to shift their sugar.13 Meanwhile, the near impossibility of loading Portuguese or Spanish salt so long as the embargo obtained prompted the Dutch to look ever further afield. Without salt, there would be no edible herrings. It had to be the right type of salt – French supplies often contained manganese, which turned the herrings black and damaged their flavour. There was plenty of salt on the island of Sal in the Cape Verde archipelago, Portuguese colonies, it is true, but the inhabitants, such as they were, were quite willing to shift it. Better still, the Dutch thought, might be the seizure of some of these islands. They attempted to capture the Cape Verde Islands towards the end of the sixteenth century, and São Tomé in 1600.14
The search for salt took the Dutch all the way to the coast of Venezuela, and over six and a half years, starting in the summer of 1599, 768 Dutch ships sailed to the salt lagoons of Punta de Araya; many of these ships sailed out on ballast, simply aiming to load up with salt and take it back to Holland. The outer edges of the Spanish and Portuguese empires were safe enough and the Dutch even carried on business in Cuba and Hispaniola, anchoring well away from Havana or Santo Domingo and carrying away large numbers of animal hides, but discretion was the rule; woe betide interlopers who were captured near the major Spanish settlements. They were likely to be slaughtered without mercy.15
These initiatives, and attempts to create small settlements in the Caribbean, would eventually lead to the foundation of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), but the most lucrative breakthrough that the Dutch achieved lay in the East, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century with the establishment of a ‘Long-Distance Company’ in Amsterdam in 1595. Nearly all of those who set up this company were actually Dutch, even though the immigration of large numbers of businessmen from Flanders, Portugal and elsewhere was gradually transforming the face of what was fast becoming the economic capital of the United Provinces. Just as the search for Venezuelan salt was prompted by exclusion from Iberia, the search for markets in the East was the result of exclusion from the spice market of Lisbon. In the beginning, this seemed to be a very profitable business, and the Portuguese were being pushed into a corner by their aggressive new rivals. Having been excluded from Lisbon, the Dutch went one better and blockaded Lisbon in 1606, preventing Philip III from sending out his spice fleet that year. This was more than the Dutch could hope to do every year, but when the Portuguese, along with the Spaniards, tried to force the Dutch out of the East Indies they soon found that the Dutch were no weaklings and could not be budged.16
If there was ever an example of an economic policy that backfired, it was surely the decision to place a trade embargo on the Dutch. By 1601 sixty-five ships had reached the East Indies from Holland, divided up among fourteen separate expeditions launched not just by the Long-Distance Company but by several rivals. Everyone wanted pepper, with the result that suppliers in the East Indies were able to double their prices. However, so much pepper was reaching Holland that the opposite effect was felt: prices began to fall within Europe, and it became obvious that the East Indies trade was already in crisis, producing negligible profits. Investors were bound to pull out of the pepper trade, and what had begun so gloriously would simply peter out. The answer was to
consolidate the efforts of all the different companies, and, with plenty of prompting from the States General of the United Provinces, one company, in which representatives from Amsterdam had a near majority, was at last formed: the United East India Company, generally known by the Dutch acronym ‘VOC’, standing for Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. From 1602 onwards the VOC became the official arm of the government of the United Provinces in the East Indies, and (taking into account the rivalry with Spain and Portugal) it was encouraged not just to conduct trade but to patrol the seas and to set up forts in the Far East. Within three years the Dutch had occupied Tidore and Ternate in the Moluccas, the source of cloves, nutmeg and mace, and much-prized possessions of the Portuguese.17 The assault on and occupation of Portuguese bases across the world followed throughout the first half of the seventeenth century. Portugal only had itself to blame for closing its own spice markets to the Dutch. And, although they were not founders of the VOC, the growing community of Portuguese merchants in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, often refugees from the Inquisition, gave active support to the creation of a Dutch overseas empire. This group will deserve separate examination later.
Early successes were not easily maintained. The Dutch conflict with Spain was renewed in 1621, with turbulent effects on the Dutch merchant navy. Once again the Dutch had to look far afield for salt and for the dried fruits that had become a staple of the middle-class diet across northern Europe; and the Spaniards were alert to this, building a fort to block access to the salt pans the Dutch had been using in Venezuela and swamping salt pans in Haiti that the Dutch hoped to use. Once again the Catholic Flemings became a serious nuisance, as the struggle with Spanish power was brought home to the very coasts of the Low Countries. In 1628 privateers from Dunkirk sent 245 Dutch and English ships to the bottom of the sea, or seized them. It is no surprise that the cost of insuring ships and cargoes rose steeply. As before, the main beneficiaries were the Hansa merchants. In 1621 they sent twenty-two ships from Iberia to the Baltic, and the Dutch sent thirty-six. The next year they sent forty-one and the Dutch managed to sneak out two ships (in several later years, none at all). For a time the Danes also did well out of this situation, bringing goods from Iberia through the Sound, which, after all, they controlled. As the conflict with Spain deepened, the Dutch found themselves short of herrings – no salt, no herrings. This was not just a problem for the Dutch, as consumers further afield who had relied on them were also badly hit, for instance the burghers of Danzig. Difficulties were compounded by the decision of the king of Denmark, in 1638–9, to increase the Sound toll levied on ships passing through the narrows at Helsingør. The Danes entered into an understanding with Spain, Protestant and Catholic working together to suffocate the Dutch. Only a Swedish invasion of Jutland in 1643 distracted the Danes from their hostility to the United Provinces. The Dutch decided that the time had come to face the Danes, and sent an imposing fleet of forty-eight naval vessels plus 300 merchant vessels into the Baltic past Helsingør Castle, where the king had taken up residence. King Christian was hardly in a position to stop them, and before long the Dutch had made an agreement with him that offered lower tolls on shipping passing through the Sound.18
One group of people who were willing to act on behalf of the Dutch were the Portuguese settlers in Bayonne, in south-western France, New Christians of Jewish origin who found their new home a good place in which to escape the ministrations of the Inquisition, although they also kept up contact with fellow Jews who remained welcome at court in Madrid, so long as they led Catholic lives in public. Large quantities of goods were smuggled through the Pyrenean passes to Bayonne. No embargo in this period was watertight. The inhabitants of Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal had prospered from Dutch trade and were not going to enforce the rules now. The Spanish government tried to improve its supervision of visiting ships, arresting vessels found in Spanish ports on the grounds that their voyage had been financed by the Dutch, and entering into agreements with Denmark, England and Scotland to make sure that their ships did not carry Dutch goods. They seem to have found it difficult to distinguish between the Danes and the Dutch, confiscating goods that had already been approved by their own officials based in Danish territory close to Hamburg.19 Still, it cannot have been easy to determine who was in the pay of the Dutch merchants, with so many Portuguese milling around, a mobile population moving constantly between Iberia, south-western France, Holland, and, in due course, England and Hamburg.
