This was Portugal’s revenge. King Manuel wrote his fellow monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella (“Most high and excellent Prince and Princess, most potent Lord and Lady!”), to tell them about “large cities, large buildings and rivers, and great populations”—no naked savages here—and to brag of spices, precious stones, and “mines of gold.” Nothing of scurvy and death, nothing of Muslim merchants and commercial disappointment. Here was the kind of place that Columbus had been looking for and did not find. Stick that in your craw.
In early 1500, less than six months after da Gama’s triumphal return, the Portuguese sent out a second fleet to the Indies—thirteen ships this time and one thousand two hundred men, including soldiers—under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral. They sent him to make money and told him not to look for trouble; but if a hostile vessel should try to do him harm, he was not to let it come near, but rather to stand off and blow it out of the water.
Nothing better illustrates awareness of superiority. For it is well known that those who possess stronger arms can kill from a distance at no risk to themselves; whereas those in a position of weakness must close and rely on personal valor and strength to gain a victory. Cabral’s instructions signaled a new balance of world power. The Asians, so much more numerous than the Portuguese, also richer and in many ways more civilized, would not have understood this, could not have imagined it. Yet there it was: Europe could now plant itself anywhere on the surface of the globe within reach of naval cannon.*
The Portuguese went at their task with method that would have warmed the heart of Prince Henry. Here were curiosity and appetite rationalized, as in the instructions (Regimento) to Diogo Lopes de Sequeira in 1508 for the exploration of Madagascar:
THE AGE OF DISCOVERY: ROUTES OF MAJOR VOYAGES
Note the way wind and current dictated the choice of route. Better to sail long and fast than tack and fight a shorter distance.
The fleet was to follow the circumference of the island, with special attention to the west coast (the side facing Africa); enter and study every port, reconnoiter means of entry and exit, explore the possibilities of anchorage with reference to winds, currents, and nature of bottom; and write all of this down [my italics].
First contact with the natives: show them a range of articles and metals (spices, wax, copper) to see if these things are known on the island; and if there, ask how to get to them and trade for them. Find out what they would want in exchange.
Find out what if any other ships come in to these ports. Where do they come from? What do they carry? Do they trade these in other islands or carry different things to different places? Where do the merchants and crews of these ships come from? Are they Muslim or pagan (“gentiles”)(“gentiles”)? White or black? How are they dressed? Do they come armed?
Are these other ships big or small? What kind? What are the seasons of their coming and going? The rhythm (annual, more often)? Their way of navigating?
Does the island have its own vessels, and if so, where do they go, what do they carry, what do they seek?
What does the island produce, what will the natives take for it? Are these things dear or cheap?
Political structure: what kinds of kings or lords, whether Muslim or pagan? How do they live? How do they administer justice? What do they possess? Do they hold treasure? What kind of state and dignity, and how do they maintain it? What military force and arms: elephants or horses, weapons, firearms, artillery of any kind? Are the soldiers timid or warlike?
Are there Muslim rulers apart, independent; and do they recognize the pagan rulers?
Is the population Muslim or pagan? If the latter, how do the Muslims live with them? Are there Christians as in India?* Do they know St. Thomas?
What are the customs? Are they, in part at least, like those of the Malabars?
Are there cities, towns, or villages of special importance? Are they fortified? How is the land inhabited?
Money? Is there some standard tender, or are there simply “moneys,” like those of Manicongo [Africa?]? In this regard do they trade copper as a commodity, and in that case, what things are made of it? In particular, is it used for casting guns and if so, what kind? Also in that case, how do they make gunpowder?
