The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Only the news that the Dutch were sending ships to the East Indies revived English plans to carve out a place for their kingdom in the spice trade. It was particularly galling that the Dutch lured the English explorer John Davis into their service as expert navigator; they also began to bid for the purchase of English ships to increase their capacity. Here was a man who could be relied upon to make an accurate record of the route to the East and of the characteristics of the islands the Dutch visited. Mapping out which islands were rich in cloves and nutmeg became an obsession, since these products could only be obtained from a small area, and the Dutch – as also the English – planned to penetrate right into those areas and gain control of them, rather than relying on local merchants to bring them to bases on Sumatra, Java or other, more accessible places. Within a few years of Lancaster’s first expedition, the Dutch had established a ‘factory’ at Bantam in Java, and then they penetrated as far as Neira, which has been called ‘the nutmeg capital of the Moluccas’.24 In response, a ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ came into being, and its first expedition to the East Indies was, perhaps surprisingly, entrusted to Lancaster. His attempt to reach the East Indies had whetted the appetite of the London investors, rather than being seen as a costly disaster. That was the immediate outcome of the formation of what would eventually develop into the English East India Company, but the long-term outcome was a long tussle between the Dutch East India Company and the English one.

  Scurvy had wreaked havoc on Lancaster’s first voyage. On a second expedition to the East Indies, in 1601, Lancaster foresightedly insisted that each sailor was to be fed three spoonfuls of lemon juice every day, but only aboard his flagship; on the accompanying ships scurvy was rampant. By the time his four ships reached southern Africa, Lancaster had lost over a hundred men to disease, which equalled the complement of one ship.25 The curative role of fresh fruit was understood, but its preventative role was not noticed. Yet an important observation did result from Lancaster’s second expedition, though it was something the Portuguese had known for a century. On arriving at Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, facing the Indian Ocean, Lancaster found ‘sixteen or eighteen sail of shippes of diverse nations’; these were Gujaratis, Bengalis, Malabaris (from southern India), Pegus from Burma and Patanis from Siam.26 Lancaster had several productive interviews with the sultan, Ala-uddin, to whom a letter from Queen Elizabeth was carried by an elephant twice as high as a tall man, ‘which had a small castle like a coach upon his back, covered with crimson velvet. In the middle thereof was a great basin of gold, and a peece of silke exceedingly richly wrought to cover it, under which Her Majestie’s letter was put.’27 Ala-uddin’s feasts were sumptuous, and he paid no attention to the Islamic prohibition of alcohol; but one of his requests was not easy to satisfy, his wish to be sent ‘a fair Portugall maiden’. Moreover, the price of spices in Aceh was higher than Lancaster had bargained for. If one wanted to obtain spices cheaply the answer was to penetrate to the lands where they grew. Even in Bantam, on the western tip of Java, spices could be bought much more cheaply than in Aceh.28 In both places the English secured the right to a factory and other trading concessions, so that the investment made by members of the East India Company seemed likely to earn good returns over the years, so long as rivals could be kept at bay. Lancaster returned home very satisfied with pirate raids on Portuguese shipping, but he left behind a small pinnace and instructed its crew to search deeper into the East Indies, all the way to the sources of the best spices.

  This brought the English, even if only a small number of them, into conflict with the Dutch. It was an odd situation: the Dutch sometimes declared how grateful they were for the support England had (though not consistently) given the United Provinces in their struggle against Spanish rule, but the fact that they were at peace in the North Sea did not mean that the English were automatically welcome in the South Seas. They saw them as interlopers; as an English factor in the East Indies named John Jourdain wrote:

  The Hollanders say we go aboute to reape the fruits of their labours. It is rather the contrarye for that they seem to barre us of our libertie to trade in a free countrye, having manie times traded in those places, and nowe they seeke to defraud us of that we have so long fought for.29