For a time it seemed that the rise of the Dutch had been a mere flash in the pan. According to Jonathan Israel, ‘the Dutch lost an eighth of the Baltic traffic’ in the 1620s and 1630s.20 However, the economic crisis was by no means limited to Holland. This was a period of internecine warfare in Germany; later, England and France would experience severe tumult. In reality, the Dutch were able to make advances, but they took place far from home. They consolidated their position as masters of bits and pieces of the Portuguese trading empire, even installing themselves for a time in Brazil; they were pushed out in 1625, but this was a harbinger of better things to come. When Piet Heyn captured the Spanish treasure fleet carrying bullion from Mexico to Spain, the West India Company found itself 11,000,000 guilders richer, and other great prizes included 40,000 chests of Brazilian sugar, which were said to be worth 8,000,000 guilders. The Dutch were a significant presence on the Gold Coast of Africa, and even (though not for long) held Elmina. Considering that Elmina had been the jewel in Portugal’s African crown, or rather the source of gold for that crown, this was an impressive achievement. With this temporary conquest the Dutch served notice that they were serious competitors on both sides of the Atlantic. The West Indies Company, it is true, was overspending, which is hardly surprising: they had to maintain a fleet, forts, foot soldiers and a whole trading network, and the value of shares in the WIC dipped and dived during the 1630s and 1640s; they were a bad short-term investment. And yet from the Moluccas to Brazil the captains and merchants of the United Provinces were steadily taking charge of the most precious territories in the Portuguese seaborne empire. The awareness that their empire was being whittled away was one factor in the uprising that brought Portugal renewed independence from Spain in 1640.21 Thus the Dutch advances were not simply important for the global economy; they were also very important in global politics.
III
Many histories of early modern maritime trade and exploration neatly separate the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the English, the French and other rivals into parallel histories. In reality, though, one cannot understand the rise of the Dutch without weaving into that story the rise of English trade in the same period, aiming at the same objectives: trading bases in lands as remote as the Moluccas, Japan and the coast of India. At first, the English attempted to reach the Spice Islands by way of a western route. Francis Drake’s circumnavigation, on which he set out in 1577, was planned in part as a sustained assault on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coastline of the Americas. A second voyage, led by Thomas Cavendish, or Candish, circumnavigated the globe between 1586 and 1588, but these two voyages only confirmed that the Strait of Magellan was difficult water, a maze of icy and stormy channels. That was the bad news; but the good news was that Cavendish returned home with the spoils of an entire Manila galleon, including 122,000 gold pesos, a rich store of silk and spices and two Japanese boys who could read their own language – this implies that he was thinking of trying to reach Japan and of opening up trade there, though in the event he headed for the Moluccas instead. It is said that on their arrival in Plymouth the English sailors were arrayed in silk doublets seized from the enemy. Cavendish was clearly an honourable man, since he set the crew and passengers of the galleon onshore in a place called Porto Seguro, and gave them supplies, including enough wood to make a small ship of their own. Some of his contemporaries would, instead, have been after their blood.
The next English attempt to reach the East Indies, by James Lancaster in 1591, t
ook what contemporaries called the Portuguese route, round the Cape of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean.22 Lancaster decided to follow up rumours that the Portuguese were close to discovering a North-East or North-West Passage above China, which remained an obsession. But his crew was worn down by scurvy and his pilot (picked up in the Indian Ocean) had obviously lost his way, with the result that Lancaster failed to penetrate beyond Penang in western Malaya. Lancaster’s one great prize was ‘the ship of the captain of Malacca’, a Portuguese vessel travelling from Goa to Melaka, loaded with Canary wine, palm wine, velvets, taffeta, an ‘abundance of playing cardes’ and Venetian glass, as well as a ‘false and counterfeit stone which an Italian brought from Venice to deceive the rude Indians withal’, but there was no trace of the treasure the English sailors confidently expected to find on board. After that the English lay in wait for the Portuguese fleet due to arrive from Bengal, which was said to carry diamonds, rubies, Calicut cloth ‘and other fine workes’, but before long, with their captain now sick, the crew insisted on waiting no longer and on returning to England.23
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