A similar questionnaire for Malacca (Malay peninsula) adds a detailed question about the Chinese who traded in those parts: vessels and techniques of navigation? arms and style of war? trade, merchants, trading posts, merchandise, prices? political power? clothing and manners? size and shape of China?6
These systematic inquiries went back in Portugal at least to 1425, beginning with the exploration of the Canaries. In 1537, Pedro Nuñes, cosmographer to King Joao III, boasted in recollection: “It is evident that the discoveries of coasts, islands, continents has not occurred by chance, but to the contrary, our sailors have departed very well informed, provided with instruments and rules of astronomy and geometry.”7 The contrast with Spain is marked. The Spanish did not adopt this methodical approach until the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Either they did not need it (no competition; simpler navigation), or it did not accord with their tradition and style. Whereas the Portuguese sealed claims of possession by asserting discovery, that is, by entering latitudes on maps, the Spanish asserted material facts. They planted crosses, “converted” natives, built Christian edifices, installed tribunals and jails. As for objectives, the Spanish aimed at treasure; the Portuguese, at profits from trade. Two views of empire.
The history of European commercial and political expansion into the Indian Ocean and East Asia is dominated by the question of a might-have-been. What if the sixteenth century were not a period of Asian political disarray, of war in India between native states and Turcoman invaders, of Chinese isolationism, a low as it were, exposing Asia to the ruthless thrusts of these invaders? The Chinese “absence” hurt especially.
From 1405 to 1431, the Chinese undertook at least seven major naval expeditions to explore the waters of Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. These voyages aimed to show the Chinese flag, bestow awareness and knowledge of the Celestial Kingdom on the barbarians, receive homage and tribute, and collect for the emperor those few rarities not available within his borders. In particular, the ships brought back exotic zoological specimens—giraffes, zebras, ostriches; also jewels and potent animal, vegetable, and mineral substances to enrich the Chinese pharmacopeia.
The relationship of these voyages to trade is not entirely clear. The ships carried valuable commodities (silks, porcelain) that were intended for exchange, but apparently not in the open market; rather, in the context of gift giving: tribute from the barbarians, benevolence from the Chinese. On the other hand, the sorties were apparently intended to open the way to normal trade, and merchants did come along to make their own deals. Independent trading voyages followed, presumably profiting from enhanced Chinese prestige. But if trade was one of the objectives, this was a very costly way to go about it. In effect the Chinese people were paying for the profits of the officials who organized the treasure fleets and promoted private trade, so much indeed that the burden of these voyages came to exceed the empire’s means.8
These flotillas far surpassed in grandeur the small Portuguese fleets that came later. The ships were probably the largest vessels the world had seen: high multideck junks (but that is a misleading term) acted as floating camps, each carrying hundreds of sailors and soldiers, testimony to the advanced techniques of Chinese shipbuilding, navigation, and naval organization.9 The biggest were about 400 feet long, 160 wide (compare the 85 feet of Columbus’s Santa Maria), had nine staggered masts and twelve square sails of red silk. These were the so-called treasure ships, built for luxury, fitted with grand cabins and windowed halls—accommodations fit for the representatives of the Son of Heaven and the foreign dignitaries who would accompany them back to China. Other ships met other needs: eight-masted “horse ships” carrying mounts to South Asia, which for climatic reasons could not easily raise these animals, along with building and repa
ir materials; seven-masted supply ships, carrying principally food; six-masted troop transports; five-masted warships for naval combat; and smaller fast boats to deal with pirates. The fleet even included water tankers, to ensure a fresh supply for a month or more.
