The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Meanwhile the Danes were having only limited success as they attempted to create colonies further north, just to the east of Puerto Rico, in what became the American Virgin Islands after the Danish possessions were sold to the United States in 1917.30 The Danish West India Company had been revived in 1670 and received its royal charter in 1672, and an unoccupied island in the Caribbean suitable for settlement had already been identified, St Thomas, which the English had briefly held but had abandoned only a few weeks before a Danish–Norwegian ship arrived from Bergen in May 1672. The English were quite co-operative, letting the Danes (or rather their slaves) cut sugar cane on one of their own small islands nearby, a free gift that proved to be the foundation of St Thomas’s prosperity, such as it was.31 The truth was that there were plenty of small islands, at most inhabited by a few Caribs, and (so long as they ignored the native peoples) the Europeans could pick and choose – Jakob Kettler had perhaps been overambitious in setting his heart on Tobago rather than a smaller territory. St Thomas, true to the style of Danish colonization, became home not just to Danes but to Dutch, German, English and Portuguese settlers, the last being mainly of New Christian origin. There were so many Dutch that the islanders mainly used their language.

  Inevitably, the arrival of the Danes set off tensions with other colonists in the Caribbean. The English had been hospitable at the start, but gradually became troublesome, though King Charles II, anxious to maintain good relations with the Danish court, sacked the English governor of the Leeward Islands after he laid claim to Danish St Thomas. The French were more dangerous, for when Denmark went to war against Louis XIV in 1675 (in support of the Dutch) St Thomas was seen as a fair prize, and the island was raided; the fortifications were still unfinished, but the French did no more than capture some free and enslaved Africans, and if anything their raid acted as a spur to the completion of the fort.32 Yet there were also deep internal rivalries, accentuated by the failure of the West India Company to make much money out of its miniature West Indian empire. In 1684 the king deposed the quarrelsome governor of St Thomas and sent out Gabriel Milan as his replacement; he was of Portuguese Jewish descent, an experienced soldier who had served under the French minister Cardinal Mazarin, and had then traded through Amsterdam, becoming Danish factor there. By the 1680s he insisted that he was a loyal Lutheran, but his sixteen-month career in the Caribbean showed little evidence of piety. He arrived with a large entourage, including six or seven dogs, and carrying 6,000 rikstalers given to him by the king of Denmark to cover his expenses. However, he regarded St Thomas as a private kingdom, treating the African slaves especially harshly: one runaway was impaled, another had his foot cut off. The Danish settlers complained to the government in Copenhagen, and he was arrested and sent back to Denmark for trial. Condemned to death for abuse of power, he received the good news that the king had agreed to mitigate his sentence: instead of having his hand cut off before being beheaded, whereupon his head would be impaled on a stick, he would simply be beheaded, and this duly happened in March 1689.

  Just as Denmark’s Asiatic trade had been restructured time and again because of its relatively limited success, none of these activities in Africa or the Americas proved to be as lucrative as the companies or indeed the Danish kings hoped, and in the 1750s the affairs of the West India Company reached the point where the Crown felt obliged to take over the company’s assets, as well as the forts of Christiansborg and Frederiksborg (which had been back in Danish hands for quite a while). Admittedly, there were some notable successes: in the late seventeenth century several successful trading expeditions were despatched from Bergen by a wealthy merchant; the acquisition of the island of Sainte-Croix from France in 1733 gave the Danes a stronger base in the West Indies close to the two islands they already held. On the other hand, Danish and Norwegian cargoes sent directly across the Atlantic (thereby excluding the slave traffic out of Guinea) were made up of basic necessities rather than costly goods: tallow from Iceland, Baltic pitch and tar, whale oil from the Faroes and Greenland, base metals and, importantly, all the equipment needed for the manufacture of sugar, such as copper boilers. This does show how Copenhagen, Bergen and Glückstadt were functioning as centres for the redistribution of goods from right across the Danish colonial empire. Guinea, on the other hand, mainly received textiles, foodstuffs and weapons such as muskets; half of the textiles were not European at all, but had been brought all the way from India or even China. The Danes had put together a maritime trading network that tied together their Indian Ocean operations with their Atlantic ones.33 What came back from the West Indies was, in the first place, sugar, the colonial product par excellence, though a few other products gradually made inroads, notably tobacco, coffee and cocoa.34

