The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The story of the first encounter is a familiar one: women offered themselves to the sailors, fresh food was taken on board. Cook sailed off after a couple of weeks, returning to the islands from his icy and fruitless search for the North-West Passage in November of the same year. The king turned up to greet Cook on the main island, Hawai’i, and offered the captain feathered headdresses and a magnificent cloak, now preserved in the Te Papa National Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. This was a sign of exceptional respect: a royal cloak required 400,000 tiny red and yellow feathers, taken from 80,000 birds. One of the crew reported that ‘we live now in the greatest Luxury, and as to the Choice & number of fine women there is hardly one among us that may not vie with the grand Turk himself’.48 Yet the gifts of food placed a strain on the Hawai’ian economy, a subsistence economy that was not well suited to the extra demand generated by Cook’s ships. After the British ships left the king placed a taboo on the land around the bay where Cook had anchored; this was normal practice when the land was exhausted and needed to revive, rather like the biblical sabbatical year. Forced back by bad weather, Cook re-entered the bay and found he was not welcome; the Hawai’ians began to steal from the British ships, and even sneaked away with the cutter attached to the Discovery, leaving Cook’s main vessel without a lifeboat. Cook went on land, hoping to make peace with the increasingly fractious crowd of islanders, but guns and daggers were drawn and Cook was clubbed to death – not, however, at anyone’s orders, for this was a fracas that had got badly out of control. The grief of the British crew was compounded by disgust when Cook’s body was returned, in the form of de-boned hunks of flesh.49

  The sudden and violent death of Captain Cook was his passport to eternal fame in Great Britain, one of those national heroes, like Lord Nelson, who did not live to see the results of his achievements. The islanders came to terms with the fact that the British were not after all divine by involving themselves in their trade from a very early date. In 1787 Captain John Meares came to the island of Kaua’i and agreed to take one islander, a prince named Kaiana, to China. Kaiana impressed the British by his build – he was six and a half feet tall – and was showered with presents by the English merchants in Canton, the most valuable in many ways being firearms. These he deployed to his advantage on his return to Hawai’i aboard another British ship; he learned that a coup had taken place on Kaua’i, so he placed himself at the service of the king of the main island, Hawai’i. King Kamehameha I had grand ambitions of his own: he had brought Hawai’i Island under his single rule, and now he aimed to conquer all the lesser islands. Kaiana would be a powerful ally, but no less useful would be the British, with their massive ships armed with deadly cannon, which were also capable of carrying many more warriors than he could pack on to even the longest Polynesian craft.50

  So began one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of Pacific navigation. The king needed more ships than could be obtained from reluctant British traders either by bargaining or – in some cases – by sending a squad of men on board to seize the ship. Kamehameha would therefore create his own fleet. In 1789, after a bloody confrontation with the crews of two American vessels in search of supplies, Kamehameha acquired the ship Eleanor and an accompanying schooner, and he appointed a couple of the officers to chiefdoms, which made sure that he kept hold of their nautical talent. Then, in 1792, his subjects built a vessel in the European style, under the guidance of an American ship’s carpenter. By 1803 he was the proud owner of at least twenty ships, some of which had their keel sheathed in copper, the most modern defence against worms. As he became more involved in the sandalwood trade with China, he ordered more and more ships to be constructed. So to the British, French, American, Russian and Spanish fleets in the Pacific a European-style Hawai’ian fleet needs to be added. Three ships are known to have traversed the entire route from the American north-west to China regularly between 1800 and 1832, though most of the Hawai’ian ships set out for Vanuatu or other island groups, to pick up sandalwood, hogs and pearls that could be fed into the networks of not just Polynesia but the wider Pacific. However, the China voyages were financial disasters, because the Hawai’ians were dependent on unscrupulous agents in Canton who saw a good opportunity to exploit innocent newcomers.51