The first of these fleets, that of the eunuch admiral Zheng He (Cheng-ho) in 1405, consisted of 317 vessels and carried 28,000 men.10 From 1404 to 1407, China undertook an orgy of shipbuilding and refitting. Whole seaboard provinces were drawn into the effort, while inland forests were stripped for timber. Hundreds of households of carpenters, smiths, sailmakers, ropemakers, caulkers, carters and haulers, even timekeepers, were moved by fiat, grouped into teams, domiciled in yards next to their work. Since the shipwrights and their apprentices were generally illiterate, learning proceeded by example, using handcrafted models whose parts fitted perfectly without nails. No detail was too small to escape the planning of the shipwrights: overlapping planks, multiple layers, joints between planks caulked with jute and covered with sifted lime and tung oil, iron nails sealed against rust, special woods for every purpose, even large “dragon eyes” painted on the prow so that the ship could “see” where it was going. These eyes, plus a good, balanced stern rudder and heavy ballast, the whole guided by navigational experience and folkloric wisdom, would take the ship from port to port. The work itself was done in huge drydocks (China here anticipated European technology by hundreds of years) opening onto the Yangtze (Yangzi). In this way, over a period of three years, the Chinese built or refitted some 1,681 ships. Medieval Europe could not have conceived of such an armada.11
Yet this Chinese opening to the sea and the larger world came to naught, indeed was deliberately reduced to naught.* In the 1430s a new emperor reigned in Peking, one who “knew not Joseph.” A new, Confucian crowd competed for influence, mandarins who scorned and distrusted commerce (for them, the only true source of wealth was agriculture) and detested the eunuchs who had planned and carried out the great voyages. For some decades, the two groups vied for influence, the balance shifting now one way, now the other. But fiscality and the higher Chinese morality were on the Confucian side. The maritime campaign had strained the empire’s finances and weakened its authority over a population bled white by taxes and corvee levies.
The decision (early fifteenth century) to move the capital to Peking made things worse: new city walls, a palace compound of over nine thousand rooms, peasants liable in principle for thirty days service but kept at work for years running. The transportation bill alone—moving the court from Nanking, some eight hundred miles—drove tax surcharges upward.12 A few conscientious officials spoke up, but the imperial courtiers stifled them by severe and humiliating penalties. A prefect who protested the extra requisitions was put in a cage and wheeled in disgrace to the capital to be interrogated by the emperor. So much for duty. Meanwhile, on the northwest frontier, a changing but unchanging cast of nomadic raiders gave the empire no peace, draining resources and demanding undivided attention.
So, after some decades of tugging and hauling, of alternating celebration and commemoration on the one hand, of contumely and repudiation on the other, the decision was taken not only to cease from maritime exploration but to erase the very memory of what had gone before lest later generations be tempted to renew the folly. From 1436, requests for the assignment of new craftsmen to the shipyards were refused, while conversely, foreigners asking for the renewal of customary gifts were turned down, presumably for reasons of economy. For want of construction and repair, public and private fleets shrank. Pirates flourished in unguarded waters (the Japanese were particularly active), and China placed ever more reliance on inland canal transport. By 1500, anyone who built a ship of more than two masts was liable to the death penalty, and in 1525 coastal authorities were enjoined to destroy all oceangoing ships and to arrest their owners. Finally in 1551, it became a crime to go to sea on a multimasted ship, even for trade.13
The abandonment of the program of great voyages was part of a larger policy of closure, of retreat from the hazards and temptations of the sea. This deliberate introversion, a major turning point in Chinese history, could not have come at a worse time, for it not only disarmed them in the face of rising European power but set them, complacent and stubborn, against the lessons and novelties that European travelers would soon be bringing.
Why? Why did China not make that little extra effort that would have taken it around the southern end of Africa and up into the Atlantic? Why, decades and even centuries after the arrival of European visitors in Chinese waters, were there no Chinese vessels in the harbors of Europe? (The first such vessel, a vehicle for diplomacy, visited London for the Great Exhibition of 1851.)
As always, there are several reasons. The result, in sociological jargon, is overdetermined.
To begin with, the Chinese lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity. They went to show themselves, not to see and learn; to bestow their presence, not to stay; to receive obeisance and tribute, not to buy. They were what they were and did not have to change. They had what they had and did not have to take or make. Unlike the Europeans, they were not motivated by greed and passion. The Europeans had a specific target: the wealth of the Indies. They had to get around Africa; that was the point of the exercise. The Chinese did not have to. They could find what they wanted in the Indian Ocean, and what they wanted was so trivial that it was not an appetizer but a dessert.14
At the same time, this desire to overawe meant that costs far exceeded returns. These voyages reeked of extravagance. Whereas the first profits (the first whiff of pepper) and the promise of even greater ones to come were a powerful incentive to Western venturers, in China the pecuniary calculus said no. This reconsideration, in its way, was very much like that currently faced in the United States by such projects as the supercollider and the space station.
