The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The Chinese government had accepted the Portuguese version of the Santa Catarina affair and, viewing the Dutch as pirates, refused to allow them to trade. In 1624, the Dutch built Zeelandia Castle on Taiwan. Less than a hundred miles from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan was home to an indigenous population of Austronesian-speaking people whose predilection for headhunting had dampened Chinese interest in the island before the sixteenth century, when it became a haven for pirates. By 1603, there was a small Chinese presence lured by the abundance of deer, whose skins were coveted by the Japanese. The island’s strategic location made it attractive to Iberian and Japanese merchants who made halfhearted efforts to settle there, but the real pioneers were the Dutch, who made Zeelandia an entrepôt for merchants from China, Japan, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Batavia. Like Batavia and Spanish Manila, Dutch Taiwan was predominantly Chinese and, in the words of a Dutch official, “The Chinese are the only bees on Formosa [Taiwan] that give honey.” By 1645 the island’s Chinese population numbered fifteen thousand, many of them engaged in the island’s sugar industry, which the Dutch had introduced from Southeast Asia.

  On the mainland, the Ming government’s position had become increasingly parlous. In 1610, the Mongolian Manchus had severed ties with the Ming Dynasty and over the next quarter century they consolidated their hold over Mongolia and founded the Qing Dynasty. When a rebel army took Beijing and the Ming emperor hanged himself in 1644, many Chinese appealed to the Manchus to intervene. As so often before, imperial loyalists retreated to the south and southeast coasts, where resistance to the Qing was strongest, although it depended on unreliable warlords and adventurers. Among the more notable of these was Zheng Zhilong, whose family controlled much of the sea trade between Hangzhou and Guangzhou. Zheng defected to the Qing following their capture of Hangzhou in 1646, but his son Zheng Chenggong, known as Koxinga, proved intensely loyal.b Born to a Japanese mother in the port of Hirado, north of Nagasaki, the younger Zheng rose in the service of the Southern Ming. In 1659 he attacked Nanjing, but Ming loyalists failed to rise in support and his forces—between fifty and one hundred thousand men in a thousand vessels—retreated down the Yangzi to Jinmen (Quemoy Island), off Xiamen. He then decided to relocate his followers to Taiwan and in 1662 forced the Dutch off the island.

  Zheng died within the year, but his followers constituted a clear and present threat to the mainland. To avoid attacks from Zheng’s successors, the Manchus ordered the entire population of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi Provinces to relocate at least thirty kilometers from the coast. The displacement of millions of people ruined China’s overseas trade for the next two decades. In 1683, the Kangxi emperor ordered one of Zheng Chenggong’s former captains to invade Taiwan. A force of three hundred ships and twenty thousand troops easily took the island and, to prevent foreign traders from establishing themselves there, the government annexed Taiwan, lifted the prohibition on China’s overseas trade, and allowed people to move back to the coasts. With its dearth of desirable commodities, however, Taiwan was again relegated to the margins of Asian trade, although it later became Fujian’s rice basket and, in the late twentieth century, a major center of shipbuilding and global trade in its own right.

  The Dutch expulsion from Taiwan was partly offset by their privileged position as the only Europeans allowed in Japan. Under Hideyoshi’s successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese merchants had begun trading with Southeast Asia. Ieyasu supported foreign trade but subjected it to tight regulation, and ships could not sail from Japan without a government-issued vermilion seal, called a shuin. Between 1604 and 1635, 370 ships sailed with vermilion seals, and “Japan towns” could be found in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Sumatra, and Java. But the fate of Japan’s maritime expansion was linked ultimately to that of Japanese Christians. In the 1630s, Ieyasu’s grandson Tokugawa Iemitsu issued a series of maritime prohibitions (kaikin) with a view to stemming Christian influence. These kept Japanese from sailing overseas and prevented anyone who had lived abroad for more than five years from returning home. Following the Shimabara rebellion involving mostly Christian peasants, the Portuguese (long suspected of smuggling priests into the country) were barred from Japan in 1639. From this point, Japan’s connections to the outside world were channeled through the “four gates”: Tsushima, for trade with Korea; Satsuma, for trade with the island kingdom of Ryukyu; Matsumae, in southwest Hokkaido, for relations with the Ainu; and Nagasaki, for merchants from China, Taiwan, and Batavia.

