The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The Sephardic diaspora, out of which early generations of Portuguese merchants trading in Italy, Turkey, the Atlantic islands, the Caribbean and even India had emerged, continued to hold together as Mogador came into existence. There were also some wealthy Muslim merchants in Mogador, with whom relations seem to have been perfectly cordial, but the significant business community other than the Jews consisted of the foreign merchants from England, Holland, Denmark, Spain and elsewhere. They were particularly important before 1800 – there was a Franciscan church to cater for the needs of the Spanish merchants. For more than forty years, from 1845 to 1886, a British consul, John Drummond Hay, exercised great influence in Mogador.27 Great Britain was the biggest trade partner of Morocco by 1800. This meant that the Jews of Mogador and other Moroccan towns, who possessed close ties with the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London, and who often had relatives in Gibraltar, were ideally placed to serve his needs.28 A series of trade agreements between Morocco and Great Britain culminated in a treaty signed in 1856 that abolished or lowered many taxes and set a standard for future British trade agreements elsewhere in the world. The treaty acted as a spur to the vigorous development of trade through Mogador, in tea, sugar and Western manufactures.29

  It has been seen that the sultan was keen to buy American cloth, but English cloth was in greater demand, woven in Manchester, where the Jewish families of Mogador often had agents, relatives and investments. Aaron Afriat set himself up in business in England in 1867, and specialized in tea and cloth. Indeed, at-Tay Afriat, ‘Afriat Tea’, was the Moroccan equivalent of Twinings or Tetley, available all over Morocco by way of Mogador, while Afriat’s linen cloth was sold right across the Sahara.30 Tea was the greatest contribution of the Mogador Jewish traders to Morocco – indeed to Moroccan civilization. Here was a product of India and China that had been carried from the Pacific, or at least the Indian Ocean, all the way to England, before being re-exported to north Africa. Although it was brewed and drunk in different ways to England (no milk but several sprigs of fresh mint), tea captured the markets of the Maghrib as successfully as it had already captured the markets of England, Sweden or the United States. Linked to the tea trade was the sugar trade out of the West Indies, since the Moroccans preferred their tea very sweet, generally placing a large lump of sugar in the mouth of the teapot, over which they poured hot water. The use of boiled water improved health across the north African population. As the tea craze gripped Morocco, demand for Chinese and Japanese porcelain grew in wealthy households, and it was brought in by way of London or Amsterdam.31

  Morocco had much less to offer to the outside world. When Meir Macnin, who dubiously claimed to be the sultan’s ambassador to the Court of St James, sailed to London in July 1799 aboard the Aurora there was nothing very exotic about its cargo of goatskins, calf hides, almonds and gum arabic. Morocco leather was the most famous product, and reached markets as far afield as Russia, by way of English or other intermediaries. Mules were sent to the West Indies. The sultan occasionally banned the export of potentially lucrative products such as olive oil and honey. There was, though, active demand for Moroccan cattle in Gibraltar, primarily to feed the British garrison, and the sultan had a consul there from 1796 or earlier. This trade, largely out of Tetuan rather than Mogador, netted the sultan a nice income.32 However, the sultan’s interest in Gibraltar was not simply economic: there were times when Sidi Muhammad imagined he could earn the trust of Great Britain and win support for his attempts to gain control of the Spanish presidios of Ceuta and Melilla. Moreover, the trade with Gibraltar had a military dimension: he obtained gunpowder and naval stores through the Rock.33 Signs that Morocco might have more to offer were visible in 1784, just after the Great Siege of Gibraltar, when some merchants based on the Rock mentioned in a report that gold dust, ivory and ostrich feathers were now arriving. Later, by way of Mogador, the trade in ostrich feathers to England, France and elsewhere was to develop into a very lively business during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by changing fashions in Europe. Yet what is also significant about these three products is that they were drawn from sub-Saharan Africa, carried on camel caravans all the way to the Atlantic coast for trans-shipment to western Europe. Just as Zanzibar was the gateway to the produce of south-eastern Africa, Mogador was the gateway to the produce of large tracts of west Africa.