  There were several attempts to reinvigorate West Indian and African trade by forming new companies, such as the ‘Royal Danish Baltic and Guinea Trading Company’ at the end of the eighteenth century, which was supposed to tie together the Baltic trade of Copenhagen and its trade in the Atlantic, including even the Greenland Trade Office. It was an ambitious project: this company operated thirty-seven ships and did very well in the years around 1780 as a result of the American Revolution, which left a neutral trading power in a strong position while the British battled against the Thirteen Colonies. However, when the Danish government banned the slave trade in 1792 (admittedly with a ten-year delay before implementation) the Baltic–Guinea Company declared that it could see no point in maintaining the overseas settlements. As a result, trade was opened up as never before to all Danes and to foreigners.35 But the Baltic–Guinea Company pointed to a special characteristic of Scandinavian worldwide trade. Well managed, the Scandinavian ports could serve as distribution centres for large swathes of northern Europe. The Danes never quite succeeded in that ambition; however, the Swedes, making intensive use of Gothenburg, had a very slow start but in the long run proved more successful.

  V

  Others came up with schemes that would, they hoped, transform the fortune of small, marginal states; from 1715 onwards, the newly created Ostend Company took advantage of the transfer of the southern Netherlands from Spanish to Austrian Habsburg rule, and had grand ambitions in both west and east Africa; but it crashed in 1727 partly thanks to the hostility of the Dutch – they hated the idea of an economic renaissance in Flanders when their own world trade had passed its peak. The Austrians agreed to wind up the Ostend Company as a condition for British and Dutch recognition of the claims of Maria Theresa as heir to the Habsburg throne.36 The Scottish Company of the Indies was chartered in 1695; in its reincarnation as the ‘Darien Company’ it was responsible for the disastrous Darien Scheme that pumped its funds into a failed colony on the Panama isthmus. Panama was not an absurd place to choose, since Pacific goods coming up from Chile and Peru, and potentially from the East Indies, were trans-shipped into the Caribbean at that point; but the architect of the scheme, Paterson, had not taken the trouble to find out what sort of place it was; in the words of Lord Macaulay:

  Let but that precious neck of land be occupied by an intelligent, an enterprising, a thrifty race; and, in a few years, the whole trade between India and Europe must be drawn to that point … It was true that the region which Paterson described as a paradise had been found by the first Castilian settlers to be a land of misery and death.37

  It is the most famous, and in many ways the most important, of these minor companies, because the catastrophic financial collapse that then followed led Scotland into full union with England, and the Darien Scheme still features in debates about whether an independent Scotland is viable.38 These and other schemes were based on the assumption, which was by no means stupid, that there was always room for companies that were willing to carry the goods of nationals of other countries while those countries forced merchants to trade through monopolistic enterprises such as the VOC and the English East India Company. The Flemish and Scottish companies just mentioned are, however, important in other ways: the Ostend c
apitalists helped create the Swedish East India Company; and the Swedish company depended heavily on the expertise of Scottish entrepreneurs whose imprint on eighteenth-century Gothenburg was at least as heavy as that of the Dutch on seventeenth-century Gothenburg. Many of the Scottish settlers in Gothenburg were Jacobites, sympathetic to the rebellions of the Old Pretender, son of James II of England, and his own son, Bonnie Prince Charlie. This did not mean that they were Catholics: Colin Campbell, a Scot, founded a Reformed Church in Gothenburg. And there were also English investors; the British presence was strong enough to earn Gothenburg the title ‘Little London’.39