  A new generation of Polynesian navigators familiarized themselves with European rather than Pacific shipping, and became an essential element in the crew of foreign ships as well as Hawai’ian ones. When American ships passed through the islands, they were often obliged to carry Hawai’ian supercargoes. The New Hazard, a 281-ton brig, carried a cargo of firearms, Indian cotton cloth, metal goods, tobacco and sugar, among other items, setting out from its home port of Boston in October 1810, rounding the Horn and reaching Hawai’i late in February of the next year. Most of this cargo was intended for the people living along the west coast of North America. However, sandalwood, potatoes, plantains and the inevitable willing young women were brought aboard in Hawai’i, and in due course it headed for Vancouver Island, in search of native American slaves as well as furs. Its job done, it returned to Hawai’i, where the reports wearily emphasize, once again: ‘not much work done this afternoon being girls on board’. The culmination of its voyage was the crossing to Macau and Canton, anchoring at Whampoa, where the ship stood for four months, and where $300,000 worth of tea, nankeen cloth and porcelain was loaded. So, by way of repeated calls at Hawai’i, the routes linking the Atlantic seaboard of North America with the Pacific north-west of America, and China as well, were bound together.52

  Kamehameha placed himself under the British Crown, for he saw that this would not weaken but rather strengthen his authority so far from London. At the start of the nineteenth century he decided that he could make a profitable deal with the Russians in Alaska, who were always short of supplies. The Hawai’ian king sent a letter to Alexander Baranov, who was running Russian operations in Alaska, suggesting that Kamehameha could solve his difficulties by sending a consignment each year from Hawai’i. Later, Kamehameha allowed the Russians to build a trading base on O’ahu.53 Kamehameha was careful not to put all his eggs in one basket. As well as the British and the Russians, he had to deal with United States shipping. By 1800 the Americans, not the British, were the most frequent visitors to his islands. This reflected their involvement in the fur trade on the eastern and northern shores of the Pacific, and the tea and silk trade on its south-western shores, by way of Canton. He noted with interest the strength of the trade in Pacific sandalwood towards China, and he decided not just to create a royal monopoly but to encourage sandalwood production at the expense of food production. This resulted in occasional famines, while supplies of sandalwood in Hawai’i became so depleted that he had to issue orders that young trees were subject to taboo, until they had grown sufficiently. These measures were revolutionary: the subsistence economy of the islands was being transformed into a commercial economy, placing heavy demands on a native labour force that had traditionally lived easily off the natural produce of the land.54 Further difficulties were created by Kamehameha’s willingness to accept American imports on credit. Many of these imports were grandiose luxuries used to decorate the royal residences, such as Chinese porcelain, European crystal and American silverware, not to mention the fine Western-style clothing in which the king enjoyed being portrayed.

  Difficulties accumulated after Kamehameha I died in 1819. His son, Kamehameha II, thought that the solution was to carry on expanding. His first new ship was a tempting and beautifully appointed yacht named Cleopatra; it was horribly expensive, was used for royal pleasure cruises around the islands, and was said to have been ‘manned by a drunken, dissipated, irresponsible crew from the captain down to the cabin boy’. This crew managed to wreck the boat beyond repair in 1825.55 Over the next few years the royal family attempted to restore its fortunes and those of Hawai’i (now denuded of sandalwood) by way of the sandalwood trade in Vanuatu, but that proved to be another disaster when the ship they had sent out dis
appeared without trace.56 By the middle of the nineteenth century the Hawai’ian kings had given up trying to operate a fleet; but there had been a glory period under Kamehameha I during which Hawai’i had managed to assimilate European business practices with remarkable speed.

  The most powerful economic force in the islands was fast becoming the United States, not Great Britain or Russia, even though the USA would only become master of these islands at the end of the nineteenth century. The success of the American traders partly reflected the fact that the shipping of the United States was unrestricted by Company rules, which stood in the way of English and Russian trade in the Pacific Ocean so long as the East India Company and the Russia–America Company insisted on licensing movement around the Pacific.57 At least thirty-one American ships arrived in the Hawai’ian islands between 1778 and 1818, maybe as many as forty-three, while British numbers (including warships as well as trading vessels) stood at thirty-nine, and the Russians at eleven.58 Hawai’i was well placed geographically to act as a supply station in the middle of the north Pacific; its role as middleman between the Asian and the American shores of the ocean provides a neat demonstration of how the entire Pacific was being drawn together into a complex network of maritime connections from the end of the eighteenth century onwards.