  III

  Further proof that the Sephardic trading network had not lost its vitality within the Atlantic is provided by the way Moroccan Jews seized new trading opportunities across the Portuguese island world. Lisbon, already home to New Christians who practised their old religion out of sight, attracted settlers from Mogador and other Moroccan towns, and in 1816 the Portuguese government agreed to readmit those living openly as Jews.34 Jews from Portugal and Morocco struck out across the Atlantic. Important economic initiatives were begun in the Portuguese Azores during the nineteenth century, thanks to the Bensaúde family, one of whom became a leading figure in Portuguese academic life (and an expert, among other things, on the voyages of discovery), while their company still dominates the economy of the archipelago. They arrived in 1818, and they exploited business contacts with England to tap into the shipping lines linking the Azores not just to Portugal, Great Britain and Morocco, but to Newfoundland and Brazil. One particularly prominent Jewish businessman was Elias Bensaúde, who possessed an enormous variety of interests, including a tobacco factory and inter-island trade. He had a penchant for oranges, which he sent in all directions, thanks to his close collaboration with partners in London, Manchester and beyond, from where he obtained ironmongery and other essentials that he sold in the islands. Although his family did much to transform the Azores from a sleepy outpost of Portugal into an Atlantic hub, the Bensaúdes were by no means alone, and there was a steady stream of Jewish immigrants from Morocco, so that in mid-century fifteen out of 167 members of the Commercial Chamber in Ponta Delgada, the capital of the Azores, were Jewish immigrants.35

  Looking even deeper into the Atlantic, Moroccan Jews settled in the Cape Verde Islands, which had once been the haunt of New Christians. As Great Britain placed increasing pressure on its ‘oldest ally’, Portugal, to abolish its all-too-active slave trade, from 1818 onwards the Cape Verde Islands came under increasing scrutiny, as Portugal’s main holding station for African slaves despatched to the West Indies. Looking for a source of income other than slaving, the Portuguese colonial regime installed coal depots in the islands, notably at Mindelo on São Vicente in 1838; the rise of the steamship created new opportunities for anyone prepared to maintain massive stocks of coal. But that meant importing coal; these are volcanic islands totally lacking in coal mines. In 1890, 156 ships are said to have unloaded more than 657,000,000 metric tons of coal, in a year when 2,264 ships visited Mindelo. It is hard to believe this figure, but even if it is exaggerated the fact remains that these ships carried nearly 344,000 people and that their cargo (other than coal) amounted to well over 4,000,000 tons.36 Whatever the correct figures may have been, Mindelo attracted Jewish merchants from Tangier anxious to service this trade alongside coal merchants from England.37

  The two examples of Zanzibar and Mogador are of special interest as success stories in which non-European rulers took important economic initiatives, making full use of the non-Muslim communities in and beyond their borders. That said, the European and American connections were vital to the success of these ports, and in both cases their rulers understood the importance of trade treaties with European powers. Similar stories of success can also be told about other marginal groups whose members took advantage of the expansion of commerce across the oceans to set up trading counters in improbable places: Armenians, Syrian Christians, Greeks (some of whom penetrated deep into central Africa), Indians (in South Africa). Sailors too came from many backgrounds. The Indian Ocean had provided manpower on board European ships since the sixteenth century; the ‘Lascars’ who helped sail European ships originated in lands as diverse
as Somaliland, Yemen, India, Ceylon, Malaya and the Philippines, though in their case ill-treatment sometimes gave rise to mutiny against European captains. Still, without them it is hard to see how the routes across not just the Indian Ocean but all the oceans could have been maintained.38 Another group of Jews, not Sephardim of Spanish and Portuguese descent but Mizrahi (‘eastern’) Jews from Baghdad, played a prominent role in the economic development of Hong Kong. In the age of the steamship the opportunities were endless and distances somehow seemed more manageable. Maybe, indeed, they could become more manageable still if ways through Suez and Panama could be created.