  The Ostend Company left its imprint on what became the Swedish East India Company in several ways. Between them, the English and the Ostenders commanded 80 per cent of tea imports into Europe. In 1731 the king of Sweden granted the newly formed Swedish East India Company a monopoly on trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope; this charter was valid for fifteen years, and it was renewed four times, the last time in 1806. Gothenburg was to be the centre of operations. The Swedes had one advantage over the English that both reflected and compensated for the fact that they were newcomers: they had no Indian Ocean factories whose support ate up a significant part of their income and that would have propelled them into rivalry with the Dutch, the French, the English and the Danes, all well installed on the coast of India by the early eighteenth century.40 It was touch and go around 1730 whether the Ostend traders would switch their attention to Copenhagen or to Gothenburg, but one or two of them, notably Colin Campbell and his fellow Scot Charles Irvine, built up their interests in Gothenburg, and helped to set the Swedish Company on its remarkably successful course. They focused on the trade route to Guangzhou, knowing that the Swedes would be only one of several nations trading there, but knowing too that the Chinese operated strict controls on access, and that they could count on the protection of the Chinese authorities once they reached the Pearl River.

  Campbell took passage on the first Swedish voyage out East, as ‘first supercargo’, an important position, second only to the captain (whom he detested), with rights of supervision over the cargo on board. He also carried a letter announcing that he was the Swedish king’s ambassador to the emperor of China; however, on the return voyage his ship encountered seven Dutch vessels in Indonesia, and the Dutch were unimpressed by the claim to diplomatic immunity. Only his persistence convinced them that it would be wiser to let him, his ship and his crew continue their journey, and in due course the Dutch governor-general in Batavia handsomely apologized.41 One factor that may have made the Dutch very suspicious was that the other supercargoes were British, and there was every reason to suppose that, as had often happened in the Danish merchant fleet, the Swedes were acting as cover for more serious rivals. The second company ship to leave Gothenburg, which left even before the first one had returned, was built in England and carried four British supercargoes. This ship brought back a profitable cargo, including pepper, silk and cotton cloth, but made the mistake of attempting to trade in India and Ceylon, and, if anything, this voyage made clear the advantages of heading straight to Macau and avoiding waters that teemed with more powerful European merchants. For when the Swedish ship reached Ceylon the Dutch denied the Swedes fresh water for the long haul back to the Cape of Good Hope. Fortunately they had a more humane welcome from the French in Mauritius, when they arrived there panting with thirst in June 1734.42

  It became more and more obvious that tea, not pepper, was the commodity Europeans wanted to buy, in all sorts of different types and qualities, and by concentrating on that the Swedish companies kept afloat financially. Gothenburg was much less important than Copenhagen, a much larger city serving a whole Danish empire that stretched from Greenland into the Baltic, plus the West Indies and west Africa. And yet the more modest status of Gothenburg, and the less advanced economy of Sweden as a whole, brought advantages: the domestic market was small, but there was an incentive to serve the lands around the North Sea, and, as has been seen, Great Britain was a marvellous target, with its thirst for China tea.

  One apparent problem was the lack of interesting products that Sweden could offer the world, particularly the Chinese. But this too could be resolved. Swedish raw materials – Finnish timber, Swedish iron, and the like – were in heavy demand in the shipyards of southern Spain. Cádiz became the preferred port of call on the way out to China, for its streets were paved with the silver of Peru. By selling Swedish goods in Spain, the Swedes acquired the American silver that the Chinese craved.43 The silver of the Swedes had been carried up the Pacific coast of South America, had passed through Panama or Mexico, across the Atlantic, and would then be taken down the eastern Atlantic, through the Indian Ocean (generally bypassing India entirely), to reach Macau and Guangzhou in the western Pacific. At the end of the eighteenth century, the proportion of silver in the cargo of Swedish ships bound for China reached as high as 96 per cent (figures for Danish trade in China are not very different). If one arrived with cash in hand, no time was wasted trying to sell European goods in the hold of one’s ships. Scandinavian businessmen could go straight to the tea and silk markets and snap up the best teas, such as the variety known as Bohea, before their rivals had a chance to do so. The Dutch often ended up mixing this tea with inferior teas to fill their tea chests.44 Importing this tea into Britain was not straightforward: taxes on tea often exceeded 100 per cent, as the British government tried to take full advantage of demand. Inevitably, this created an unofficial tea trade – the word ‘smuggling’ conjures up a dramatic, even romantic, image, but the Swedes certainly knew how to dump their tea on the English.

