The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  One of the many curiosities of life in Deshima was that the Dutch captain was treated as an honorary daimyo, or high vassal of the shogun, and was expected to make an annual visit to the court at Edo, bearing presents and conducting himself with meticulous attention to the exacting etiquette of the Japanese court. Once he had reached the ceremonial hall and been sonorously announced as the Oranda Kapitan, ‘captain of Holland’, the Dutch captain was required to crawl past the piles of gifts his embassy had brought towards the platform on which the shogun was seated (though behind a lattice, so he could not actually be seen); that done, he crawled back ‘like a lobster’ as a European observer wrote – although later in the day a relatively informal session often took place in which the shogun and his courtiers, still out of sight, cross-examined their exotic visitors about the world they had come from.52 Historians have debated whether the treatment of the Dutch embassies at Edo was a humiliation or a sort of honour, since the VOC had received favours from Ieyasu, and his successors were keen to see those privileges continue. Moreover, the chance to learn about Western science was too good to miss. Intellectual contact was also maintained through the work of interpreters and translators, and this contact became more intense over time, so that by the late eighteenth century Japanese authors were expounding Western medicine in their own books.53

  A Japanese historian has made the valid point that Japan was not alone in closing off access to European merchants, and in trying to suppress the spread of Christianity. Similar moves can be seen in China, the Ryukyu Islands, Vietnam and Korea.54 The violence of the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Dutch had earned them poor reputations. The arrival of the Dutch while the Portuguese were at a weak point in their fortunes and under the rule of the Spanish king gave the Japanese the chance to maintain limited links with European trade. Contrary to common assumptions, they did not cut themselves off completely from the outside world; rather, they chose exactly what sort of contact they wanted, and confined it within narrow parameters.

  39

  Nations Afloat

  I

  The complex rivalries among those who aspired to control the ocean routes (whatever Grotius might say about free trade and navigation) can too easily be reduced to an image of national empires in conflict with one another. In public, noble Spaniards scorned trade, as if they were ancient Roman patricians, and left the dirty business, officially at least, to the Genoese and German financiers without whom not just the Crown but the city of Seville would have found themselves short of resources. In reality, financiers and aristocrats were keen to form powerful teams, whose links were strengthened by marriage alliances. This was visible in the close links tying the New Christian families of Spain and Portugal to the Iberian noble houses. When money began to run dry, an injection of funds from wealthy families of Jewish origin made sense, until the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’, began to spread in the sixteenth century, making such marriages undesirable; every attempt was then made to cover up evidence of Jewish or Muslim ancestry.

  Frontier regions tend to attract chancers, hustlers, ne’er-do-wells, but also those looking for new and potentially lucrative business opportunities. In the late sixteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese empires acted as hosts to a myriad of different ethnic groups: there were Bretons and Basques, Scots and French Huguenots, Galicians and Corsicans; Basques are found as far away as Potosí in Peru, the source of the apparently endless quantities of silver that were sent to Spain and China. Some, such as the Huguenots, were refugees, leaving their native country to avoid religious conflict. Others were looking for new economic opportunities. Some left their homeland en famille, while Portuguese migrants tended to be male and were drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and social classes. It was the classic combination of those fleeing persecution and economic migrants, with a fuzzy boundary between those two groups.1 However many they were, the European migrants did not come alone – shiploads of slaves diffused black Africans right across the two Iberian empires, in places as far from home as Lima and Manila.2 By the late seventeenth century, so many slaves were delivered to the Americas as contraband that no one was bothering to buy the asientos, or licences, that had long been required in this revolting trade.3 The European colonization of the lands claimed by Spain and its rivals was not, then, an orderly imposition of authority, though Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats and soldiers abounded, but a haphazard movement of merchants, religious dissidents, criminals fleeing justice, impoverished peasants and artisans, and slaves. Yet it was hard to find a safe haven: an apparently settled life in the smaller Canary Islands could not guarantee immunity from attention, as those accused of secret adherence to Judaism in the seventeenth-century Canaries were to find.4

  Solidarity within migrant groups was often maintained by the existence of a community church, typically, in the Portuguese case, dedicated to St Anthony of Padua, a companion of St Francis, who was and is much venerated in Portugal, having been born in Lisbon. These were not just places of worship – after all, some of the Portuguese were more sympathetic to Judaism than to Christianity – but sources of charitable support, and places where one could exchange news and make useful contacts. In Cartagena de las Indias, in what is now Colombia, the Portuguese were prosperous enough to build a substantial hospital.5 The Genoese and the English tended to name their churches overseas after their common patron saint, St George, and the Huguenots built Protestant chapels wherever it was safe to do so.