The vulnerability of the program—here today, gone tomorrow—was reinforced by its official character. In Europe, the opportunity of private initiative that characterized even such royal projects as the search for a sea route to the Indies was a source of participatory funding and an assurance of rationality. Nothing like this in China, where the Confucian state abhorred mercantile success. The opening to the sea, moreover, entailed huge outlays for defense against piracy: the more active the ships, the greater the temptation to corsairs.* For the Chinese government, then, the traders were free riders, getting rich at imperial expense.
Hence the decision to turn from the sea. In 1477, a powerful eunuch named Wang Zhi, head of the secret police, asked for the logs of the great voyages by way of renewing interest in naval expeditions. In response, the vice-president of the Ministry of War confiscated the documents and either hid or burned them. Challenged on this mysterious disappearance, he denounced the records as “deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things far removed from the testimony of people’s eyes and ears”—so, unbelievable. As for the things the treasure ships brought home, “betel, bamboo staves, grape-wine, pomegranates and ostrich eggs and suchlike odd things,” they obviously did nothing for China. These voyages to the West Ocean had wasted “myriads of money and grain,” to say nothing of “myriads” of lives. And that was that.
The question remains: Suppose the Chinese had not given up on trade and exploration, suppose the Portuguese had arrived in the Indian Ocean to find these huge Chinese ships ruling the seas? Or even more, suppose the Chinese had not stopped somewhere around the Mozambique channel but had gone around the Cape into the Atlantic, thereby opening maritime links to West Africa and Europe? Those are the kinds of counterfactual that have come to fascinate historians and economists, not so much because one can ever know the answers but for their heuristic value. Looking backward, we think we know what happened. Looking forward, we have to contemplate diverse outcomes. Such questions focus attention on cause and effect, help us distinguish between major and minor, direct and indirect influences, suggest possibilities otherwise overlooked.
On the possibility of con
tinued Chinese maritime expansion, for example, one has to consider the possibility of violence, of competition decided by force. On the surface, the Chinese were immeasurably stronger and richer. Who could stand up to them? Yet reality ran the other way. The Chinese had learned the secret of gunpowder before the Europeans, but the Europeans had better guns and greater firepower, especially at a distance. The Chinese had bigger ships, but the Europeans were better navigators. If we compare the two sides around 1400, the Chinese might have come out on top, at least in the Indian Ocean or South China Sea. (Even a strong animal has trouble defeating his weaker prey close to home.) But fifty years later, even in Asian waters, the Europeans would have run circles around the Chinese vessels. Of course, the Chinese might have learned by experience and eventually met the Europeans with comparable weapons and ships. That is one of the problems with hypotheticals: they are open-ended, and confidence levels diminish with speculation.
Isolationism became China. Round, complete, apparently serene, ineffably harmonious, the Celestial Empire purred along for hundreds of years more, impervious and imperturbable. But the world was passing it by.
7
From Discoveries to Empire
The news of Columbus’s find spread fast thanks to the power of the printing press.* Nothing speaks so eloquently to the reality of this discovery than the excitement and wonder it aroused. The world had opened up, transforming European self-awareness. Who are we? Who are they? Theologians and moralists posed questions about the nature of the “savages” found in these distant lands and the appropriate way to deal with them. For artists, the New World provided a plethora of images and themes, not only in itself but also as part of the new oecumene. For cartographers, maps became ephemera, repeatedly redrawn to new information. The sea monsters and ornamental flourishes disappeared to make way for new landmasses of increasingly accurate shape.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 12
