The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  a A cowrie is the shell of a marine snail used for money (hence its Linnaean designation, Cypraea moneta) in various places around the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

  b “Capitulations” refers to the chapters (capitula) in the agreement and has nothing to do with surrender.

  c The Knights of Malta originated in the early eleventh century as the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, a religious order that cared for pilgrims in the Holy Land. After the fall of Acre in 1291 they moved to Rhodes, where they became corsairs. Expelled by the Ottomans in 1522, they relocated to Malta, where they remained until ousted by Napoleon in 1798.

  d Fireships were usually worn-out vessels loaded with combustibles, set alight, and steered, towed, or allowed to drift down on enemy ships to set them on fire.

  Chapter 16

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  State and Sea in the Age of European Expansion

  The seventeenth century represents the coming of age of the maritime powers of Atlantic Europe. Apart from the Iberian kingdoms, no one had been satisfied with the church-sanctioned division of the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal, but it was not until the 1600s that Hugo Grotius articulated cogent and accessible arguments in favor of “the free sea.” People and governments deployed this thesis in opportunistic and sometimes contradictory ways, but support for the doctrine encouraged broader participation in intercontinental trade. For the most part these were private initiatives, typically undertaken by joint-stock companies endowed with considerable latitude of action to defend their business and their flag. The Dutch in particular exercised armed force with the blessing of their home government to create an empire of “ledger and sword” that overlay far older networks of trade in which Asian merchants continued to predominate.

  Companies took on such sweeping responsibilities because, notwithstanding the baroque grandeur of their courts and their ships, European monarchs lacked navies capable of executing their will overseas. Even so, rivalries between England, the Dutch Republic, France, and Spain turned the English Channel and adjacent waters into the dark alley of seventeenth-century trade, where corsairs and privateers threatened all comers, and tricked-out ships of state occasionally swaggered out with their gilded entourages as a reminder of who was in charge. But the ineffectiveness of naval power is obvious from the staggering numbers of merchant ships captured in the course of five major conflicts in less than half a century. Between the first Anglo-Dutch War and the Nine Years’ War (1652–97), the English are thought to have seized between 3,600 and 4,300 enemy merchantmen, while in the same period they lost between 5,500 and 6,300 of their own. Many of these vessels were ransomed back to their owners or recaptured.

  Northern European warships rarely operated beyond European waters. Over the course of the seventeenth century, ships, fleets, and infrastructure grew in size and complexity, and innovative approaches to financing and administration were adopted. Combined with legal and diplomatic remedies, these gradually exerted a stabilizing influence on maritime trade, and smugglers and pirates working without political sanction found themselves increasingly marginalized. The apparent free-for-alls in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean at the end of the century were less a sign of widening chaos than a demonstration of more effective navies, especially on the part of the English, who in the following century would become the world’s preeminent naval power.

  The Capture of the Santa Catarina

  Northern European states lacked the means and motive to mount effective naval campaigns against the Iberian powers overseas, but their governments condoned the activities of merchants willing to challenge Spanish and Portuguese dominance of trade in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Hoping to put a stranglehold on the Dutch rebels, in 1598 Spain’s Philip III banned Dutch shipping from Iberian ports as well as Portuguese holdings in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The embargo hobbled Dutch trade in the Mediterranean and between Iberia and the Baltic, but it spurred Dutch interest in oceanic shipping. The number of vessels sailing to West Africa for gold, gums, ivory, and São Thomé sugar rose from three or four per year to an average of twenty in the decade after 1599. Even before Philip’s embargo, Dutch merchants began to consider ways to reach Asia via either a Northeast Passage or by following the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese held close the secrets of navigation to the east: in 1504 Manoel I issued a royal decree calling for the routine destruction of logbooks and charts describing Asian waters. Northern Europeans gained some familiarity with the Monsoon Seas as crew, merchants, and adventurers in Portuguese pay, and in 1591–94, James Lancaster commanded three English ships as far as the Malay Peninsula. Yet information about the Indian Ocean and beyond remained sparse and anecdotal until the publication of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario in 1595. The Dutch Linschoten had spent several years as a merchant with his brothers in Seville and Lisbon before becoming secretary to the archbishop of Goa in 1583. After a decade in India he returned home and wrote his Itinerario of