  In the final analysis, trade generally trumped distaste towards other religions: the Portuguese monarchy tolerated the existence of Jewish communities in the Moroccan towns over which it ruled, even though the open practice of Judaism had been banned in Portugal in 1497.

  II

  Portuguese settlers had helped set up sugar industries across the Atlantic from the fifteenth century onwards. But the Portuguese diaspora of the late sixteenth and early century seventeenth had a distinctive character. The Portuguese merchants in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific attracted suspicion because a high proportion – exactly how many it is impossible to say – had Jewish forebears. That does not mean they were Jewish in both the patrilineal and the matrilineal line; and, whereas the leading Sephardic families, like the Arab elites of al-Andalus and the hidalgos of Castile, carefully preserved their genealogies going back very many generations, this was only worth doing if one could live as a Jew and take pride in one’s Jewish ancestry – the image of past times in Spain and Portugal as a golden age in which Sephardic Jews had risen to eminent positions at court was too attractive to be easily forgotten. For the New Christians, most of whom had adopted Portuguese or Spanish names, often as inconspicuous as López or da Costa, Jewish ancestry was better not advertised. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the practice of Judaism in secret within Spain had largely disappeared, under pressure from the Inquisition. But in Portugal the king had promised the Jews that he would wait for a whole generation until the Inquisition was unleashed, when he forced the great majority to convert in 1497 – these were not just native Portuguese Jews but Spanish Jews who had arrived as refugees only five years earlier after the Jews were expelled from Castile and Aragon. Portugal therefore became fertile ground for the practice and dissemination of crypto-Judaism. Then, as the Portuguese New Christians became more and more involved in trade and finance, they turned up at the court in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain, seeding a revival of interest in the religion of their ancestors among Spaniards of Jewish descent.

  Even though the Portuguese merchants were by no means all of Jewish descent, contemporaries sometimes assumed that all Portuguese merchants were really Jews, and in the seventeenth century those who wrote about the Nação, or ‘Nation’, of the Portuguese might even add the adjective hebrea.6 By then the term made some, though not total, sense, because increasing numbers of New Christians were openly returning to their ancestors’ religion in Livorno, Amsterdam and London, and there existed a strong sense of brotherhood
binding together these scattered communities that had managed to defy the Inquisition. To this day the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London, founded by members of the Nação, offers prayers in Portuguese each Day of Atonement for os nossos irmãos prezos pella Inquisição, ‘our brethren taken by the Inquisition’.

  The new Portuguese trading network came into being after the extinction of the native Portuguese dynasty and the succession of Philip II of Spain to the throne of Portugal in 1581. The shock of losing King Sebastian in the sands of north Africa while he pressed ahead with a vain attempt to conquer Morocco was commercial as well as political. Portugal had benefited for two centuries from its close trading relationship with England, and now the country was hitched to England’s most potent enemy. Yet the Portuguese hit the ground running: earlier generations had already accumulated handsome profits from the trade in spices, sugar and slaves, and so they were as well placed as the Genoese to invest in voyages across Spanish waters. Portuguese merchants, who had already been supplying large numbers of slaves to the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the American mainland, diverted their attention towards the well-developed trading empire of the Spanish Atlantic. This occurred with the approval of King Philip: ‘the entire traffic of all that has been discovered, in the East as in the West, will be common to the two nations of Castile and Portugal.’7 The Portuguese also became masters of the contraband traffic that brought Peruvian silver down from the mines at Potosí in the Andes and across the plains of South America to a small but bustling Atlantic harbour at Buenos Aires. After all, it was cheaper to trade without having to pay for asientos, or licences, if one could get away with that. On the other hand, this did not make the Spanish officials love the Portuguese, particularly in the early seventeenth century, when competition from European rivals such as the Dutch led to a noticeable reduction in Spanish trade across the Atlantic.8 There was still the sense that they were foreign interlopers, chancers skilled in exploiting loopholes, never really loyal to the Habsburg monarchy both as Portuguese and as secret members of another faith – exactly what one might expect, in the anti-Semitic language of early modern Spain, of the Jews.

