The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  St Helena and Tristan da Cunha, and even the archipelagoes much further north, were not simply Atlantic bases. They were tied as closely to the Indian Ocean as to the Atlantic. Just as the oceans flowed into one another, their trade routes were inextricably intertwined.

  V

  It may seem strange to include the fourth largest island in the world, Madagascar, among these dots on the map, but there are good reasons for doing so: a few points along its coasts were initially seen as potential points for the resupply of ships; and, although it does not lie in the Atlantic, it was seen as a valuable link between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, reinforcing the sense that merchants, pirates and indeed governments did not employ the rigid divisions between oceans that tend to be applied nowadays, above all among historians.42 Later, as the idea of settling larger tracts of the island took hold, the assumption grew that this was a more attractive version of Asia, rather than Africa; the full title of a widely circulated pamphlet by ‘Richard Boothby, merchant’, published in London in 1646 and reprinted the next year, was A Breife Discovery or Description of the Most Famous Island of Madagascar or St Laurence in Asia neare unto East-India; with relation of the healthfulnesse, pleasure, fertility and wealth of that country, also the condition of the natives: also the excellent meanes and accommodation to fit the planters there. Another tract by an Englishman who knew the island well was enthusiastically entitled Madagascar, the Richest and most Fruitfull Island in the world; and the author was especially charmed by the ‘loving and affable condition’ of the people – indeed, in another pamphlet he called them ‘the happiest people in the world’.43 These were some of the many manifestos that praised an island that, in truth, the Europeans did not know well, but one that was much more easily accessible by way of the Cape of Good Hope than Sumatra, let alone the Moluccas. The hope was raised that Madagascar could be a substitute for the East Indies, a new Asia away from Asia proper. As usual, optimism turned to disappointment when the Europeans encountered areas of dry, red earth that seemed to extend for ever. On the other hand, there was truth in the idea that this was a world apart from Africa – a miniature continent, with its own extraordinary wildlife and its historical links right across the Indian Ocean.

  The Portuguese had reached Madagascar in 1500, and they found that the island lay under the authority of several different kings. They also found that it was already well connected with the outside world through major east African ports such as Mombasa. In 1506 they conducted a raid on a Malagasy port; it did not produce gold or ivory, but there was so much rice that it would fill twenty ships. These contacts brought Islam as well as goods to Madagascar, but Islam failed to make a strong impact on the island, even though some Muslim practices, such as circumcision and avoidance of pork, became quite widespread. The same applied to Hinduism, whose influence trickled along the trade routes that had brought the first Malay sailors to the island during the Middle Ages; but again it remained weak, and the main cult consisted of ancestor worship (which could, according to some accounts, involve the ceremonial display of ancestors’ corpses and even their consumption).44 Although it became obvious that conquering the island was out of the question, the Europeans exploited the wars between local kings, just as they always had in west Africa, to secure a supply of slaves, which they exchanged for European textiles and cattle. Some of the kings had more upmarket tastes: Dian Ramach had been educated in Portuguese Goa, so it is not surprising that he showed off a lacquered throne made in China, a Japanese vase and both Persian and European robes.45

  Slaves were the main ‘product’ of the island in which the Europeans took an interest. As in west Africa, there was a world of difference between the harsh regime to which the great majority of exported slaves would find themselves subjected, whether in Indian Ocean colonies or across the Atlantic, and the much looser style of slavery on the island, a light version of serfdom that only turned vicious when rulers and nobles decided to sell their unfree subjects to the Europeans.46 Malagasy slaves accounted for a small percentage of the number of slaves who were carried across the high seas by European merchants, less than 5 per cent of slaves traded by Europeans in the Indian Ocean, and a small fraction of those traded in the Atlantic. By comparison, over 2,800,000 slaves are believed to have been transported out of west and central Africa just on English ships during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.47 However, the Malagasies were valued for their intelligence and skills (while their distant relatives, the Malays, were deemed to be too lazy and unreliable); in Barbados, English planters took the view that Malagasy slaves were the ‘most ingenious of any Blacks’, well suited to be trained as carpenters, blacksmiths or coopers. The East India Company sought ‘lusty well-grown boys’ on Madagascar – the term ‘lusty’ being used here without sexual connotations.48

