The stereotype of Asians uninterested in maritime commerce is as at variance with the facts as the image of Portuguese as inveterate seafarers. During the Mughal Empire (1526–1764), Bania (Hindu) shipowners had a commanding presence in both Bengal and at Surat. They also functioned as agents for other people’s ships and worked for two groups of clients in particular, Mughal officials with an interest in shipping, and Europeans—whether private country traders or, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the various East India Companies—engaged in either intra-Asian trade or trade between Europe and Asia. Hindu merchants were noted for their frugality and lack of ostentation, but highly respected for their commercial acumen and disciplined approach. “When they are still very young and in the laps of their parents and hardly able to walk,” according to an employee of the Dutch East India Company writing in the 1680s, “they already begin to be trained as merchants. They are made to pretend to engage in trade while playing, first buying [cowries], followed by silver and gold.”a In addition to commerce and moneylending, many were sarrafs, money changers who specialized in collecting taxes; some were also responsible for transferring government funds around the subcontinent. Foreign coins were not legal tender in the Mughal Empire, but one could take these, or bullion, to the mint and turn them into Mughal coins. This took time, however, and an alternative was to obtain the equivalent in rupees from a sarraf.
The subcontinent consumed vast quantities of eastern spices, precious and semiprecious stones, tin from Malaya, and silver from southwest Asia, especially Mocha, the “treasure chest” of the Mughal Empire. And as in the past, Arabia and Persia provided horses. Indian, Arab, and Persian merchants shared the traffic of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. As many as a thousand Gujaratis may have lived at Melaka in 1500, and perhaps twice as many were trading across the Bay of Bengal at any given time. In addition to Melaka, their primary destinations included Pegu, in Myanmar; the peninsular ports of Tenasserim/Mergui and Kedah; and, on Sumatra, Samudra-Pasai and Aceh. Cambay was superseded as Gujarat’s premier port by Surat, which already had a thriving pilgrim trade to Jeddah, the most profitable in the Indian Ocean and one that attracted investment from the royal household, government officials, and major merchants. With the incorporation of Gujarat into the Mughal Empire in 1573, Surat was connected to the Indian heartland and it grew further still. To the south, Dhabol and Chaul traded to western Asia as well as Bengal and Melaka. In the Malabar ports of Calicut, Cannanore, and Cochin, pardesi (foreign) merchants—Arabs, Persians, Jews, and Africans—focused on the western trade, while Mappila merchants sailed mainly to Bay of Bengal ports and Southeast Asia.
The idea of the Portuguese and the Ottomans (by proxy) going to war in Southeast Asia would have been unthinkable had the Ming Dynasty not abandoned the sea after the last of Zheng He’s voyages in 1433. As it is, though, the Portuguese helped revive trades left moribund by a shrunken Chinese market and a dearth of Chinese shipping. If the initial rationale for discovering the sea route to the Indian Ocean was to acquire spices, the realities of Asian trade encouraged the Portuguese to diversify. At the siege of Melaka, a group of Chinese merchants approached Albuquerque to announce their intention to sail with the start of the monsoon. Eager to establish cordial relations with potential trading partners, he granted them safe passage and gave them letters of introduction to the king of Ayutthaya saying that “King Manuel of Portugal had been informed that he was a heathen and not a Moslem and so he had a great affection for him and desired to have peace and friendship with him” and promising merchants of his kingdom “all the protection they might need.”
This offer was disingenuous. The greatest threat to peaceful trade was the Portuguese, and at this point their greatest export to Asia may well have been guns and mercenaries to control trade or as commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Assuming a role previously unheard of in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese instituted a system of passes—cartazes—which all non-Portuguese merchant ships had to carry. The fee for the pass—essentially protection money—was nominal, but the cartaz obligated the holder to sail via Portuguese-controlled ports and to pay duties amounting to about 5 percent. Nor did possession of a valid cartaz guarantee freedom from harassment by the Portuguese, who plundered many ships with valid passes.