  So much for Grotius. Jourdain would die in a skirmish with the Dutch out in the East Indies in 1619, in what has been called ‘flagrant disregard’ of yet another Anglo-Dutch truce.30 The Dutch scored major successes against the Portuguese, gaining control of the island of Amboyna in 1605. The Dutch intended to keep the proceeds for themselves, and on island after island they resolutely sought a monopoly. English adventurers attempted to secure the tiny island of Pula Run for the English Crown, so that King James I was described as ‘by the grace of God, king of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’, these being the spice islands of Ai and Run.31 This, however, set off a dirty battle for control of Run in which the Dutch shamelessly cut down all the nutmeg trees on what was the nutmeg island par excellence; it was better no one should have the nutmeg of Run than that the English should. The main English defender, Nathaniel Courthope, was shot and killed in 1620, and the Dutch took charge of the island, expelling the native population for good measure; but negotiations about its future dragged on for forty-seven years, until the Dutch and English governments finally agreed that the Dutch could keep Run if the English were allowed to hold on to Manhattan island far away in North America, which they had seized from the Dutch three years earlier.32 To the inhabitants of the East Indies one lot of Western barbarians was much the same as another, and they easily confused the Dutch with the English.33

  Even after they captured Run, outrageous acts of violence were still being committed by the Dutch, to intimidate all English interlopers present and future: in 1623 a group of innocent traders based at the English factory in Amboyna were arrested, tortured within an inch of their lives and then executed, on the specious grounds that they had been conspiring with Japanese mercenaries, who met the same fate, to take over this island.34 The ‘Massacre of Amboyna’ soured Anglo-Dutch relations, as did the high-handed manner of the Dutch governor-general of the Indies, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a singularly unattractive figure who had no compunction about wiping out native peoples, European rivals or anyone who stood in his way, and sometimes ignored the instructions of his own government in the Netherlands. Coen rejoiced in the killing of his old foe Jourdain. Such methods did, however, greatly strengthen the Dutch position in the East Indies, particularly after the transfer of their headquarters to the well-placed town of Jakarta, renamed Batavia, the Latin name for the Netherlands.

  English attention turned away from the East Indies towards the Indian subcontinent. In part, it is true, English interest in India was generated by the need to find products that would appeal to the inhabitants of the East Indies, because heavy English woollen cloths were not exactly what the near-naked inhabitants of these islands craved. Indian calicoes, though, were lighter and could find a market. Thus the English, like the Portuguese before them, became intermediaries between the far-flung coasts of what they broadly called ‘India’. There was already a lively inter-regional trade by sea, and it was not just clever but necessary to insert themselves into it if they were to make themselves welcome in the Indian Ocean and beyond.35

  The human cost of conflict with the Dutch was high enough; but the financial cost was also difficult to bear. The East India Company already functioned in a rather different way to the other English trading companies, such as the Muscovy Company and the Levant Company, which was active in Smyrna and other parts of the Mediterranean. Whereas the other companies were, in essence, umbrella bodies facilitating and licensing trade by syndicates of members, the East India Company traded as a single operation, ‘one body corporate and politick’, to cite Queen Elizabeth’s charter of 1600. The board made the decision when and where to trade, and investors were not permitted to fit out their own expeditions in
parallel with official ones.36 Over time, and following a number of crises, it evolved into a joint-stock company, much strengthened after 1657 by a generous new charter granted by Oliver Cromwell that attracted record investments, exceeding £700,000.37

  IV

  The most remarkable success achieved by the Dutch was not their series of victories over the Portuguese, for the Portuguese trading empire was already under severe strain by 1600, or their victories against the English, but their installation in Japan. Between 1641 and 1853 the Dutch merchants based in Nagasaki were the only European merchants present on the soil of Japan, and even then they were based on the offshore island of Deshima.38 Their presence there around 1800 has been beautifully portrayed in a work of fiction by David Mitchell.39 The idea that this was the channel through which the Japanese acquired scientific knowledge, dealing with navigation, medicine and much else, has been much discussed; the Japanese knew this western knowledge as Rangaku, ‘Dutch learning’, which implies that it was seen as a coherent system, though the tendency nowadays is to stress the higgledy-piggledy nature of the acquisition of Western science and technology over more than 200 years.40 This seems much more characteristic of the way knowledge was transmitted along maritime trade routes: a slow osmosis, as one can also see with the spread of religious ideas, whether Christian, Muslim or Buddhist.