  However, there was another advantage to Madagascar beyond resupply and the slave trade: piracy. At the end of the seventeenth century, local kings actively tolerated the presence in coastal ports of European pirates, as well as pirates from the English colonies in North America. Well-armed pirates could be recruited to take part in wars between rival kings. And the reason they were well armed was that far away in the Atlantic – as far away as New York – friendly merchants could be found who were keen to supply them with arms as well as strong drink. Casks of beer and spirits were sent all the way from America, despite the objections of the East India Company and the Royal African Company in London. Meanwhile the pirates, who were variously of English, Dutch, French and – interestingly – African descent, supplied Malagasy slaves to willing buyers.49

  The American backers of these pirates were men of significance back in New York. Frederick Philipse, of Dutch descent, was one of its wealthiest citizens; and, hearing that a pirate named Adam Baldridge had abandoned his old business, piracy in the Caribbean, and had taken up residence on St Mary’s Island, off the north-east coast of Madagascar, he saw a golden opportunity to send him supplies in return for Malagasy slaves. Philipse and Baldridge had bought a winning ticket: once the base on St Mary’s was up and running, with hundreds of people living in the settlement, all the pirate vessels active in the western Indian Ocean began to call in there for supplies. Baldridge did particularly good business by selling on rum and beer at an appreciable mark-up. Yet he also imported bibles from North America, a reminder that many pirates saw no contradiction between robbery on the high seas or the enslavement of fellow humans and the Christian life. As the settlement expanded, so did the Malagasy population; and while Baldridge was away from St Mary’s late in 1697, on a local slaving expedition, the islanders living in the town rebelled, tearing down the fort he had built and killing about thirty of the pirates. Baldridge abandoned St Mary’s, and later he would complain that the revolt had taken place because the Europeans had no idea how to treat the islanders gently. But William Kidd, a famous Scottish pirate who was later to hang for his crimes, thought that Baldridge was making excuses for his own mistreatment of the Malagasy inhabitants of his little town, since he would inveigle men, women and children on to his ship, before taking them captive and selling them as slaves to the Dutch in Mauritius and the French in Réunion (then known as Île Bourbon), the two Mascarene islands to the east of Madagascar which were being colonized just at this period.50 Maybe, then, there were other pirates like Kidd who did read their bibles and did have a conscience.

  Some pirates valued their Malagasy slaves highly and appointed them as cooks on board ship, where they occupied positions of some responsibility; making sure that food did not run out and that as much fresh food as possible was served was an important task. One such cook was Marramitta, who was appointed by his master, none other than Philipse, as cook aboard the Margaret. His real name is unknown, for ‘Marramitta’ appears to be a corruption of the Malagasy word for ‘cooking-pot’, marmite in modern French. Malagasy slaves were dispersed across the world. The English East India Company made use of Malagasy labour when it built a fort at its pepper fact
ory in Sumatra, at Bencoolen, towards the end of the seventeenth century. Once there, quite a few headed off into the jungle, no doubt able to take advantage of the fact that they spoke a language not too dissimilar to Malay–Indonesian. But the Atlantic also received increasing numbers, often via a holding station on St Helena.51 As early as 1628 a slave from Madagascar arrived in the new French colony of Quebec; and at the end of the century ships loaded with slaves were regularly reaching New York. However, the growing cities of North America were less frequent destinations than the islands of the Caribbean, particularly Barbados and Jamaica, or the English settlements in Virginia and the Carolinas. In 1678 three ships out of Madagascar delivered 700 slaves to Barbados, where the intensification of sugar production (with the high mortality this industry produced) led to greater and greater demand for slaves not just from west Africa. By 1700 something like 16,000 slaves on Barbados were Malagasy, about half the total; and just one port in Madagascar is thought to have exported between 40,000 and 150,000 slaves during the seventeenth century.52 The good news, if it can be called that, is that mortality on English ships carrying Malagasy slaves was low.53 This may reflect the quality of supplies they were fed, loaded in Madagascar, at the Cape or in St Helena; and it may also reflect the fact that they were often transported in relatively small ships, which reduced the danger of epidemics: average cargoes in the eighteenth century were sixty-nine slaves. In 1717 the Board of Directors instructed the East India agents on St Helena to treat slaves ‘humanely’, pointing out that ‘they are Men’.54 And, after all, slavers wanted to deliver their human cargo alive; a dead slave meant financial loss.