In 1513, Portuguese ships arrived at Macau, a peninsula in the Pearl River delta and gateway to Guangzhou and southern China, where they hoped to establish themselves and capitalize on the official Chinese withdrawal from overseas trade. They were refused and when they tried again in 1521–22 the emperor responded by banning all maritime trade in Guangdong Province. In barring Chinese ships from going abroad, the Ming government’s intent was to funnel tribute trade exclusively through imperial ports. Among China’s most important trading partners at this time was Japan, a major source of the silver that was the preferred medium for paying taxes. A riot between rival Japanese merchants at Mingzhou (Ningbo) in 1523 led to a suspension of Japanese trade there, but China’s demand for silver and Japan’s appetite for silk led to an increase in smuggling and piracy in the coastal provinces. This was exacerbated by the lack of profitable employment among Chinese traders, many of whom relocated to Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Ryukyu Islands, from where they engaged in illicit commerce with their homeland. In Japan, they were joined by similarly disenfranchised local sailors with whom they plundered coastal shipping and the Chinese mainland. Rather than acknowledge the fault of their own policies in nurturing this outlawry, the Chinese officials labeled these recreants wokou, “Japanese pirates.”
Denied the opportunity for legitimate trade, the Portuguese simply joined smugglers active in Fujian and Zhejiang where corruption among the Chinese officials was rife and they could sail with impunity. According to a complaint filed by the commander of coastal defense, Zhu Wan, in 1548, “the Portuguese sailed their ships one after another into the interior. After unloading the goods, they publicly hauled up two ships at Duan-yu-zhou for repair. In the eyes of those pirates and barbarians, do they know that the authorities are still there? They are not to blame though,” because the government was not prepared to enforce its own laws. While acknowledging that the Portuguese were smugglers, an opponent of Zhu Wan’s policies argued that the local economy benefited because as commercial intermediaries they paid well for trade goods and double the market price for food and provisions. Persisting in their efforts to establish themselves in China officially, within a decade they had secured extraterritorial rights at Macau, which remained Portuguese territory until 1999. Confined to this enclave, westerners were not allowed to enter China proper until 1583 when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci settled at Guangdong, where he embarked on a deep study of Chinese culture and religion and undertook to introduce Catholicism and the fruits of western learning and technology, including especially clocks and other mechanical devices. This effort ultimately took him to Beijing, where he died in 1610.
Having reached China, it was only a matter of time before the Portuguese ventured to Japan, where they established themselves at Nagasaki and served as middlemen between Japan and China. Their timing was impeccable, for in an effort to curtail the depredations of the wokou the Chinese had severed relations with Japan in 1548, nine years before the founding of Macau. Civil war had engulfed Japan for almost a century, and the revenues that accrued to the shogunate from the revived commerce helped tip the balance toward stability and unification. The Portuguese traded silk, gold, and silver but virtually no western goods except the harquebus, a cumbersome but lethal gun that the Japanese quickly learned to manufacture and deploy for themselves. (Cannon were introduced in 1551, but these proved harder to manufacture and their use spread more slowly.) In 1549, a mission led by (Saint) Francis Xavier introduced Christianity. Whereas Ricci converted only two thousand Chinese before his death, by the end of the sixteenth century there were an estimated three hundred thousand Japanese Christians. This success excited the hostility of Buddhist clergy whose int
rigues convinced the government that the Christians constituted a threat to the country’s hard-won political stability. The shogun began restricting their activities in 1565; Christianity was outlawed completely in 1614; and the Portuguese were expelled brutally in 1639. Their only real legacy was a minute community of Dutch traders who had followed them to Japan but whose religious modesty made them acceptable to the authorities.
The Japanese Invasion of Korea, 1592–98
The shoguns not only limited the activities of foreign traders, they also imposed tight restrictions on Japanese merchants, who were all but barred from sailing abroad. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, the likelihood of Japan’s withdrawing from active participation in the affairs of Northeast Asia and beyond would have seemed remote, for no sooner had the regent, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, ended the Japanese civil wars and brought Japan under unified rule than he invaded the Korean Peninsula. In so doing, he certainly sought to reopen trade with China, for although the Ming eased their ban on Chinese traveling overseas in 1567, Japan remained off-limits. Hideyoshi also seems to have viewed an invasion of Goryeo and China as a natural extension of the unification of Japan as well as a convenient outlet for soldiers and mariners idled by the peace. An edict of 1588 ordered “sea captains and fishermen of the provinces and seashores, and all those who go in ships to the sea [to] subscribe to written oaths that henceforth they shall not engage in the slightest piratical activity.” Japan’s soldiers were probably as well armed and seasoned as any in the world, and lacking either recent experience of large-scale warfare or firearms, Goryeo was ill-prepared for an unprovoked invasion. About 140,000 Japanese landed near Busan in May 1592 and within ten weeks Seoul and Pyeongyang had fallen.
