by Lucy Inglis
Opium was now classed as a part of the spice family by the merchants who dealt in it. Spices were both medicinal and culinary, much as they still are in India, and they were part of a complex commodities market that included gold, silver and copper coins, silk and linens, ambergris, borax, saltpetre, sugar, oils, nuts, dried fruits and living plants as well as myriad other items. The sheer scale of the opium trade alone is demonstrated by a letter from a Portuguese factor, Gonçalo Gil Barbosa, based in Cannanur (now Kunnar), north of Cochin on the Malabar Coast. Barbosa was part of a family in the service of the Duke of Braganza and was writing in 1503, when da Gama was already on his way back to Portugal, and recorded that a ship belonging to Coje Camaçedim, a Moorish merchant, had arrived carrying twenty bahares of opium, amounting to 8,400 pounds.7 The ship was one of five that had left Aden for Cannanur, of which two were lost and two more had been forced to stop along the way for repairs. Such losses were not uncommon, and the quantities involved in a single shipment of one commodity to one private merchant give an idea as to the amounts of not only opium, but cloves, nutmegs, cinnamon, ginger and other spices that were circulating between the Indian Ocean, Asia and Europe. Families such as the Barbosas are unusual in that they were ‘not noble’, but they kept eloquent travelogues of their time on the trade routes, offering insights into the societies they encountered. Duarte, Gonçalo’s brother, travelled the Red Sea route to the East, and made numerous references to the importance of the trade in opium, particularly from Aden, whose merchants dealt in ‘gold, opium and diverse other things’.8 He noted soon after how, in Moorish parts of Abyssinia, infant girls had been subject to genital mutilation: ‘in this land the custom is to sew up the private parts of girls when they are born, and thus they continue until they are married, and made over to their husband then they cut the flesh again’.9 Discoveries such as these strengthened the early Portuguese and Spanish ideas that the people they were trading with were savages, and the initial Portuguese forays into trading in the East Indies were followed up rapidly by military expeditions to take advantage of what they saw as weaker nations. Da Gama’s forces attempted a Malabar armada and failed, but they captured Goa in 1510, and in 1511 they sailed into Malacca on the Malaysian coast with 1,200 men and took it as a Portuguese colony after forty days of fighting. The capture of Malacca was a coup. Although the fortified port itself was a nuisance to maintain and under threat from the displaced sultan, it was also one of the few large, year-round harbours in the Indian Ocean, and so had a constant stream of revenue. But the Portuguese aggression in taking Malacca had serious repercussions in terms of trade with China, prejudicing Chinese authorities against any further Portuguese incursions. As far as long-term trade with south China was concerned, Portugal had made a terrible error.
The Portuguese pressed on with their aggressive expansion in Indonesia. In 1511, the first official embassy from Lisbon headed out to Malacca, via India. Heading it was Tomé Pires, an apothecary and ‘factor of the drugs’, born in Lisbon around 1465.10 Pires was charged with taking Portuguese medicines out to Malacca, and then securing other medicinal supplies when he reached his destination. Pires’s detailed descriptions of the trade carried out at each place he visited indicate that opium was not only a medicine, but a currency. It is mentioned in the same lists as gold and silver, mercury, vermilion, horses and slaves, the only drug to feature in them. Places are noted down as importers or exporters, and the many tiny kingdoms of Burma and India were notable exporters, their kings spending most of their time in their harems, ‘stupefied with opium’.11 The Pires travel journal is the first by a European to describe the Spice Islands – the Moluccas – which had been converted to ‘Muhammadanism’ thirty years before. The Portuguese were interested primarily in cloves, and the Moluccas produced millions of pounds of them annually, harvesting them every two months. It was a source of potential revenue on an unimaginable scale, if the local people could be won away from the Muslim merchants – although this might prove difficult, as the native people were heathens: ‘They are at war with each other most of the time. They are almost all related.’12
The Portuguese foray into Guangzhou, which they called Cantão, in 1516 resulted in a predictable diplomatic disaster, with many of their number eventually dying decades later, still prisoners in Chinese gaols, including Tomé Pires. But Portugal knew it had to pursue these new routes, for the Ottomans had taken Suez from the Mamluks in the same year with the clear intention of pushing east.