  43

  The Wickedest Place on Earth

  I

  When looking at the centuries after Columbus and da Gama, this book has laid an emphasis on the links between the oceans. The flow of people and goods from one ocean to another created a series of connections, wrapped right around the world, that can justifiably be described as a global network. Whether one would want to call this a global economy is a less straightforward question, since the term ‘global economy’ might indicate an economy in which global connections moulded the activities of a high percentage of merchants, craftsmen and consumers in all the major centres of economic power, from China to England to the Spanish cities in the New World. The careers of the English and other pirates who plagued the Caribbean in the middle of the seventeenth century may seem a rather unimportant issue, despite the enormous fascination that pirates of the Caribbean have generated among film-makers and film-goers. However, the passage of treasure ships through the Caribbean is not simply a story of Caribbean, or at best Atlantic, history. Bearing in mind the origin of much of this bullion, the Potosí silver mines in Peru (now in Bolivia), and the route the silver had already taken along hundreds of miles of Pacific water to reach the isthmus of Panama, the history of the silver routes shows clearly how the different oceans were bound together by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nor should it be forgotten that much of this silver was being sent westwards, reaching Macau by way of Manila. In the seventeenth century, though, production was declining and Spain was financially overstretched thanks to its heavy involvement in European and Mediterranean conflicts. The failure of a treasure fleet to arrive, following raids by English pirates, was a bruising blow to a failing empire.

  These pirates certainly existed, although many of them are better described as privateers, armed with official letters of marque entitling them to attack the ships of enemy powers, than as freebooters.1 The term that came into use to describe the Caribbean pirates was ‘buccaneers’, derived from the French word boucan, which meant the grill on which they would smoke large slabs of meat, often cut from the sides of animals they had rustled in Hispaniola and other Spanish islands, which were now depopulated of Taíno Indians and heavily populated instead with roaming cattle, easy to find and wholesome to eat. The term ‘corsairs’, derived from corso, ‘journey’, is usually reserved for a quite different class of pirate, the Barbary corsairs who infested the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic waters.2 It is true that the pirates of the Caribbean tied red cloths around their heads, wielded cutlasses and drank plenty of rum, and that they preferred a rather democratic system of command according to which the ship’s captain lived and slept among his men, and decisions were made by consultation.3

  Nonetheless, the pirates and privateers served the interests of higher powers even when, like Henry Morgan, famous for his raid on Panama, they went about their business without taking direct instruction from above. They were valuable instruments in the creation of a permanent English presence in the Caribbean from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards; they shared with the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and then the king, Charles II, the ambition of interrupting the Spanish treasure fleets bringing silver from Veracruz in Mexico and Porto Bello in Panama to Cádiz and the coffers of the Habsburg kings of Spain. Successful piracy depended, however, on maintaining a watchful balance between the capture of treasure ships and their free passage through the Caribbean. The principles underlying this approach were once explained by an economist who developed ‘The Pure Theory of the Muggery’. Just as a fishing fleet has to take care not to overfish so that no resources are left behind, a mugger, or equally a pirate, has to ensure that streets or seaways are sufficiently clear to permit most people to pass. Winning too many prizes results in abandonment of the route by those the pirate hopes to despoil. If the route is too dangerous, like Central Park, New York, at 3 a.m., it will be abandoned entirely by potential victims. Equally, the pirate, or the mugger, or indeed the fisherman, has to ensure that competitors are kept at bay.4