  The Dutch presence in Japan can be traced back to 1600, to the voyage of De Liefde, whose pilot was William Adams, the Englishman who later won the trust of the Japanese shogun.41 Other English merchants managed to win privileges from the shogun, and there was an English factory in Hirado from 1613 to 1623; however, it was regarded as unprofitable, a source of copper to be sure – but taking copper to England was like carrying coals to Newcastle. Later, the Dutch would realize that good profits were to be made by hawking Japanese copper round Asian seas.42 Since the Portuguese and Spaniards still had some influence in Japan, they did all they could to poison the relations between the first Dutch visitors and the Tokugawa administration. But the Dutch had a particular selling point: they explained how they had thrown off the shackles of Catholic Spain, which, in the eyes of the Japanese, made them into non-Christians. This was enormously helpful just when the Japanese government was becoming increasingly hostile to Jesuit and other missionaries. Prince Maurits, the Stadhouder, sent a polite letter to Ieyasu, which arrived in 1609; and a remarkable correspondence between the Stadhouder and the shogun continued for a while – the Stadhouder took the opportunity to berate the Portuguese and the Spaniards for their ‘cunning and deceit’, and portrayed King Philip as a power-crazed megalomaniac who planned to use the Christian converts to spearhead revolution in Japan. Oddly, Ieyasu did not respond to the damning indictment of King Philip and his subjects, but diplomacy worked and the Dutch secured trading rights at Hirado.43 Even so, the Dutch presence remained precarious during the next thirty years: a hasty request for the renewal of their rights following the death of Ieyasu was viewed with deep displeasure at court, since it implied that his son and successor was so disloyal to Ieyasu’s memory that he would quash his father’s decisions. The Dutch clearly needed to be taught a lesson, and the shogun began to restrict their freedom to trade in raw silk. The governor-general of the VOC, based at Batavia, had a good understanding of how the Dutch should behave:

  You should not get into trouble with the Japanese, and you have to wait for a good time and with the greatest patience in order to get something. Since they cannot stand being retorted, we should pretend to behave humbly among the Japanese, and to play the role of poor and miserable merchants. The more we play this role, the more favour and respect we receive in this country. This has been known to us through years of experience.44

  He wrote these words in 1638, by which time he could see clear proof that it paid to be patient. By 1636 the Portuguese had been cleared out of Japan, apart from the trading station at Nagasaki on Deshima Island. This was not a permanent factory: the Portuguese were to bring their goods, do their business, and leave, until they came back the following year. At the same time the Japanese were banned from sending ships overseas. The penalty for doing so was execution. Care was also taken to prevent Portuguese travelling on Dutch passports, which by this time was happening all the time – the New Christians of Amsterdam were well installed in Macau and even Manila.45

  In reality, the Japanese did want to keep a door open, but only by a small crack. They were deeply insulted when the commander of the Dutch fort on Formosa, or Taiwan, Pieter Nuyts, impounded some Japanese ships; rather than breaking off all relations, the Japanese demanded that Nuyts should be sent to Japan, where he was held hostage until 1636. But the shogun was careful not to cut himself off completely by expelling the Dutch. Equally, the Dutch were perfectly aware that they needed to prove that they were nothing like the Portuguese. In 1638 they were happy to support the shogun against rebels, including many Japanese Christians, backed by the Portuguese, and, since the defeat of the rebels culminated in the massacre of maybe 37,000 victims, the Dutch were for ever after blamed for their cynical betrayal of their fellow believers. Yet this confirmed the belief at court that the Dutch were not really Christian, or at any rate were a very different sort of Christian who would not try to spread their faith. In Gulliver’s Travels, the hero visits Japan, pretending to be a ‘Hollander’, and in Edo (Tokyo) he witnesses the Dutch trampling on a crucifix, a standard ritual for the Japanese, but obviously rather more questionable for a Dutch Christian.46 The shogun was shocked to learn that the newly built and elegantly gabled Dutch warehouse at Hirado carried a date on its façade according to the Christian calendar. Forewarned of a plot to massacre the Dutch merchants in Hirado, the Dutch quickly demolished the offending building, while the government, anxious to keep all traces of Christianity at bay, forbade the Dutch merchants from observing the Sunday rest that had become part of the Calvinist religious routine.47