The tortuous completion of the Portuguese Magellan–Elcano expedition of 1521–2 proved that it was possible to circumnavigate the globe under sail, although only eighteen of the original 270 hands survived the journey.
On land, as at sea, the sixteenth century was a time of extraordinary change and innovation. In 1557, the Portuguese managed to negotiate an unlikely lease on Macao, situated on the west side of the Pearl River Delta about eighty miles south-west of Canton, as it had become known to the Europeans. This was not secured by their clumsy negotiating abilities, but by the fact that the Chinese Ministry of the Public Treasury was caught in something of a dilemma. In 1552, 800 exceptional virgins had been selected for Emperor Jiajing, and in 1554, he was still in need of an aphrodisiac potent enough to render him fit for such a monumental task. His doctors prescribed a recipe calling for quantities of ambergris, of which very little is found in China, but the Portuguese dominance of the seas meant they held a near monopoly on the grey, greasy product of the sperm whale’s digestive tract, so sought after as a medicine and perfume fixative. This put them in a strong position to bargain for the land lease in Macao.
By 24 June 1571, the Spanish had captured Manila in the Philippines, the point at which trade with the East became highly integrated. Opium is listed with many hundreds of different commodities, ranging from glass beads and shells to gold and silver bullion and slaves, all of which were circulating around the world by the end of the century. The barbarity meted out in both the East and West Indies by the European conquerors – the conquistadors – was ‘cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see,’ wrote one eyewitness.13 Yet both Portugal and Spain were in the midst of building a new history for themselves, one of empire and glory, of ‘Sailing from the end of the Occident to the end of the Orient without seeing more than water and sky . . . a thing never attempted before by mortal man, nor ever believed possible.’14
Tea, Tobacco and Opium
‘It is at the end of the monsoons, where you find what you want, and sometimes more than you are looking for.’15
Tomé Pires
For the Iberian navigators who first set out in the late fifteenth century, China and Japan were the ultimate destination. Columbus even carried a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels with him in 1492. China, however, had its own problems. The Ming paper money Polo had written about had suffered a series of failures and was in terminal decline by the middle of the fifteenth century. Currency was a thorny issue, and China did not have enough silver or gold to create the high-value money it needed to operate over its vast territories, in terms of both commerce and taxation. Copper was the staple, but it was unsatisfactory and bulky, particularly with a taxable population that was rising rapidly. In 1500, the Chinese population was 155 million people, comprising just over 30 per cent of the world’s population.16 At the same date, the population of the Spanish Empire was 8.5 million, and the combined population of England and Wales was 2.25 million. For many Europeans, the scale of China was almost impossible to comprehend, but it also offered excellent commercial opportunities for anyone with ready stocks of cash in bullion. The Chinese also had a long history as sophisticated consumers of art and luxury goods, the kinds of luxury goods that newly wealthy Europeans coveted. Many of the early visitors to the South China Sea were private merchants, inspired by the journeys of Columbus and da Gama, and determined to try their luck. Their successes and failures went largely unrecorded, but the existence of Muslim, and later Christian fanfangs –
foreign streets – inside coastal towns and cities indicate a significant local existence. Many traders on the streets were from South-East Asia and had been established in China’s coastal region for decades. They too had problems obtaining enough silver currency to trade and Portuguese money was welcome, even if its merchants were only just tolerated. The Portuguese and the Spanish quickly realized that their silver money was worth a lot more in the Far East than it was at home. As soon as this news filtered back, more European privateers set sail for the South China Sea.
In 1526, the Iwami Ginzan silver mine was discovered on the main island of Japan by merchant Kamiya Jutei. It was enormously productive, although there are no accurate early records. Japan used this new money to deal with the Baltic for fur, and from 1540 onwards, with China and then the Portuguese. They also exchanged silver for gold, further complicating the already sophisticated commodity markets of the area.
In 1545, on the other side of the world, the mining town of Potosí was founded high in Bolivia’s tin-belt mountain range. Using more than 50,000 native workers, imported African slaves, and countless mules and llamas to trek the precious metal to the Pacific, by the end of the sixteenth century Potosí was producing more than half the silver in the world: 254,000 kg out of a global production of 418,900 kg.17 Coupled with enormous production from the hills to the north and west of Mexico City, Spain was amassing wealth on incalculable levels. This silver arrived in the East Indies via Chinese merchants who shipped it to Manila, fuelling trade with outside merchants at a speed never seen before.