  A similar story can be told for silks and ceramics. In the eighteenth century 30,000,000–50,000,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain passed through Gothenburg. Admittedly, one reason for carrying so much of it in the cargo of European ships was that it provided ballast, but it was not all needed in Sweden. A Swedish expert who has also thought about rival sources of Chinese ceramics in Europe has pointed out that ‘the company brought home the largest quantity of Chinese porcelain not only in relative but even in absolute terms’.45 Even the very first voyage to China, which set out in 1732, brought back 430,000 pieces of porcelain, including over 21,000 plates and six chamber pots, which were put up for auction in Gothenburg; the ship also carried 165 tons of green and black tea and over 23,000 silk cloths.46 On each voyage, much of the return cargo took the form of teacups and other paraphernalia for the tea and coffee consumers of Europe, who now encompassed not just crowned princes but city-dwellers of quite modest means – a consumer revolution was taking place in eighteenth-century Britain and elsewhere, and Chinese blue-and-white pottery was a universal obsession.47 Attempts to imitate Chinese ceramics were matched by attempts to imitate Chinese silks, and a village called Kanton was built outside Stockholm in the hope that the Swedes could develop their own silk industry. This was influenced by a set of attitudes known as ‘cameralism’, which argued for the creation of self-sufficient national economies. Maybe, indeed, tea could be planted in Sweden; the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who died in 1778, tried various experiments over a period of twenty years, but there was no substitute for the teas of the Far East, as the tea bush could not be persuaded to grow in a cold climate.48

  During this period 132 ships were sent east, all but a few to China; most returned, for the Swedes had a very good safety record compared to other European nations. Accidents were much more likely to occur in the North Sea on the way out from Gothenburg, in winter, or on the way back, than in warmer ocean waters. One ship foundered on rocks in the Gothenburg archipelago in 1745 when it was almost within sight of home; it is quite possible that this was a deliberate insurance scam.49 What brought the Swedish expeditions to an end was a combination of factors: a reduction in the heavy tax on tea imposed by the British government, which created a free-for-all in the tea trade; competition from new rivals, the Americans; bad financial management around 1800; the accumulation of vast amoun
ts of unsold tea. But the Swedish East India Company had been, until the start of the nineteenth century, a remarkable success story; more than that, it had helped shape not just Swedish but European culture and society, with its massive imports of tea and tea services.

  41

  Austrialia or Australia?

  I

  The idea that a great southern continent existed can be traced very far back in time. It has been seen that the Romans understood Ceylon to form the northern tip of this mysterious continent, in accordance with Ptolemy’s view that the Indian Ocean was an enclosed sea whose southern shores connected Africa and south-east Asia. Even when it became obvious that Ptolemy was mistaken, the assumption that a southern continent existed led mariners sailing in the wake of Magellan to think that Tierra del Fuego was the tip of this southern continent. The sixteenth-century English circumnavigators, Drake and Cavendish, travelled through the Magellan Strait, but their explorations suggested that Tierra del Fuego was a large island; even when the route round Cape Horn was discovered, its high winds and violent seas long discouraged navigators. It was believed that the world needed to be in balance to occupy its position in the middle of the firmament. Therefore a southern land as weighty as the continents in the northern hemisphere must exist. Moreover, once one had crossed the torrid regions, where human survival had long been assumed to be impossible, one would find lands that were ‘as fertile and habitable as the northern hemisphere’, rich in precious stones, pearls and fine metals, as well as abundant flora and fauna. These lands were sometimes known as Magellanica, though this term was quite flexible, and could mean Pacific islands or even South America.1