  Part Five

  * * *

  THE OCEANS CONTAINED,

  AD 1850–2000

  48

  Continents Divided, Oceans Conjoined

  I

  The search for more direct routes from Europe to the Far East had continued without interruption since the days of Columbus and Cabot. The possibility of an Arctic route was still being mooted when Sir John Franklin led his disastrous and long-lamented expedition to the icy wastes north of Canada in 1845.1 The increasing role in international trade of the east-coast ports of the United States also stimulated thinking about new routes to the riches of the Orient, since the voyage around Cape Horn and the voyage past the Cape of Good Hope were long and sometimes dangerous. In addition to the Pacific fur trade, the Americans were heavily involved in whaling, sending ships out from Nantucket and into the Pacific by way of the Indian Ocean. Ships suitable for whaling began to be constructed in Nantucket in 1694, and other New England towns followed suit: New Bedford had eighty large whalers by 1775. At first these ships hunted whales in cold northern waters or (when searching for sperm whales) in the warmer waters of the central Atlantic, but they began to penetrate the Pacific as well, by way of Cape Horn; in 1850 the whaler Hannibal sailed all the way to the still impenetrable north-west coast of Japan, three years before Commander Perry’s famous attempt to break into Japanese trade.2 Herman Melville enthused about the Pacific in his tale of American whalers, Moby-Dick:

  To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.3

  After the United States acquired California from Mexico in 1848, American interest in the Pacific grew further; but a transcontinental railway was still a dream, and it was far easier to send Asian goods to New York by way of Mexico or the isthmus of Panama than across the Rocky Mountains and through the large expanses inhabited by native Americans. On the other hand, rumour had it that Japan was rich in coal, and naval strategists could see that it was vital to create coaling stations around the globe now that the steamship was coming into its own, as Great Britain had managed to do in Mindelo and elsewhere. Coal rather than silk brought the Americans to Japan. The Japanese were startled by Commander Perry’s ‘black ships’, belching smoke, when the Americans reached Edo Bay in 1853, in an episode that is, rather exaggeratedly, seen as the moment Japan opened up to the wider world after centuries of near seclusion.

  Like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Perry had set out from the east coast of America, not from California. Perry travelled most of the way on a steam-powered paddleboat that took him around the bottom of Africa to Macau, Shanghai and the Ryukyu Islands, before he brazenly forced his way into Edo Bay (now known as Tokyo Bay), parading his ironclad steamboats and his firepower and flatly refusing to follow Japanese instructions: as far as the Japanese were concerned, there was a single place, Nagasaki, where foreigners could trade. Although he managed to secure a treaty on a second visit, in 1854, the agreement focused on consular representation for stranded sailors rather than trade, and powerful interests at court remained very hostile to the idea of opening up the imperial ports. In the short term, the main effect of Commander Perry’s visit was that the Dutch argued for more generous terms of trade through their base at Deshima, and the Russians and the British obtained similar rights to the Americans.

  It was not much; but the door to Japan was open a crack, and a commercial treaty was signed in 1858, permitting the Americans to trade through Yokohama, near Edo. From the American perspective the advantages of trading directly with Japan remained limited while the route to Japan was so arduous. From the Japanese perspective, trade with the outside world was at best a mixed blessing. The Americans might not yet account for much, but taken together foreign trade had a massive impact on the economy of Japan. Foreign goods began to compete with domestic products; powerful foreign demand for silk, tea and copper forced up prices for Japanese consumers; the low price of gold in relation to silver within Japan created strong foreign demand for its gold, which flowed out relentlessly and was replaced by foreign silver. These changes were not easy to absorb: they happened fast, and on an alarming scale; between 1854 and 1865 the price of raw silk trebled, and the price of tea doubled; even the price of the staple foodstuff, rice, shot up.4 Not surprisingly, then, the arrival of the ‘barbarians’ opened up new controversies within Japan: should the intruders be welcomed, as one party more loyal to the shoguns insisted, or should they all be expelled, as the first stage in a return to traditional values, including proper reverence for the emperor rather than the shogun – to cite the much-read author Kamo Mabuchi (d. 1769), ‘the Way of the gods is superior to the Ways of foreign lands’? The debate about the ‘barbarians’ and other arguments about the reform of government in Japan culminated in the abolition of the shogunate in 1868 and the creation of the emperor-centred Meiji regime, dedicated to modernization on Japanese terms. As Macpherson noted, ‘Perry’s black ships symbolize the challenge of possible western colonization. The response was not to withdraw further into an isolationist posture but to emulate and catch up with the West.’ The encounter with Perry and with other foreign ships helped create a curious amalgam combining Japanese civilization with European technology. Vigorous and imaginative reforms attempted, with varying success, to adapt Japanese society to its new outward-facing existence, notably the creation of a Ministry of Commerce which made government loans available to producers.5