  46

  From the Lion’s Gate to the Fragrant Harbour

  I

  Competition for access to the markets of the Far East did not wane in the early nineteenth century, even though the nations that had created the first links to China and the East Indies no longer dominated the trade of the East. Having won Melaka from the Portuguese in 1641, after a series of attempts, the Dutch had to cede the city to Great Britain in 1795, and Britain took advantage of its war with Napoleon, and the incorporation of the Netherlands into the Bonaparte empire, to keep hold of the place for a while, without quite knowing what to do with it.1 The Dutch had never based their government of the East Indies there, preferring Batavia (modern Jakarta), which lies on Java and was therefore closer to the Spice Islands. And yet the idea of creating a base on the Strait of Malacca made good sense for any European power keen to trade through the South China Sea: it was the best place to watch for the switching of the winds as one monsoon season gave way to another, and a safe route back west opened up to shipping.2

  Melaka had been founded, at least according to legend, by a refugee prince from Temasek, or Singapura, generally translated as ‘the Lion’s Gate’. Fragments of sixteenth-century blue-and-white porcelain recovered from the Kallang River in Singapore reveal that the foundation of Melaka did not spell the end of Singapore; indeed, the sultan of Johor, the southernmost kingdom in Malaya, established a shahbandar, or overseer, of customs at Singapore, who was in his post by 1574. A few years later, in 1611, the Singapore settlement was burned to the ground; the entire region had become sucked into wars between the Portuguese and competing Malay and Indonesian rulers, into which the Dutch eventually inserted themselves as well. Probably there was not much to show on Singapore Island in 1703 when the sultan of Johor, who approved of the English, offered the site of the old settlement to a Scottish captain named Alexander Hamilton. Even when it was offered for free, Singapore was beyond Hamilton’s means, as he was expected to develop the site from his own limited resources. However, the East India Company began to recognize that Singapore lay in a perfect position overlooking the entrance to the main passageway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea; the islands opposite Singapore, which are now part of Indonesia, were the haunt of the Bugi pirates, who needed to be kept quiet – the surprise is that it took so long for Great Britain to create a base at Singapore.3

  That Great Britain did so was the result of the vision and endeavours of two employees of the East India Company, Thomas Stamford Raffles and Major William Farquhar. Farquhar administered Melaka for a while before it was returned to the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and had a talent for winning the trust of local rulers, which was crucial in the foundation of British Singapore. Raffles, however, is much better documented; he is one of the most extraordinary figures in British imperial history, and is generally seen as a more attractive personality than the great majority of empire-builders.4 He was born in 1781, and his origins were quite modest; he spent his early career in the gloomy offices of the East India Company on Leadenhall Street in London, joining as a clerk when he was only fourteen years old. But he was an exceedingly quick learner, and he won the attention of his superiors, so that he was sent off full of enthusiasm to Penang on the Indian Ocean coast of Malaya in 1805, as Assistant Secretary in the British administration of what, it was hoped, would become a British base to rival Calcutta and Bombay. Raffles took the trouble, unusually, to learn basic Malay; he also took a serious interest in the history and culture of the lands where he had been sent, and realized that new opportunities now existed for the British in the Far East, which would take the East India Company some way beyond its current obsession with relations with Indian princes, and might even bring the Company control of the spice trade through the East Indies, if the Dutch and their French allies could be dislodged. When Britain succeeded in gaining control of Dutch Java, Raffles found himself appointed lieutenant-governor, in 1811, but his attempts to introduce land reform failed to work, partly through lack of support. An important clue to his thinking is Raffles’s insistence that ‘Government should consider the inhabitants without reference to bare mercantile profits and to connect the sources of revenue with the general prosperity of the Colony.’5 This was a man who deeply deplored slavery, and who insisted that ‘all kinds of servitude should be abolished’. But social reform so far away was of no interest to the EIC in London. He was summoned back to London, and was disillusioned by the return of the East Indies to the Dutch in 1816, following the fall of Napoleon. Raffles redeemed his reputation back home – his scholarly interests were acknowledged when he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and received a knighthood, thanks to the support of Queen Charlotte. He used his time after his recall to London well, writing a History of Java in two volumes, which was as much a compendium of geography, natural history, ethnography and archaeology as a somewhat higgledy-piggledy history in the traditional sense. Dedicated, with his permission, to the Prince Regent, it was nonetheless an extraordinary work of scholarship, based on almost obsessive research and limitless curiosity.6