These sea voyages brought unspeakable horrors to the people of West Africa, the West Indies and South America. Local populations were decimated by cruelty and disease. Further examples of botanical imperialism show just how huge these changes were in a few decades. Crops unknown in China before the discovery of the Americas, such as sweet potatoes, peanuts and maize, rapidly became staples for China’s poor agricultural labourers. By 1538, less than forty years after Columbus’s first voyage, peanuts were already listed as a local product of Chang-shu county, near Suzhou, west of Shanghai.18
China wasn’t only importing commodities. The country was in the grip of a series of dynastic wrangles that changed the course of its history. Geography and global events were conspiring to thwart Ming isolationism, even as it faced challenges from within China itself. Therefore, they were surprisingly tolerant when the Jesuits arrived in China in 1582.
The Society of Jesus was already established in Japan, despite only arriving there two years earlier. China’s long history meant that religious and secular traditions were muddled, and the Jesuits were prepared to overlook customs such as the veneration of ancestors, whereas the earlier Dominicans and Franciscan envoys pronounced indignantly that these heathen customs should be abolished. Understandably, the Chinese people of all classes were indifferent to what Rome had to say about their centuries-old customs.
The Jesuits flourished in Asia through their policies of tolerance and non-interference. Some of them even adopted Chinese dress. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), a Jesuit missionary to Macao and cartographer, used the model of the Jesuits in Japan to avoid forcing European ideas on the Chinese. Through the influence of men such as Ricci, the Chinese viewed the Jesuits as collaborators rather than interlopers. Like his Jesuit counterpart in Japan, Alessandro Vaignanol, Ricci made every effort to learn the language and writing, although he was initially daunted by the task in front of him. Twenty years later, in 1602, he produced the first true map of the world combining Western and Eastern knowledge, and the first featuring both China and the Americas: the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, or Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World. Ricci put China at the centre of his map, a diplomatic relations coup, although he did also label northern Russia as the land where tiny men and women rode into battle on goats, and described North Americans as people who ‘kill one another all the year round, and spend their time in fighting and robbery. They feed exclusively on snakes, ants, spiders and other creeping things.’19 There is also a delightful, although almost certainly apocryphal, story of an early draft of Ricci’s map featuring Europe in the centre. After an official enquired why this was, when surely China was the Middle Kingdom, Ricci retired to alter his map with a hasty cut and paste, and re-presented it with China in its rightful place, much to the satisfaction of the assembled dignitaries.
The Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, and Ricci’s memoir of the Jesuit mission to Macao, De Christiana expeditione, initially published in Augsburg in 1615 and then in Antwerp and Amsterdam, were widely disseminated throughout Europe and studied eagerly by merchants wishing to do business in the South China Sea. Ricci’s measured, pragmatic writing gives a strong sense of how he operated in China. Even on the tradition of foot-binding amongst young girls and women, a subject that was rapidly becoming politically and socially inflammatory throughout China, he noted simply, ‘Probably one of their sages hit upon the idea to keep them in the house.’20 This practical priest had moved the centre of the world from Europe to the Far East in more ways than one, with astonishing consequences.
By 1600, fuelled by this new prosperity and in no small part the crop imports, China had a population of 231 million. Meanwhile, the Dutch and English took advantage of a period of stability and prosperity to embark on their own worldwide naval explorations. To this end, they sent a number of private operators east to assess the situation. Ralph Fitch was a London merchant born around 1550 who travelled widely through India, Burma and South-East Asia in the 1580s. He is remembered primarily for bringing back the tale of the king of Thailand’s white elephants, who lived in gilded stables and were dressed in cloth of gold, giving rise to the association of a white elephant with an expensive burden. In Burma, Fitch recorded the ready market for decent opium, and from Agra in India he was part of a fleet of ‘one hundred and fourscore boates laden with Salt, Opium, Hinge [asafoetida], Lead, Carpets, and divers other commodities’.21 Fitch arrived back in London in 1597, more than eight years after he had left. In his absence, he had been declared dead and his will proved, but a new career awaited him, as an advisor to the East India Company.