  The foreigners were not expelled and the Americans became keen to capitalize on their new opportunities. Reaching Asia would become much less difficult if transit through the narrow neck of Central America could be made easier. Panama had long been a transfer point for goods brought from China and the Philippines. The name Panama meant ‘the place where many fish are taken’. It was originally applied to a little town on the Pacific that was wrecked by Henry Morgan in 1671, whereupon a new settlement was created on the site of modern-day Panama City. Both gave access to a ‘royal road’ that was barely a mule track, across which goods were humped to Nombre de Dios, a very modest little port on the Caribbean, founded as far back as 1510. It failed to flourish since the larger town of Veracruz, in Mexico, was adopted instead as the main departure point for the ships carrying Asian goods, as well as Central American ones, towards Europe. But, in the eyes of nineteenth-century observers, the location looked just right for a railway linking the two oceans, or even – maybe an impossible dream – a canal cutting right through Central America.6

  II

  Although, after many frustrating decades, the Panama Canal was eventually built by the United States, the pioneers of this great project, the largest engineering project in human history, before the late twentieth century, were not American but French. Their enthusiasm for a canal through Central America was generated in part by their success in promoting what, on the surface, seemed a similar scheme, t
he Suez Canal.7 Ambitious canal projects across large areas of land were in vogue in the middle of the nineteenth century: other examples of massive, and very successful, canal projects included the Erie Canal linking the Great Lakes in North America to the Hudson River and the sixty-mile Caledonian Canal across Scotland.8 Actually, the digging of a canal between Africa and Asia was a lesser challenge than the building of the Panama Canal: the land was fairly flat; it was not crossed by powerful rivers; heavy rains did not interfere with the project; there were saltwater lakes through which a route could be dredged; there were traces of much older canals that proved such a route was possible; a labour supply was available among the Egyptian fellahin. There was, it is true, some anxiety about the lower level of the Mediterranean compared to the Indian Ocean; and, as at Panama, there were political and financial challenges that had to be met in addition to the technical problem of actually digging the canal.

  The building of a canal through Suez excited romantic ideas of the ‘conjoining of East and West’ in ways that the building of a canal through Panama did not. In the 1830s Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin became the self-appointed apostle of a new world order in which East and West would join in a single ‘nuptial bed’, consummating their marriage ‘by the piercing of a canal through the isthmus of Suez’.9 Enfantin was by any standards a colourful eccentric, with his sky-blue cloak and his exaggeratedly pseudo-oriental costume; but the Parisians took him to their heart, and his insistence (guided by the thinking of Saint-Simon) on the urgent need for both material and moral improvement appealed not just to the French but to the rulers of Egypt, beginning with the redoutable Muhammad Ali. But Ali was less impressed by the argument for a canal than he was by the arguments for modernizing, even attempting to industrialize, Egypt: trade through Alexandria and other ports produced much-needed revenue for the treasury; and Ali was, nominally at least, only the viceroy of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, who was opposed to the plan, as, initially, were the British, who valued the existing link between Alexandria and England – a steam packet set out from Falmouth in Cornwall every month, bound for Malta and Alexandria. The last thing Great Britain wanted was France fishing in its own waters within the Indian Ocean, which would become much easier if a canal carried French shipping from Marseilles to India.10