  The first Dutch to visit Japan were survivors of a Pacific crossing in a Dutch privateer four decades before. Three of the crew, including the English sailor William Adams, obtained passes to trade abroad and were allowed to operate from Hirado. The Dutch hoped to trade with Chinese merchants who called there, and to use the port as a base from which to raid Portuguese and Chinese shipping bound for Macau, Manila, and Nagasaki. The seizure of ships trading to Nagasaki cut into the shogun’s profits, and he ordered the VOC merchants to desist. Realizing that the only way to maintain profitable relations with Japan was to guarantee peaceful trade, the Dutch refrained from attacking Iberian shipping even when the Dutch Republic was at war with Spain. The VOC went to almost any lengths to guarantee access to Japan, and the Heren XVII’s prescription for the conduct of Dutch merchants signals a definitive break between the medieval crusader ideals still discernible in the Iberian consciousness of the sixteenth century and the modern age of commercial capitalism:

  Company officials … should above all be provided with modesty, humility, politeness, and friendship, being always very obliging in regard to the Japanese, so that their hearts shall in the end be won over to us. Modesty consists of prudent behavior and circumspection in all transactions; Humility means that one shall never raise jealousy with haughty actions towards this easily offended nation, but will always behave oneself as the lower one in rank; Obedience means that we should not resist their laws, without being too timid, or too indulgent, always trying to maintain the Company’s rights in a discreet manner.

  So agreeable were the Dutch that when the shogun ordered them to tear down their warehouse at Hirado—because the lintel bore the Christian date Anno Domini 1639—the Dutch promptly complied. Satisfied with this show of respect, the Japanese allowed them to stay, moving them to the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay, which served as the VOC headquarters for more than two centuries. The company remained Japan’s only window on the world beyond East Asia until the arrival of an American fleet effected the next sea change in Japanese history in 1853.

  Asian Trade in the Age of Partnership

  Limited though the Dutch trade with Japan was, it provided them with a competitive advantage in intra-Asian trade because apart from the Chinese they were the only carriers of Japanese silver, gold, and copper, which they could sell in India, thereby reducing the amount of specie they had to export from Europe to pay for Asian goods. Because Europe produced little of interest to Asian markets, most Asian goods had to be purchased with bullion. Between 1600 and 1623, the English East India Company alone shipped £1.1 million worth of bullion and goods to Asia, more than two-thirds of it silver. This deficit drove the European search for lucrative intra-Asian “country” trades because the prevailing mercantilist doctrine of the time maintained that states needed to hold gold and silver to pay for wars, and if these were not available domestically, they had to be acquired from trade or colonies. To this end, the government promoted commerce, often through protectionist policies that encouraged domestic manufacturing; imposed high tariffs on or banned the import of foreign goods; and developed colonies that provided both raw materials and markets for domestic manufacturers. But the Dutch learned early on that they would not have to rely entirely on precious metals to finance their purchases. Van Heemskerck was assured that the most sought-after commodity in Southeast Asia was not silver but cloth from the Coromandel Coast. Nor was pepper all that was on offer for the Dutch. “Bring us textiles,” urged the por
t master of Pattani, “and we will all declare war on the Portuguese.”

  Similar recommendations were forthcoming from Gujarati merchants the Dutch met at Aceh and Banten. The VOC did not take an especially active interest in India until their position in Southeast Asia was assured, but when they began setting up factories, on the Coromandel Coast as well as at Cambay, Broach, and Surat, they focused on textiles. Between 1620 and 1700, the value of the VOC’s trade increased from three million to fifteen million florins, yet the share of pepper and spices declined from about three-quarters to a quarter. The share of textiles and silk, however, rose from 16 percent to more than half. While the value of English imports from Asia nearly equaled that of the Dutch, the East India Company took little interest in the country trade, which was left to private English traders, or interlopers.