  In the end, the stand-off was resolved when the Dutch were ordered to go and occupy the former Portuguese base at Deshima. Once again the Japanese government spoke dismissively of the Dutch presence in Japan, in language that, if anything, betrays that the Japanese did value having some access, but mainly for the court, to the exotic goods of the world beyond – whether European guns or Chinese silk:

  His Majesty [the shogun] charges us to inform you that it is of slight importance to the empire of Japan whether foreigners come or do not come to trade; but in consideration of the charter granted to them by Ieyasu, he is pleased to allow the Hollanders to continue their operations and to leave them their commercial and other privileges, on the condition that they evacuate Hirado and establish themselves and their vessels in the port of Nagasaki.48

  Deshima means ‘Fore island’, since it lies in front of Nagasaki proper, although the modern extension of the city has completely enveloped it in metropolitan Nagasaki. The island was an artificial one, a curved trapezoid shaped like a fan, supposedly because the shogun replied to the question of what shape it should be by snapping open his fan. No larger than Dam Square in modern Amsterdam, Deshima measured 557 feet at the top and 706 feet at the bottom, while the sides were 210 feet long.49 Such a confined space was rendered even more claustrophobic by its railings of iron spikes and the sentries posted on the stone bridge that linked Deshima to the mainland, checking every entry and exit. The Dutch tried to build houses as similar as possible to what they knew from home, and, being Dutch, they naturally found space for a flower garden on their tiny island. There were few permanent residents: some Japanese officials, and the Dutch captain, the chief merchant, a secretary, a bookkeeper, a doctor and other essential support staff, and a few black slaves and white artisans. They were vastly outnumbered by the Japanese officials, not just guards but a vast horde of interpreters – around 150 at the end of the seventeenth century. The numbers were so swollen because the Dutch had to pay for the upkeep of the Japanese officials. Not surprisingly, then, there were many sinecures. On the other hand, there were other
officials who took their job extremely seriously, carefully inspecting all goods that arrived, with special attention to Christian literature – the Dutch were not even permitted to hold church services on Deshima. Meanwhile Nagasaki flourished on the back of Dutch trade and maritime trade within Japan itself – around 1700 the city possessed about 64,000 inhabitants.50

  Why, it might be asked, did any Dutch merchants agree to live there? The answer lies in the profitability of trade with Japan. During the late seventeenth century Nagasaki proved more profitable than any other VOC base in the Dutch trading world: during the decade 1670–79 Dutch merchants were making a 75 per cent profit on their trade through Japan, though this was a high point. For no one else was on hand to offer everything from sugar and shark-skins to buffalo horns and brazilwood to microscopes and mangoes, not to mention pickled vegetables, lead pencils, amber and rock crystal; but the greatest demand was for Chinese silk. All these paid for gold, silver, copper, ceramics and lacquer-ware, though the Dutch did not neglect sake or soy sauce too. And one can see from the nature of the goods they sold in Japan that the Dutch were by no means specialists in European goods. They brought together goods from India, the Spice Islands, east Africa and the Atlantic – that was the source of narwhal tusks, which had a similar fascination to rhinoceros horns, another product that they eagerly sold through Deshima.51 So Deshima gave them a Japanese monopoly, and they were prepared to put up with the humiliation of living in a virtual prison in order to maintain access to the court of the shogun.