The companies were a compromise between private merchant trade and the state. Various trading companies had been formed in England in the sixteenth century, such as the Muscovy Company in 1555, the Turkey Company in 1581 and the Levant Company in 1592. As far as China and the Spice Islands were concerned, the East India Company (EIC), founded at the end of 1600, and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), founded in 1602, were of primary importance. Both benefitted significantly from the far-reaching infrastructure, trading protocols and maritime knowledge accumulated by the Hansa over the previous centuries. Spain and Portugal, meanwhile, were no longer in the ascendant, as they wasted their stupendous wealth on war and ceased to innovate at sea.
Although the VOC was created as an official entity slightly later than the EIC, the Dutch merchants were already trading with Indonesia by the 1590s, and reached China earlier than the English, who were using the EIC to reach the spices on the west coast of India. In 1600 a Chinese merchant – Wu Pu – returned from the East to Holland on a Dutch trading ship, and allowed himself to be publicly baptized at Middelburg.22 He returned to the East as a VOC agent. It was the beginning of a century of heavy Dutch and English involvement in Eastern trade, which set the trend for their relationships with China and Indonesia for hundreds of years to come.
The English and Dutch companies differed in purpose at the beginning: the EIC was a merchant trading company, and the VOC was also a military organization determined to establish monopolies and to crush their Spanish and Portuguese competitors. In the sixteenth century, Holland had experienced a golden age of cartography including, crucially, the work of Flemish cartographer and globemaker Gerardus Mercator, who published the Mercator projection in 1569. The Mercator projection is a cylindrical world map that, despite its inaccuracies at extreme latitudes, was effective as a marine chart, and well suited to use on
board ships. This level of knowledge, coupled with their maritime power, meant that the Dutch established their trade networks with the East rapidly, after the foundation of the VOC. In April 1621, they arrived in the Banda Islands. The Portuguese had tried to do business with the Spice Islands for over a century, dropping anchor periodically beneath the smoking volcano of Gunung Api. They found the native people so difficult to deal with that in the end they contented themselves with buying their nutmeg from intermediaries in Malacca. Not so the Dutch. A group of five islands of the Banda archipelago were the only known producers of nutmeg and mace in the world, and the Dutch were determined to have the monopoly.
Nutmeg in particular was thought to have special medicinal properties, and it is a potent natural anti-inflammatory. In sufficient quantities raw, it is also a powerful hallucinogen, and by the early seventeenth century the rich opium eaters of Bengal were consuming cocktails of opium, nutmeg, mace, cloves, Borneo camphor, ambergris and musk to enhance the effect of their high.23 Essentially, this was just a mixture of the most expensive things in the world, and a display of wealth and consumption. It must have been a repellent concoction.
The Dutch control of Batavia (now Jakarta), and of the Spice Islands from 1609, meant they had a near unassailable position in Indonesia during the seventeenth century. Backed by the government and long-term investors, they had a stable and efficient business model, if a brutal one. The EIC manner of trading was as an umbrella organization under which each expedition was crowdfunded. This had the dual effect of limiting the company’s loss, and also compelling crews and captains to be successful on each voyage. The EIC deployed all manner of tricks to sail into quieter harbours in the Banda Islands, out of sight of the Dutch fort at Neira, such as buying nondescript junks and making secret trades of provisions with the Bandanese, whose food supplies were being blockaded by the Dutch. The Dutch, meanwhile, were furious because the English had sailed into the East on their coat tails, without putting in the money, men or ships necessary to break Spanish and Portuguese control. The year the VOC arrived in Banda, Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius published Mare liberum (The Freedom of the Seas), stating that ‘the sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one’, and that ‘Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it.’24 But it was the subtitle of Mare liberum that spelled out clearly Holland’s assumption of their political and legal superiority in Asia: ‘Or, The Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade’. In 1613, a conference was called in London to debate the matter, and Grotius attended as spokesman for the VOC, putting forward the Dutch case for their rightful monopoly. The representatives of the EIC responded with what amounted to a rude ‘So what?’, and relations in the East Indies deteriorated rapidly until outright war threatened. To avoid it, in 1619 England and Holland formed a treaty of cooperation in Indonesia, although a treaty of mutual mistrust, deceit and manipulation was closer to the truth.