  In this way, Jewish or not, they were often seen as Jews; in any case, there was plenty of intermarriage between New Christians and members of Old Christian trading families, which meant that defining who was a Jew was not straightforward.9 The Sephardic rabbis in Amsterdam and London were not too worried if the new members of their community could not prove Jewish ancestry in the female line, as orthodox Jewish law requires, or if they knew next to nothing about Jewish practices. The sense of common experience as members of La Nação was good enough. Their observance might be limited to the avoidance of pork and shellfish and the occasional fast, practices that it would be possible to keep alive without attracting too much attention.10 And what is one to make of families such as the Nunes da Costa, where one brother died in Safed, the great centre of Jewish mysticism in Galilee, and another brother, Fray Francisco de Vitoria, became archbishop in Mexico City?11 The New Christians crossed a fuzzy boundary between Judaism, crypto-Judaism and Catholicism, and the beliefs of the crypto-Jews were often an apparently unholy mix of prayers, observances and theologies drawn from both Judaism and Christianity, generated in part by their movement back and forth between lands where they had to pose as Christians and lands, such as Holland and Italy, where it was possible to live as Jews if they so chose.12

  Jewish or not, these Portuguese merchants created worldwide networks that linked all three great oceans. Manuel Bautista Pérez made his fortune after he transported hundreds of slaves from southern Africa to Peru in 1618, thanking God and his uncle (a co-investor) for the fact that he made a profit of over 50,000 pesos. Although his centre of operations lay in Lima, he did business with correspondents in Panama, Mexico City, Cartagena de las Indias, in the Americas; in Luanda in Angola; in Lisbon, Madrid, Rouen and Antwerp. In Peru he handled Chinese silk, European textiles, Caribbean pearls and even Baltic amber.13 These contacts were by no means unusual. Around 1630 Portuguese merchants were also doing business in Acapulco (linking them to the Manila galleons), Havana, Bayonne (an important centre of New Christian settlement) and Hamburg, whose citizens had begun to welcome Portuguese Jewish merchants into their midst.14 There they built relations with the rulers of Denmark and Sweden, to whom the Teixeira family provided credit; and eventually a Sephardic settlement sprang up in Glückstadt, a royal foundation in the contested territory of Schleswig–Holstein, and after that in Copenhagen too. That is just to speak of their local business, which extended into the Baltic; but in the seventeenth century the Hamburg Sephardim had links with the Portuguese possessions in India, with Mediterranean ports such as Venice and Smyrna, with Ceuta and the other Portuguese possessions in Morocco, not to mention Barbados, Rio de Janeiro and Angola.15

  The wealthier Portuguese merchants settled comfortably into the urbane business worlds of Amsterdam and Hamburg, dressing like the local elites and living in equally gracious homes. But the Portuguese network brought their partners to very different societies across the globe. The Portuguese Jews who settled in Porto de Ale, near Dakar in west Africa, from 1606 onwards also took note of local habits and customs, and, just as they managed to win favour at European courts, they gained the protection of Muslim kings in and around Senegal. They were mainly a male community, so they took local women as their wives, and managed to convince the rabbis of Amsterdam that their families should be accepted as Jewish; they observed Jewish rituals and received advice from a Portuguese rabbi sent out from Amsterdam to minister to their needs. Their open profession of Judaism alarmed the other Portuguese in west Africa, who supposedly threatened to kill them; but the king told their enemies ‘that his land was a market where all kinds of people had a right to live’, and those who caused trouble would have their heads cut off. Just like the Portuguese merchants elsewhere, they rapidly built ties across the trading world of their ‘Nation’, as far afield as Brazil.16 By the seventeenth century the New Christians were in the ascendant both on the Guinea Coast and in the Cape Verde Islands. Some became involved in one of the major activities on these dusty islands: the collection of slaves sold by African rulers to Portuguese merchants, and their transmission via the islands to Brazil or the Caribbean. But it would be a grave mistake to treat this as in some way a Jewish speciality.17