  Goa, and the Indies, concerning their manners, traffiques, fruites, wares, and other things, the better to understand the situation of the Countrey, and of the coasts lying on the East side, to the last and highest part of the borders of China, which the Portingales have travelled and discovered, together with their Ilandes…[and] a briefe note of the Orientall coastes, beginning at the redde, or the Arabian sea, from the towne of Aden to China: and then the description of the coastes before named.

  Based largely on secondhand information, Linschoten’s “briefe note” presented detailed descriptions of major ports, their inhabitants, forms of government, and chief trading goods. The Itinerario became a Baedeker for merchants aspiring to capture the riches of Asia, and Cornelis de Houtman took a copy on the first Dutch expedition to the Indies in 1595–97. This voyage barely broke even and only a third of his 240 crew survived, but Houtman won permission from the sultan of Banten, in western Java, for Dutch ships to trade there. Between 1598 and 1601 fifteen provincial merchant companies sent a total of sixty-five ships to trade in the Spice Islands and make commercial treaties with local rulers. Indicative as it was of the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit, this competition drove up the cost of pepper and other spices in Asia while depressing the prices at which they could be sold at home. To counter the decline in profits, in 1602 the various companies came together as the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company, or VOC). Whereas the earlier companies had been “established … solely for the purpose of doing honest business and trading in peace and not from hostility or maliciousness,” the VOC was both a trading entity and an instrument of the state chartered by the States-General (the Dutch parliament) and invested with the powers to wage war, contract treaties, establish forts, administer the law, and in most respects act as an arm of the Dutch government, which in effect it was. The state’s view was epitomized in a comment by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the leading politician of the day: “The great East India Company, with four years of hard work, public and private, I have helped establish in order to inflict damage on the Spanish and Portuguese.” In effect, the VOC went on to create its own version of the Estado da India. The main difference was that its ruling body, the Heren XVII (seventeen gentlemen) in the Netherlands, and the governor-general and council of the Indies in Batavia (now Jakarta), had greater freedom from political control, demonstrated vastly more commercial acumen, and drew on infinitely greater financial resources, distribution networks, and industrial capacity, especially shipbuilding, than the Estado ever mustered.

  Map of the coasts of Southeast Asia and China—east is at top—published with the Itinerario: Voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan Huyghen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579–1592 (Travel account: Voyage of the sailor Jan Huyghen van Linschoten to the Portuguese East Indies) in 1596. Linschoten presented detailed descriptions of major ports, their inhabitants, forms of government, and commodities and rarities—trade secrets the Portuguese had jealously guarded throughout the sixteenth c
entury. The Itinerario became the standard guidebook for merchants aspiring to capture the riches of Asia, and Cornelis de Houtman took a copy on the first Dutch expedition to the Indies in 1595–97. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland.

  Two years earlier, an Amsterdam fleet had sailed under Admiral Jacob van Neck, who took two ships to investigate the possibility of establishing a Dutch presence in China. Sailing into the Pearl River delta, the Dutch anchored before “a great town spread out before us, all built in the Spanish style, on the hill a Portuguese church and on top of it a large blue cross.… According to Huygen [van Linschoten]’s notebook this had to be Macao.” Van Neck sent twenty men to negotiate with the Portuguese, who, determined to prevent their meeting with local officials and securing the right to trade in China, executed all but three of them. In the meantime, Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck had reached Banten, where he found six rival Dutch ships and countless other merchants from around Asia. With pepper prices too high for his liking, he took the Witte Leeuw and Alkmaar to the northern Java port of Japara, where the sultan arrested twelve of his crew and forbade him to trade. Sailing east he established a factory at Gresik and seized a Portuguese ship and letters recounting the fate of Van Neck’s men at Macau. Unable to avenge his countrymen’s judicial murder out of concern for the men held at Japara and others he planned to leave as agents at Gresik, Van Heemskerck sailed for the Malay Peninsula port of Pattani, whose queen had allowed the Dutch to establish a factory as a counterweight to the Portuguese. While there, the sultan of Johor’s brother encouraged him to wait for the Portuguese ship due from Macau.