  Still, there was work to be done out East, and Great Britain still retained a small and rather neglected post at Bencoolen in Sumatra, which the Dutch had tolerated for many years. Sent there in 1818, Sir Stamford Raffles, as he now liked to be known, was disappointed to find that the Dutch were vigorously rebuilding their network in the East Indies, while Great Britain had paltry resources east of India:

  The Dutch possess the only passes through which ships must sail into the Archipelago, the Straits of Sunda and Malacca; and the British have now not an inch of ground to stand upon between the Cape of Good Hope and China, nor a single friendly port at which they can water and obtain refreshment.7

  To be sure, this was an overstatement (Penang was still in British hands), but Raffles managed to convince the governor-general of India, Lord Hastings, that some sort of base was needed close to the Malacca Strait. However, the only way to achieve this was by delicate negotiation with the Malay princes; and the view in Britain was that it was important not to offend the government of the Netherlands, which was now an ally, meaning that Raffles found himself treading on eggshells. The Dutch noted how Raffles was trying to extend British influence beyond Bencoolen to the other, more valuable, side of Sumatra – Raffles had Palembang, the old capital of Śri Vijaya in his sights; they complained to the EIC in Calcutta, and Raffles was warned off. Lord Hastings insisted that Raffles should only try to obtain a patch of land for a trading base, ‘not the extension of any territorial influence’; should the Dutch have established themselves nearby, he was to go elsewhere.8 In fact, the Dutch did establish themselves a very short distance aw
ay, in the Riau archipelago, but this did not deter Raffles and his close companion, Major Farquhar (who was to become governor of the new settlement). Fascinated by the evidence that Singapore had a distinguished history many centuries earlier, Raffles retained the traditional name of the site, when standard British practice was to choose a royal name or something recalling the past history of Great Britain.9 This interest in the past only in part explains his choice of location. It was quite simply an ideal spot at which to park an EIC garrison; and the harbour, in the mouth of the Singapore River, was as good as or better than that of Melaka.

  Farquhar was already on good terms with the sultan of Johor, Hussein, and in 1819 a first treaty allowed the British to create a base on a small piece of land they had leased at Singapore. The event was celebrated with great pomp and ceremony as the officers and soldiers of the EIC, with Sir Stamford Raffles in charge, received the sultan of Johor in a magnificently decorated tent, its floor covered with scarlet cloth. British observers were unimpressed by the sultan: he was half-naked, and his bulging stomach and sweaty face were sharply criticized, even though it is hard to imagine that there was anyone, Malay or British, who was not perspiring heavily in that humid environment. This agreement brought the sultan a handsome rent of $5,000 a year, in Spanish coin; it was followed a few years later, in 1824, by another treaty, by which the sultan ceded the sovereignty of Singapore entirely to Great Britain. For the sultan’s claim to rule was contested by his half-brother, and Hussein needed the British. Finally, the same year, the Dutch and the British agreed to divide and rule, with Britain taking Malaya (the ‘Straits Settlements’) and the Netherlands keeping the East Indies, though they had long been one world, culturally, economically and politically, and still use variants of the same Malay-Indonesian language.10