  At the end of the sixteenth century, English merchants active in the eastern Mediterranean viewed the success of the Dutch and English voyages to the Indies with concern. To capitalize on the burgeoning trade with Asia, a group including members of the Levant Company applied to the crown for a charter for the East India Company, which they received in 1600. Further removed from the corridors of political power than its Dutch counterpart, the East India Company never enjoyed comparable latitude of action. Lacking the resources or commercial sophistication of their Dutch rivals, the English abandoned their factories in the Indonesian archipelago by the end of the seventeenth century, but they more than made up for these losses by focusing on Indian textiles. Their reliance on low-value, high-volume goods within the framework of traditional intra-Asian trade—in Indian cotton, lead, silver, and pepper, and Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquerware—yielded significant profits that were not diverted to maintaining monopolies on high-value goods like those that burdened the Estado da India and the VOC.

  Breaking into the Indian market required a combination of diplomacy and naval superiority. The English and Dutch demonstrated the latter by seizing Mughal merchantmen, which the Portuguese were supposed to protect, and by besting the Portuguese in a series of battles off Surat and Bombay (modern Mumbai). These actions convinced Emperor Jahangir to allow the establishment of English and Dutch factories at Surat and elsewhere. This apparent concession brought more trade to Surat and gave the Mughals the upper hand in negotiating with the English and Dutch. The Mughals were no match for Europeans at sea, but the Europeans were impotent on land, as James I’s ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, found when he spent three years in Agra vainly trying to negotiate a commercial treaty with Jahangir. In 1634, the English built a fort at the village of Madraspatnam in Coromandel, just north of the Portuguese factory at São Thomé. The ports most clearly identified with English rule in India were not established until midcentury. About 150 miles south of Surat, Portuguese Bombay was given to Charles II as part of his Portuguese bride’s dowry in 1661. Charles leased the unprepossessing port to the East India Company, which later transferred its headquarters there from Surat.

  The high profile of Europeans in the country trades should not obscure the dominant role of Asian merchants in the Monsoon Seas. The Mughal ruling elite was deeply invested in overseas commerce in the seventeenth century. At first their involvement was limited to support of the hajj, but they soon developed a taste for trade for its own sake. From the 1640s to 1660s, members of the Mughal royal family, nobles, and high-ranking officials were financing trade and building merchant ships of up to one thousand tons. Most Indian merchants were not nobles or politically well connected, but their profits could be considerable nonetheless. Records are scanty, but in 1654–55 twelve Indian-owned ships (five belonging to Emperor Shah Jahan) returned to Surat from the Red Sea and seventeen from the Persian Gulf; the value of the nineteen cargoes whose manifests survive totaled more than three million rupees.c

  The Mughals were also involved in Bengal’s maritime trade. The Portuguese had become active in Bengal at the end of the previous century, at Chittagong, Satgaon, and later Hugli, in the Ganga estuary upstream from the future site of Calcutta. So many Portuguese were engaged in piracy, however, that in 1632 Shah Jahan expelled them from Hugli and invited the Dutch and English to trade there. Bengal fed off Surat’s growing trade with Southwest Asia, but Bengal merchants preferred to let merchants at Masulipatnam and Surat serve as intermediaries in the trade of the western Indian Ocean. The bulk of their own trade was directed toward eastern markets from Myanmar to Manila, to which they exported textiles, silk, sugar, and opium. Imports of tin, precious stones, gold, and elephants came from South and Southeast Asia, while Sri Lanka, southern India, and the Maldives sent cinnamon, areca nuts, cowries, pepper, coconut oil, and coir.