  On the morning of February 25, 1603, the Witte Leeuw and Alkmaar were at anchor in the Singapore Strait off Johor when first light revealed a richly laden Portuguese nao at anchor before them. The Santa Catarina was en route from Macau to Melaka, just as the Dutch had hoped. With the help of Johorese galleys, the Dutch battered the Portuguese ship for ten hours before she surrendered. In acknowledgment of his assistance, Van Heemskerck presented the sultan of Johor with gifts worth ten thousand guilders and reimbursed a Johorese merchant whose ship he had despoiled the previous year. When auctioned at Amsterdam, the remainder of the Santa Catarina’s silks, camphor, sugar, aloes, and porcelain netted three hundred thousand guilders, enough to build fifty or sixty merchants’ houses in Amsterdam. The fantastic wealth of the Santa Catarina’s booty notwithstanding, the outstanding importance of this incident derives from the long-term legal consequences of Van Heemskerck’s actions.

  Hugo Grotius and The Free Sea

  The Portuguese vigorously protested the capture of the Santa Catarina, but Van Heemskerck claimed that he was entitled to avenge the crimes against his countrymen at Macau because Prince Maurits of Orange had commissioned him to use force. A Dutch court concurred in judging the capture a lawful prize, but to bolster their claim the directors of the VOC asked the precocious Hugo Grotius, then twenty-one, to draft a justification of their decision. His complete work, De Jure Praedae (The Law on Prize and Booty), remained unpublished until the nineteenth century. One chapter, however, appeared anonymously as Mare Liberum (The Free Sea) in 1609. The essence of Grotius’s thesis is that “it is lawful for any nation to go to any other and to trade with it,” and that Portuguese claims to a monopoly of trade on the basis of a papal grant, territorial possessions in the Indies, or custom were groundless. Furthermore, in the absence of a competent legal authority to which to appeal, Van Heemskerck was entitled to avenge any wrongs committed by the Portuguese to hinder Dutch trade. Support for this argument, and for the practice of using a business to achieve political ends, was far from universal even within the Netherlands where many merchants believed that their interests were best served by peaceful trade.

  Portrait of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) by Jansz. van Mierevelt. Grotius sat for this portrait at the age of twenty-eight, seven years after writing his seminal Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), the legal justification for his countrymen’s attack on a Portuguese merchant ship in Southeast Asia and, more broadly, on the right of Dutch merchants to sail to and trade in a region over which Portugal claimed a monopoly. His arguments for “the right of navigation and the liberty of traffic” earned him the appellation “father of international law.” Courtesy of the Museum Rotterdam.

  The Santa Catarina affair and publication of Mare Liberum did not initiate the examination and refinement of legal norms governing trade, the right to possession of unoccupied territory, privateering, freedom of the sea, and other matters pertaining to maritime expansion. Few of Grotius’s legal theories were new, and several of his arguments regarding the laws of nature and of nations derived from classical antecedents. The need to rearticulate them sprang from the determination of northern European states to counter Iberian pretensions in Asia and the Americas, an effort already evident in the sixteenth century. Although Spain demonstrated almost no interest in North America, Giovanni da Verrazano’s exploration of the coast from North Carolina to Newfoundland in 1524 and Jacques Cartier’s three voyages up the St. Lawrence River between 1534 and 1542 (both men sailed for France) had to be legitimated in the face of Spain’s monopolistic claims under the Treaty of Tordesillas. Francis I argued that neither Spain nor Portugal had any right to land they did not effectively occupy, and Pope Clement VII reinterpreted the bull Inter Caetera to apply to “known continents, not to territories subsequently discovered by other powers,” which freed the French, among others, to launch their own voyages of discovery. Planning for Cartier’s third voyage alarmed the Spanish court, although the French king was reported to have said “that he did not send these ships to make war nor to contravene the peace and friendship with your Majesty [Charles V].” Rather, he blithely insisted that “the sun gave warmth to him as well as to others, and he much desired … to learn how [Adam] had partitioned the world.” Francis furthermore drew sharp distinctions between discovery and occupation, and between the spiritual and temporal power of the popes, who, he claimed, had no business apportioning land among secular sovereigns.