  The idea that piracy remained a constant scourge in the Caribbean needs to be qualified. Licensed piracy aimed at Spanish ships was a serious problem between 1655 and 1671, but after that the problem receded, partly because the English and the Spaniards had hammered out a peace agreement, and partly because the passage of the treasure ships had become intermittent, with several years at a time going by during which no silver ships left Mexico or Panama. The Spanish navy was by now so poorly supported at home that Spain could not always provide ships to carry the bullion to Spain, and there were even occasions when Dutch ships had to be hired to do the job. Returns from raids on treasure ships were, therefore, sinking. Moreover, the major English base in the Caribbean, at Port Royal on the coast of Jamaica, was largely destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in June 1692. This is not to deny that outbreaks of piracy recurred. Piracy was rather like the plague: it came in waves, but was generally a low-level threat. To give one example: in the first few years of the eighteenth century, the Bahamas became a nest of pirates, what has been described as a ‘buccaneer republic’. But once a British governor was in place (himself a former privateer) he offered an amnesty to those who were willing to change their ways, and set them against those who were not. Within a few years the pirate plague was at an end.5

  II

  The acquisition of Jamaica by the English is a good example of Sir John Seeley’s dictum that the British Empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Yet it was not the first English colony in western Atlantic waters, even if it became one of the most important ones. Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempt to create a colony at Roanoke on the coast of North Carolina during the 1580s had ended with the mysterious disappearance of its settler population.6 More enduring was the Jacobean colony at Jamestown, founded in 1607 in Virginia, which gave the English their first permanent foothold in North America, over a century after Cabot’s first voyage, but only a year after a legal ban on the right to emigrate was abolished.7 One accidental spin-off from the establishment of Jamestown was the settlement of Bermuda, briefly visited a century earlier by a Portuguese seaman named Bermudez. In 1609 an English ship caught in a hurricane while bound for Virginia collided with rocks off Bermuda; no one drowned but some of the sailors and passengers kept insisting that they would rather stay there than return home once thei
r ship had been repaired – there was even a meat supply, since wild pigs infested the island, having survived an earlier shipwreck. When the Virginia Company back in England heard about this, they seized at once on the attractions of an island that had no previous inhabitants (unlike Virginia) and whose contours had been carefully mapped by the castaways, whereas much of the Virginian hinterland was still terra incognita.

  It took three years, starting in 1612, to despatch 600 settlers to Bermuda, aboard nine vessels. Bermuda proved to be very suitable for tobacco cultivation, and lumps of ambergris, the enormously valuable secretion from the bile duct of whales, were sometimes washed up on its shores. Soon after settlement began, a large lump worth £12,000 secured the financial future of the new colony. It became the first English colony to make use of African slave labour. However, planters on other English islands learned how to produce far superior tobaccos, and the islanders on Bermuda shifted their attention to food production, first cattle and then sugar. Out of that, by the early eighteenth century, a lively exchange market sprang up, with North American grain and timber passing through Bermuda to the Caribbean, and Caribbean sugar and rum passing the other way. The ships the Bermudians used were put together on the island, built and sailed by slaves as well as free men. These mainly small but fast sloops became a familiar sight in North American ports, which, rather than Great Britain, were before long the focus of the island’s trade; the Bermudians also ran their ships down to Dutch Curaçao and all around the Dutch Caribbean. Bermuda’s success as a centre of exchange was extraordinary: its ship movements compared well with those of New York and Jamaica, though they fell some way behind Barbados, of which more shortly.8