  Despite their engagement in these overseas networks, the Mughals made little commitment to protect their trade and they had no navy. The closest they came was an alliance of convenience with the Siddis of Janjira. Descended from East African slaves who had settled on the island of Janjira about forty miles south of Bombay, the Siddis constituted the principal non-European naval force in western India. They were in the vanguard of the Mughal wars with the Hindu Maratha state, which brought them into frequent conflict with the English. Although the Marathas had virtually no maritime trade, the Maratha leader Shivaji created a fleet and articulated a coherent naval strategy for dealing with the Siddis, but he was unable to put it into effect for want of experienced officers and crews. He was also unsuccessful in wooing the English, who struggled for decades to remain neutral in the conflict between the Siddis and Marathas around Bombay.

  For all the wealth and the commercial acumen available at Surat—an estimated thirty thousand merchants were based there—the port was riven by divisions of caste and occupation, ethnicity, religion, and language. Nonetheless, it was a vibrant emporium with strong ties to the Indian hinterland and a full range of services from sailors and porters to commercial agents and moneylenders. It was also a place where a man could rise from rags to riches. The wealthiest Surati merchant of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was Mulla Abdul Ghafur. A Shiite Gujarati merchant (bohra), Ghafur started life at the bottom of the economic ladder but made a fortune in the Red Sea trade. At a time when the entire seagoing merchant fleet of Surat numbered about a hundred ships, he owned seventeen with a total capacity of five thousand tons, and at his death his estate was estimated at 8.5 million rupees. Nonetheless, whether because of the fractious social climate or because the nouveaux riches tend to be shunned no matter what their background or language, his Arab, Persian, and Turkish counterparts seem to have spurned him.

  The closest Ghafur came to leading his fellow merchants was when he rallied them to demand that the Mughal government win compensation from the East India Company and the VOC for the depredations of European pirates. Most of the offenders were English who had been driven out of the Caribbean. Many had taken refuge on the island of Madagascar, from where they could attack shipping around the Indian Ocean, especially in the lucrative trades of the Arabian Sea. The first attack on Surat ships in the Red Sea, in 1686, led to mutual reprisals between the Mughals and English before the two sides came to terms. Piracy intensified in the 1690s, among the worst offenders being Henry Avery (possibly one of several aliases). In February 1695 he left a proclamation in the Comoros—a customary port of call for English ships—announcing his intention to seize any ship not flying the English flag. This infuriated East India Company officials, who had long been at pains to assure other traders that not all English were pirates, and that not all pirates were English. It was an understandable assumption; while Avery’s two ships lay in wait for pilgrim ships returning from the Red Sea, they were in company with five vessels from English colonies in North America. Avery seized a ship belonging to Ghafur with a cargo of silver valued at £50,000–60,000, as well as the largest of the Mughal ships, the cargo of which was valued at half a million rials. Many of his crew eventually returned to the Americas and England, but the authorities never caught up with Avery.

  The only s
tate in the western Indian Ocean to offer sustained resistance to a European power on the high seas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was Oman. For most of the 1500s, the Portuguese had held undisputed sway over Muscat, Suhar, and Hormuz. Concerted opposition began at the end of the century when Omanis took Suhar, but the Portuguese were not thrown on the defensive until the early 1620s when the Omanis expelled them and the Persian Safavids took Hormuz with English help. The Omani reconquest of the coast began in earnest with the rise of the Yarubid imamate in 1625. Diverted by their contests with the English and Dutch in India, Portuguese authority in the Persian Gulf region steadily eroded until Sultan ibn Saif I expelled them from Muscat a quarter century later.

  Between 1652 and 1665, the Omanis took the fight to the Portuguese in India and in East Africa, where they captured the port of Mombasa. The Omani fleet consisted of captured Portuguese ships and purchases from the English and the Dutch, who willingly accommodated anyone undermining European rivals. From the early years of the Estado da India, a majority of the crews on European ships in the Indian Ocean were non-Europeans, so manning their fleet was not a challenge for the Omanis, although they also employed Europeans. The Portuguese regained the upper hand in the 1660s, but the Omanis remained active antagonists into the next century. As the scope of Omani influence widened—the East African island of Zanzibar was ruled by Oman from 1698 to 1890—the imam’s ability to control his subjects diminished, and in the eighteenth century the Omanis became known for outright piracy against Europeans, Persians, Indians, and Arabs.