  III

  Historians who have written about the Portuguese merchants, particularly those of Jewish origin, have generally concentrated on one ocean or another. Even though this reflects the way historians have divided themselves into Atlanticists, Pacificists, Indian Oceanists and Mediterraneanists, this is a pity, because the really impressive feature of their network is the way it embraced the entire globe. Portugal itself recedes from view as ships move between Africa and South America, or goods are sent up the coast of South America for trans-shipment to Macau. Maybe half the Portuguese traffic in the Indian Ocean was operated on behalf of New Christians. The royal monopoly on trade in this region proved to be only theoretical. The wealth and influence of the New Christians increased exponentially as private trade in the hands of merchant houses became the mainstay of Portuguese prosperity – with effects, as will be seen, on the prosperity of the Habsburg monarchy as well.18

  All this happened despite attempts to stamp on the New Christians in precisely this area. The mass conversion of 1497 left former Jews free to engage in overseas trade, their involvement having been tightly circumscribed while they were still practising their old religion. Yet in 1501 King Manuel was already trying to exclude New Christians from positions of responsibility in the new trading stations that were being established in Asia, and the decrees became ever harsher – eventually they were banned from travelling there in any capacity, but they continued to arrive nonetheless, giving the Inquisition in Goa a fierce headache. Risks were worth taking when the proceeds were so impressive: the annual trade around the Cape was worth about 5,000,000 cruzados by 1600, an
d the king realized which way things were going, so he levied especially high customs dues on the most precious spices carried along this route, nutmeg, cloves and mace. But the private trade also brought diamonds from India, fine eastern cloths, lacquered boxes and porcelain. Needless to say, all this was managed by very effective, well-connected networks, by and large constructed around families and marriage alliances. There were New Christians in Mexico City such as the brothers Vaaz, who dominated trade to Manila around 1640. Then, in Manila, there were other New Christians who maintained close contact with fellow New Christians in Macau and Melaka.19 These operations were conducted on behalf of investors far away in Lisbon and Seville.

  The Portuguese diaspora included, importantly, Madrid, even though Spain was hardly a safe place for anyone who did attempt to practise Judaism. The Spanish monarchy, having relied heavily on German and Genoese bankers in the past, began to see the Portuguese as ideal financial agents. As with the Genoese bankers, the Crown required advance payments against the income it could expect to receive further down the line, largely from the silver mines of the Americas. In the 1570s the funds advanced by the Genoese had been used to pay the salaries of soldiers serving in Flanders, and an attempt to write them out of existing contracts by Philip II, in 1576, left the troops bereft of funds and sparked a mutiny among the Spanish troops in Flanders.20 Genoese capital could not appear out of thin air, and as the transatlantic trade between Seville and the Americas declined at the start of the seventeenth century, the ability of the Genoese to service the needs of the Crown also declined. The Genoese were overstretched; they already dominated the banking of the kingdom of Naples, another Spanish possession of great strategic importance where the Habsburgs could not let their control slip.21 As the Portuguese also found, the role of bankers to the king engendered xenophobia, which in the case of the Genoese was already visible in the age of Columbus. Genoa did develop an interest in the Indian Ocean, but only from the 1640s onwards, and attempts to fund a Genoese East India Company came far too late to enable them to challenge the Dutch or the English.22 By contrast, Portugal had become master of trade routes in all the oceans, and the political link to Spain meant that the Portuguese had been able to intrude themselves in the Spanish trading world as well. For anyone looking for a source of large amounts of capital, this was where to turn.