Goryeo’s salvation depended on an unlikely combination of the Chinese army, Korean guerrillas, and Admiral Yi Sun-sin. Goryeo was divided into sixteen naval districts, two for each of the kingdom’s eight provinces. An admiral of Jeolla (Cholla) Province, Yi combined a sophisticated and aggressive strategy with the severe tactical discipline necessary for converting apparently certain defeat into a series of paralyzing victories. Among the tools at his disposal was the heavily armed and protected geobukseon, or turtle ship, a two-masted, covered galley. According to a contemporary description
On its upper deck were driven iron spikes to pierce the feet of any enemy fighters jumping on it. The only opening was a narrow passage in the shape of a cross on the surface for its own crew to traverse freely. At the bow was a Dragon-head in whose mouth were the muzzles of guns [cannon] and another gun was at the stern. There were six gun ports each, port and starboard, on the lower decks. Since it was built in the shape of a big sea-turtle, it was called Kobuk-son. When engaging the enemy wooden vessels in a battle, the upper deck was covered with straw mats to conceal the spikes. It rode the waves swiftly in all winds and its cannon balls and fire arrows sent destruction to the enemy targets as it darted at the front, leading our fleet in all battles.
Turtle ships constituted something of a dead end in warship development and no more than five were probably available to Yi at any one time. All the same, they were critical to the Koreans’ success. In the summer of 1592, Yi forced ten engagements, the most decisive of which came in June at the battle of Hansan Island. Feigning retreat before superior numbers, Yi lured eighty Japanese ships out of harbor and then enveloped them in what he called the “crane wing” formation. With the loss of sixty ships, the Japanese were unable to open the passage around the Korean Peninsula to the Yellow Sea and thus move supplies or troops to the front lines by ship. The resulting delays combined with China’s entry into the war forced the Japanese to evacuate Pyeongyang and Seoul and to open peace negotiations. These drawn-out discussions eventually collapsed and Hideyoshi renewed the invasion in 1597. The Japanese had absorbed the naval lessons of the earlier campaign, and Yi Sun-sin had been sacked as a result of court intrigues. His incompetent successor lost more than 150 ships at the battle of Chilcheonryang and the Japanese were poised to sail into the Yellow Sea. Hastily reinstated, Yi rallied a dozen ships and on September 16 fought the Japanese to a standstill at the battle of Myeongryang, a strait that narrows to only three hundred meters and through which the tide can race at more than ten knots. Prevented from deploying logistical support by sea, Japanese ground forces were again put on the defensive.
The Japanese began their withdrawal late the next year but the Koreans and Chinese pressed their attack on both land and sea. On the night of November 19, 1598, a week before the last Japanese forces left Korea, Yi attacked at the battle of Noryang. The Koreans inflicted great losses on the Japanese, but Yi was killed at the height of the battle—“a fitting end to such a career,” in the words of a twentieth-century British admiral and historian who declared Yi “equal in his profession” to the Royal Navy’s celebrated Lord Nelson. Yet the subsequent absence of naval warfare in Northeast Asia was due not to the overwhelming might of one power, but to the lack of interest in naval affairs on the part of China and a withdrawal from overseas ventures by Japan and Korea for more than 250 years.
The Changing Mediterranean
The Portuguese held their own against Ottoman intrigues in the Indian Ocean, and they commanded strategic strongholds from East Africa to China. Even so, while they dominated the Asian trade to Europe in the first half of the century they could not shut down trade to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. In 1560 nearly 4.5 million pounds of spices reached Venetian, Ragusan, Genoese, and French ships in Alexandria, and five years later, twenty-three ships from India and Aceh were reported at Jeddah. The Portuguese share of the overall trade may have risen again after 1570, when small quantities of spices began reaching the Americas via Macau and Manila, but surviving statistics suggest a decline in Europeans’ per capita consumption of pepper over the century, and a modest rise in that of other spices. Yet Europe was only one market among many and in this period the size of the Malabar pepper crop probably doubled, while the production of cloves, nutmeg, and mace grew fivefold, outcomes that cannot be attributed to the Portuguese and European demand alone.