  The English made similar arguments to justify Francis Drake’s forays into the West Indies in the 1580s, and in the next decade the evangelist of English expansion Richard Hakluyt observed that because “the sea & trade are common by the lawe of nature and of nations, it was not lawfull for the Pope, nor is it lawfull for the Spaniard, to prohibite other nations from the communication & participation of this lawe.” English support for the doctrine of the free sea was reversed under James I, who was also James VI of Scotland. More dependent than the English on fish for food and with a relatively modest overseas trade, oriented toward the Baltic, the Scots had long claimed an exclusive right to waters out to twenty-eight miles from shore. After ascending the English throne, James began applying this Scottish notion of a closed sea to keep the Dutch from fishing in English waters, and many assumed that Grotius wrote Mare Liberum with a view to preserving Dutch rights to the Dogger Bank fishing grounds of the North Sea as much as to justify Dutch actions in Southeast Asia.a

  Indeed, John Selden’s Of the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea (also known as Mare Clausum, “the Closed Sea”) was drafted in 1619 as a justification of James I’s requirement that foreigners purchase a royal license to fish. The most famous rebuttal to Grotius, Selden’s work was not released at the time for fear of offending the king of Denmark, whose fishermen also frequented British waters. Selden justified his interpretation of the law by pointing to the “Customs of so many Nations both ancient and modern.” While his chief focus was the fisheries, he delineated an absurdly expansive conception of England’s territorial sea. The “sea-territory of the British Empire” to the south and east ended at the continent, but “in the open and vast ocean of the north and west they are to be placed at the utmost extent of those most spacious seas which are possessed by the English, Scots, and Irish.” In other words, Britain’s territorial sea included the North Atlantic all the wa
y to North America, where the French, Dutch, and the English had been making fitful attempts to establish colonies of their own.

  The Dutch in Asia: Batavia, Taiwan, and Nagasaki

  Tightly argued and influential as his work is, Grotius was writing at the behest of political masters who changed course as conditions warranted. The Dutch vigorously advocated free trade in European waters, where their shippers were dominant and any restrictions on their movements threatened their profits. Yet once they had removed the Portuguese from Southeast Asia, they abandoned the notion of the free sea to preserve their own monopoly against the English and even restricted where and what indigenous mariners could trade. The VOC expelled the Portuguese from the Spice Islands in 1605 and signed treaties with local rulers to fortify the islands. Soon their greatest competition was from their anti-Catholic allies, the English. The Twelve Years’ Truce ended hostilities with Spain in 1609, but by 1618 war was again on the horizon, and rather than risk a confrontation with England, the States-General allowed the English a fixed share of the spice trade in exchange for help in paying for the Dutch garrisons. The VOC’s governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, grudgingly followed his superiors’ lead, and a combined Anglo-Dutch squadron besieged the Spanish colony at Manila and captured many Chinese junks in an effort to divert the silk trade to Batavia. An empire builder in the mold of Afonso d’Albuquerque, Coen became governor-general of the VOC in 1618. Over the objections of the local ruler of what is now Jakarta, the next year he founded the castle of Batavia, which became the administrative capital of an informal yet growing Dutch empire in Asia and a major emporium of the East Indies. Celebrated through the early 1700s as the “Queen of the Orient” and “Holland in the Tropics,” Batavia was a city of brick town houses, government buildings, hospitals and churches, and canals. Within the city walls lived the ruling Dutch minority alongside the prosperous and numerically larger Chinese community, while discrete communities of Bugis from south Sulawesi and colonies of Madurese, Balinese, and Ambonese lived beyond the city limits.