Similarly, Venetian and other merchants had not been driven off the Mediterranean for want of spices at the start of the century because in spite of the attraction of exotics, as alluring for historians as for consumers, most Mediterranean shippers dealt in more mundane, high-volume commodities like cereals, livestock, wine, fish, metals, leather, and manufactures. Unreliable crops made grain “responsible for more espionage … than the affairs of the Inquisition itself,” and merchants were well attuned to the vagaries of the harvest: scarcity in one place might be met by surplus from another, but profits could only be made by those fortunate enough to arrive before prices began to fall or to escape the ravages of piracy, which in the eastern Mediterranean was most often directed against grain ships. The center of the grain trade was Sicily, as it had been intermittently since antiquity, but it did not always dominate the market. Levantine grain could cost less in Spain, and a sharp rise in Turkish production in the mid-sixteenth century led to surpluses, although grain could only be exported to Christian countries through an elaborate black market.
Despite the continued growth of Mediterranean trade, the start of transatlantic, transpacific, and Atlantic–Indian Ocean shipping meant that the Mediterranean was no longer the primary arena of western sea trade, but only one region among many. Nonetheless, its shipping remained a cornerstone of the European economy: Venetian tonnage doubled between 1498 and 1567, and from 1540 to 1570 that of Ragusa grew by 75 percent. Yet changing political and economic fortunes saw the rise of vigorous commercial enterprises in French and Ottoman territories. In 1568, the Ottomans opened their trade to Christian Europeans by issuing “capitulations” to French merchants.b The equivalent of the medieval aman (safe-conduct pass), these proved invaluable in the mid-seventeenth century, when European merchants could trade legally in Ottoman ports only under the protection of the French flag. Christians were not the only ones to seek protec
tion from the French. Attacks by the Knights of Malta and other corsairs—sailors who plundered ships without the official sanction of a privateer’s commission but with greater national allegiance than a pirate—compelled many Muslim merchants to put their cargoes under the French flag and many Mediterranean hajjis opted to sail for Egypt in French ships.c
English commercial efforts in the eastern Mediterranean were put on a rational footing with an Ottoman grant of capitulations in 1580 and the formation of the Levant Company the next year. The English advantages were pronounced. They produced woolens more cheaply than their rivals; the Ottomans charged them only 3 percent customs duties (compared with 5 percent paid by the French and Venetians); they sailed large, heavily armed ships that could sweep aside Spanish opposition in the Strait of Gibraltar; and as Protestants they had no qualms about ignoring papal interdicts against supplying war matériel to the Ottomans, including iron guns and gunpowder. Ironically, the greatest threat to the company was other Englishmen—corsairs who preyed indiscriminately on the shipping of all nations and sold their prizes in the North African regencies. English merchants may have suffered less direct harm than did those of other nationalities, but the burden of reprisals for their countrymen’s actions fell on the lawful traders of the Levant Company. The Dutch followed the English into the Mediterranean, where the Italians hired them for their expertise in the grain trade, and they negotiated for Ottoman capitulations of their own in 1612.
The Rise of the Dutch
While Iberian mariners were weaving a worldwide web of trade around Africa and across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, the Dutch were busily engrossing the bulk trades of Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They also benefited from the Portuguese decision to market their pepper at Antwerp, which had superseded Bruges as northern Europe’s premier port in the 1400s. Lacking reserves to fund their Asian expansion, the Portuguese could only keep their ships running if they had access to ready cash from merchants who dealt with the problems of retail sale. This was most easily done at Antwerp, to which German merchant families like the Fuggers and Welsers diverted huge quantities of copper and silver to pay for Asian spices. The Portuguese also benefited from this arrangement, and by the 1520s Manoel I derived half his income from spice exports to northern Europe. Antwerp’s connection to the Iberian world strengthened in 1516 when Charles, duke of Burgundy, who possessed the Netherlands, became Charles I of Spain. The city’s fortunes were subsequently tied to the tensions between Spain and her fellow Netherlanders to the north.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 59
